Ukrainian Family in a German Monastery

 

Sergey, Maria and I at a monastery guesthouse 

When Cliff and I returned to Darmstadt from Denmark we met a family of refugees from Ukraine who are staying in a guesthouse at the monastery.  Sergey and Maria and their seven children between six months and thirteen years old are living in a house at the edge of the property. 

While we drank coffee together on the patio, the seven kids popped in and out of the house.  The oldest girl brought the baby out to see mom, then the oldest boy scooped the baby up and disappeared into the house.  

Sergey is Ukrainian, from Kyiv. Maria is Russian, from Moscow. Sergey speaks Ukrainian and Russian. Maria speaks Russian, English, and Ukrainian. They marked their 15th wedding anniversary on March 31st with their whole family in a car driving toward the border to seek asylum in the west.  Maria and Sergey lived in Sevastopol in Crimea, so they have been in an area of Russian occupation since 2014.  

When the Russians invaded, the fighting was not near their home, but missiles fired from Russian ships blasted over their city.  Maria talked about trying to tell the kids it would be okay, but after a month, they decided to leave. After a long journey, they made it to Darmstadt and the Land of Kanaan monastery.

Several times over the past five years, I have stayed in the guesthouse where Sergey and Maria and their family are now staying.  It was built for several men, usually visiting volunteers. There are several small rooms, a kitchen and a common room and two bathrooms with showers.  It was always so quiet. It was funny and delightful to see kids zooming in and out, running and riding bikes.

I am very glad to see another family safe from the war Russia inflicted on Ukraine and the democratic world.

Cliff Has More Than 200 years of Connections to American and German Military History

Cliff and Dmitri during our visit to Point Alpha.

I wrote about Dmitri here.

During the last week in June, I stayed in the Guest House at the Land of Canaan. My friend Cliff Almes, now Bruder Timotheus, is a Canaan Franciscan Brother at Canaan in Darmstadt.  In the late 70s Cliff and I were both sergeants and roommates in the barracks at Lindsey Air Station, Wiesbaden. He put away his U.S. military uniform and donned the uniform of the Franciscan community after leaving the military almost 40 years ago.

Darmstadt is in the state of Hesse in central Germany. During my stay at Canaan, I found out Cliff has more connections to Darmstadt and Germany than I would have imagined.

First, Cliff's great-great......grandfather was a soldier from Lower Saxony who became a mercenary for the British during the American Revolution. He was what Americans call a Hessian.  After the war ended, the very elder Almes decided to stay in America.  When Cliff's brother came to visit Cliff and look into the family history, he found men with the name Almes who died in World War II.

Immigration was salvation for the Almes family, as with so many others.
Fast forward to World War II and the connections of Cliff's family to the Canaan and Darmstadt are as strange as they are close. On September 11, 1944, the British made a night raid on the city center of Darmstadt. It was not a strategic raid, it was a terror raid, and it was the dress rehearsal for the fire bombing of Dresden five months later.

On that the British bombed the residential center of Darmstadt in an asterisk pattern, intersecting lines that crossed in the middle. First the British dropped high explosive bombs to blow the roofs off the houses, then they dropped firebombs into the houses to start a firestorm. The center of Darmstadt was completely destroyed.

But just outside the center of the city center was the Technical Institute. This Institute was the center of research for the missile V-2 missile program sending rockets to attack England.  The firebombing raid missed the institute. So a week later, the Americans sent a daylight precision bombing mission to destroy the institute. The American B-24 Liberator bombers hit their target. One of the American gunners flying that mission was a young man named Sergeant Almes who would have a son named Cliff in 1956.

The mission was successful. Cliff believes that one of the young women who was a student at the Institute was almost killed. That same young woman would later join the Canaan ministry as a Sister of Mary. Canaan began as a sisterhood in 1947. The student almost killed by the raid in which Cliff's father was a crewman on one of the bombers, would later work together with Cliff in ministry at Canaan. The Land of Canaan itself is located just outside Darmstadt, just three miles away from the city center firebombed to such devastating effect.

When I was stationed in Germany, Darmstadt had a huge American military community. Cliff reminded me that I drove him from Wiesbaden to Darmstadt to join the new Novices at Canaan on my birthday, May 2, 1979. For several months after that I went to the Darmstadt military community once a week, usually on Wednesdays. Many of those Wednesdays, I had a chance to eat with Cliff and the other Novices at Canaan.