In 1974, Marshal Zhu De's physical condition was very bad in his later years, and as one comrade-in-arms passed away one after another, this old man who was as kind as his brother and father often washed his face with tears alone.
In addition, his identity is more sensitive at this time, not only can he not attend the memorial service of his old comrades-in-arms, but it is also difficult to see his family and children again. The health of the elderly is deteriorating.
On this day, the old man's daughter-in-law Zhao Liping came to the new sixth institute on Wanshou Road in Beijing, and finally took the child to see Zhu De. This may be one of the few opportunities they will have to see each other during his grandfather's lifetime.
"The children are a lot older, why didn't Zhu Qi come? ”
Zhu Qi is Zhu De's biological son, although Zhu De is in a high position, his son Zhu Qi is just an ordinary railway worker, and the two have not seen each other for a long time.
Zhao Liping's eyes dodged, and he didn't know whether to speak:
"Dad, as a wife, I have accepted the reality, and you, as a father, must also be mentally prepared first. ”
Zhao Liping said this, and then silently handed over a note.
"Dad, you also know that Zhu Qi had a heart attack when he was a child, and his living conditions have not been very good, and this disease always recurs. Ten days ago, he worked overtime alone at work, and as a result, he had a heart attack and the person was gone...... By the time his co-workers found out, it was too late...... I wanted to tell you as soon as possible, but I couldn't get in, and I was worried about your health, so I ......"
Zhu De leaned on the edge of the bed, looked at the note in his hand, and burst into tears again. Zhao Liping stepped forward and knelt in front of Zhu De and held his hand tightly: "Dad, I'm sorry for hiding it from you for so long." ”
A bumpy marriage road
Marshal Zhu De, as the founding leader of the mainland with high moral integrity, throughout his life, there were six marriages before and after, but the descendants left behind were only one son and one daughter.
The life experiences of these two brothers and sisters were more bumpy than the other, and when these hard-working brothers and sisters grew up, Zhu De did not provide them with any help, and the two of them relied on their own abilities, one became a teacher, and the other became a railway worker.
You must know that Marshal Zhu De once served as vice president of the state and had a very high prestige in New China, and such a thing is rare in the whole world.
As the "father of the Red Army" that year, Zhu De entered the Yunnan Army Lecture Hall as early as 1909 to learn Xi, and he was an old acquaintance with Long Yun. At the same time, he also joined Sun Yat-sen's China League and began to participate in the revolutionary cause. And his first wife was his cousin Liu Congzhen, who dated four years ago.
For this first marriage, Zhu De was very disgusted, he only had the affection of sister and brother for his cousin, but there was no intention of man or woman, and the marriage between the two was soon unable to maintain, and Zhu De rarely saw her again.
His second wife, Xiao Jufang, met in the second year after Zhu De's graduation, Xiao Jufang was the daughter of the hotel where Zhu De lived at that time. After Xiao Jufang became an adult, the two soon fell in love and became husband and wife.
In the fourth year after marriage, when Zhu De was about to go out to participate in the war, Xiao Jufang found out that she was pregnant, they were newly married Yan'er, and they were really reluctant to give up with each other, and Zhu De didn't want to leave his pregnant wife alone, so they lived together in the barracks.
Later, their son Zhu Qi was born in the barracks with his parents, and it can be said that from the first breath, he carried gunsmoke.
The dirty and messy environment of the barracks is naturally not a good place to spend confinement. In 1917, Xiao Jufang contracted a strange disease for some reason, and her body continued to have a fever, and Xiao Jufang was just pregnant, so her body was weak. When Zhu Qi was less than three years old, Xiao Jufang died due to the aggravation of her condition, leaving Zhu De alone with the child, and I really didn't know what to do.
In desperation, Zhu De had no choice but to find a stepmother for the child as soon as possible, so that someone could take care of him. This is Zhu De's third wife, Chen Yuzhen.
Chen Yuzhen is a woman with some background, she is the niece of Sun Bingwen, the secretary general of the Political Department of the National Revolutionary Army, who is generous and stoic, not at all like the traditional "stepmother" role, not only is she not insidious and vicious, but she also treats Zhu Qi as her own, and she has no dislike at all.
However, although Chen Yuzhen's conditions are very good, she has been single for a long time because she is too old. After the two met, they both felt that it was very suitable, so they got together and formed a new family. In order to continue the war, Zhu De left the child in her care. This is also the last time Zhu De met his son Zhu Qi for a long time.
Later, there was a scuffle among the Yunnan warlords, and Zhu De was wanted by Tang Jiyao, who later refused Yang Sen's invitation. Zhu De abandoned his ties to the warlord forces of the past in order to join the Communist Party, but his application was denied by Chen Duxiu.
