"Operation Hannibal" Introduction (Part 4)

INTRODUCTION (Part 4) No-one knows what happened to Edward after he was pressed into the German auxiliary forces. His sisters don’t remember hearing from him, and the many dozens of letters written to him and to the Red Cross after the war went unanswered. To this day, the only news the family has was the rumour that he had been killed during a mortar attack by partisans early in 1942 while carrying supplies to the front. Edward has no grave, and today his memory is kept alive only by his two sisters who think of him with love, regret, and a deep longing. One of the two is MeeMee. With her surviving brother, her sister and her parents, she survived the war by being rescued from the horrors of the Eastern Front by the German Navy in Operation Hannibal, the greatest evacuation of all time. This is her story, but it is even more than that. It is how a choice for mercy by both Red Army soldiers and Heer troops saved a family’s life and helped atone for the merciless cruelty practiced on either side of the Russian Front. It is also the story of how the sailors and soldiers of Germany saved two million civilians and redeemed at least a part of their nation’s soul, lost in the cruel and merciless fires of the Second World War.