Charlie Melfort

This is Klaus-Heinz Frischzeit (*2 April 1922, Trier, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany – †1 July 2010, Melfort, Saskatchewan, Canada), I never met him, but I know his story from Burt Melfort, who also supplied the picture, but let me start at the beginning:

Klaus-Heinz turned eighteen in 1940 and fell desperately in love with Gertrud, wife of his much older brother Klaus-Werner, who had a son of fourteen named Hans. In an act of incalculable cruelty Klaus-Heinz killed his brother, who was sleeping in the backyard, by trusting in his ear a very sharp thin dark hardwood stick he found in the attic. There was no blood, no sign of external injury and the doctors concluded "natural causes". When Gertrud rejected Karl-Heinz' awkward advances and "Uncle Hans" became suspicious almost violent, even pretending to see his father's ghost, Karl-Heinz, in another bout of irrational anguish, went to the recruiting office and enrolled in the Wehrmacht. He went first to France and then to Northern Africa where he was captured by the Allies and sent to the POW Camp in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Pretending to have farming skills and waiving his rights under the Geneva Convention, Karl-Heinz became a labourer in the rural community of Melfort, Saskatchewan. In 1946 when German POWs returned to (the now divided) Germany, the British government allowed him to stay as he married Ophelia, youngest daughter of Paul Danmark, his employer.  His name was unpronounceable to all around him, so he changed it officially and picked Melfort as a nod to the host community, first-name Charlie, what people called him anyway. The Melforts had five children who had children of their own: Burt was the eldest and Charlie's unabashedly favourite grand-son. One dark summer night, sitting on the porch looking out to nowhere, Charlie, by now in his eighties, told his story and showed Burt the sharp polished dark hardwood stick that he kept all these years. "Burt, meboy, this is where's y'all comes from!".