Nema’s Story

An oral history told by Barbara (Nema) in her own words, spanning a childhood in Silesia, wartime Germany, and heading for a new life in America.

The Old World — Silesia and the Life Before

Hello? Is anybody there? Is anybody listening? Let me tell you my story. Sometimes I feel as old as a dinosaur.

And I wonder if anyone would ever imagine and realize how old I really was. It’s not so much the years that count, but it’s because of the times I have seen the strange stretch of years between nineteen twenty to nineteen ninety. A time that was so full of change that a lot of things that I saw in my childhood. Must seem to you like fairy tales. I thought at first, if you want to tell a life story, it would be kind of boring to start with when I was born, everybody starts that way. It would be more fun to just hop back and forth between the different subjects.

But then it occurred to me that because of so many changes that have gone on, and because it must seem so long, long ago to you to bring it in different sections would only serve to confuse you. People today are already confused about some of the historical events of the past and the century. And it’s amazing how many people even ask me sometimes. How big is Germany, Actually.

Well, Germany. Was smaller than New England. And when I was born, it was right in the center of Germany, which was called the Green Heart of Germany because it was all woods, hills and woods with little farms and little villages. And looking in a way, quite a bit like New Hampshire. What’s in milk and beer to the travelers. And before you knew it, you had a big town. And wherever there was some profit, there were tradesmen to take care of the horses.

The broken wagon wheels. And when there is a profit to be made. There come the jewellers who were trading gold and precious jewels. And then, of course, the spice trade from the foreign countries came in traveling the same routes. And ever since the time of the traveling merchants, the city grew and grew and grew. Until one time it was known as a town of many towers.

The towers.

The church steeples. Because the town had over forty five churches. And it grew and grew. And in twelve hundred the big cathedral in Erfurt was already built. And they had the biggest bell made in all of Germany at that time hanging in this cathedral. And it was called by the name of off. Gloriosa. This bell is still hanging there today.

And ringing. And when you go through the small, narrow streets, it gives you a funny feeling to think that this town has been there for a thousand years. And parts of the old wall that went around the town, and the old moat in front of the wall are still preserved today. In this fine town. My parents made their first home in nineteen twenty one, and I was born as a second girl in nineteen twenty five.

The story of how my father and mother met is already one of the fairy tales Is that I have to tell. It is a lovely love story and has always been one of my favorites, and my father told it to me several times, not thinking much about it because people in those days, I suppose they were more romantic and it was not so easy to date and carry on a courtship.

Everything was much, much more proper and usually carried out through the parents. However, this is not what happened in the case of my mother and dad. My dad came from a family who was not very well off. They had his father had a big farm and had a small job with the government, or bookkeeping, as you would call it today.

But he married.

The daughter of a very well-to-do family, and her brother owned the biggest resort hotel in the spa of Bathurst, which some of you know. Uh. This fact, by the way, makes Carl Otto my second cousin, because. This man who owned the spa was the father of Carl Otto’s mother. And since his sister was married to my dad’s father, this makes them cousins.

However, before all the family plans came to be realized, it was World War One, and my father had to go to war. They had to go to war to France. And in those days, my father, when he became a lieutenant riding. And a young soldier who was taking care of the horse and taking care of my father, and being more or less a servant in the old fashioned style.

And so my father wrote to war and style. They rode across the countryside and between Germany and France, and then went on trains. And these famous trains were freight trains with boxcars, and boxcars were for forty men and eight horses each, which they were called forty and eighths. There still exists a club In the States that is called the forty and eight, which preserves the memories of the Americans that went to war in those days who were also fighting in World War One.

Over there, over there, over there.

Well, it was long over by the time I was born.

It was over in nineteen eighteen. And my father, who had been studying architecture, he had gone to a very fine school, I suppose. Helped by a lot of. Persistence on his parents part, since he was the only son. He went to a very fine monastery school where he had to study Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French. and played the piano and played the organ, and in the war he also learned to play the drum and the bugle, so he loved music and he would have preferred to become an opera singer, he told me.

But you had to do something useful after all. So he studied to be an architect and decided to work for the railroad. And right after the war they were offering him a job and he was in Strasbourg, in Alsace-Lorraine, in the country between France and Germany. And since he was a young fellow there, just living by himself, he did not think much of getting married yet, because being in the war for six years had made him kind of late and behind.

His plans because nobody in those days married without having money in the bank and a good job. So he stayed there for quite a while, and much to his grief. Things were in a very bad way in Germany. Germany had lost the war, and it had to pay a lot of money to the people that won the war, and they were hunger and inflation going on.

And he did not dare give up his job. And he was not around to help his parents very much. And his mother died. And his father died during that time. And it was a very sad time for him, I am sure. And by the time he even came back and start of getting married. It turned out he was already thirty seven years of age.

He was already traveling for the railroad. Then he had to go on business trips. And one day he was riding in the train, and he saw this young lady sitting across from him, dressed all in black. Very young, beautiful lady. And he kept looking at her.

But she looked so young. And he wondered what made her so sad. And she was all dressed in black, but he didn’t dare speak to her. So after he got back home, he kept thinking and thinking and didn’t know what to do. He had missed a good opportunity, he told himself the next day. So since he was very good at entertaining at parties and singing and making rhymes, he decided to write to the newspaper and he made a little rhyme about the beautiful lady in black that rode on the train.

And since he was a railroad man, he knew exactly what train it was and where it was going, and the number of the train and what time of day it was. He knew all that exactly. And he put it all down in the paper, and he hoped for the best. Well.

The young lady was my mother, but she did not see the announcement in the paper. Her girlfriend did, and she came over to her and said, look, this is you. This is you he’s describing. This man is looking for you. And my mother said, don’t tell me There was nobody there but an older man, and he looked like he was a cattle salesman. He had on knickers and hiking shoes and a Tyrolean hat and a walking stick. What will I do with him? She said, you don’t know for sure whether it was him. And how do you know what he’s like?

And he wrote this nice poem and she says, I think you should go.

My mother said, no way. And so she said, okay, I’ll go and meet him. This lady met my dad and came back to my mother with glowing reports. What a charming man he was. And she was missing a good opportunity. So reluctantly, my mother agreed.

My mother indeed had a sad story to tell. During the war. She had lost her youngest favorite brother who went down with the ship. Her oldest brother was missing in Russia and had not even returned yet at that time, and nobody knew whether he ever would. And her mother had died, and she was keeping house for her father.

My mother also had a fiancee who was the brother of her best girlfriend, who was a flier in World War one. And that was quite a daring profession in those days. And I’m sure he had turned my mother’s head quite a bit. He also got killed during the war. This is a sad story that my dad found out when he met my mother.

