Past slave labourer Mr. Fix-it at 95
Kam Lake vet recalls forced farm work under Nazis
Simon Whitehouse
Northern News Services
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Frank Welna happily "wheels and deals" old clunkers and building supplies at his business on Coronation Drive. But the long-time Yellowknifer, now 95, didn't always have it easy.
Frank Welna, a 95-year-old former slave labourer in the Second World War, displays documents issued to him by his Nazi captors while he was held during the Second World War. Welna recently connected with his twin sister over the Internet for the first time since leaving Europe in 1951. - Simon Whitehouse/NNSL photo |
As Remembrance Day passes for another year, Welna was thinking again about his days as a young man after being rounded up by the German Nazis in rural Poland in October 1939. In September of that year, Adolph Hitler invaded Poland and in the following weeks shipped many young people, including Welna, to work in slave labour camps in Germany.
"The Germans took me and I was only 17 at the time," he recalled of his home in a farming district 100 kilometres south of Warsaw. "After the war stopped in Poland, the Germans for two weeks came to pick up workers and young girls only to work in Germany. They loaded up so many people to the train station. Every girl and guy got one rye bread and one salami. We were locked up in livestock cars and the train went right to Germany close to Czechoslovakia in a huge camp where there were thousands of people already."
Welna, using a piece of plywood to explain Germany's geography in an interview last week, pointed to where a huge camp was located in the southeast central portion of the country. It was there working orders from farmers and manufacturers were collected from across the country. He recalls staying at the camp for three days straight with no washroom or cleaning facilities and "no food, no sleep, no nothing."
He was grouped in with 12 people where he was locked into another livestock car to be shipped to an unspecified location.
"From the camp the train go, go, go, go way up north through every town and every place the train would stop and dump people off to respond to (work) orders," he explained, tracing his finger along the board. "My order was way up north close to Denmark. I had a big ride, day and night, locked up to hell. Standing room only."
He recalls arriving in the city of Kiel with a group of people on a Friday night and staying in a charity-type shelter until the following Monday when the government had the farmers come and pick up labourers. A translator had to be used between the farmers and workers like him because he could only speak Polish.
After meeting his farmer, he travelled with the man by a small train to the country.
"We were in a train station waiting for a train and he buy me beer in a nice mug with a handle," he said. "It was the first beer I had in my life."
The experience was somewhat strange as when he arrived in the small village, a number of villagers came to look him up and down because up until then they had never seen a Polish slave labourer, he laughed.
For two and a half years, with two other labourers, he worked on a hobby farm of grain, 12 cows, three horses and some other animals, but he said he was mostly treated well. The land had a creamery to make butter and cheese and a little lake.
One day the farmer said he would let him have a holiday and provided the documentation to allow Welna to travel to Poland for a month.
"After one month I come back to the same place and I stayed two weeks again," he said. "(The farmer) put all my belongings and everything in a horse wagon and took me to another village to another farm!"
For another two and a half years, he worked with a family with three daughters. His job was to look after the farm's horses and do work such as ploughing, harrowing and seeding until the end of the war.
"On the 5th of May, 1945 the British tanks come into the village," he said, recalling it was about 10 a.m. and that they came with a lot of supplies. "Holy Moses - surprise! Everybody ran out there and greeted them because they had never seen English people."
The farmer said it was up to Welna whether he wanted to continue working on the farm or leave. Welna said he stayed for another 10 days because he didn't know what to do.
"I didn't work anymore because I was partying and there were so many people with the slave labourers getting together," he said. "It was a hullabaloo."
When he decided to leave, the farmer fixed him a round tray of sandwiches for the road and he left for the next village where there was an abandoned German navy camp. About 238 foreign slave labourers collectively took over the camp, he said.
"Polish, Russians, Czechs, Romanians, Yugoslavians," he said listing them. "They needed a cook so I worked in the kitchen in there with stainless steel boilers. Big stuff."
A large amount of food was coming in from England and cooks were boiling it to feed the former labourers, he said.
Around that time, Belgian immigration officers came through looking for workers to fill positions in the coal mines near Brussels, and he signed up to work with them, he said. For three days he tried working underground but hated it and left to sign up and train with the American army instead. After intense training, he got a job guarding an airport base in Stuttgart.
By 1951, he was ready to leave Europe all together when the Americans no longer needed workers. He signed up with Canadian immigration and left on a Swedish ship called the Anna Salen from Bremen.
Through the years he worked a number of hands-on jobs, including his own construction business building houses in western Canada. He travelled to Yellowknife when Imperial Oil was building an airport filling station at the Yellowknife Airport in the late 1960s.
Since 1973, Welna has lived on Coronation Drive where he runs his business. The lot is filled with 200 trailer campers and 150 boats which he fixes in his spare time.
