STARKVILLE — Ellen Weaver Hartman didn’t know she was a kriegie kid. She knew almost nothing about her father’s service in World War II until a few years ago.

“My dad had a scar on his back and a scar on his torso … but we didn’t talk about it,” Hartman said to a crowd Thursday at the Oktibbeha County Heritage Museum. “And so, both my parents died, and I went, ‘darn, I didn’t ask him about his war experience.’”

But Hartman started researching after her parents’ passing, and she found the truth her father – Joseph D. Weaver – that he never said. His plane had been shot down at Normandy, leading to his capture and becoming a German prisoner of war – forced on an 86 mile death march between two prison camps.

She displayed the communication he sent back to his parents in Ackerman to the crowd.

“His parents, my grandparents, only knew that he was missing in action and possibly a POW,” Hartman said. “And this was the first communication they got from him. He said ‘Happy Mother’s Day,’ because it was May 2. And he said, ‘I’m fit and fine,’ but he wasn’t.”

In 1944, Soviet forces advanced on a prison camp in what is now Tychow, Poland. The camp was known as Stalag Luft IV, where Allied airmen who had been captured were being held.

The weakest of the prisoners there were sent by train to another camp, while the rest – about 6,000 U.S. and British airmen – were forced to march west barefoot with little food or clothing.

Hartman’s father broke his leg on that march. But Hartman said he survived because a Louisiana serviceman picked him up and carried him, passing their packs to others who shared the load.

“By the time he got home, my dad weighed 90 pounds,” Hartman said. “And you can imagine, being so emaciated himself, having to carry a 90 pound person.”

Having learned about Stalag Luft IV, Hartman reached out to Laura Edge, an author whose father had been through the same evacuation of the prison camp and wrote a book about that experience, “On the Wings of Dawn: American Airmen as Germany’s Prisoners.” Without ever meeting, the pair decided to make a trip to Germany to walk in their fathers’ footsteps.

“Sight unseen, I met her in Berlin, and we spend the next 10 days retracing the death march, and going and visiting the camp,” Hartman said.

It wasn’t until after that first trip Hartman met Jim Hemphill, a longtime Starkville resident whose father had also been in captivity at Stalag Luft IV and walked the death march. While Hemphill had asked his father a few things about that experience, Hemphill still said he didn’t know much until he researched the war after his parents’ death.

“I asked my father if it was hard to jump out of a plane without practice, and he said, ‘not when it’s on fire,’” Hemphill said.

While Hartman’s father was taken part of the way to the next camp by train due to his leg breaking, Hemphill’s father walked all the way – including the final two miles they were forced to run through as soldiers slashed at them with bayonets and police dogs tried to bite them.

Hartman, Hemphill and Edge started planning another trip to go to Germany in 2024. But as they were planning, the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force reached out to ask if another member could go with them to retrace those footsteps. Then, yet another child of a prisoner of war came out of the woodwork, making five total. The group started calling themselves kriegie kids – based on the German word for war.

As the group planned its trip for last spring, Edge hired a German historian for help. Hartman said that the historian pitched the idea of creating a documentary for the trip to ARTE TV, a European public service channel dedicated to culture.

Christine Ruetten with ARTE TV then got in touch with the group, asking if they could film the trip as well as extend it. The channel also set up meetings with mayors of small villages, who brought in local historians and witnesses to talk about their experiences.

Last spring, the kriegie kids followed their fathers’ trail through Germany and Poland, seeing the barns they were forced to sleep in and searching for pieces of the past. One of the kriegie kids, Hartman said, ended up finding the engine of the plane his father flew during the war.

The journey felt like it brought closure, in a lot of ways, Hemphill said, as they were walking the steps their fathers had taken almost 80 years later.

“If my memory and math is OK at this age… 80 years and 12 days ago, my father was liberated,” Hemphill said on Wednesday. “My father spent 15 months in Germany.”

Hemphill said interacting with locals along the way was also special, as many of them thanked the kriegie kids for the service their fathers provided during the war.

“When a war is fought in your homeland, it’s a forever war,” Hemphill said.

The final one hour documentary, “Kriegie Kids: On Our Fathers’ Trail” was created as a collaboration between Hessischer Rundfunk, acamnetwork & WABE TV Atlanta and the group’s newly formed nonprofit, the Kriegie Foundation, dedicated to preserving and honoring the memory of WWII prisoners of war. The documentary is available on YouTube, Hartman said, though it is also set to debut on WABE in Atlanta soon.

READER FAVORITES

• 

  Master Gardeners bloom at state conference

  By Ashlyn Joyner • 4 hours ago