Teodors Zekants was the 4th child and third son of Jekob Zekants and Magreete Latīnis. Teodors was born in 1887 near the town of Talsi in north-western Latvia. Teodors wasn’t baptized, however, until 1897 when he and his younger brother, Žanis, were baptized in Nurmuižas Lutheran Church. This was most likely because Jekob and Magreete converted to the newly introduced Baptist religion around 1886. They must have spent ten years as Baptists before coming back into the fold of the Lutheran Church in 1897. In 1906 Teodors’s older sister, Lizette, died during childbirth with her second child. This was Teodor’s first experience losing a sibling, but it wouldn’t be his last.
Like his older brothers, Andrejs and Karl, before him, Teodors became a sailor. He must have done mandatory military service just before WWI and we think he must have done this service in the Black Sea. After the catastrophic defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 the Baltic Fleet was decimated and the focus of the Imperial Navy moved south. Teodors may have decided to make his career in the navy and enlisted permanently after his mandatory service was complete, although we don’t know for sure. We know that he remained in the Black Sea region for the duration of WWI. He was based in Sevastopol and we think that may be where he met his wife, Liene Balodis. She was also Latvian, from the Daugavpils area of Latgale.
The years between 1918 and 1920 were dangerous and harsh. Conditions were such that he would have been unable to return home to Latvia and inadvertently he became part of the White Volunteer Army. This became the last bastion of troops fighting in vain against the encroaching Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. During these years Teodors and his wife had two daughters and must also have reconnected with Teodors’s sister-in-law, Olga Rozentals/Rozenvalds, as she too ended up as a refugee in the Crimea at this time. By November 1920, the 150,000 people left fighting or fleeing the Communists set out into the Black Sea on hundreds of vessels heading for Constantinople. The convoy was led by General Pyotr Wrangel and has forever been known as ‘Wrangel’s Fleet’. Teodors and his family didn’t reach home until the middle of 1921.
Now back in a newly independent Latvia, Teodors and his family settled down in the Daugavpils area of eastern Latvia. We are not sure exactly when, but eventually Teodors ended up working as a prison warden at the famous Daugavpils Prison. Between the years 1921 and 1932 Teodors’s wife gave birth to six more children. Tragically, Liene did not survive her final childbirth. Teodors was then left with eight children under the age of sixteen. At some point he remarried a woman named Helena Gulans. Helena seemed to have loved Teodors’s children very much and must have been a godsend to the family.
In the middle of 1940, Soviet troops invaded Latvia. The takeover was quick and relatively bloodless but left the Latvian people reeling. The Soviets controlled Latvia for the next year, until the middle of 1941. We are pretty sure that when the Soviets took over, Teodors would have been dismissed from his job at the prison. He might have headed into the countryside to live close to his wife’s family. By spring of 1941, the Soviets were becoming more and more horrific, culminating in mass killings and deportations of tens of thousands of people in June 1941. It was at this time, as the family stories go, that soldiers approached Teodors’s house while he was having dinner. They yelled at him to come outside. Teodors shouted back that he was not guilty of anything. The soldiers dragged Teodors out of his house and possibly marching him a short way into the forest, they shot him dead. These must have been desperate Russian soldiers or bandits, killing as many as they could before succumbing to the German enemy. The Germans were at Latvia’s doorstep and the Soviets knew they couldn’t stop them. If Teodors could have held out just a couple more days, until the Germans took Latvia and expelled the Russians, he might have survived.
(photo from Wikipedia Commons: Glossologist)
According to the 1941 census taken by the newly victorious German Army, Helena and the children had moved from their previous house in the middle of July and were now scattered at various farms in the area. All of Teodors’s children survived WWII but sadly his son Edward would be killed under unknown circumstances in 1949. Helena continued to look after Teodors’s children and grand-children for many years to come.