Andreas Voitkun

Alias Voitken (POW file)     Latvian spelling Andrejs Voitkuns        Russian spelling Андрей Адамович Войткун

Born 29.09.1885     Place Riga, Latvia     Ethnic origin Latvian/Pole     Religion Roman Catholic

Father Voitkun, Adam     Mother -

Family wife Emilie (Emily) Voitkun, b. Riga, 1878; by 1915 5 children; children Alice and Frances, b.1913, Betrice Edith b.1915

Arrived at Australia

            from London     on 5.04.1913     per Orontes     disembarked at Adelaide

Residence before enlistment Port Pirie, SA

Occupation 1913 engineer (shipping records); 1915 labourer (enl.); fireman (POW’s details)

Service

service number 2134     enlisted 4.10.1915     POE Adelaide

unit 32nd Battalion       rank Private

place Western Front, 1916       casualties WIA 1916, POW 1916-1919

final fate RTA 17.03.1919      discharged 12.06.1919

Naturalisation 1935

Residence after the war Port Pirie, SA

Died

Materials digitised naturalisation (NAA)

digitised service records (NAA)

digitised Red Cross wounded and missing file (AWM)

Red Cross POW file (AWM)

application for admission of friends (NAA)

Andreas Voitkun's 'Memoirs' in Latvian (1962) (extracts were published in The Baltic peoples in Australia: Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians / B. & A. Birskys, A. Putniņš and I. Salasoo, Melbourne : AE Press, 1986, pp. 69-72) (book includes photo)

From Russian Anzacs in Australian History:

[Prisoner of war] Andreas Voitkun [...] who left his Latvian-born wife and five children at Port Pirie, was not naturalised but seems to have had no hesitation in identifying himself as an Australian: ‘I am an Australian’, he says, ‘and a good bit from home’. This is how his ‘comrade’, an English fellow-prisoner, also sees him: ‘There is here an Australian married with a family of 5 children who speaks German, Russian and French’, he writes to his sister. ‘He acts as interpreter for us English to the Russian Doctors and so in an indirect way is doing his bit to better the lot of us wounded.’ Voitkun himself was severely wounded and was in hospital initially at Ohrdruf in Thüringen with British and Russian prisoners-of-war.

From Andreas Voitkun's 'Memoirs'

My first ten years in Australia were fairly hard. There was hardly any industry because everything was imported from abroad, especially England, and so work was hard to find because frankly there wasn't any work. One had to take whatever was available. I settled in the small town of Port Pirie. There were more than 25 Latvians working in the lead and oilier metal smelters. Except for myself and one other Latvian family they were all so called lost sons (seamen). A few married local girls but the majority remained bachelors until they died. [...]

    In 1914 war broke out. I had served in the Russian army and was classified as a Russian army reservist. We had planned to return to our homeland after ten years where I would have been regarded as a refugee if all had been as before without a revolution. The Russian government announced that all Russian army reservists who found themselves abroad could join any Allied army and would then be regarded as having served in the Russian army. In 1915 I joined the Australian army and served until the end of the war in Egypt, France and Germany and then from England returned to Australia. I was not the only one. There was a fairly large number of Latvians because from the casualty lists of fallen and wounded one came across many Latvian names such as Kalniņš, Bērziņš and so on. Of course at that lime we were all regarded as Russians because a Latvian government did not exist . . .

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