But what made him fall in love with her, I think. Was her sweet. Quiet manner that she kept all her life. And her warm heart.

She was as dear as an angel. And everybody who ever met her said so. She came from a little village in Thüringen, in the woods where her father was forest master, to the Duke. And she grew up. With the people in town. In her little village. And she was sort of like a princess of the village, since her father had such an important job. And everybody knew her.

When we returned years ago, everybody said to her, oh, Foillan helped her. Are these your children? Calling her Miss Hertha as usual, and then asking her if we were her children because they still remembered her as the young girl that grew up in the village. And she also, on occasion, went on the hunts that my grandfather made for the Duke.

And they were friends with the princess and the Archduke. When he got engaged, invited my grandfather to the wedding and sent them thank you notes for the gift. And it was quite a very respectable job. He had but a lovely, lovely country setting, and in everything she did for the rest of her life. This attitude of being able to deal. With the highest and the lowest of people always made her dear to everyone she met. And my father.

Of course, must have fallen head over heels in love with her, and would not give up because the first objection he naturally got was it once in years because my mother was eleven years younger than he.

But being a hiking enthusiast and his hiking shoes and the knickers and the walking stick very much impressed my grandfather. And soon the two of them were taken inspection trips through the forest together. And it developed into a wonderful courtship. And before long the wedding was held in the forestry and the little village in the woods.

And after that? My father got a new job with the railroad as an inspector. On the. In the railroad offices in the district city of Erfurt. Which became the hometown for all my family. My first sister was born in nineteen twenty two and her name was Rosemarie. And when I was born, it was quite a shock to my dad because he didn’t expect to have another daughter, and they said they had not expected me to be born the day I was born.

And it was a Sunday and there was no doctor around, and everything happened so fast that it was my father who delivered me. And after everything was over and the neighbor woman was there helping my mother and In bathing the baby already.

My father finally appeared with the doctor in tow, and the doctor said, what do you want me to do here? Bathe babies or or help giving birth? You’re all done. And so everybody was happy. And my father said, I think since I am the one that was in attendance, I should be the one to name the baby. And since he was, he had been a lieutenant with the artillery, artillery, artillery. He named me after the patron saint of the artillery, which was Saint Barbara.

But again, as another fairy tale, a long story, because Saint Barbara was locked into a tower. By some ruler in Africa, and I didn’t find this out until I went to Egypt, that there really was apparently a legend of that kind. Or maybe it really happened, but they knew the place where Saint Barbara lived and the tower where she lived in.

And she was freed from this unhappy fate by horrible. And she was praying all the time and trying to bring the new face about when a mighty thunderstorm occurred and split the thunder and lightning and crashing and split that tower in half. And she escaped. And because of the thunder and lightning, that’s why the artillery picked her as the patron saint.

Also, she is the patron saint in Europe for the miners who work inside the mountains because they work, of course, with dynamite. And again, you have the thunder and lightning and explosions. So I must say it is apparently quite a noisy name.

And I guess in my young years I created a lot of thunder and lightning and noise, because from the way I hear it, I was a hard two year old, three year old, four year old in my days. And my mother used to say, you are going to be a nail to my coffin. I can still hear her.

I was stubborn.

I had a head full of wild ideas. And it was really hard to keep in check.

And I don’t know what made me that way, because.

I was really smart because when somebody asked me and I must have been about four years old at the time, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, I don’t want to be anything.

When I grow up, I want to be. I want to stay just the way I am. Because I was very happy the way I was.

It was the most wonderful, wonderful childhood we had.

It was a little world away from the world. And the world in those days was full of unrest and upheaval. And people were going hungry, going without jobs. In America.

It was a time of depression. In Germany.

The inflation had started even earlier than that, and I remember my mother telling me that I had toys that cost one hundred thousand marks and diapers that cost a million marks. And it was just so fantastic. People used to get paid in cash and run to the stores before the money would go up again, and trade all the money into goods as quick as possible. And we were better off than most because of my father working for the government.

There was security in his job, and also he had been offered a promotion which meant to leave our home, but I’m sure he took it because of the fact that now he had two children to support and he could not very well refuse. refused. And everybody was moaning and groaning.

We were going to East Silesia, right next to Poland, into the cold pot of Germany, they called it, where there were nothing but coal mines and Polish people who did not even speak German. And the worst conditions. And it was coldest in Russia. And everybody said we would starve to death and freeze to death. And it was like we were going to Siberia.

There was a big lament going on over this, and we also moved in the middle of winter, and it was terrible and it was horrible cold.

But one thing remained for us children, and that was the fact that our dear nanny Elisabet, But who I called baby. Oh, my favorite nursemaid decided to come with us and leave her home in Tyringham and come with us into this godforsaken place. And so we moved in into a palace of an apartment.

It was a huge railroad building which had two floors of huge apartments, two huge apartments. And it was connected to the office that my dad was in, which was the district office for the direct railroad traffic. And behind this building was a huge railroad office building for the whole. County for the whole part of Germany there, and it was a huge building of, I think three floors or four floors high, beautiful new building.

But my dad did not work there yet until later.

But between these two buildings was a garden spot about the size of a average playground. I would say, and this was again divided into two gardens for the two apartments, which made our garden really rather small. And when my sister and I returned to it about ten years later, we were shocked about how small that little garden really was. And yet, it was the most wonderful, wonderful spot on earth for us.

My mother worked day and night on this little garden because when we moved in, we discovered it had.

It was divided into a round bed of roses in the middle. And then it had four plots of grass. Which on each corner section was one fruit tree.

We had a cherry tree, a pear tree, a green plum tree, and a blue plum tree. And it had raspberry bushes and gooseberry bushes and strawberries already started.

My mother was overjoyed. She made this garden into a little Paradise. Every little section of the garden was framed by little low irises, pale blue.

And I can still see those irises in the summer. Glistening, kind of like flower petals do in the sunshine and going me being a toddler almost to the height of my knees or my hips. Yet they were only the low ones. They were only a border plant and they were flowers, tulips, larkspur, zinnia, and all kinds of roses in that rose bed. That little garden had one of each.

It was like a botanical garden.

We had a little spot for a table so we could have coffee outside, and it had like a a vine trellis over it, and we had great grapevines going over them. And it was a heavenly place. And from the garden the garden had a little gate. And from the garden we could go out around the house, around the building, but the whole. Plot of land was enclosed by a wall. Between the two buildings, that was our garden wall, the garden fence to one side. And then in front there was a big iron fence with gates and a big gate for for cars to come in or horses. They were always kept locked.

We were not ever allowed outside that area. We could go in the yard behind the house. That was cobblestone in that little yard, under the under the balconies from the house.

