“Lubeck 1946.”
AI Translation: ALL EARTHLY POSSESSIONS WITH THEM FROM KUCKNITZ THEY DISAPPEAR!
Chapter One – Down the Rabbit Hole
When my dear friend Tom died last year, he left behind a large assortment of papers, memorabilia, and odd objects. Tom was a pack rat and kept what others would overlook or toss out. His rationale for this was frugality, that all these things might come in handy some day. But that day never came, and what now remained was a disparate collection of things, all token of Tom’s inherent sense of loss.
We had assembled a crew of Tom’s oldest friends—Mike, Phil, Gary, and me—and his girlfriend, Joyce, who lived down the hall at the senior apartments complex. It took us weeks to sift through the plastic containers and stacks of paper In Tom’s apartment, a process made slower by all the buried trip-wires of memory and nostalgia.
Amidst one of the piles of papers, Gary found a worn notebook inside a clear plastic sleeve. Since I was s designated documents processor, he passed it to me. Tucked inside the notebook was a folio of 19 pencil drawings. Each of the drawings had lengthy handwritten captions at the bottom. In essence, it constituted a comic book that told a story of three characters. Its front cover bore the notation, “Lubeck 1946.”
Although the pulp paper sheets had turned the color of tea, the outlines of the figures and the colored pencil hues still were vivid. The materials were humble, but the drawings showed the care of a talented artist. And, after 80 years in dark exile, these pages spoke to me with a strange urgency. They grabbed me by my figurative lapels.
All I had to do was listen. However, the first problem was that all the words it “spoke” were Estonian, the native tongue of Tom’s family. I know a few words of German, fewer of French, and can suss out a few words in languages with Latin roots. Estonian, though, is a Baltic language. It looked like alphabet soup to me.
Still, I knew Tom’s family and often had talked with his late grandmother and father. Tom’s extended family had arrived in Chicago a short time before Tom was born in 1951. They all were refugees, fleeing the Soviet takeover of Estonia after World War II, and had resided in a relocation camp in western Germany before coming to America. There were thousands of such displaced persons from Europe in my boyhood neighborhood in Chicago.
With this background to start with, and from what I could glean from the drawings themselves (e.g., a truck on its way to Lubeck, Germany), I understood that I held in my hands the first-person story of a refugee’s experiences, likely written in detention camp. Even so, the pictures were full of humorous touches and the overall tone of the folio was optimistic. Interspersed with realistic, even frightening, panels in the comic were drawings of dreamscapes and magic animals.
With that same optimistic spirit, I set out on my present task to uncover the story’s meaning, and perhaps to liberate its voice so that others may hear it. Last Friday I took the first step towards getting a good translation, done by someone steeped in Estonian culture. (I will recount this in the next installment.)
In a sly way, this unusual comic book seems to be my dear friend’s parting gift. For now I am engaged in carrying forth his ritual honoring of what is lost and forgotten. You knew me well, Tom.
tfg 05.26.2025