It was April 6th 1943, he was 17 years old, and he just received his official call to enlist in military service. He surely knew that this mail was coming. His older friends had received theirs without fail. This was the fate of every young man in Nazi Germany in 1943. It is hard for me to imagine what level of anxiety must have come along with that postcard. When I turned 17, my mind was primarily occupied by thoughts of girls and fun, not war and a very possible early end to life. The second card is dated May 5th, 1943, it is an appointment card for an X-ray to affirm his health. One has to imagine that by 1943 in Germany, it took very little to qualify and pass this exam. The final document shown, the larger letter, designates his proper acceptance into service of the German military. He was now on his way to a speedy and rather crude basic training, one that would never prepare him for what he would experience. April 6, 1943 was the day that his life would change forever.
This is my uncle, Joachim Kessler. I should say he is my pseudo-uncle, in the sense that he was not actually related to me in the way uncles usually are. He was a friend of my mothers and her family when they where younger. His wife had passed away around the time I was born, and he never had any children of his own. He was a really good man who took all of his adopted nephews on trips and instilled in each of us special memories that will last a lifetime. Recently my cousin who lovingly had cared for him the last several years as his health deteriorated gave me a box of photos, documents, and a small book. The photos included my uncle long before I knew him. During a time of which he never spoke. A time in his life I knew little about, and was simply never discussed. But these snapshots and documents paint a nearly complete picture of his time in service of the German Infantry, his capture, and his life as a prisoner of war in one of Canada's most notorious camps of WWII. Clearly these documents meant a great deal to my uncle. They were a reminder of a different time, and era the world has tried so hard to move past. Now I have been given the honor of preserving and maintaining these items. I have decided they are too interesting to not share, therefore this blog will be my vessel in which I preserve the timeline of events, and tell the story of a man that would become if nothing else, one of the great 'uncles' of all time.