Yunnan couldn't go back, and the Communist Party didn't take him in, so in desperation, Zhu De had to temporarily leave China to study in Germany.
During this period, Chen Yuzhen keenly discovered that Zhu De's wanted notice was posted on the street, so she left her hometown secretly with her children without notice, and no one knew where they went.
Later, when Zhu Detuo people in Germany contacted him, he could only listen to the rumors in the market, "Chen Yuzhen and Zhu Qi were killed together."
In 1922, Zhu De, who thought he had lost his family forever, met his fourth wife, He Zhihua.
If the previous marriage experiences brought Zhu De emotional pain. Then He Zhihua is the extreme of another dimension. Her love period with Zhu De was very short, the two were in a foreign land at the same time, and Zhu De, as an officer, was quite manly, so He Zhihua married him. During the transfer of the two to the Soviet Union, He Zhihua gave birth to Zhu De's daughter, Zhu Min.
Later, with the outbreak of the Northern Expedition, Zhu De, who had just joined the Communist Party abroad, had to return to China to participate in the war. Considering that the distance was too far, he left almost all of his savings to He Zhihua and asked her to live with her daughter in the Soviet Union first, and then wait for the end of the domestic war to take her back to China.
But who knew that in the process of separation, He Zhihua's feelings for Zhu De gradually faded, and the money was not enough to spend, so she soon empathized and remarried a revolutionary young man named He Jiaxing. and informed Zhu De that Zhu Min was sent back to China.
The daughter who went to a Nazi concentration camp
After being sent back to China, Zhu Min was arranged to live with He Zhihua's mother, her grandmother, in Sichuan. After parting with her mother in Moscow, she never saw her mother again, let alone her father Zhu De. The first time Zhu Min knew his father's name was on a wanted notice on the street.
In 1937, with the outbreak of the all-out war of resistance, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party once again reached a cooperation, and the domestic bounties and arrests of Communist relatives were suspended. Zhu De also took this opportunity to ask someone to find his missing family member.
Zhu Min was quickly found, but she was still young at the time and didn't want to leave her grandmother's side. After more than two years, when Zhu Min was a little older, he agreed to return to Yan'an, at this time Zhu Min was 14 years old, and Commander-in-Chief Zhu De was almost 54 years old.
Considering that the child was still young, Zhu Min was later sent to the Soviet Union to study Xi with a group of students, but the year was unfortunate that it was 1941.
On June 21, 1941, Zhu Min was sent to Minsk to recuperate due to an asthma attack due to unaccustomed water and soil. The very next day, Nazi Germany defied the non-aggression pact and subsequently occupied Minsk. Zhu Min, along with other Soviet children, was put in prison for temporary conservatory.
For two years, Zhu Min was imprisoned by the German army in Minsk, and later sent to a concentration camp on German soil. On the way, the train transporting the prisoners was sealed with iron sheets, and the harsh environment once again made Zhu Min have a high fever and was almost thrown off the train by the Nazis.
Conditions in the camps were even worse, with Red Army prisoners of war who knew how to fight being transferred to hard labor, and teenagers being forced by the Nazis to assemble ammunition and machinery, working well more than 12 hours a day. Later, after returning to China, Zhu Min lost a lot of hair because of this, and his height has not been very long.
Not only that, because she was a rare yellow person in the prisoner of war camp, Zhu Min became the punching bag of the Nazis, and the beatings and scolding that fell on her were often more than those of other prisoners. In order to save his life, Zhu Min had to pretend to be deaf and dumb as much as possible, so that the Nazis would think that he was just an East Asian. If they find out that they are Zhu De's daughter, I am afraid that what awaits her in the future will only be a worse fate.
The painful time in the camp lasted for three and a half years, and one morning they found that all the Nazi soldiers guarding the camp were gone, and gunfire rang out nearby. Maybe the Nazis were arresting deserters? Zhu Min and the others didn't have time to think about it, so they hurriedly took advantage of this opportunity to flee with a few friends.
Although Zhu De had been to Germany, Zhu Min really did not know the terrain, so he had to keep walking to the east, where the Soviet Union and China were both in the east. When he arrived at the Polish border, Zhu Min was affected by the war, became separated from his friends again, fell seriously ill, and was sent to a Soviet military shelter.
Life at the shelter didn't last long, and because Zhu Min concealed his identity and only said that he was from China, the political commissar of the local shelter told him that the war was over. It was only at this time that Zhu Min revealed his true identity to him and the purpose of being sent over back then.
After communication at the shelter, Zhu Min was transferred back to Moscow. However, there was also an undercurrent in China at that time, and Zhu Min continued to stay in the Soviet Union until she completed her studies as agreed. By the time she returned home, it was already 1953.
