Leon Grunte was born in January 1926 in Riga, Latvia. It was fun growing up there. His father was a baker who was a farmer's son. [Annotator's Note: He tells a story of his uncle's business.] His father was a decent and honest man and was an ultra-orthodox Lutheran. School was fun for Grunte and he attended a slightly upper-class school that had been founded by a German Duke. There were four Jews in the class. Two were very good students. They all perished when the Germans came [Annotator's Note: in 1941]. The Russians left them alone pretty much. They did switch from learning German to Russian, but they could still learn English. Grunte was fluent in English in his early teens and learned German by reading. In 1940, Stalin [Annotator's Note: Russian Premier Joseph Stalin] took Latvia. They marched in from Lithuania on 17 June. Two weeks before, they had deported a lot of Latvians to the Soviet Union as enemies of the state. Grunte was to be deported on 3 July, but the Germans marched in on 1 July and the Latvians welcomed them. He was in his mid-teens when his uncle Piotr had been deported. They did not know where they were going. Piotr survived and came back. When Stalin returned in 1944, his uncle and his father were taken. His father died in a Soviet labor camp. During the war years, nothing much happened.

The Germans who marched into Riga [Annotator’s Note: Riga, Latvia] were viewed as liberators by the townspeople. When the war broke out on 22 June [Annotator's Note: 22 June 1941], Leon Grunte's mother started crying because she was so happy that it was between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Germans had been the nicest people, but they turned nasty too. Quite a few Latvians had emulated Germany. A colonel was supposed to start a Latvian Army on the German's side, but the Gestapo [Annotator's Note: Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police] shot him. Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] had different ideas. They were so powerful they did not need anybody, little did he know. The news was controlled by the German government. German officers and SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization; abbreviated SS] were all over the place. If they caught you in the black market they were hard on you. His father ran the bakery, so they had plenty of food. Grunte ran a little business on the side. He would deliver loaves of bread to people. He never had any contact with his Jewish neighbors. He had a family physician who killed his own family and then himself. He was Jewish. The Germans said they would rather die than have a Jew take care of them. Grunte did not think much about it. As a teenager these things are not things to worry about.

The Germans interviewed Leon Grunte to join the German work service [Annotator's Note: Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst, or RAD)]. He did not want to go and the German officer told him that if he did not serve in Germany, he could not go to college. Grunte told him maybe he could go to Oxford [Annotator's Note: University of Oxford, Oxford, England] or Cambridge [Annotator's Note: University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom]. He was very Anglo-oriented. A couple of friends did go. Communication abroad was not easy in those days. He had welcomed the Germans with open arms when they came into Riga [Annotator’s Note: Riga, Latvia]. Afterwards, the front line troops went to fight in Russia, and the Gestapo [Annotator's Note: Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police] took over. That was very different. They would shoot you. Latvians just wanted to be left alone but they were stuck between the Nazis and the Russian Army. His cousin was deported in 1940 and then drafted into the Soviet Army. It was a crazy time. Grunte was not completely against the Bolsheviks until they started shooting people and arresting relatives of his who he never saw again. His family lived quietly. His father supplied bread for the entire district. They did get to attend a small school from one to five o’clock. The Germans took whatever they wanted, and they took the best school over for their dependents. Grunte heard about the war through the news. Goebbels [Annotator's Note: German Reich Minister of Propaganda Paul Joseph Goebbels] kept promising them great things and they kept on losing great battles. Grunte remembers when the 6th Army surrendered around Stalingrad, December 1942. Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] would not let anyone retreat. Grunte did not think that much about it because it was so far away from Latvia. He thought it would not affect them, but it came closer and closer. Germans would come and visit with his family. His father was fluent in German. They were ordinary Germans. There was nothing special about them. He never had any contact with the SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization; abbreviated SS] or the concentration camp guards. The others were ordinary and told to be there and do their job. As a teenager, it just kind of passes by.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Leon Grunte to talk about August 1944.] He received an invitation from the Führer [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler]. You come, or else. Because of some friends of his parents, he ended up in the Luftwaffe [Annotator's Note: German Air Force]. He was happy to go into the flight school. It would have been better if he had gone to the local airfield and worked on planes. He used to sleep until eight o'clock in the morning and listen to the English radio to get the news. Now he had to get up at five in the morning and had rotten food. It was enough to survive on. He was there for a month. They could not fly anymore due to the Russians. They were sent to Statien [Annotator's Note: possibly Stadtilm] in western Germany for about six weeks. They were not flying as there were not any planes, ammunition or gasoline. They were made paratroopers then but they could not be dropped from planes because there were no parachutes. They went to Denmark. Their colonel was a smart man and wanted to put them somewhere safe. Denmark was a paradise. The only thing he could not get was sugar. There was plenty of cheese. The Danes hated the Germans. Since Grunte spoke English, he was the food buyer for his troop. He was there for two months and then got sent back to Germany. The place was crawling with Gestapo [Annotator's Note: Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police]. They went to Königsburg [Annotator's Note: Königsburg, Germany; now Kaliningrad, Russia]. He loved the Danes. There was no tobacco but they got three cigarettes a day. He did not smoke so he would save his cigarettes and did well with that. They only marched while there.

