Alex Rezanowich (Primary Source)

Transcript

My name is Alex Rezanowich. I was in the 1st Survey Regiment of the Royal Canadian Artillery. We served in England, and then went to Italy, and finally wound up in Holland in the early part of '45, at the end of the war. Our Regiment - the 1st Survey - came up from Italy to take part in the final push into Germany. After VE Day, we were processing German prisoners and sending them on the long route march into Germany. Then we learned that the survey regiment had another job to do before the war was over. This was on the island of Texel, where there were still an armed group of Germans fighting Russians or Georgians who had rebelled. This was May 20th, something like two weeks after armistice. Now, these Georgians were prisoners captured on the eastern front. They were so badly treated - beaten, starved, and so on - that some of them volunteered to join the army as non-combatants. Some time in early April, the Germans broke their promise and wanted to send the Georgian battalion, which was on Texel incidentally at this time, to fight the advancing Canadians. This caused a rebellion, and they killed a large number of Germans in a surprise night raid. The Germans brought in reinforcement from the mainland and defeated the rebels, and the rest of the Georgians who were still alive then took to the countryside, and carried on a vicious guerrilla war, where neither side took any prisoners. So when we came on the scene around May the 20th, there were still bullets flying between the Germans and the Georgians. The Georgians were helped by the Dutch Resistance and the Dutch civilians on the island. Our job was to restore peace and get the German army out of Texel without any delay. When we arrived there, there were no incidents at all. Everyone was very glad to see us, especially the Germans. The next day, the German forces were rounded up and promptly escorted to the ferry and then to the mainland, where another group of our people shunted them off on the way to Germany. The Georgians then came out of hiding, and were very glad to see us. They were a friendly bunch, and we had no troubles with them. I tried to speak to some of them by sign language and so on, and I got the impression that they didn't want to go back to Russia. There were only something like just over two hundred survivors left out of the battle. The next day was the 22nd. Some Dutch officials came over from the mainland, and they were looking for mass graves of Dutch civilians who had been killed by the Germans. They dug up two mass graves in our area, which I witnessed, but none of these were Dutch. They were all Georgian soldiers. We left Texel a few days later, and that was that. It's still a mystery to me, why the Canadian military waited until May - until late May - to send the Survey Regiment to Texel, because we were free after VE Day, and all we were doing was sending Germans on the way to Germany. As a footnote to all of this, I understood - well, we understood - that the Russians didn't take kindly to prisoners of war that were being returned, and many of them were killed or jailed or sent to Siberia, and so on. So the Georgians weren't too happy about returning, I suppose. But General Foulkes, the commander of the 1st Corps., wrote a letter, highly praising the Georgians for their part in killing so many Germans, and offering a lot of resistance which, he said, helped the Canadian Army greatly in their advance up north in Holland. In 2000, when a few of us returned to Texel, we found out that the Georgians were treated quite well, and some of them actually returned to Texel occasionally just to see the graves of their comrades who were buried in a beautiful churchyard on the island of Texel.