More than Memories

By David Maurer

Published: September 7, 2008      The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Virginia

The green foliage of spring was just starting to appear along the Danube River when the high-explosive incendiary bombs began to fall.

For nearly a week, German bombers flew more than 500 sorties over Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in what the Nazis dubbed “Operation Punishment.” The merciless bombardment was Hitler’s answer to Yugoslavia’s decision to side with the Allies.

Kathryn Nikkel was a young girl when the thunderous explosions shook the beautiful capital asunder. The terror bombing started on April 6, 1941, and continued for four days.

The mindless fury obliterated hundreds of historic buildings, including the National Library of Serbia. More than 300,000 books, some of which were precious medieval manuscripts, fueled the conflagration.

More tragic were the countless broken bodies of innocent civilians strewn amid the debris and decaying blossoms. More than 65 years later, the memories, although faded, remain for one Virginia woman.

“What I remember are the bombs falling and people being killed,” Nikkel said during a telephone interview from her Lovettsville home. “I remember a lot of dust, smoke and big craters.

“At night the sky was lit up by flares that were so close together that it was like daylight. And I vaguely remember that it snowed after the bombing stopped.”

Vague recollections may suffice when family stories are exchanged over mugs of coffee at the kitchen table. But when historic accounts are entered into book form, a higher degree of accuracy is required.

When Nikkel commissioned local freelance writer Michael S. Zbailey to write her memoirs several years ago, she wanted it to be historically correct. Confirming that snow did fall after the bombing was just one of many challenges the Albemarle County resident faced while writing “Time Remembered, Grief Forgotten: A Personal Memoir.”

“After working on the book for a while, I started to sense that it was one of those meant-to-be things,” said Zbailey, who took up writing full time after retiring from banking. “Some information came to me in ways I wouldn’t have expected.

“For example, I was playing tennis against somebody I didn’t know, and I asked him about his accent. As it turned out his name was Basil Lukianoff, and he was living in Belgrade when it was bombed in 1941.

“He was able to tell me things about life in Belgrade at the time, such as the bread lines and how they dealt with the Nazis. I asked him if it was true that two days after the bombing it started to snow, and he confirmed that it had.”

The just-released memoir opens in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1914. It goes on to recount the story of three generations of Nikkel’s family.

“When Kathryn and I started talking about the book, she told me her grandparents were well-off people living in St. Petersburg just prior to the Russian Revolution,” Zbailey said. “I told her that was very interesting, and including it would make her story all the more interesting.

“I realized some of the things that have happened to her were related to her family’s background. They happened to have lived through probably the most chaotic century in human history.”

The trauma and tragedies of the 20th century were still in the future when Nikkel’s grandmother, Sophia Belenky, went shopping for an anniversary gift for her husband on a spring day in 1914. Through his research, Zbailey found she had walked along Nevsky Prospekt Street and stopped in the shop of Peter Carl Faberge.

Among the gifts she purchased that day was an exquisite pair of gold cuff links. She couldn’t have imagined that in the not-too-distant future she would be forced to trade the cuff links for a bit of rabbit meat to ward off starvation.

The bartering story was oral history. Like a stone mason, Zbailey had to fill in the spaces between the rocks of family lore and then secure them to places and events. He often was able to find the perfect mix of mortar on the bookshelves of the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library.

“I spent a lot of time in Alderman Library, particularly in relationship to Kathryn’s grandmother,” said Zbailey. “Kathryn knew things happened, but she didn’t know all the connectors, because these were stories she had been told.

“Because the story starts in St. Petersburg, I had to know what the city had looked like in 1914. In the Alderman Library I found two large books with enhanced photographs of St. Petersburg before the revolution.

“I was able to see exactly what the streets of the city looked like. It had lampposts, electricity, streetcars, horses, cars on the street and so on.

“In 1920 Sophia and her children had to flee Russia as the Communists were taking over. It’s January and they have to cross the frozen Don River, which I also had to research extensively to get a sense of that.”

The chapter describing the river crossing received the Virginia Writer’s Club Nonfiction Award. Another chapter detailing Nikkel’s arrival at the Nazi concentration camp at Strasshof, Austria, received another of the club’s nonfiction awards.

After escaping from Russia, Nikkel’s family lived in Yugoslavia, where she was born. Her part of the story starts in 1944 as she and her family departs Belgrade to go live with an aunt in Linz, Austria.

During the train ride Nikkel’s father makes the mistake of asking a group of German soldiers how things were going on the Russian front. The soldiers immediately detected his thick Russian accent and, suspecting him of being a spy, had the entire family removed from the train.

A short time later the family was squeezed into a boxcar of another train that was filled with Jews, Gypsies and Russians. The next time the sliding boxcar door was opened, the dazed occupants were pushed and beaten into a world of unspeakable horrors.

In later years, Nikkel would speak to groups about her experiences at Strasshof and the slave labor camp at St. Polten, just west of Vienna. Her talks would invariably cause people to ask her to write a book, but she didn’t give it much thought.

“I just wasn’t interested in writing a book,” Nikkel said. “I don’t have the patience for something like that.

“But when General Lou Wilson, who was the commandant of the Marine Corps at the time, told me I had an obligation to write it, I was moved by that. I felt I had a duty to do it.

“Michael really sank his teeth into it, and did all the research, which backs up everything I told him. I’m so fortunate to have had him do it, because I wanted it to have the integrity of history, and he gave it that.”

Nikkel approached the book with unflinching honesty. She tells about being beaten by her stepmother even while they were enduring life in the work camps.

“I remember seeing the condemned prisoners in the striped uniforms,” said Nikkel, who immigrated to the United States in 1951 and became a citizen in 1956. “We didn’t look much better, and the guards would work us until we fell over dead.

“What food there was was abominable, and typhoid fever was rampant because of the unsanitary conditions. My memories of the war have subsided, but my memories of child abuse are with me to this day.

“It comes out as nightmares, and in all the horrors that come through after a traumatic experience. My hope is that my story will help somebody in some way.”

Shortly after 9/11 Nikkel was watching “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” The theme of the program was the American spirit, and she was so moved by it that she wrote a letter to the host.

Nikkel wrote about her experiences during the war and what her adopted country meant to her. Winfrey was so taken by Nikkel’s words that she included her in a follow-up program that focused on immigrants who had made a new life in this country.

Nikkel’s memoir ends with the letter she wrote to Winfrey. In it she tells about finding a discarded magazine in a refugee camp after the war. On one of the pages she sees a picture of an American flag with the word “integrity” beneath it.

Nikkel wrote that she finally understood the full meaning of integrity after watching the nation pull together after 9/11. The tragedy also motivated her to tell her story.

“Interlaced throughout the book is the whole idea of what our country is all about,” Nikkel said. “From three generations back, my family has been touched by American values.

“This country has done so much good, and I think we should remember that. My dedication in the book is everything in a nutshell that I wanted to say to the American people.”

When Nikkel was a terrified little girl she had to pick her way through the snow-covered shards of war. She couldn’t have imagined then that one day she would dedicate a book to the citizens of a nation she would come to call her beloved home.

The dedication reads: “To the American people, who fed me when I was hungry, clothed me when I was cold, gave me shelter when I was homeless, and defined for me again the word integrity.”

“Time Remembered, Grief Forgotten: A Personal Memoir” can be ordered at www. kathrynnikkel.com.