But we didn’t play there. We stayed mostly in the garden. And it was the most wonderful time in my life. And at night, our nursemaid would come down and say, it’s time to come in, because the night owls are going to come out and the chimney swifts would be flying around and going. Siri. Siri, Siri. And we were looking at them and getting a little scared when it got dark, because we thought maybe they were the night owls. And we would hurry up, down the back, up the back stairs and down through the kitchen. Kitchen was up two steps into the apartment and home.

But we stayed out most all day.

We had a beautiful sandbox, and it was always a big excitement in the spring when we heard that the sand was going to arrive.

The new sand for the summer was coming and we played, uh, butcher shop and chopped off worms for sausage. And we played on the swings and we had our tricycles. And also we played Indians one time and went into the big ash container in the in the cobblestone yard.

There was the ashes for the boilers kept there, and we thought it was wonderful to paint ourselves like Indians. And then we decided it was just this wonderful to climb in and live in there like a tent. And boy, did we catch the devil that day. I don’t even know who told me how to play Indians when I was that little.

But there was a little boy upstairs. He lived under the eaves in a small apartment. I imagine it was a railroad widow. They live up there in a small apartment. And her little boy, Walter, played with us in the sandbox, and. Oh, God, he was such a shy little guy. And we beat up on him pretty good sometimes. And he said to his mother one time, I’m not going down there in the yard again because I get beat up. And his mother said, why don’t you hit her back?

And he said to her, this person, he said about me, you should know her.

I was about three years old and I was this person already.

But on the whole we were good friends. And the little boy downstairs, his name was. John, and his nickname was normal. I still remember that normally we called him.

He was playing with us too, and the parents were good friends. And the apartments were fabulous. They were so fabulous.

It was still the Roaring Twenties.

And I remember my mother wearing short skirts and silk stockings and those beehive hats, and everybody bobbed their hair and tried on the new waves in their hair.

But my mother did not cut her hair. She wore her hair Along into a bun in the back.

And I remember how bad the times were, because I remember there were vagrants coming into the house. Sometimes, even though the gates were locked, if somebody left them open, somebody had come into the big gate and left them open for a while. There they would be. And some of them came to the back up the back door where the servants were to go.

There was a servants bell for deliveries. And knocked on the kitchen door.

But some of them came right to the up the front steps, which were wide by steps about as wide as a room today would be. That went upstairs and there was a big door.

The whole wall where the door was, was in, uh. Inlaid lead pane glass. Fancy fancy lead panes like they have in the Mount Washington Hotel. That was the whole wall there around the door. And there they would ring the bell, and my mother would tell them to sit down on the steps, and they would bring out soup and things to eat and wrap something up for them, sandwiches to take along. And she never turned anybody away.

But I remember that seeing them sitting on the steps. Hungry. Run down people and never hungry. Run down people out in the street.

When we looked out through the iron gates. And there were demonstrations. You lived right on the main street that led to the railroad station.

There was just across from us the post office. And then it was the The end of the square, and you saw the whole length of the railroad station. And on this big square, that was the one they picked for all the demonstrations. And we saw the communists going by with their red flags. And then after a while, we saw the Nazis going by with their brown shirts and their flags.

And then they would start fights and beating each other after the parade at night. And the police would come with the green trucks and stick them all in the green trucks and drive them away. And this was all very exciting. And everybody, somebody shouted, here comes another parade! Everybody would run to the windows and look out. And here we were, right on the main street, watching everything.

It was a wild world out there. And sometimes there were shots fired, too. And my father would shake his head and come home early from work. And my parents would talk. Sometimes they would sit out on the balcony back of our room toward the yard side of the house, and they would talk in low voices about what was going on out there.

And I heard my father say, you know, several times he said, that I can’t help being bitter because he said, my parents starved to death.

And I always wondered about that.

I think a lot of people lost their fortunes during that day, what little they had.

It was all gone. And the people that were not living out in the country, and I’m sure.

My father’s parents were retired and not on the farm anymore, long gone. And they had to move in the town and they starved like everyone else.

Before my father even got himself situated when he was still awake, and it. Was hard for him to bear. I’m sure. And he had strong feelings of patriotism and did not know which way to turn. Except he was still belonging to the. Union of the. Foot soldiers which he was supporting. And trying to bring order in all his care.

Our apartment on the inside, like I said, seems to me like a palace, because it had inlaid wooden floors throughout. And the rooms were like eight and a half feet high. I. Huge wounds. And we had a big living room. And my father and mother must have been well off after a while, because they bought a big grand piano to put in that front room.

And that was my father’s joy and pride. And every day when he came home from work, he was playing on Sundays, he was playing hymns on it. And then came my mother’s salon. That was Cherrywood, traditional furniture that came from the forestry, and some of them came from the family that had the big resort hotel.

There were all kinds of relatives that contributed to them. I know that the bedroom and the dining set with the buffet my mother had made interring clearing in the woods from local furniture people and who later had furniture factories. And my mother had my mother could draw quite well, and she had designed them herself and was very fond of them.

It was a light oak bedroom set with simple modern lines. And the dining room was dark oak, and it was what you would consider modern for this twenties.

It was very nice furniture. And then she had this old salon with the glass and mirror cabinet and beautiful China. And in it also she kept her local costume, like every region in Germany, has their own special way to dress. And she kept her bonnet And her apron in there, and some of her grandmother’s fans and some old things that she used to come once in a while, bring out and clean and show to us.

That were very precious to her. And keeping a house in those days was a horrendous job, because I remember number one, we were in the in the cold coal region, which meant that there was always more cleaning to do than anywhere else.

The curtains were always black, the windows were always dirty, and when the cleaning time came, they were rubbing all these wooden inlaid floors with steel wool and scrubbing. And they were scrubbing the carpets. With sauerkraut, the vinegar would bring out the colors really nice and glowing again. And this took days.

And my mother had, of course, our nurse maid helped cleaning, but she also had a cleaning lady that came once a week, and she had a wash lady that came every three weeks, and she had a seamstress that came every three or four months or so, whenever she wanted to make some new dresses, because it was considered kind of cheap to buy dresses ready made.

In those days, you had your clothes made by a seamstress if you wanted to be somebody. I still remember the first time my mother ever bought two dresses for us, and we had to go to a birthday party at my grandfather’s.

We had to travel to Turin for a surprise, and there was no time to make one. And she bought us two velvet dresses from the garment makers in the store. And she said, well, it’ll do.

But all our other dresses I remember. And we always wore the same clothes. We always wore identical dresses. Now I have to remember that I haven’t mentioned the third person here yet because my sister was born. And my mother said, I really don’t know why he had to have another one. And this was a little present from heaven. And she said, why didn’t I have a little boy?

