Site Updates

The first photographs — from Hilde's collection

Hilde (Lilli) has shared five original photographs from the family collection, and they are now on the site — the first images of the people and places the books describe. Four appear on the journey map (and its German edition), each in its place in the story: the campers at the Artek pioneer camp, summer 1936 (Stop 4); Karl at desk work in Kharkiv, where he served as camp interpreter and clerk (Stop 39); Mother and Father Hubbeling at the farm in Gaxel (journey stop G7); and the Hubbeling family gathered on the last day before the departure for Canada, autumn 1949 (Stop 44).

The fifth — a studio portrait of Karl Fast as a young man — now greets visitors on the home page and stands at the head of his section on The Family Behind the Names. Each photograph opens full-size when tapped. With gratitude to Hilde for preserving and sharing them.

The last gap is closed — "Die Bibel" recovered

Pages 108–121 of Book One, Part Two — missing from the transcription since the project began — have been photographed, transcribed, and translated. The seven recovered leaves hold the end of the Krohne case (nine men of a Nebelwerfer company sentenced to fifteen years each for slaughtering livestock on their lieutenant's orders) and the full chapter "Die Bibel" / "The Bible": the pocket Bible Karl found in a pile of confiscated belongings, and the Christmas 1946 service where 1,300 prisoners sang "O du fröhliche" behind fourfold barbed wire.

The chapter now reads in place in both editions — German and English — and the Markdown and Word downloads have been refreshed. The page sequence of Book One is now complete from cover to cover. On the journey map (and its German edition), the Skorochodowo and Poltava panels now carry the recovered material — the Bible find and the Christmas 1946 service, and the tribunal sentencing of 9 January 1948 — with links into the recovered pages and new archival leads.

Die Karte auf Deutsch — the map, in German

The interactive map now exists in a complete German edition at /map/de/ — every one of the 44 numbered stops and all 21 family-journey panels, the historical background notes, sources, and research leads, along with the legend, chapter names, and the map’s own country labels. An EN · DE switch sits in the corner of both maps, and the German reading pages now link to the German map. Built for family in Germany who read no English — herzlich willkommen.

The family behind the names

A new page, The Family, sets the real people beside the books’ pseudonyms — Karl Fast (born Abram Fast, 1921–2005), Margaret Fast née Penner (1924–2022), and their daughter Marlies Klassen (1953–2014) — built from the family’s own records: Margaret’s Lebenslauf, read by six of her grandchildren at her funeral and given in full in her own words, and the published obituaries.

These records reached back into the rest of the site. The map’s family-journey panels now carry Margaret’s first-person account of the Osmolin schoolhouse and the Cossack episode, the Hubbeling friendship that lasted into the 1980s, and her one plain sentence for the Vreden reunion — with one genuine divergence from the book (where she spent the summer of 1944) flagged rather than smoothed. Her “June 1944” also becomes a third independent source for the conscription date. The Archival Research Guide advances to Revision 2, its identity sheet and draft request letters filled with verified names and dates — including the finding that the brothers Gerhard, Hans, and Peter appear in the books under their real given names, and that Karl’s Soviet-era records may be filed under the name Abram.

Correction: site descriptions previously called the first book’s protagonist “Heinz Siebert” throughout. In Gebt der Wahrheit die Ehre! he is Abram Siebert — the name “Heinz” is a cover identity he adopts mid-story, during the war; only Laß dir an meiner Gnade genügen uses Heinz Siebert throughout. The pseudonym thus mirrors the author’s real name change from Abram to Karl. Descriptions across the site have been aligned.

The family’s journeys, annotated

Every stop of the three family journeys on the map — Grete & Hilde’s flight west, Mutter Siebert’s road to Orsk and back, and the brothers’ Trudarmee years — now carries an expandable “Historical background” note with sources and further-research leads, in the same format as the numbered route. The research draws on the GKO decrees that governed the labor-army mobilizations, archival studies of the Ural camps (which name Korkino among the sites where mobilized Germans were quartered, and count 33,787 in the Perm region alone), the Yalta repatriation rules that made the Wolfsburg assembly camp so dangerous, and the records of the MCC camp at Gronau through which the family emigrated. Where the record is thin — Mutter Siebert’s age at call-up, the length of her sentence, Gerhard’s fate — the notes say so honestly and point to the archives that could answer.

Site-wide, the two books are now referred to by their titles rather than by number.

The German original of Laß dir an meiner Gnade genügen — and the author’s Word editions

The verified German Gesamtausgabe of Laß dir an meiner Gnade genügen (transcription v13, checked word-for-word against reshoot photographs of the family’s copy) can now be read online, complete with the editorial Prüfnotizen documenting every correction round. Its page anchors run parallel to the English edition, so any passage can be compared side by side, and the map’s journey panels now link into both.

The downloadable Word (.docx) files for both editions of Laß dir an meiner Gnade genügen have also been replaced with the project’s master documents.

Laß dir an meiner Gnade genügen joins the site — and the map learns the whole family’s journeys

Karl Fast’s second memoir, Laß dir an meiner Gnade genügen (Canzona Publishing, 1989), is now on the site: the complete English translation of all five parts can be read online or downloaded as Markdown or Word. Where the first book followed the author alone, this one tells the story of the whole family — above all of the author’s mother, drawn from the 276 letters she wrote to Winnipeg between 1953 and 1965.

The interactive map has grown with it. Three new journeys from the second book can be switched on from the legend, drawn as round lettered markers beside Heinz’s numbered route:

• Grete & Hilde (Ella & Lilli) — nine stops from the separation at the Freihaus station in June 1944, through Lilli’s birth, the night flight of January 1945 and the Oder crossing, to the Hubbeling farm at Gaxel and the reunion at Vreden — and onward toward Canada.
• Mutter Siebert — six stops on her road between Dolinowka and the Trudarmee city of Orsk: conscription at forty-six, the flight home, the People’s Court, eight months as a convict, and the letter years at the end.
• The Brothers — Gerhard and Hans in the coal pits of Korkino, Peter in the forests of Perm, Hans’s walk home over the three hills — and one line that ends in the taiga, where Gerhard’s trace ends.

Heinz’s own route gains a 44th station: Vreden — the reunion, the scene where the first book ends and the second carries on. The home page has been rearranged around the two books, and this Updates page is new.

The missing leaf of Part Three is recovered

A physical leaf — pages 175–176, at the end of the “Homeward!” chapter — had fallen out of the family’s copy of the 1952 edition of Gebt der Wahrheit die Ehre! The gap has now been filled from another copy, and the recovered text is transcribed in the German master and translated in place in the English edition. One transcription gap remains (Part Two, pp. 108–121) and is noted where it occurs.

HonourTheTruth.com goes live

The site launches with Gebt der Wahrheit die Ehre! (1950–52): the complete German Gesamtausgabe transcribed from the original self-published volumes, the complete English translation, and the interactive journey map — every place named in the memoir, each stop with its story, page references that link straight into the texts, and an expandable historical-background note drawing on archival research.