Speechless About my Grandfather

Tweet

I mentioned this in my last post about my father and my late husband, Martin, that he had the same name as my mother’s father, who was also a Martin. I never got to meet him, but he met with a tragic end. My grandfather Martin was born in the 1800s, and he and my grandmother Emily set up house in Riga, Latvia. It was the time of Russia being ruled by Czar Nicholas. My grandfather joined the Russian army as an officer, and one of his assignments was that his regiment would be sent to Siberia in a place just over the Ural Mountains. Not knowing when he would return to Latvia, he took his wife and my mother, at the time a little girl of five, with him. My grandfather had one great fault. What was it? He greatly resembled Czar Nicholas, whom we know the Bolsheviks were plotting to get rid of along with his entire family. They did not want a look-alike hanging around. The speechless part is that the Russian army shot my grandfather the usual way, by firing squad. He had no time to protest. My grandmother was so shocked she went to bed and woke up the next morning with snow-white hair. She gave my mother over to neighbors to watch her until my grandmother could pull herself together. Eventually she did and, along with my mom, returned to Riga.