And she said, this should have been an udder, which is a boy’s name. And she was quite a tomboy when she was little.

But sadly.

The explanation soon came. Because after Yuta arrived and when she was born, one of my mother’s girlfriends was in the cathedral in Naumburg, where there is a famous stone sculpture of. A Duchess of Thüringen in the medieval times. This is a really historical person.

She was Uta from Naumburg. They call her because she is in Naumburg Cathedral and so is her husband Eckehart. And this is why she insisted that my sister was named Uta. And this is why my sister Uta named her son Eckehart.

Well, soon after Uta was born, my older sister died. She had a severe case of pneumonia.

Family and Shadows — Sister Rosemary and the Early Years

My sister Rosemary, who we called Rosie, was always the quiet, good girl in the family. She had she was seven years old when she died and had just started her first year of school, and she was very good in school and very well behaved.

And I imagine my mother must have been devastated. To lose another person so dear to her as her first child. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for her. I understood much later, when I was myself a mother, how horrible it must be. And it was just starting with a simple cold and pneumonia, and it developed into pleurisy.

Of the membranes of the brain. And the doctor told her to take comfort in the fact that if she had survived this sickness, she would not have been right. So it was well for her to die. And as was the custom of the day, there were no funeral homes. She had a white open coffin, and it was sitting in our room. With candles on each corner. And she had a wreath of white roses in her dark hair.

And I felt so terrible.

But when they asked me what I thought of it, I said, oh, now I can have all her toys.

But I felt very guilty because a very short time before that, it was a time where we had another one of those parades going by at night, and we were already in bed in our nightgowns. And of course, we wanted to run and see. And somebody had grabbed the chair. And my sister Rosie was standing on the chair.

And I was below it and wanted to get up and see. And little sister just barely could toddle around.

She was standing down there yelling loudly, as she usually did, because she wanted to get in the act too.

And I wanted to see. And somebody said, here come the bicycles.

It was always a long column of people pushing bicycles at the end of the parade. And then came the few cars with cars there were in those days, the big ones with the running boards and the big tires and the silver headlights.

It was a fight. Admit it.

But there was no reason why I bit my sister in the leg. I bit Rosie in the leg so she would let me on the chair. And that’s. An offense that was much talked about in our family. And my mother had called me a wild cat, and I was referred to as a wild cat from then on. And there was this incident that caused me all the grief when Rosemary was gone.

I was not a good girl like she had been. And then somebody came to visit. I usually did not want to talk to anybody.

And I would be looking at them from afar. And there was a picture of that Christmas.

It was a bitter, bitter, cold winter. And it must have been not too long before Christmas, because there is a picture of that Christmas that shows little Walter and me under the Christmas tree. And there were three little dog beds under the Christmas tree. And my mother is not in the picture. I’m sure she probably did not even approve of having that picture taken.

And they gave the big carriage to me and the smaller carriage to my sister, and that little baby basket thing was just sitting to one side. And there is also something that that did not occur to me until much later, that what I really got for that Christmas was my sister’s bigger carriage.

And I now was supposed to fill the shoes of the oldest. And it was lonesome because Woody was still very small. And my mother was wearing black again.

And I see a picture of her sitting downstairs in the garden at the table, doing embroidery, all dressed in black in the spring with the flowers blooming, and my little sister and I playing in the sandbox now.

And I guess time went on. Christmas and winter time. I always remember lots and lots of snow.

And I remember the heat as we had the heater where a big heating system, coal of course, and the radiators were like a mantle. Big mantles like they were fireplaces almost, but they had big chains of discs, brass discs, round ones and square ones, and they were like big chains all in front of it, so you could not really see the radiator. And of course, they also had to be cleaned at housekeeping time. And they were beautiful because at unexpected moments you could rattle those things and make a heck of a racket with them. And, uh.

When the first snow fell, all the housewives would roll up the rugs and have them carried downstairs and throw the rugs face down on the snow, which is also a good cleaning way to clean it. And the housewives in Germany to this day fight about a spot on the first clean snow to do that. Beating with the rug, beater of the rugs to clean them in the snow. And it didn’t matter that the snow was dirty.

There was enough snow for everybody in those years. And when you went for a walk, we had a girl that took care of us when we wanted to go out for a walk like a babysitter. She lived in the in the little railroad office where my father’s office was, right near, near the big gate.

And I suppose the man there was the janitor and took care of the boilers for the building, and was in charge of the gate being opened and closed, and there was a bigger boy. Who became a member of the Hitler Youth.

I remember that was big. Impressive thing that happened. Had no idea what that meant, but it was very impressive. And he talked about it a lot. And his sister. Elsie was coming over lots of times to babysit with us and taking us for walks down to the river.

We were right behind the big office building from the railroad was the villa of the railroad president. Which also had a big wall to the street there. And then you came right to the river, and there was a nice little walk along the river, and you could see the big barges going up and down on the Oder river.

And the ice and the river would flood in the spring. And after Christmas my mother would take the Christmas tree and pour fat and birdseed, cook it hot on the stove, and then pour it over the whole tree on our kitchen balcony. And pour it right over the Christmas tree and stick it in the snow out there.

And the birds had a Christmas tree to feed on. And we would take little buckets and fill them with colored water and let them freeze out there, and then melt them in some hot water and turn them upside down on the balcony rail. And there would be green, blue, pink and red and purple big globs of globs of ice in there with the sun shining through.

It was the prettiest sight.

We had three balconies.

We had one by our children’s room, one kitchen balcony, and we also had one balcony.

But hardly anybody ever went out there except when we had to put out the flag because the street was dusty and dirty, even though there were not many cars yet.

There were a lot of horses.

The milkman came in the morning, and the people used to run down with the pitcher and get the milk from the milk wagon, and the vegetable man would drive by and holler, and he could buy vegetables fresh from the truck there. And it was all done with horses and wood and coal, which was delivered by horses. Nobody in that day that I knew had either an icebox or a washing machine.

It was unheard of.

We had a little pantry with, uh, screen windows. That was the only screen window in the house would be the one in the pantry so the flies wouldn’t come into the food. And usually the pantry had just a tiny window, and a stone building would keep it cool enough so that you could keep food in there for a couple of days. Three days anyway, with no problem. And the butter keeper was a thing made out of clay with water in it that evaporated and then kept the butter cool.

But nobody had a fridgerator. And. What else was different? We still had. A kitchen stove in the kitchen. That was done out of tiles and had to be heated with wood and coal. And then later on we did have a gas stove as our latest novelty. And we also had a record player to wind up, which was the cause of lots of fun for my sister and me because we had some old records and children’s records.

