After my wife and I returned from our first visit to Nowy Dwor Gdanski (NDG) in September 2011, I was recounting the highlights of our trip to my now 87-year old mother. She was particularly curious how Tiegenhof, and the town where my father was born, Ratibor (today: Raciborz, Poland), which we’d also visited, look today, and whether I had been able to recognize any of the places my father had photographed; as with me, my father had spoken fondly to my mother of his years in Tiegenhof.
It was during this conversation that my mother reminded me that my father’s good friends, Juergen “Peter” Lau and his wife Hannelore “Lolo” Lau, were still alive, then-living in Oberhausen, Germany; my mother explained that Peter Lau had spent part of his childhood in Tiegenhof. Having by this time scanned my father’s entire photo collection and having thoroughly studied them for any identifiable landmarks or captions, I was extremely curious to speak with someone who might recognize some of the unidentified people in the pictures, particularly those from Tiegenhof. Reminded of Peter Lau’s childhood connection to this place, I immediately contacted him, first by phone and, subsequently, by mail. I asked him what he remembered of Tiegenhof, about my father, about some of the people and places that featured prominently in my father’s photos, as well as his own family’s connection to the town. In passing, I mentioned that my wife and I were planning another trip to NDG in 2012 at the Muzeum Zulawskie’s invitation.
Some weeks later, I received a very gracious reply from Peter and his wife, detailing his family’s association with East Prussia and identifying on an enclosed map various towns he talked about. Peter briefly explained how his parents had wound up in Tiegenhof and how they became life-long friends with my father, and told me he had lived in Tiegenhof from about age 5 to age 15. Since I’d mentioned my interest in having Peter look through my father’s pictures, he suggested my wife and I incorporate a visit to Oberhausen the following year on our way to NDG so we could meet in person, he could peruse my father’s photos, and we could discuss his memories of Tiegenhof. Given Peter’s advanced age, he was 88 at the time, we eagerly agreed to this suggestion. In the interim, I had also asked the Director of the Muzeum Zulawskie, Mr. Marek Opitz, if he could send Peter a copy of his book on Tiegenhof, so that we would have additional visual prompts to work from when we met.
Finally, in May 2012, my wife and I drove to Oberhausen for the first time to meet Peter and Lolo Lau (Figure 1). Peter has an excellent memory of many of the people and places that figure in my father’s pictures. During our visit, he explained that his father, Kurt Lau, and his mother, Kathe, married in 1919 and moved to Danzig that same year. Kurt Lau worked there for the Deutsches Bank. Jurgen Lau was born in Danzig on August 23, 1923. Around 1927 or 1928, when Peter was four or five years old, the Deutsches Bank, which owned shares in the rapeseed oil mill factory in Tiegenhof, needed a manager to run operations, so they tapped Kurt Lau for the position of Managing Director of the “Tieghenhofer Oelmühle.” To this day, rape or rapeseed, grown for its seeds which yield canola or rapeseed oil, is widespread in the Zulawy region. In any case, during his time in Tiegenhof, Kurt Lau slowly began acquiring shares in the oil mill, so by the time he returned to Danzig in about 1936, he owned the oil mill. Peter attended elementary and high school in Tiegenhof. It was there that my father, Kurt, and Kurt’s wife Kathi became close friends, a friendship that lasted throughout their lives. Towards the end of the war, as the Russians were closing in on Tiegenhof, Kurt Lau convinced the German authorities that the oil mill was critical to the war effort so they agreed to dismantle it and ship it to the Hamburg area. While newer technology eventually rendered the old mill obsolete, the replacement technology formed the basis for Kurt Lau’s future rapeseed oil business in Deggendorf, Germany.
My hope that Peter Lau would recognize some of the people in my father’s photographs was partially borne out, although his equally important contribution was in providing some historical and geographic context for Tiegenhof, as well as Danzig. Not surprisingly, Peter picked out his parents in a few of my father’s photos, identified some of his own father’s business associates, gave names to a few of my father’s friends and acquaintances, and even told me the eventual fate of some of my father’s associates.
Given the rather hasty and chaotic departure from Danzig of Peter’s parents and Lolo Lau as the Russians were approaching in 1945, predictably, few pictures survive of their lives in Tiegenhof and Danzig, making the survival of my father’s collection of photos that much more remarkable. One photo that did survive was given to Peter by one of his dear friends from his days in Tiegenhof, Rudi Schlenger, and shows Peter and Rudi’s graduation class around 1937 (Figure 2). Another, post-dating Peter’s time in Tiegenhof, shows Rudi’s widow, Hedwig or “Hedsch,” and Peter’s mother, Kathi Lau, when she visited the Laus in Deggendorf, Germany.
In subsequent Blog posts, I will focus on several people identified by Peter Lau who formed part of my father’s circle of friends and acquaintances, what and how I was able to learn about some of them, and, in one instance, how I even met the descendants of a few of my father’s friends.
It was during our initial visit with Peter and Lolo Lau in May 2012 that Peter showed me his copy of the “Tiegenhofer Nachrichten,” an annual periodical for former German residents of Tiegenhof and their descendants that ceased being published in December 2014. Naturally written in German, it reported on annual trips to the former German town, interviewed former residents, their current whereabouts, people who’d passed away, the history of still-standing historic structures in NDG, and more. As a non-speaker, however, the most intriguing part of the periodical was the list of member’s names, addresses, and, in the case of women, maiden names, found in the back of the publication. This proved to be a real treasure trove of information, and provided the basis for the next phase of research into my father’s life in Tiegenhof. Following my return to the States after our vacation in 2012, I focused on writing letters to various people with variants on the surname “Dicke,” having mistakenly, but amusingly, misunderstood that the name of one of my father’s friends was “Grete Dicke.” The people to whom I wrote to with this surname were names I found in the “Tiegenhofer Nachrichten.” My next post will focus on this “Grete Dicke,” and how I was eventually able to discover her true identity.