Anna German

Anna Wiktoria German-Tucholska (14 February 1936 – 26 August 1982) was a Polish singer (lirico-spinto), immensely popular in Poland and in the Soviet Union in the 1960s–1970s. She released over a dozen music albums with songs in Polish, as well as several albums with Russian repertoire. Throughout her music career, she also recorded songs in the German, Italian, Spanish, English, and Latin languages. Family background and early life Anna German was born in the town of Urgench in Uzbekistan (Central Asia; then the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union). Her mother, Irma Martens (1909—2007), was the child of Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonites with descendants from the Netherlands who exchanged Friesland for the area around the Vistula delta and on Empress Catherine the Great's invitation came to live in the Russian Empire. Martens' mother Anna Friesen had been born in present-day Ukraine. Later, the family settled in the Kuban. Martens' native language was a Plautdietsch variant with both German and Dutch influences. In the 1996 radio programme Spoor Terug on Dutch public broadcaster VPRO, Irma Martens said that she and her family always identified as Dutch despite her Polish passport. Martens studied German in Odesa, but had to leave her village due to a lack of work as a teacher and instead moved to Redkaya Dubrava in Altai Krai. Due to NKVD Order No. 00439, Martens fled to Uzbekistan, where she met Eugen Hörmann. Her accountant father, Eugen (Eugeniusz) Hörmann (in Russian, Герман), was also of a German–Russian pastor family and born in Łódź in Congress Poland (part of the Russian Empire), now in Poland. Eugen Hörmann's father, Anna's grandfather, Friedrich Hörmann, who had studied theology at Łódź, was in 1929 incarcerated in Gulag Plesetsk by communists for being a priest; he died there. In 1937, during the NKVD's anti-German operation, Eugen Hörmann was arrested in Urgench on false charges of spying, and executed (officially, sentenced to ten years in prison).