“On February 13 (1945), the Russians came and we all had to get out,” Peter Fuhrmann recalled when detailing his incredible and tragic youth during the Second World War in Germany.
Furhmann, who brought new mountain rescue techniques to Canada in the 1970s, shares vivid aspects of being caught behind the Iron Curtain such as escaping the Soviet Union’s icy grip, almost losing a leg and spending over two years behind enemy lines trying to find his way back to his parents.
“It was survival, just basic survival,” Fuhrmann said. “I was so ill and so sick and so undernourished. I think when I got to Nuremberg, I remember something that I weighed 52 pounds. You know, I was basically a diseased skeleton... That’s why they put me into a hospital right away.”
At 86 years old, Fuhrmann is best known for his mountaineering and mountain rescue work for Parks Canada when he first came to Canada in 1955. Living in a quiet neighbourhood on the outskirts of Banff National Park, Fuhrmann spends his days in town diligently creating stained glass art, or listening to jazz music from a massive collection of vinyl, CDs and cassette tapes.
He became absolutely hooked on jazz after hearing influential figure Louis Armstrong for the first time over a makeshift radio in a small town where he, his grandparents and relatives hid underground from invading USSR soldiers.
The sound of war was all the bunch listened to inside a root cellar with the German army and Russian invaders blasting overhead. When things quieted down, the hidden figures emerged from the bunker to find the Nazis gone and the Soviet Union still there.
Born into wealth, Fuhrmann’s wartime story began in 1942, when he was a nine-year-old boy sent away by his parents due to the growing risk from bombings in their hometown, Nuremberg.
Fuhrmann described his father, a well-known architect, as a clever man with connections enabling him to remain out of the Nazi Party.
“I don’t know how the hell he ever stayed out of it because he was working and building stuff for the Organization Todt, which was the architecture sector of the Nazi regime,” he said.
Fuhrmann went to live with his grandparents in Breslau when the bombings became too troubling. Furhmann’s grandfather, Josef Kramer, who fought in the First World War for Germany, didn’t agree with the Nazi platform, either.
In Christmas of 1944, Fuhrmann’s large family all met for a dinner in Breslau, unbeknownst of the looming danger.
“The whole family was united,” he said. “My parents came, we had Christmas celebration there and after that they went to Nuremberg and I stayed.”
It would be the last time Fuhrmann, now 11 years old, would see his parents for over two years.
“When the Russians came [to Breslau] everyone fled, including the German army,” Fuhrmann said. “Then what happened was very confusing. I ended up basically being with my grandmother and aunt, and more relatives … my grandfather got out of Breslau and went to find us and did find us.”
Josef, the war veteran, was one of many forced to stay back in the Nazis scrambled attempt to hold back the Red Army, but the German army fled quickly.
Fuhrmann ended up in Dresden and found temporary refuge in a bunker close to the train station.
“My grandfather still had this idea of walking [back] towards Breslau, even though Russians were moving in,” Fuhrmann said.
The family started marching back, however, during the hike, which was hundreds of kilometres in length, a bad infection developed on Fuhrmann’s right leg. The constant walking and wear-and-tear on the boy’s shoes caused them to fall apart. When they came upon a dead soldier’s body, Josef removed the army boots and gave them to his grandson. However, the large boots rubbed and scrapped the boy’s leg, bloodying it and causing it to become badly infected.
“We ended up in a railway car makeshift First Aid station and some guy insisted to amputate my right leg because it was rotten,” Fuhrmann said. “My grandfather had this grand idea, which worked out very well, to put a fly net around [the wound] and put flies in it and the [hatched] maggots and would eat [the infection on] my leg and it all cleaned itself out.”
The practice is still used today if anti-biotics fail because the larvae feasts on the wound’s dead tissue that can cause infection.
“So anyway, I kept my leg,” Fuhrmann said.
The family then took shelter again in Wiesa, but the Soviets took over the town shortly thereafter. Behind the Iron Curtain under Russian occupation, which Fuhrmann called a “horror show,” tragedy struck the family when his aunt killed herself.
Josef and his grandson were tasked with finding the materials to make a coffin.
“We went down to the railway station because we thought there might be planks or something there. Well there was a bunch of Russians there and they were drinking vodka,” Fuhrmann said. “Now, at the time a lot of them were drinking the alcohol that came out of the train, out of the engine. But it was basically vodka for them. They were very friendly after we told them what had happened and they helped us rip a whole bunch of crates apart and get some planks so my grandfather and I could build a coffin for my aunt and I had my first drink of vodka with the Russians.”
The thought process was clear after his aunt’s death: Fuhrmann needed to get out and return to his parents on the Allied occupied side of the bombed-out country. His grandparents stayed under Russian occupation while he headed for Nuremberg.
One attempt was unsuccessful, when Fuhrmann jammed into a crowded train car for a week, with a small hole cut out of the bottom for a toilet, only to be turned away once they arrived.
He managed to get into a refugee camp, which was close to the U.S. occupied sector, where he “scraped the stuff out of garbage barrels” for food.
He lived this way until 1947.
At this time, laws became more lenient and selected people with family in the west were allowed to travel east.
Fuhrmann met an elderly man with two young children while staying in a compound. “One day, he was called out and he got a stamp on a piece of paper that gave him the authority to go to the west and there was trains coming in occasionally,” he said.
“When he came back, he also had a copy and put my name … so I had now also a document to go to the west, so I went with him and those two little babies.”
Fuhrmann was sickly and weak, but was finally going to see his parents.
“When I got to Nuremberg I was totally diseased and my body was covered in eczema and boils; my leg was still oozing and I was in bad shape, so they put me into a hospital and brought me back to something half reasonable. That was 1947-and-a-half.”
Back in Breslau, there were 36 members in Fuhrmann’s family during Christmas in 1944, but when it was all over, only six remained.
Once healthy enough to leave the hospital, Fuhrmann recalled walking around the town and seeing bananas bountiful on street corners and tasting Coca-Cola for the first time. A far cry from his dire situation a few months prior.
After the bleak misery of being under Russian occupation, where Fuhrmann found passion for jazz while hiding in a bunker, like Louis Armstrong’s classic song, Fuhrmann had finally returned to the “Sunny Side of the Street”.
