Et is almost 80 years since Siegfried Gronau last smiled. That was in 1944. At that time he was living with his mother and three sisters in Koenigsberg, East Prussia. A few months earlier, the family had learned that their father had died in the war on the Eastern Front. Gronau was in third grade, but after heavy bombing raids on the city, he was no longer able to attend school. “My wife always says to me: ‘You don’t smile,'” says Gronau today. “I’ll say that’s when I stopped smiling.”
The eighty-six-year-old speaks Lithuanian on the phone, although he has been living in Germany again since the 1970s. Gronau finds it difficult to remember his past, but he says sometimes he feels better after telling his story. Gronau is a “wolf child”. During World War II he fled to Lithuania. He visits the country every year to this day. “60 million people died in World War II and I was doomed to live,” he says. “Lithuania helped me survive at all.”