We find that thing up and sometimes we would get our sandwiches on a plate brought by our nanny, and we put the plate of sandwiches on it, and the sandwiches would fly all over the room and then we’d be in trouble again. Yeah, we had a lot of carefree fun. We never. Except some Sunday. We never really ate dinner with my parents when we were little. We ate in the den, we would call it now. That was really where we lived.

There was a big table there where we could paint and draw, and Christmas time.

My mother would come and she would say, must be getting too wet. Christmas because they haven’t bananas and oranges down at the store and big sacks of nuts. And then she would sit down in the hall and pull her rubber boots off her shoes, you know, or rubber shoes, and come in our room there in the little den, and she’d pull an orange out of her pocket and cut it up, put it on a little plate, all in little section with a little pile of sugar in the middle, and we’d all dip the little orange sections and think it was wonderful.

Oh we should. She would come back from town and bring some bakery stuff and have coffee, and then baby would come with us and we’d all have coffee and goodies in the afternoon. Dad was a must at least twice a week. All the ladies would gather, some friends would come over for coffee, and we would have to put our clean dresses on and wash our hands and go in and shake hands and say good day and make a little curtsy to every lady.

And then maybe we got to pick one little piece of goodie, and then we had to disappear and be quiet. And every once a month or so, there was a big coffee.

My father used to call it the coffee battle for all the railroad ladies. And there would be bacon for two days. Everything had to be home baked, home made, and and bread would have to whip the whipped cream in a bowl. And my mother used to make lemon cream and orange cream and whatever was possible to do at that time of year and whip these things into glasses.

And everything was on crystal with doilies underneath, and there would be the best China on the table. And then we could hear them giggling and laughing. We would have to go in again. Good day, good day. Make a curtsy all around. Get one little piece of pastry and out we go. And then we could hear him giggle and laugh all afternoon.

Giggle and laugh. A lot of parties at night too. And my father would play the piano and he would start to sing and giggle and shriek, sometimes his way into the night while we were supposed to go to sleep. They were still good days and was going into his thirties. Things must have been better, and things were definitely going better for my dad, because he worked in an office where we could go actually through a double door into his office from our children’s room, which they had given us instead of the master bedroom for them to use.

They had moved into. My parents had moved into the smaller room and gave us the big master bedroom out front. So it was a huge children’s room we had since there were three of us. I guess they did that. And from there you could go into right into the office.

And I used to sneak over there and sit with my dad’s desk. He had a desk lamp with one of those green glass big globes over it. Like as big as a washbowl. Big green globe on. And it was all quiet in there, and he worked until about eight o’clock at night. And then I’d tell him to come home for supper.

Of course, in Germany, people ate their hot meal at noontime and there was rest.

After that, there was an hour’s rest.

My father had his coffee and his cigar before he went back to work. So very good. And and and. Easy days for the the normal middle class person.

The ones that had a steady job, they had. They lived a very prescribed and very formal life. While on the street, the unrest was going on and the controversy.

It was the end of the what they called the Weimar Republic, which was the only democratic system they had. It lasted from the end of World War one until Hitler came to power. During this time. I saw a lot of important things in history. I saw, for instance, the big dirigible airship, the famous Hindenburg and the famous Zeppelin both came over our garden and I could see them flying up there like a big silver cigar and little cabins underneath with the little windows. And it was the most amazing sight to think that people could really fly like that far, far away. And they traveled so quiet.

It was just like when you buy a balloon and you’re in, it flies away and you think, oh, I wish you could go with it. And they really went and they really could go. And there was still the old days and we went on vacation. We usually went back to Turin, to our relatives. And since my grandparents lived back in the same town where that famous spa was. We got back in touch with my father’s cousin and Karl Otto and his three bigger sisters, Sabina, Anna Marie and Eva. They also had three girls in the household. That was a jolly time. And they were.

He was an independent merchant for wood, coal and grain. And so. And of course. Our armed lodger. I’ve. Had quite a bit of money from that spa. Even though the spa went by the wayside, as most all the things of this era went in in the roaring at the end of the Roaring Twenties.

But she still had all the China and all the silver from there. And there was always talk of the courageous knight. That was the name of the big hotel and the baths. And they had a. Built a big villa up on the hillside over the river that they called Villa Eden, after the Garden of Eden in the Bible. And that’s what it truly was.

It was a fabulous big villa with the tower and high above the valley and there were big fruit trees and strawberry beds. And all along the hillside and up, up one hill there were there was wine planted. And a vineyard house. And up above that he had leased a hunt. And there was a little hunting hut. And down in the town they had the town house, which had been the start of his business.

Right there in town, it had kind of a big yard with a big barn behind it for the grain and stuff. And he kept horses and they had big carriage. And the man who was in charge of all the carriage and the horses and the hunt. And so when we visited there, we were always invited in a carriage ride. That was the big day when they hitched up the horses.

And that beautiful coach. and we’d go through town and then up the hillside and down through the hollow, up to the hunting lodge. With the horses snorting and trotting.

It was exciting.

It was fun. And then they would have this big dinner table. And they always had gifts. They had three maids and always had guests. And this big dinner table would be full of people. And we were to sit there quietly and properly and behave ourselves and not interrupt the grown ups. And we had to see how other people lived.

And with this experience, I suppose, matured to the point where we were also having our dinner with our family and our dining room, and there was this big lamp over the dining room table, and everybody had a little thing hanging down from the light with a bell on it, so you could ring the maid when she was supposed to serve the next course.

And that’s how it was in my childhood. And especially when we went to my grandmother and grandfather. My grandma was, of course, the second wife of my grandfather. And that was a peculiar story in our family, because she was my grandfather’s second wife.

But she was also the second wife of the owner of the spa. And therefore. Aunt Gladys stepmother also. She had my mother and aunt were stepdaughters and was all of our cousins. Cousin grandma. And grandma was a jolly, jolly lady.

But she was thoroughly a lady. Every afternoon she had to lie down for a nap, and then she had her maid come in, and she sat in front of the toilette and had her hair done with, uh, curling irons and done just so. And she would dress in a different dress and different jewelry and sit there like a doll, and then maybe go for a little walk with my grandfather and come back and have coffee, and the table would be all set again.

Oh my goodness, my goodness. And you had to behave just so and try not to spill anything. And you had to be quiet and not jiggle around and not yell and be nice and play with your dolls quietly.

But when we got out of there and we all ran up the mountain behind.

There was a little hill behind the house that was supposed to be the hill where the gallows were in ancient days, and that’s where we used to run around and play wild and play with the three from from our household. Sabina and Anna and Eva. And then came along, little Carlotta, who was just a baby. He came late in life and was a definite, definite anchor on our legs, because we didn’t want to take that little brat along everywhere we went.