In Denmark, Leon Grunte really only did some marching as his military training [Annotator's Note: as a Latvian paratrooper in the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force]. In November [Annotator's Note: November 1944], they were chased out [Annotator's Note: of Denmark] and into the woods where they just sat. The invasion was in full force. Köln [Annotator's Note: Köln, Germany] had fallen. He listened to the radio and he would tell the Germans who would say the attacks had been repulsed. Grunte was fluent in German and English. The German officers treated them well. They did not mistreat them. The forest was full of mines. A couple of the men tried to go to Sweden. They offered their rifles to Danes who happened to be Gestapo [Annotator's Note: Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police]. They marched in exercises along the North Sea and it was bitterly cold. He did the best he could hiding in the rooms of houses there. Nobody cared that much. It was not a serious exercise. It was all a big, big joke. In Denmark, he just sold his cigarettes and ate food. He must have gained 20 pounds, which was good because when he ended up in East Prussia, that was something else.

Leon Grunte was supposedly still a German paratrooper when he left Denmark. There were no parachutes left or planes for them to jump out of. They went to Königsburg in East Prussia [Annotator's Note: now Kaliningrad, Russia] by train. He did the same duty there, sat in trenches and froze. It was cold and they did not have proper clothing. The Russians were shooting at them and the Germans were shooting back. Three miles south of them was a brewery that the Russians attacked for three weeks. Grunte was assigned to a German unit when the Russians were suddenly all over them. He was pulled out and thought he would be shot because he had a Latvian insignia on his sleeve. He was interrogated and beaten. He told them all kinds of nonsense. They did not care as long as they could report they had interviewed him. He told them the rumors he had heard, all kinds of rubbish. He was then put in with German civilians, East Prussians. Eventually he was transferred to a prison in Tapio, East Prussia [Annotator's Note: unable to locate exactly]. He could understand and read Russian. He got pulled out and put in charge of a barracks. He was taken to Prussia by truck because the railroads were destroyed. The prison conditions were terrible. Very little food. The German women were raped again and again. They were later sent to Russia. That is where the real misery started.

