The Son and Heir: A Memoir by Alexander Münninghoff

Author:Alexander Münninghoff [Münninghoff, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2020-07-31T22:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Convivial or not, Frans Münninghoff was still in prison in Scheveningen in 1947, and the Dutch interrogators were determined to paint him as a war criminal. But after months of interrogation, they had gotten nowhere. The Soviets refused to provide the information that would verify Frans’s story, which had to do with the fact that the Netherlands had been the last western country to recognize the USSR, in 1942, and was extremely critical of the ruling powers in Moscow. Furthermore, relations with the Soviets had become increasingly tense with the onset of the Cold War, and a wall of mistrust had been built between East and West.

Wera was called in for questioning in June, and the detectives tried to extract incriminating information from her. They knew that her marriage to Frans had fallen apart, and they hit her with one question after another. But despite her frazzled nerves, my mother didn’t give them what they wanted. She told them how they’d met in Riga, and how she’d seen him at the end of 1940 at Café Schwan in Posen. “He was wearing a German uniform with a diagonal belt across his chest and carrying a weapon. There was a band around his upper arm that read Dolmetscher, or interpreter. I fell in love with him all over again, though we hadn’t seen each other for over a year. Then the war began. He didn’t write, but he visited me twice in Posen, where I got a job with the government. We got married on May 11, 1942, in Hamburg. Why there? I had family in the countryside there, some distant relatives of my mother’s, and they could still afford a few luxuries, so we went to celebrate our marriage and let them spoil us for a little while. No, we never considered getting married in the Netherlands. Frans had a bad relationship with his father and didn’t plan on ever returning to Voorburg.”

At this point in the report, Wera begins to recite the lawyers’ version of the story almost verbatim. She mentioned, without offering details, Frans’s injury in the spring of 1943 at Cherkasy and his admission to the hospital in Bamberg. She saw him again later that summer, when he returned to Posen on sick leave. It was then that I was conceived, but there’s no mention of this in the interrogation report, nor of the fact that my father returned to Posen after his second injury in early 1944 and was there when I was born.

“After that, to the best of my knowledge, Frans was dismissed from military service,” my mother continued. “How he eventually returned to his parents’ home in the Netherlands, I have no idea. I had been living there since September 1944, when Xeno came to rescue me and my child from the impending Russian attack on Posen. Then, on June 1, 1945, Frans suddenly showed up at the front door in Voorburg.

“It was a difficult period for us,” she continued. “He couldn’t cope with the misery of the war, and on top of it all, his father was incredibly hard on him.

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