I remember him and we had those velvet dresses for my grandfather’s birthday. He had a little black velvet suit on and a red or red hair. Looked a lot like Nate when he was little. Those were jolly days and and they had beautiful toys. They had an electric train. Ah.

When we used to go up there for Christmas sometimes. Oh, in the winter it was so pretty. And they had the house full of toys and that big electric train up there. And the house was kind of a rambling house and went up the stairs. Down the stairs.

It was built on the hillside, like the whole town is sort of on the hillside up above the river. And you could go up to the study and down then the gallery around the yard.

It was fantastic. You could go down the steps in the yard and up the steps again. You come into the garden out back of the house and walk back in the house again.

There was the second floor and the third floor, and then there was the basement.

There was down. And when you got out of that door going down, you came out right on the street level. Very confusing to children, but it was like a castle. That thread made my downfall.

He was there one time.

The street went down the hill and big, long, drawn out steps like about five yards long and I couldn’t resist it. I took the scooter out about ten minutes before we were going to leave for the train, and I sailed down the sidewalk, walk on the scooter over those steps. That sounded like a great idea. I took the worst spill. I owned both knees, both elbows. I couldn’t bend them. I turned stiff and had to carry me to the train, literally. Oh, I never heard the end of it. There I was again. Bad Barbie did it again. Almost didn’t make it to the train back to school.

It was at the end of school vacation, I think. Found out later on that my cousin did the same thing, and I was just as wild as I was. And Sabina wasn’t so bad either.

She was the oldest, but she had done most of her evil deeds before, I really remember. I thought she told me some of them had been made of me. That were pretty good too. I guess we were all so worried because we figured we had to replace the boys for our parents. Who else was going to do it? I know Sabina and Anna used to like to wear leather pants and go on the hunt and on to tell me, like, leather pants. I wore leather pants for a long time.

It was wonderful.

But the stress and the strife around us, around us. We could sense. We could sense it From the grown ups talking and from what was going out outside on the street.

We had a neighbor. Now that was that whom we called Uncle Cohen, and he was babysitting us. And.

He was one of the dearest friends my parents had. And he was Jewish, and so was my baby doctor, doctor Fisher. And so was our butcher by the name of Hirsch across the street. His daughter, Irmgard was my favorite friend because she was another one. She had big, long pigtails by the time that was by the time we were about six.

And she already had big, long pigtails. I mean, it was enough to make anybody jealous. And curly. Curly other here. Black, black eyes. And she was my idea. And we started school together. Nineteen thirty one, I think we started school together. And so we had. And my my parents had oodles and oodles of friends. And we were invited to weddings to go and be flower girls, which was a lovely event. We both had to behave very well again.

We had pale green dresses with pink embroidery and pink little socks and patent leather shoes and little rosebud wreaths in our hair. Oh! He was still dressed the same.

My mother dressed me and aunt the same.

And I guess she just pretended.

Well, that was God’s reason for, aren’t you? But she had another one to replace Rosie. And she still had her two girls. She must have taken comfort in that, because in later pictures she looked really happy and rather well nourished. I must say, too. They had a lot of parties where they had bought the dinner by raiders from the railroad hotel. They had long things where you clipped metal trays right in with different containers of food, and they came running right down the street and brought it over.

It was still hot. Ah, I remember those days. They must have lived it up. In the early thirties. Turned out very well for my parents. But. They were upset by the politics because one day we were out in the garden, my sister and I. And we decided we were going to be observing these people going. Hitler and talking about elections and stuff like that. Had no idea what it was all about.

But we knew about the Brownshirts from this boy up front who was in the Hitler Youth. So we took this brown blanket we had, and we hung it over our little clothes rack and stood them out by our gate. He couldn’t go out, but we were right inside the gate, and we made a head out of a pillow and painted a face on it. And then my sister went under the blanket, and every time somebody came by, she’d say, Heil Hitler. Heil Hitler.

Well, I thought it was hilarious. And we were laughing and giggling until my nanny came down to bring us up for lunch and saw what was going on. And that day we both got a terrible, terrible licking from my mother. Which is. Which is why it made such a big impression on me. She used the strap of my lunchbox.

You had a little leather, like little leather purse where you had your sandwich and your banana in it or whatever, and you hung that around your neck when you were little first grader, and she used a strap on that to spank her. Oh, she was mad. She never tolerated making fun of people, anybody or anything.

And if anybody said anything against somebody, she would immediately go to their defense and find something good to say. She could not stand it. And that’s just the way she was. And I’d never seen her so mad. I later on realized, too, that it may have been fear also. That we could really get in serious trouble for doing that.

And that we were so visible from the gate to being in there, and that it could have implications for my dad at his work. Do you realize that all the hidden fears that must have been among the people of that time? My father still was feeling like the old veteran, and one day he came all excited, and I saw a person that is really probably the oldest historical person that I saw, and that was the Field Marshal Mackensen, who had been in the war against France and he was one of the hussars, or whatever you call it here, general.

And he looked like the Nutcracker. His uniform, he had this red coat with silver tresses going crisscross in the front and high hat with a visor, black visor. And he was a frail, frail old man, and everybody was cheering and shouting and elated to see him. And they gave him this stormy ovation. And here’s this little old man who looked like, just like the steadfast soldier out of the fairy tale.

Except his legs were not straight and stiff. They were both from riding horses, and he was not too steady on his feet.

But I remember seeing that picture. And that must be the oldest historical figure. There are many. Many. I can’t even count them all. Probably famous people that I saw during my life.

But that was the first one. And the next one was Hindenburg himself.

The one that the airship is named after, who was a general in World War One, much beloved by the Germans.

He was sort of like Ike, the big general, a steadfast type, and they elected him to be Chancellor.

But from what I hear now, he was not all that great because he was already too old and he didn’t shake. Uh, exactly. History up and do great things. And he was he could not deal. I don’t think, with all the upheaval of the times. And he is the one who later on conceded, was actually overpowered by Hitler’s mouth is about the best way to put it, and proceeded to elect Hitler for the Chancellor’s office under much, much pressure after many years.

I never understood all this stuff until I read about it later on, but I saw him work there and I saw him work later in Berlin. One time he came to Berlin, driving by in an open car. Great old man with a big. Mustache. Moustache like that. White mustache like Arthur Fiedler. Big head. He had fought the big battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia and saved the day.

And then after all this, the whole country broke down. And As the soldiers claimed that they betrayed them inside the country by having a political revolution and wanting a change, and got rid of the Kaiser, which I never knew, never met, and knew nothing about.

