A letter, written by a Romanian prisoner of war to his wife shortly after World War II has finally reached its destination— 76 years later and long after she died.
Michael Markel, an ethnic German from Romania sent the letter from Britain where he was working on a farm on August 17, 1947, via the POW postal service, Caroline Fernolend told Universul.net.
The letter arrived in the local post office in Rupea, where it sat for almost eight decades.
His wife, Sara Markel, who lived in the village of Viscri where Britain’s King Charles III now has a residence, never received it.
Nevertheless, her husband sent her money every year, Ms Fernolend said. In the letter he talks how he filled a barn the size of the one he had at home with oats and sheaves of wheat in four days “and was well rewarded” for his labor.
“The letter was kept in a very good condition,” Ms Fernolend said. “It didn’t have a stamp though.”
Ms Fernolend is the president of the Mihai Eminescu Trust which protects historical Transylvanian heritage.
In the years after the war ended, communists and members of the Roma community moved into ethnic Saxons’ houses and took their farm animals, Ms Fernolend said. Thousands of ethnic Saxons were deported to the Soviet Union during WWII.
By this time Markel wrote his letter, Romania was under strict communist rule and was a closed country. After receiving no reply from his wife and not knowing what had happened to her, Michael Markel moved to Germany and remarried, Ms Fernolend said.
Details of how the letter was discovered in Rupea post office and how it was ultimately delivered have not been released.
Sara Markel apparently never forgot her husband, never remarried and died in the 1980s.
Romania was allied with the Nazis between 1940 and 1944 and the British Army took Markel prisoner during that time, although no details were available. Romania joined the Allies after a coup against Marshal Ion Antonescu in 1944.
This is not the only case of this kind. About a year ago, a letter written in 1945 by an American soldier in Germany reached his ex-wife of 76 years in Massachusetts after it was discovered in the Pittsburgh postal service.
