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Some soldiers bring home captured flags or weapons as war mementos. World War II prisoner of war Victor Leerhoff opted instead to bring a piece of German bread back to his mother in the northwestern Minnesota town of Fosston when the war ended in 1945.
That 77-year-old bread is now tucked away in a Maple Grove cedar chest, where the Rev. Nancy Carlson, the youngest of Leerhoff's three children, has written "SAVE" all over its box.
"It looks perfect," said Carlson, 59, a retired pastor and chaplain. "It never got mold probably because they didn't use much yeast and the salt dried it out quickly. It is hard as a rock, but still looks fresh as new."
When "CODA" won the Academy Award for best picture last month, Carlson was inspired to write about her dad's ancient loaf and her quest to find the bakery that made it. Leerhoff was a CODA — a child of deaf adults — like the child portrayed in the Oscar-winning film.
Leerhoff's father, Detmer, was born deaf, while his mother, Amelia, lost her hearing at age 4 when she contracted rheumatic fever on the boat while emigrating from Sweden.
As the oldest of five children, Victor Leerhoff "was the one who would go into town and translate for his dad and who also taught his younger siblings how to speak English," Carlson wrote.
Born in Iowa in 1925, Leerhoff moved in the 1930s with his family to Fosston, where they farmed east of town. He had just turned 19 when he enlisted in the Army in 1944.
In February 1945, Leerhoff's rifle suddenly exploded while he was fighting with the Army's 3rd Division Infantry near the northeastern French village of Colmar. "He didn't get hurt, but he needed a new rifle," according to Carlson.
But when Leerhoff returned with the rifle, his unit had vanished.
"He looked up in the tree and there were two Germans pointing their rifle barrels at him, so he surrendered," Carlson wrote. For the next three months, Leerhoff and his fellow POWs were marched for at least 250 miles around Germany, starving and sleeping in ditches and barns.
Back home in Fosston, Leerhoff's sister Eva came home from school for lunch one day to find nothing on the table. A "missing in action" telegram had arrived, and Detmer Leerhoff had retreated to the barn to process the news about his son.
"Every night at the same time, Amelia would stand at the kitchen window that faced east and spend at least a half-hour praying for Vic," Carlson wrote.
At the end of April 1945, Amelia was at the Fosston post office when the clerk handed her another telegram. Panicked, she refused to read it, but the clerk jotted her a note: "It's OK, your son is safe."
After being set free in Germany, Leerhoff and a buddy found a bakery and bought a loaf of bread. Heeding warnings not to eat too much in their emaciated condition, they cut the loaf in half and then each gobbled up half of their portion.
"For some reason, my dad brought the rest of it home — didn't eat it even though he was starving," Carlson wrote. "He brought it all the way from Ettringen, Germany ... and gave the loaf to his mom."
Carlson said her family glimpsed the bread only once before it was wrapped in wax-like paper and stashed in a living room hutch near the nice dishes. Amelia gave the bread to Victor and his new wife, Gladys, when they married 75 years ago. Carlson eventually inherited it.
In 2016, Carlson and her husband, Jim, visited Bavaria to retrace her dad's footsteps during WWII. Armed with a map provided by the son of Leerhoff's war buddy and a photo of the last barn that had sheltered them, the Carlsons popped into a fire station in a village near Ettringen, where a firefighter recognized the barn and pointed the way.
"What an amazing thing to be in the place where my dad was so many years ago," Carlson wrote.
They even found the bakery, where a woman put her hand on her heart and said she remembered the prisoners from the barn. They ordered some cheesecake because no bread was for sale that day.
"It was quite emotional," Carlson said, "to be in the bakery where my dad had bought the loaf of bread."
After the war, Victor Leerhoff was shop manager at a tire shop and served as an officer at Cross of Glory Lutheran Church in Brooklyn Center. He died in 1995, a month short of his 70th birthday.
"He never talked about his time in the war until I was older," Carlson wrote, "and then the story came tumbling out."
Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.