Zhu Min later became a professor of Russian at Beijing Normal University and has been working on the education front ever since.
The son of a strong man was pulled
Zhu Min fell ill due to his displacement since he was a child, and he fell ill in middle age. But at the end of the day, she still lives a lot longer than her brother.
And Zhu De's eldest son, Zhu Qi, has been living a very poor life since he left his hometown and went into hiding with his stepmother. After the establishment of the national anti-Japanese united front, he was pulled by the troops of the Yunnan warlord Long Yun before the party organization could find it. The warlord's army doesn't care what your identity is, it's just that you can catch someone you see.
However, fortunately, Long Yun had a very good relationship with Zhu De before, and when he increased his troops, he deliberately paid attention to the person surnamed "Zhu" inside, so he found Zhu Qi in time.
At that time, Zhu Qi had already fought several battles with the troops, and he should have been sent away as artillery fire, but it was only because of some coincidences that Zhu Qi survived until now. After that, he was transferred to Yan'an by Long Yun, reunited with his father, and met his sister Zhu Min.
After that, Zhu Qi took the initiative to ask to join the party and went to the battlefield of resistance against Japan like an ordinary young man. After being shot in the leg, Zhu Qi was almost amputated due to excessive blood loss and treatment too late. But even if he is saved, he is destined to be lame for the rest of his life, and there is no way to continue fighting.
This made Zhu Qi deeply shocked, and he lost himself for a while, not knowing what else he could do next. People have also become extremely fragile and inferior, and even when they reach the age when they should get married, they dare not find a partner.
Zhu Qi's father Zhu De was anxious in his eyes, thinking of his emotional experience when he was young, and felt that it was better to find him a partner quickly, the two of them lived together, and they could soon forget those unpleasant pasts. After many introductions, Zhu De recommended Zhao Liping to his son.
Zhao Liping, a child of an ordinary peasant family in Hebei, followed a team of students to Yan'an when he fled and entered the Xi University of Resistance University. At that time, Zhu Qi was out of the firing line due to a leg injury and was an instructor at Kang University.
Zhu Qi and Zhao Liping are both interesting to each other. But one has low self-esteem because of his lameness, and the other feels that he has "climbed" the son of Commander-in-Chief Zhu De, and is afraid that he will be "not free" after marriage. The suspicion and pressure between the two have always existed, and they couldn't get closer for a long time, so they "survived" each other until the Japanese surrender in 1945.
Due to the end of the Anti-Japanese War, the work of the Communist Party was more focused on local land reform. Cadres and manpower are needed everywhere, seeing that Zhu Qi and Zhao Liping are going to be transferred to other places respectively, Zhu Lao is always anxious, but he is not good at this kind of thing in person, so he has to ask his old friend Marshal He Long.
He Long is a straight person, and directly called the two together to talk, and finally talked about it, and the two tied the knot.
Why is Zhao Liping worried about "not being free" after marriage? She is worried that as the son of the commander-in-chief, Zhu Qi will inevitably have a half-official position in the future, and when the time comes, as his partner, Zhao Liping's own achievements may not be recognized. There may even be restrictions.
But it turns out that Zhao Liping really "thinks too much".
Become a "Train Driver"
During the Liberation War, because he was unable to participate in the war and had no teaching tasks, Zhu Qi went to the Shijiazhuang Railway Bureau as a driver, and Zhao Liping worked in a bank.
But at some special points in time, Zhu De's own actions were also limited during this time, and Zhu Qi was transferred out of his job as a driver because of his background. He became a storekeeper and carried goods like any other worker on a day-to-day basis.
Zhu Qi has a congenital heart disease, and it is not obvious when he fights, after all, he is young. But when he arrived at the warehouse, he was so busy every day that he was so tired that he was often out of breath.
In the summer of 1974, Zhu Qi suffered a heart attack at work and was exhausted. But at that time, no one was by his side, and he lost the last chance to rescue, and Zhu Qi passed away in pain.
Zhao Liping didn't dare to tell Zhu De the news for a long time, the old man had gone through too many lives and deaths in his life. He had just cried bitterly because of the death of Marshal Chen Yi before, and if he told him that his son was also dead, the old man might be much sadder than his wife at that time.
Zhu De thanked her for her kindness, but still said that she should have told him sooner so that there might be a chance to see him one last time.
Although Zhu Qi is the son of Zhu De, he has hardly received any benefits in his life, but he is still willing to fight for the cause of the country for the rest of his life. In that period of the most lonely, he did not simply give up the work in his hand, nor did he complain about his own experience, and did his life well, which is the biggest expectation of his life.