Illinois man receives letter sent in 1946

SADORUS, Ill. -- Neither rain nor sleet kept a 1946 letter from getting delivered for 60 years.

But a war did.

Only this fall, Eberhard Brieschke, a Sadorus musician, received the letter his uncle sent to his mother in elegant German handwriting. It was touching for Brieschke, since his mother has died and he lost contact with his uncle somewhere in eastern Germany.

Brieschke is a former postal worker himself, so the 68-year-old doesn't blame the postal carrier.

"They couldn't find the house because it didn't exist anymore," he says of his mother's home, destroyed in the war.

Brieschke, who left his town in Germany, now part of Poland, to serve in the U.S. Air Force, was a little boy when Hitler battled Stalin for Eastern Europe.

He has strong memories of his family being forcibly moved from their hometown, Lauenburg, to Danzig, now Gdansk.

One of 10 children, he walked with his mother and siblings dozens of miles deeper into Soviet territory, where they would be interned while superpowers divvied up the nations.

It was a horrifying trip, especially for women and children. Brieschke said it was common for women who weren't carrying babies to be asked to step aside "for five minutes," where they would be raped by drunk Soviet troops.

"They weren't so bad if they were not drunk," he recalls. "I never saw anybody shot or mutilated."

Meanwhile, his uncle Paul was interned in a Norwegian camp not long after the war ended. On Easter 1946, Paul wrote to his sister-in-law with questions about his brother, Franz Brieschke, her husband.

All were separated in the chaos of war's aftermath. Paul Brieschke wrote that he was all right and looking forward to meeting the family again.

Decades later, a genealogical group was looking through the undelivered letters at Lauenburg, and a distant Brieschke relative living in Carterville, Ill., told the Sadorus man about an inventory of the letters. Eberhard Brieschke received his uncle's letter last week by registered mail.

So much had changed in Eberhard Brieschke's life. He'd started working at a West German post office at age 15, then came to the United States to work at a foundry in Crystal Lake, Ill.

From 1960 to 1964, he served in the Air Force, two-and-a-half years of that at the former Chanute Air Force Base, and another year in Alaska.

After leaving the service, he got a job as a meteorologist at the Illinois State Water Survey.

"I didn't know the first thing" about radar telemetry despite his Air Force years, he said, yet Brieschke did learn to perform tests all over the state and worked there for 18 years.

He spent another near-decade working at Willard Airport as a refueller, then took a factory job before retiring two years ago.

His retirement has allowed him to devote more time to German culture, his passion. His wife, Elfrieda, is of German heritage, and their daughter Heidi, 25, joined him in a German band.

Brieschke continues to perform German music on accordion at parties as "Der Singende Rheinlander."