Žanis (John) Zekants is the link between all the family lines in this story. All of this history in some way culminates with him. He is the reason I have gone on this journey of discovery and if history had not played out just as it did, my husband and children would not be here today.
Žanis Zekants (Jr.) was born in February of 1915. His parents, Žanis Zekants and Emilija Rozentals/Rozenvalds were serving on a ship in the Gulf of Finland, near Helsinki (known as Helsingfors at that time). Most likely this was a merchant ship serving as a transport for goods or people, but it is also possible that they were serving on a military ship. The Gulf of Finland arm of the Baltic Sea was the normal ‘over-wintering’ location for much of the Imperial Baltic fleet. This helped to protect the Russian capital and port city of St. Petersburg in case of an early spring attack. But the winter of 1914/1915 was different. The world was in a state of total war. And the weather was more brutal than usual.
Žanis (Sr.) was a young sailor and his wife must have been hired on as a cook or laundress. Due to a lack of workers, since so many had already been called up to fight, some women were being allowed to do this. It meant that this newly married couple could stay together. We don’t know if they knew Emilija was pregnant or not, but by the time they found out, it would have been too late to make their way back to Riga in those winter conditions. The family story my husband grew up with was that his grandfather was born on the frozen sea. This was actually the initial question I set out to answer back in 2014 when I began my journey into Latvian history.
By April, the Zekants family had finally made it back to Riga. They made a point to record the baby’s birth at St. Martin’s Lutheran Church on the 19th of April. Sadly, less than a month later, baby Žanis lost his father. The elder Žanis died of tuberculosis on the 13th of May. Emilija, now a widow with a small child, then lived through the next two and a half years in a city of extreme uncertainty, deprivation and fear with her parents and sisters. And in August of 1917, Emilija too lost her life under unknown circumstances. It is possible she was in some kind of street accident but we will never know for sure. This left baby Žanis an orphan. Three days after they buried his mother in Lāčupes cemetery next to her husband, Žanis and his remaining family fled Riga in the wake of the long-awaited German invasion of the city. They spent the next three years in northern Latvia just trying to survive.
By 1920, it was safe to return to Riga. The next 20 years (known as the Inter-War Period), was full of rebuilding, optimism and national pride. Žanis’s first several years of life had been tragic and unstable, but his grandparents, Kristaps and Anna Rozenvalds and aunts and uncles took care of him and raised him into a man. His Aunt Olga, his mother’s sister, in particular took on the role of ‘foster-mother’ to Žanis and in Žanis’s own words ‘She raised a lice-ridden boy into a man.’ They all lived together in apartment #20 on Karlines Street in Riga, just north of the Old City.
We know Žanis attended the Riga Craftsman School and studied electrical engineering in his teens. Then in 1937, he started his mandatory military service in the Latvian Army in a communications battalion. After this mandatory service he opted to enlist permanently as a soldier. As a radio-telegraphist, he was sent to Valka on the Estonian border. This experience saw him add Estonian language skills to his growing list of languages that included Latvian, German, some English and some Russian.
Then in 1940, everything changed. The Soviets invaded Riga in mid-June 1940. The coup was quick and done with minimal violence. But the population was scared. Žanis’s beloved Aunt Olga and her son, Valdis, and her husband, Willi Droune, decided to give up their Latvian citizenship and flee to Germany rather than face living in a Soviet state. The Latvian military was almost instantly dissolved by the new Soviet regime and most of the commissioned officers were shot. Žanis had only reached the rank of corporal and was spared this fate. The remaining soldiers of the former Latvian Army were now considered to be in the Soviet army. But we know that Žanis was dismissed fairly quickly for ‘distrust’. He must have been scared for his life every moment of the next 12 months of Soviet occupation.
At the end of this ‘Year of Horror’, in June of 1941, Žanis’s uncle, Teodors Zekants, was pulled out of his house and shot by Russian soldiers at his home in eastern Latvia. This tragedy shook Žanis to the core. Within days of Teodors’s execution, the Soviets had been replaced by the Nazi German ‘liberators’. Many Latvians looked to the Germans to reinstate their country’s former independence. But it was not to be.
Probably sometime in 1942, Žanis joined the German military. We believe he thought he might be a target by the Soviets if they ever regained power in Latvia. His aunt Olga and his uncle Teodors had been on the side of the anti-Bolsheviks in WWI and the Russian Civil War. If the Germans lost, and the Reds took over, he could be next and he couldn’t let that happen. We know that Žanis spent a good part of those years as part of the Siege of Leningrad. And then in 1943, Hitler authorized a new ‘volunteer’ army dubbed the Latvian Legion. Latvian men were called up in the tens of thousands to fight. Žanis was eventually transferred to this new legion.
By the middle of 1944, the Russians were knocking at the door of western Latvia. Cities were falling to the Soviets and hope was dwindling. Žanis was ordered to go with the 15th Division of the Latvian Legion to Germany. By April of 1945 Žanis, under the command of Vilis Janums, were ordered to help in the defense of Berlin against Allied forces, known as ‘The Battle of Berlin’. But Janums could see the writing on the wall. He knew the Germans had lost the war. There was no way he was going to send his men to their deaths on behalf of Adolf Hitler. The Latvians had never been fighting ‘for’ Nazi Germany. The had always been fighting ‘against’ the Soviets. Janums disobeyed orders and he led his company of just over 700 men, including Žanis, to the west. They ran for their lives, quickly stripping themselves of all signs of their German military status. They marched night and day, hearing the rapidly approaching Russian tanks getting closer and closer. They slept in the forest and scrounged for food. Žanis watched men all around him die of heat-stroke and starvation as they made their way east. Amazingly, Žanis made it to the Elbe River, where he surrendered himself to the Allies. The horror was over.
