Ioan Daniciuc
Letter to my 93-year-old father: I am now in Galați. In Romania, where you were stationed for a few weeks as a soldier in 1944. You sent me copies of the letters you had written to your mother at the time and had sent by military post. You also sent me photographs you had taken here in Galați, in that wartime spring. After that, we spoke on the phone for a long time. Our correspondence inspired me to find somebody for my series of European portraits, someone who, like you, had experienced the war.
Ioan Daniciuc, 95, Galați:
My interpreter and I found him in a nursing home. When we enter his room, he is lying on the bed wearing only a pair of tracksuit bottoms in the unbearable July heat. However, he insists on smartening himself up for the photograph. He appears in the garden in his best clothes, dark trousers, white shirt and grey tank top, a carefully chosen grey and blue striped tie and a black hat, ready for his photo shoot. Before coming down to us he had had a little look around for the »girls« in the home, he tells me. Despite the fact he does actually have a girlfriend here – much younger than him, of course. His wife died after their golden wedding anniversary, but that was 25 years ago now. Ioan was a soldier in the Romanian army. At Christmas 1943, he was sent to the front line to fight alongside the Germans, against the Russians. He was severely wounded when they were surrounded by Russian troops near Sevastopol in Crimea. He and the other wounded German soldiers were taken to Lazarett in Odessa, which had German and Romanian military hospitals. They were then taken back to Romania by train. Ioan recounts how they were looked after by nuns in the carriages, and about how many of his comrades had lost limbs. He ended up in the hospital in Galați. Months later, Ioan was discharged from hospital and had just returned to his unit when he was suddenly being ordered in the opposite direction: Romania had changed sides. He was now fighting against the Germans, alongside the Red Army which had injured him so badly – just like that. In Iași, not far from Galați, he then faced the Germans in battle. When I ask how it felt to be fighting against his former comrades on the side of his former opponents, he says, »We just did what the officers told us to, we didn't really think about it. We were just scared, we didn't have time to think, not about our wives or life before the war. We were just scared.«