David's World

December 4, 2006

Alois Kapfer, 16-Feb-1916 - 03-Dec-2006

Up until two weeks ago, Alois Kapfer, aged 90, would drive to the grocery store, fetch fire loggs, climb apple trees in fall and, occasionally, make a door or a shelf out of wood in his carpenter's workshop. He was the last person I knew who experienced World War II as a soldier, spending ten years in his military service, driving a mobile kitchen on a horse-drawn carriage in Russia. Even 60 years later he still knew how to said "bread, please" in Russian. Apart from that, Alois Kapfer spent all of his life as a carpenter in a small, provincial village called Demmingen in rural Germany, near the Bavarian border. With his wife he lived in a large estate surrounded by fruit trees, with a small barn where sheep and chickens used to be kept. His life dream of being a farmer had come true in some way.

Alois Kapfer left his wife and a family of four children and eight grand-children, one of them me.