Leon Grunte was locked up in a cattle truck going to prison in the Soviet Union. He went through parts of Latvia. He thought if he could get out, he could make his way home. He did manage to send some notes to his parents that he was going to Russia to work. He spent three weeks in that truck. It could have been worse. He could have been captured by the KGB [Annotator's Note: Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security; main secret police force of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991]. The worse thing was thirst. They were taken to a camp on the far side of the Ural Mountains south of Chelyabinsk [Annotator's Note: Chelyabinsk, Russia]. That is when the real problems started. There was soup and some black bread. They would line up at four o'clock in the morning to get that. There were Germans and Poles in the camp. They had fought against each other but they all ended up in the same camp. It was summer so he tried to sleep outside. Once a month they were sent into the bathhouse with some evil-smelling soap and a tub of water. Grunte had diarrhea. He ran to the latrine and there were women there. They took no notice of him. He was so thirsty he would drink anything he could. The Russians would send women to chop pine branches to cook. It was awful-tasting but he drank it by the gallon. He never got scurvy, but developed hepatitis. A German doctor saved his life. He was lucky. The dead were dumped behind the camp in ditches. 1,400 people died. There were Japanese there that had been captured in 1941. Human life was worth nothing. He just went along from minute to minute hoping to survive.

[Annotator's Note: Leon Grunte was a Latvian prisoner in a labor camp in the Soviet Union after World War 2.] He was sick for a while and could not work more than around the camp. It was under Russian Army control. He had to collect coal. It was very disorganized. Some people escaped, but were promptly recaptured. Some German teenagers were marched out of the camp to work in the civilian populations. They were no longer prisoners, same for their German doctor. He thinks he has to thank Eleanor Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] for getting out of the camp. There were a lot of American prisoners in Russia and she wanted them back. The Russians sent him with them to Germany for a prisoner swap. He is glad it was summer because he would not have survived the winter. He tried to trade or sell to the Russians who had literally nothing. They went to Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany. There was an unbelievable mix of nationalities. Two were Americans who had come over to help Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler]. Two could not speak English but told the Russians they were Americans. There were Italians, Dutch, and Germans. They were sent to get wood to heat the barracks and Grunte met up with some Dutch soldiers. They asked him to come with them. He thought he had nothing to lose and he went with them to West Germany.

[Annotator's Note: Leon Grunte was a Latvian prisoner in a labor camp in the Soviet Union after World War 2.] There were Italian prisoners in the camp who asked the Russians what had happened to the 800,000 Italians captured at Stalingrad [Annotator's Note: Battle of Stalingrad, Russia, 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943]. An Italian officer acted as liaison but none of them spoke Russian and the Russians did not speak Italian. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks him why he went to Holland instead of Riga, Latvia where he is from.] He went where he could that was not Russia. The men he went with were border Germans who spoke Dutch. They ended up in West Germany. It saved his life. His blessing was that he was fluent in German. He stayed there until the Fall of 1946. The Germans were poor, they had lost everything. He heard about a displaced persons University in Hamburg [Annotator's Note: Baltic University in Exile, Hamburg, British Zone of Occupation, Germany]. He took a train there. He met relatives and friends there. He stayed there on the Elbe River. Life was much more enjoyable. He did not find out much about his family. He managed to communicate with his mother who had been left in Latvia. His father was sent to a Soviet Union labor camp in 1944. His brother was 14 years older than him. He could have gotten out, but Latvia was awash in vodka and he loved vodka. He ended up in Vorkutlag [Annotator's Note: Vorkuta Corrective Labor Camp, Vorkuta, Russia] on the Arctic Ocean. He was there until Stalin [Annotator's Note: Russian Premier Joseph Stalin] died. He came close to dying but he eventually returned to Latvia. Grunte did not have much to do with him.

Life in the displaced persons camp [Annotator's Note: in Hamburg, Germany] did not require work for Leon Grunte. The living conditions were miserable. There were six beds to a room. Some people did better than others. All they did was the black market. On the eastern shore of the Elbe were orchards. His cousin was a prisoner of war in Italy who came and joined him there. They borrowed rucksacks. They saw a German patrol, so they ducked in the bushes but they were caught, and the Germans took the fruit they had and sent them back across the Elbe River. They swam back across to see if they could get their bags back. They stole the bags back. They took a boat back later and got the fruit and hid it. They paid a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration [Annotator's Note: also referred to by its initials UNRRA] driver to help them get the fruit. The Germans chased them but did not catch them. Another time, his cousin got him an UNRRA uniform and they got through with more fruit. The camp did not provide that great a living. A commission came from England recruiting workers. Grunte reported to them and they took him and his cousin to England. His other relatives stayed in Germany.