But my dad said he saw him when he was a little boy. That goes back a long, long way.

But it was all these changes in the air. And that was the time when I started school. When kids go to school in Germany for the first time, as I’ve told you many times, they get a sugar coat, which is a big cardboard thing, like a like an ice cream cone, but it’s much taller. It’s mostly, if you can get it as big as the kid himself And filled with goodies from top to bottom to make it a little sweeter for the first day of school.

And I had already gotten a little one when Rosemary started school. And now I was getting the big one and the little one. And you carried on your back a leather satchel with a slate, and it was real slate framed in wood. And on that was. And the frame was a little hole, and there was a little string for a little rag and a little sponge, so you could clean your slate.

And the string hung out of the satchel. That was the custom. So when you ran, it was bouncing gaily in the breeze, and you had your reading book and your writing. Book and your slate in there and your big pencil box. And that’s how you started school.

And I can still smell how the chalk smells for the slate board. We didn’t write shock because you couldn’t have written neat chalk. We wrote with slates, sticks on the slate, and the slate had lines on one side and on the other side it had squares for doing numbers. You practiced your letters? Whole lines full of A’s and B’s and C’s.

And then when the thing was full, you took the sponge and you did some more. And it was saving a lot and a lot of paper that people waste all through the first grade. Imagine how much paper, how much trash paper is produced with the system today. And how simple it was with one slate, and the slate could be handed down to the next kid in the family.

When we were dice, there was ice ice cream, but we were only allowed to have ice cream from May to September. Because the police did not allow the ice cream stores to stay open in the winter because they figured it was not good for the children. So it was a big day when the ice cream stores opened and we got a beam.

The ice in Silesia was a bane, which means Bohemian.

It was Bohemian money, but it wasn’t really.

But it was just a leftover from all the other days, from the many Poles and Slovaks that lived in the area. And when you went to the market, on rare occasions, I could go to the market with my mother and I seem to remember every time I went because it was such an event.

It was so beautiful. I can remember the sun shining through the Chestnut Street, Chestnut Street, trees on the street and the organ grinder playing and going over the market with my mommy. And it was so nice. Skipping and hopping along. And now the market people would holler and polish. They used to call my mother means good lady or something like that.

My mother knew all the words for eggs and bread and cabbage. And the German farmers and the Polish farmers would all have their wares spread out. I told my mother.

School Days, Pets, and a Childhood Garden

Little white ghosts became our companions. I have an idea that maybe the reason my parents consented to having these little ghosts is for my sister and I to have some companions after my big sister died, and to be a distraction. And they were adorable, but they grew up too fast. So soon they had to disappear and reappeared as two little white firs, which we put in front of our beds as mats, and it didn’t feel terribly saddened by this fact.

That’s the way children are, I guess. And also, we got some baby chickens after that. They were little dwarf chickens, and the railroad carpenter came over and built a little chicken house for them, and we were supposed to take care of them. And they became the source of much amusement for the whole family, because these chickens would not sleep in their house.

They were in there during the day when it was hot, and they ate, and they had their water in there, but they slept in the big lilac bush. And every night we were worried about the chickens, and we would go down and the nanny would go down trying to get the chickens in the house, and then my mother would end up down there, and at last my father.

And nobody could get the little chickens in the house. So for the rest of their lives with us, they slept in the big lilac bush, as far as I know. And it was funny. And the little rooster started to crow.

And I think really, my parents got kind of kick out of them too. And everybody was joking about our little farm and our little garden.

And I remember climbing. Up the cherry tree in our garden and making tests of my courage by jumping from higher and higher branches into the grass and eating cherries until I was sick to my stomach, and walking among the gooseberry bushes and the currant bushes.

I remember how the little grapes of currants hung there in the sunshine, so tempting as the sun shining through the red ones and the white ones, and the black currants like little blackberry bunches, the little purple grapes hanging there, and all of it. You could eat in the raspberries. You picked them off and you looked if there was a little worm in it or not.

And then you could eat them. And he came berry picking time. He would help pick the berries and they were brought up in the kitchen and being cooked. And then my mother put the kitchen chair upside down on the kitchen table, and a big cloth in between the legs of the pot under it, and they were being strained for the juice, and there was jelly being made and jam being made. Oh, it was always so busy.

There was always something interesting going on. Preserves put up in glasses.

There were no canned foods in the store that I remember.

I remember sort of when the first ones appeared. One of my father’s favorite was called Leipzig Mix, which was, uh, peas and carrots and cauliflower buds mixed in. One that was that you could buy in in tin cans.

I remember that was one of the first things, but everybody more or less made put up their own vegetables and their own food too. And my mother made apple jelly apples. We did not have in the garden. Apples were being bought in the fall and stored in the cellar on racks. Cooling racks, just like wine, came in and was stored in the cellar.

My father’s doctor’s cellar. And also ciders, sometimes, uh, fruit juices of, uh, mountain ash, berries and, uh, elderberries, things like that. They encouraged they had a club in the railroad that encouraged, uh, non-alcoholic beverages, I remember they were health conscious in those days, and it was the days where people were, uh, getting into the outdoors and hiking and appreciating nature.

This had all started back in eighteen hundred with, uh, the times of Teddy Roosevelt and started in this country. And, uh, that was the time when people came to the Mount Washington and did all those trail hiking. And my father belonged to the. Wandering bird or migrating birds, which were people that had a club that made mountain huts and played guitars. And my father played the lute beautifully. He played the lute.

We had a big lute which looks like a pregnant guitar with a big bump. Pump.

We had a beautiful one and my father had parties, used to sing songs with the lute and. That was his thing every Sunday. And that started about the time when I was starting school. Every Sunday we would have our plan already made by my dad where we would go. He usually started out with one of his railroad stations, where he had already scouted out beautiful surroundings of some kind, or some old castle of interest, or lake we could hike around and off we were for the weekend. We would go early Sunday morning and hike through nature all day and come back at night.

And I was not always in favor of all these trips. And sometimes I think I had some of my temper tantrums about doing all these prescribed hikes, but as soon as I got started, I usually liked it because it was nice.

I was pretending, being a scout, riding ahead of the troop, or cutting a little switch off a tree and pretending that I was driving a herd of cattle. Or find some other amusement. Or we would sit by a lake and start playing with little boats, or there was always something to stimulate my imagination. In the end, and of course, when we came to some old residence chateau or some old castle, my father would recite the whole history. He knew simply everything. He knew every monastery and every cardinal and every war in history.

It was amazing.

He was just a born tour guide, and as far as nature is He was concerned. He had a good friend who was the nature. Counselor for the area. They had these, um, the nature club. Who kind of watched over the birds and the wildlife, just like nowadays. And he was the expert of the region, and he was a close friend and often came with us, and he would go and see, uh, black storks and cranes or special things like, uh, certain butterflies or certain plants.

