The End of the Childhood

I learned to read incidentally from my Mama. I think that when I was five years old, I could read pretty well and write a few letters of the old German Script. My parents had decided that I should be educated in a German school. Therefore when I was six I received the basic education from a private teacher, Mr. Siggat. He was Latvian, but spoke German very well and was teacher at the German church school and deacon of the Protestant church. I like the tall, friendly man with the reddish blonde beard. He lived near the city, where the Igumenski tract started. Every second day I drove in a horse drawn cab to him or walked with the nanny the three-quarters of an hour.

Reading soon became my passion. The children’s books I had received for my sixth birthday I soon knew by heart. During my appendicitis, my classes stopped for almost three-quarters of a year and had to be made up. I still read everything I call get my hands on and my parents allowed me to sometimes look for a suitable book from their bookcase.

So came the summer 1912. My grandfather had had a bad case of gout for years and was dependent on a wheelchair. On the island Osel in the Baltic near Riga you could take beneficial mud baths, and grandfather usually went in the summer to the Spa in Ahrensburg. A small letter from that time from me to grandfather still exists. But then communication became even easier, because Mama also wanted to take some mud baths against her rheumatism and took me along. Ahrensburg on Osel was a paradise for us. Besides the spa and the ocean there was something much more interesting for us boys, a pretty old, relatively well preserved knight’s castle with supposedly a walled-in knight. We boys tramped around the whole castle, we even found the dungeon, but no sign of the knight. Then there was supposed to be an underground passage from the castle to the cloister. In the thick walls, we, the boys from Riga and I, found a dark passage that we followed for a bit with candles and flashlights, until it became too spooky. This was the last year we spent there with grandfather.

Easter 1913 our whole family, Papa, Mama, and we three grandchildren went to Riga for visit. Uncle Robert and Aunt Erna had also come home from England and Italy. The Grandparents had sold their old house in the Saulenstreet and had moved into a nice big apartment in the Nicolaistreet. They had a big terrace that led to the garden. There a photographer took a family picture, where we all were grouped around Grandfather in his easy chair. It is a very nice picture that shows everyone very characteristically. Always, when I look at that picture, it seems to me, that that was the high point of the family Lietz, whose sparkle and fortune disappeared completely in less than five years.

In the first days of June of the same year, Grandfather suddenly got a cold, that very quickly turned into a bad pneumonia, and our Grandfather Carl Christoph Lietz died of it on the 11th of June 1913. The parents took me to Riga for the funeral. I still see the picture in front of me of Grandfather layed out in the big hall and Grossmama, Erna, and Mary kneeling and crying in front of the casket.

Later on we saw it as an act of providence, that Grosspapa did not have to see the war that brought the destruction of this life’s work.