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German visits Knox, where POW father stayed

The postcard is curled at the edges, the words typewritten in red — save for a few German words handwritten in black.

Translated, they read: “I’m fine, I’m still alive. I hope you are also fine, I hope to see you soon.”

Only two sentences, but it is almost more about World War II than Peter Simon’s father ever shared with him.

A German prisoner of war in the U.S. during the war, Simon’s father, Willi Simon, didn’t share his experience with his family. World War II isn’t something his generation talked about, said Fort Knox’s German liaison, Army Sgt. Major Karl-Heinz Grenzebach, “because they still have flashbacks; still have cruel memories from this.”

Peter Simon knew that his father and one of his father’s brothers served in the German army and that the third brother died a political prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. But it was only after his father died in 2001 that he found the things his father couldn’t share: a pocket-size New Testament written in Old German with a prisoner of war stamp, a blue leather wallet with a Fort Knox marking and several pages of a fictionalized memoir.

They are the reasons Peter Simon now sits in Grenzebach’s Fort Knox office. He has come to the United States to complete what his father never could — to return to where he was held captive, bring closure to a story that began more than half a century ago.

Markers of the past

In Fort Knox’s own collection of artifacts from that time, there are few pictures, few detailed documents, just a sketchbook and a postcard bought on eBay.

From 1944 to 1946 prisoners of war — first Italians, than Germans — were held here. It was one of at least 450 such camps in the country, said Criss Helmkamp, cultural resources manager at Fort Knox. Although at any one time, between 1,000 and 3,000 prisoners of war could be found at the bigger camps like this one, genuine artifacts are rare.

“They came here with nothing; left with nothing,” Helmkamp said.

Still, there are clues: In a sketchbook in Helmkamp’s office are drawings of prisoners painting P’s and W’s on the U.S. military uniforms they had been issued. Other pages show the barracks where they stayed, similar to those of their American counterparts — except for the barbed wire. There are the vegetable gardens, a chapel and a soccer field. The field is still there; only now it is a high school football field.

There are also less noticeable reminders, like the symbol carved into more than 30 chimneys in the historic district. A small palm tree etched into the bricks, the symbol is that of the Afrika Korps to which many of the German prisoners at Fort Knox belonged, and which some must have carved while repairing the roofs.

They also left their mark on an old stone bridge they repaired on post. Carved into the belly of the bridge is a year — 1945, a name —” Josef Schedntl, a place — Oberbayern, Germany, and two letters — “PW.”

Peter Simon found another “PW” on an old stone. But what really made the trip worth it, he said, was not an object but the feeling of standing in a field where his father’s barracks once stood, he said.

“He came back to this place like American veterans come to Europe to see place where they fought,” Grenzebach explained.

But rather than battlefields, Simon searched for a street, Kennedy, which he found in Brandenburg, Ky., and a farm that he didn’t find. It could have closed, moved or simply never existed; for his father’s tale is part fiction, part fact; and it is not always clear which is which. (Peter Simon completed the memoir and published it in Germany in 2007 under the title “Das Vergessene Kreuz Von Kentucky” — “The Forgotten Cross of Kentucky.”)

The facts are that his father was 22 years old when he was drafted into the German army. He was taken prisoner near the Rhine River, where Germany borders France, about 1945, shipped to New York and then put on a train for Camp Atterbury, Ind., where he sent the postcard to his family.

Weeks later, he was transferred to Fort Knox, where he spent a year before being transferred back to France, where he became ill.

At Fort Knox, he worked on a farm, made wood carvings for his captors and generally enjoyed himself, according to his memoirs and to letters Simon discovered that his father had mailed to schoolchildren in Alabama.

“So he’d always try to go back to this area, but for medical reasons, health reasons, he never was able to go,” Grenzebach translated. “So 60 years later, his son does it for him.”

The whole story

The book, the one Simon’s father began, starts with two young men, German immigrants, who settle in Brandenburg, Ky. One of the men is called Hans Yonker, just like a family member who also moved to the U.S. as a young man. The family lost track of the real Yonker, but the fictional one meets a prisoner of war from Fort Knox working on a farm.

The farm part is real. Every morning, Willi Simon was transported by truck to a farm where he worked with tobacco, tomatoes and lettuce. Other details are sketchy, so with his father gone, Peter Simon searched for former prisoners, including Heino Erichsen, who was among the first German prisoners at Fort Knox.

Erichsen was 18 when he was drafted into the German army and a prisoner of war before he turned 19. Hearing that treatment in America was better than in France, Erichsen said he made sure he was among the prisoners being shipped to America from North Africa in 1943.

His first impression was validating: “We were led to the Pullman trains; I thought, ‘My God, in German army, we were always transported in cattle cars,’ ” he said during a telephone interview from his home in Texas.

But he was still a prisoner, and at the first camp he was sent to in South Texas, he said, the prisoners who were Nazis “ran things” behind the barbed wire. Fort Knox, where he was later transferred, was better. “Generally, the prisoners here were not hard-core Nazis at all,” Helmkamp said. “They were enlisted guys who just got drafted, went to Africa and then got captured.”

In 1953, he moved to the U.S. and has lived here since. With his wife, Jean Nelson-Erichsen, Heino Erichsen, now 85, wrote the book “Reluctant Warrior: Former German POW Finds Peace in Texas.”

After Peter Simon discovered his father’s manuscript, he decided to complete it, first for the family and then for the public.

Like his father, Peter Simon served in the army and then with the police. Tan with short spiky hair, he describes himself as the family historian. In Kentucky, he saw what his father never saw — Mammoth Cave, Land Between the Lakes, horse farms and a distillery. He also learned that the end of his story — the story his father started — is not quite right.

In the book, Peter Simon has the prisoner of war returning to Brandenburg as an old man and meeting up with the farmer for whom he had worked in his youth.

“And that’s a funny story: It’s two old men sitting in bar in Brandenburg and drinking whiskey,” Grenzebach said of Simon’s fiction.

Mead is “a dry county; it’s not even possible.”