[Annotator's Note: Leon Grunte left a displaced persons camp in Germany to go to work in England.] England was very poor. He could not buy any decent clothes and the food in the camp was pretty miserable but he survived. They were looking for instructors to teach English to foreign coal miners and he got the job. It was cold there and they had no coal. He was sent all over. It was not great, but he could survive. The English accepted him. He did some traveling to France to get some warmth. England is very cold. A year later, the job ended. He headed to London [Annotator's Note: London, England] with his cousin. He visited some friends in Manchester on the way. A friend worked in a hospital in London. He was interviewed and was asked if he wanted to train as a nurse and he did so. He has been in the hospital industry ever since.

Leon Grunte ended up in London, England and started training to be a nurse. He wanted to stay there. London was fun. He was rebuilding his life from scratch. He was paid well and given full board. Three years later he went to RN [Annotator's Note: registered nurse] training and worked in a TB [Annotator's Note: tuberculosis] hospital. He met people he had seen in Germany as military officers riding horses who were now patients he was looking after. He went to work in a general hospital where he met his future wife. He kept in touch with his mother who came to join him in America in 1955. America was short of nurses. He was interviewed and had to swear he had never been a Communist. He ended up in New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] and once again he met friends and relatives there. His mother did not get along with his wife. European mothers want to take care of you. If you do not like them, they get antsy. She had to move out and later she committed suicide. She had suffered from depression. He did not recognize the symptoms in his own family despite his training. The war was a lot for her to go through. She talked some about losing her husband. They had communicated and she had sent him food. He was going to be released but a hernia ruptured, and he died. She did talk to Grunte about what she went through. She was okay for a while and did do some traveling, but the depression got worse. He feels he should have left her peacefully in Latvia. They had not seen each other in 30 years when she came over.

Leon Grunte says it is hard to tell how the war affected him. He let it go, dismissed it. He thinks of the funny things that happened. When he was interviewing to go in the Air Force [Annotator's Note: German Luftwaffe] in 1944, he made some friends of Latvian Air Force officers. The Germans would not give them proper planes, they gave them double-deckers [Annotator's Note: biplanes]. They would be given bombs to drop by hand. Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] should have said enough is enough and negotiated peace. Göring [Annotator's Note: German Reichsmarschall Hermann Wilhelm Göring] told him they were finished. War is like a millstone that keeps on grinding. If you are in the middle, you get ground to nothing; if you are on the outsides, you get thrown out. He was lucky he survived. He has no enmity against anybody. He has not had any bad dreams or anything. He has holes in his legs from bug bites. Russia is bug infested. You do not expect bugs to be there, like lice, bed bugs, and cockroaches. The first time he saw a cockroach they were everywhere, even in the tea kettle. His war experience did not affect his postwar life in the least. He got ambitious and enrolled in New York University [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] receiving a degree in Nursing. He then applied to Columbia University [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] receiving a degree in Hospital Administration. World War 2 should not be forgotten. Stalin [Annotator's Note: Russian Premier Joseph Stalin] and Hitler were monsters. Grunte feels that Nixon [Annotator's Note: Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th president of the United States] saved us from the third world war. The Russians were set to attack Germany when Nixon made friends with the Chinese [Annotator's Note: 1972]. The Chinese sent two and a half million people to the Siberian border. The Russians had no choice then but to guard against them. They were both Communists, but they clashed. Grunte's service in the German military meant nothing to him. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks him how he thinks the war changed the world.] The Latvians got their country back in 1991 when they chased out the Russians. He feels the Latvians were just ordinary soldiers drafted into SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization; abbreviated SS] fighting units and they should be honored as World War 2 Veterans. It is all past. The truth will come out. He says he just was there and tried to survive under miserable conditions.