Journey into the

By Seth Hynes
THE death of his close friend and the revenge taken on the killer during the Siege of Leningrad stayed with German born author Juergen Buchholz all his life.
He recalls the incident and how he and his fellow soldiers desperately fought the Red Army during the 872-day battle to take the city during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in a new book.
A Journey into the Unknown: From the Siege of Leningrad to Prisoner of the Stasi, which was launched at Healesville Library, tells how he and his fellow soldiers scrambled from cover to cover and many were mown down by machine gun fire, dismembered by exploding shells and picked off by snipers.
Mr Buchholz also almost became a victim when a mortar blast reduced the other men in his bunker to a splattered mess.
It was among the carnage that his friend Hans was killed by shrapnel from a grenade.
Mr Buchholz wrote that despite all he had been through he was still shocked by the horrible screams of a Soviet gunner as his forces took revenge by burning the gunner to death with a flamethrower.
Mr Buccholz was born on 11 July 1923 and lived the last years of his life at Buxton. He died on 25 August, aged 85, shortly after finishing the book.
In it Mr Buccholz tells how he joined the Hitler Youth during his childhood in Anklen, Germany.
That journey took him to the Second World War battlefields of Leningrad, now St Petersburg, to serve the Nazi regime that he did not understand. The battlefields had a “sweet penetrating smell of death and gunpowder”, and soldiers on both sides had to fight and kill just to survive.
After the war he lived in East Germany, where he established a small business, but was arrested by Stasi state security on false charges and jailed in 1952.
In prison he said “time passed slowly, like a stream of lava”. Monthly rituals such as haircuts were demoralising and guards rarely gave out medicine and mail.
They even confiscated the potatoes that Mr Buchholz and fellow prisoners had traded cigarettes for. After this “an icy silence reigned”.
Mr Buchholz’s time in prison consisted of an uncertain future, tedious confinement and strenuous forced labour. He was constantly aware that the state “could crush me whenever it wanted to”.
Upon his release in 1957 Mr Buchholz and his family fled to West Germany and immigrated to Australia in 1964. Mr Buccholz died shortly after finishing the book, which was published this year by Kathleen Holton from Melba Program, an elderly support group which Mr Buchholz attended, and his daughter Anne Notley on his behalf.
Ms Notley and Mr Buchholz’s son Dieter Buchholz attended the book launch on 24 August.
At the launch Ms Holton said: “It’s a harrowing book to read through, but it certainly ends with hope and freedom.” A Journey into the Unknown: from the Siege of Leningrad to Prisoner of the Stasi can be purchased from the Buxton Hotel and the Melba Program office at 208 Maroondah Highway, Healesville.