Žanis spent the next 5 months as a Prisoner of War. He often spent days without food and had no idea what would become of him. He and the other Latvians were very worried that the Americans would turn them over to the Russians. That is certainly what the Russians wanted them to do. But the Baltics were a special case. It was finally proven to the American decision makers that the Latvians had not really ‘volunteered’ for service but rather had been forced to fight by the Nazis. Latvian soldiers were then given the choice to repatriate or stay in Allied Germany. The Soviet government pleaded for Latvians to return, promising them anything they wanted to hear. Of the few who went back, it is thought they were never heard from again. Lucky for us Žanis chose to remain in Germany.
By the end of 1945, Žanis had been released as a POW and was now moving from camp to camp as a DP (Displaced Person). His health had suffered enormously from the war. He was malnourished, racked with unexplained skin rashes and sores, plagued by digestive issues, insomnia, heart symptoms and chronic mental distress. The state of his health would really never recover for the rest of his life. Over the next couple of years Žanis was able to reunite with his Aunt Olga and her husband Willi as well as with his cousin, Elza, the daughter of his Aunt Lavize Vimba (Rozenbergs). They had all managed to escape. Many of his family members, however, had not left Latvia and Žanis would never see them again.
At the end of 1946, Žanis was living in Furth, just outside the city of Nuremberg in southern Germany. There he met a pair of sisters working in Furth, who were from a very small German village. The older sister had lost her husband in the war. Together the two sisters had lost all of their brothers and brothers-in-law in the war. Over time Žanis and the younger sister, Lore, began dating. They were married in the middle of 1947. Olga and Elza were there for his wedding. Then in March 1948, Žanis and Lore become parents of a baby boy. They named him ‘Johan’, like his father and grandfather before him (the name ‘Žanis’ is Latvian for John).
Soon it was time to start thinking of emigration. It seemed everyone was trying to get out of war-torn Europe and make a better, safer life somewhere else. Žanis wanted to contact the Latvian Embassy in Australia to find his Uncle Karl, who had gone there many years before and lived in Broome. But he never found Karl. He started looking into Canada, the USA and even South America. They eventually were able to get approved for emigration to Australia. Near the end of 1949, Žanis and his wife and son, made their way to Bagnoli Resettlement Camp in Naples, Italy. They spent four weeks there waiting on their travel documents and passage on a ship. The conditions in this camp were horrendous and Žanis would be interviewed after arrival in Australia about his experience there. The conditions were so bad in the camp that by the time they boarded the ship Anna Salen in December, 1949 many children were gravely ill and some even died on the ship before enroute to Australia. Their own son got sick on the 6-week trip to Australia. The Anna Salen was supposed to travel to Melbourne, but so many children needed medical care that the ship docked in Freemantle on the western coast.
So after everything that they had been through to get to a place of safety where they could reinvent their lives, Žanis and Lore’s had to hand over their only son to doctors in a foreign country and wait to see if they would ever see him again. Their were lucky, their son survived.
Part of the agreement to emigrate to Australia was an obligatory 2-year-period of labor wherever the Australian authorities decided to place you. John, as he was now officially going by, would be placed in various manual labour jobs. Regardless of the fact that he had training in electrical engineering and radio operation and spoke several languages, he was just another refugee from Europe. Free labor for Australian companies for the next 2 years. But maybe it was a small price to pay to be welcomed into the arms of a country willing to provide a new home for thousands of European refugees.
Over the next 33 years, John and Lore would go on to have five sons, one of which died at the age of two. They lived in Western Australia for several years before settling in Queensland, in the city of Brisbane. John would continue to have health problems and mental distress from the horrible experiences of his past and even had his own battle with the disease that had killed his father, TB. They tried their best to assimilate to their home, speak only English and raise their children the best way they could. Although he searched, he never found out what happened to his uncle Karl. He didn’t talk much about ‘The War’ as was common for that generation. And although there was a part of him that wanted to remain in contact with his Latvian family, he just couldn’t bring himself to communicate much after arriving in Australia. Those ties faded away. John’s sons only learned small snippets of their father’s Latvian past.
Little by little, John’s Latvian connections slipped away. His cousin back in Latvia, Davids Voldemars, son of his father’s sister Lizette Pudze (Zekants), who he did correspond with on occasion died in 1959 in Valtaiki, Latvia. His aunt Olga died in 1963 in Bonn, Germany and his cousin Elza passed away in 1969 in Seattle, Washington. John/Žanis Zekants passed away on the 3rd of February 1983 from a stroke. His ashes were laid to rest in Mt. Thompson Cemetery in Brisbane. His wife, Lore, lived until 2018. Her ashes were laid to rest next to her husband and the two sons who preceded her. John/Žanis has generations of living descendants in Australia today and this is their story too.
