What a Story!

This evening I finished reading my mother-in-law's tale of what it was like to live in Soviet prison camps for three and a half years. This was 20 pages, single-space typed, on what had to have been originally a European paper format for size. The copy of the manuscript I have is on 11" x 17" paper, and the typewritten part is about 10" x 13", and it is thickly typed without paragraph breaks. My coauthor, Rita, typed it from a tape recording of her mother made years ago.

The story is a little hard to follow sometimes because Mom Baltutt did tend to go off on tangents in her tale (as anyone would do while speaking freely telling a story that hadn't been told before), but it's pretty clear what was going on — except for some German words I had never seen before, and some unfamiliar idiomatic expressions. This is one tough story, though. This would have made a good book, if an interviewer had had some time to sit down with Mom Baltutt and elicit more details and background. As it is, I am afraid it is going to delay completion of the book by a few months! Maybe I'm being pessimistic. But whatever I am being, the book cannot go out without this part of the story.

One thing that I found worthy of mention (among many others) is that she ran into a number of Germans held in servitude in the Ural Mountains who had been taken prisoner during World War ONE! And were never released.