Artistic Legacy

German POW left behind his paintings

Morganfield, KY. -- Martha Bolg came from Augsburg, Germany, in search of the father she lost 55 years ago — the German soldier she knew only from patchy childhood memories, some letters, a notebook and a few black-and-white photos.

Martha (Mayer) Bolg was about 6 years old in this family portrait (right) with her parents, Hermina and Daniel Mayer. The photo was made while Daniel Mayer was home on leave while serving as a soldier in the German army during World War II.

Sunday, she wept at his grave in a cemetery at Fort Knox, Ky., where he lay with five other German World War II soldiers who died while prisoners of war at Camp Breckinridge, in Morganfield.

Tuesday, as she stood gazing up at a massive, color mural in the former noncommissioned officer's club at Breckinridge, tears welled in her eyes once more. Until that moment, the 65-year-old woman had never seen a painting by her father, who had gone to war when she was 5. Until that moment, nearly all her memories of Father had been associated with the war that took him from her and her mother.

"From now on when I think of him, I'll just think of this painting," Bolg said.

The mural, a 20-by-30-foot depiction of a baroque castle, lake and grounds in central Germany, was her father's final work, taking the last of his art, his will and his strength before he died at the age of 36 on Sept. 21, 1945.

"It's so wonderful," she said in her native German. "That from such tragic circumstances something so wonderful came to be."

Donald Wolfe, a University of Southern Indiana German professor, translated for Bolg and her husband, Wilhelm, who stood by her side, but they had little to say as they stood together in front of the mural.

"She's just so touched by everything, it's hard for her to express her feelings," said Wolfe.

What the painting expressed had nothing to do with the war that had dealt Mayer head and body wounds in three battles and left him with failing health in a prisoner-of-war camp nearly 8,000 miles from his family in Baerringen, Czechoslovakia.

Like the scores of smaller paintings Mayer and an assistant, German POW Hanz Genz, created in the hall, it captures the rustic beauty of the land the men longed to return to.

Mayer was among 4,000 German prisoners of war kept in Camp Breckinridge from spring 1943 to the end of World War II. He was a house painter and self-taught artist who had drawn, but never painted before he came to Camp Breckinridge, in May of 1943, said his daughter.

There, his art flowered as his health waned. His large mural of Castle Werneck was his magnum opus. It took him 15 months to finish the painting. Toward the end he was barely able to climb the ladder, and could only lift his brush for a few moments at a time, according to Ruth Espy, a Morganfield woman employed at the camp while Mayer worked on the project.

Even so, his output was prodigious, said Wolfe, who has researched Mayer and his art and lectures on it. Wolfe estimates Mayer painted more than 100 scenes, drawn from memory and picture postcards, on plywood wall panels in barracks, the mess hall and the NCO club.

Today only the NCO club survives. After a $1.3 million restoration, it stands as the James D. Veatch Camp Breckinridge Museum and Arts Center, and is home to the Union County Historical Society and Arts Council.

The organization has raised about $15,000 to pay for cleaning, stabilization and conservation of the mural and some 40 other paintings in the hall, all done in Grumbacher oil paint on plywood.

Before Tuesday's visit, Bolg had seen only a few photographs of her father's paintings, she said. She saw only pencil sketches sent home with letters.

Bolg's own memories of her father are sketchy, too. She was 5 when he left for the war. Her only memory of him until then was of a heavy snowfall when he took her skiing.

She was about 6 when he was first wounded and sent back to a German hospital. She remembers taking a long train ride with her mother to visit Mayer in the hospital near Nuremburg, and falling asleep on her father's bed.

Bolg still has a photograph, apparently taken during his convalescent leave, a black-and-white portrait of her, her mother and her father in a uniform decorated with ribbons and medals.

She remembers the letters he sent from the war, and then from Camp Breckinridge. In an apparent effort to keep his family from worrying about him, he never told them of his deteriorating health.

Then the letters stopped. Because of a problem with the mail, the typewritten letter announcing her father's death didn't reach her mother until August 1946, nearly a year after he had died.

Bolg was 11 when her mother and her aunt sat her down to tell her her father wouldn't be coming home, she said. It took her a while to accept it, and then she had to comfort her mother, who, she said, was devastated.

Postwar years were hard for her and her mother, who were forced to move out of Czechoslovakia and into Germany after learning of Mayer's death.

Her mother died at 71 without ever remarrying, said Bolg.

Bolg grew up in Germany, married and raised two sons with her husband, whose father came home after being taken prisoner of war.

If it weren't for a special invitation to Sunday's public dedication of the museum and arts center, the Bolgs might never have come, she said. Now she wants to make sure their sons and grandchildren come to see what her father did, she said.

"Just standing there and realizing this was the last thing my father had done, and that he had left such a wonderful testament to his life," she said, "I think he would have been thrilled."

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