And, uh, I remember many, many trips for that purpose. And it kept our interest up, whether we did it reluctantly or not, it it stuck into our system somehow. and lasted for a lifetime. This interest in nature. So even though I wasn’t too happy with going to school, there were always the weekends to look forward to.

And then, of course, the seasonal changes came the big house cleaning, the big wash day when the wash was being boiled in the cellar in the big old brick kettle was heated, you know, underneath it, and the wash was actually boiled and then rubbed in tubs and rinsed and rinsed and hung out either in the cobblestone yard or in the cellar.

What work it all was. And then they rubbed the inlaid floors and rubbed them with turpentine afterwards. And it smelled so good and fresh. And that was toward the fall. And then it got to be Christmas. and my father would take us down to the pond in town which was near the castle.

There was an old tower left from one of the old Polish kings that had a dynasty there. And this big. Pond was the ice skating rink. And it was usually my father that took us there. He had some old figure skates that were curling in the pond, and he could skate quite well. He would show us how to make figure eight.

Figure three. Put your leg out. And then he would hold our hands crosswise, and we swing the right leg and the left leg. They played music there, too. They played some of the popular tunes of the twenties, schmaltzy songs and the. And they also had wooden sleds like chairs with runners. And so you could bring your girlfriend or your wife or your child, whatever.

Whoever couldn’t skate. You could sit in that chair and push them around on the ice, which I think was very nice. And you could see the, uh, young lovers there pushing their, uh, sweetheart in these chairs around the music. Also, there was a famous. Uh, woman skater that became an Olympic champion who was practicing there, and everybody was always watching.

But I did forget her name, but she was very famous.

I remember my father used to point out to me, that was one of the other famous people I saw after Field Marshal von von Mackensen. That skater was the other famous personality. Another thing Was that Hitler came to town there one time and gave a speech, because I remember my parents going and every one of their friends went because they wanted to finally hear what he was all about. And as I gather, they were quite impressed.

But I didn’t see him. I did see, however, my first movie with my nanny and she took me. I don’t know whether my parents know about that or not, but it was the all quiet on the Western Front, the silent movie.

And I was really impressed with the movie. That was something else. I never forgot that.

And I have loved the movies ever since.

I think I must have been about four years old when I went with her. And this this was our winter. Fun was great. I can remember going home at night and the street lights would come on and the snow looks pink from one side and then the shady side. It looks blue and pink and blue, snow crunching in the crack and cold squeaking under our boots.

We had the old skates with the skate key that you had to clamp to your boots. And you carried your skates in your hands, and your hands were frozen stiff and your toes were numb long time ago. And you just made it home in a long, long knitted stockings we wore. And then mother was home. And she’d take our frozen hands and stick them under her armpits and warm us up, and bring us into the little den by the table. And she’d have some surprise for us, like decals.

I remember one time before Christmas, she had a whole set of decals that had golden background, and putting those on the page was like gold, glistening so nice under the lamplight. And it was so nice and cozy in there. And it was going to be Christmas. And when that happened, they would lock the door to the big room.

The parlor door was being locked, and we never, never saw the Christmas tree until Christmas Eve. And the three front big front rooms, you could go into them from the hall, but on the inside they were all connected by huge sliding doors.

There was frosted glass cut in intricate patterns in the panels, and these huge sliding doors were closed also. So the one parlor was closed off on the whole house for about four or five weeks before Christmas.

The only thing we were allowed to do is bake cookies with my mother. Put little sprinkles on. And at night when it got dark and the sky would be all red, my mother would say, There’s Mary up in heaven. Heeding her big oven to make all the Christmas cookies.

And I was so exciting. Sometimes in the morning we would find a little piece of tinsel or a golden nut on the threshold, and she’d say, Kris, Kindle was here last night. Look it. There must have been here again. And it was so exciting. And on the sixth of December, Santa Claus would come. Santa Claus went all through town checking whether the kids were good or bad.

And you better have been good, because if you weren’t, that was the end of it because you did not get anything if you weren’t good. And one time he came to our house. And my sister and I were very scared. He had on a real fur coat, and he left me nothing but coals in my shoes.

The air was a bad Barbie again, and he hit my bed with a switch. Oh, we were scared. And he rattled those chains on the radiator.

Well, that was a warning. You were supposed to wash all your doll clothes and have everything nice and clean. And the railroad carpenter would come over and clean all our doll house and glue all the missing little legs and everything that was out of shape, and glue the doll beds back together. Because Santa Claus saw that you did not take good care of your toys. You wouldn’t get any new That beautiful dollhouse with real wooden furniture and upholstered sofas.

And I had a French double bed. In my bedroom set are real mirrors and real curtains and little light switches on the side, and electric light that worked from a battery in the dollhouse. They weren’t really doll houses. They were like rooms, and you stacked them on top of each other. If you wanted to make a house so we could separate them and play separately with them, which I think is a better idea for two kids or three kids to play with.

We also had a store, a real corner, old fashioned corner store, as they looked like in those days, the stores for cocoa and flour and little bags and little set of scales to weigh the wares. And we played with that for a long, long time, and we played with real pennies. And that brings me to another subject. Of winter time.

We had sicknesses in those days.

We had trench mouth and the doctor said we had put money in our mouth. And that’s where we got it.

We had both trench mouth and we had diphtheria.

We were sick for a long time.

And I remember I had rheumatism very, very bad. And that was when she was little and she was still in her little white crib, and she was all wrapped in cotton and crying all the time and saying, mommy, mommy, I want to die. It must have hurt very, very bad.

She was very, very sick for a long time, and then she had quite a weak heart after that. And always was a little more sickly than I was. And when we went in the mountains later on, her and my mother were usually the ones that could not do the big mountain trips that I did with my dad because of their hearts.

But sickness was a way of life in those days. I mean, we had the chicken pox, the measles, and everything was scarlet fever, and everything in those days was more serious than it is today. So I remember a lot of days in the winter with our long stockings and house slippers on, and being all wrapped up with sweaters and being home from school a lot.

But Christmas was always the highlight and everything seemed better after that.

It was a big night of the year When finally I could hear my dad playing in the piano, the piano in the parlor, and through those glass doors, sliding doors, you could see the Christmas tree already lit up.

But we’d have to say our prayers and sing songs and carry on all our little programs that we made up.

Before the door was open and we could see the tree and the presents, and there was usually a big plate for everybody with goodies too. And that was the big night. And all the church bells in town. And the whole air used to be humming was the sound of bells, and it just made you all quivery inside and excited.

But we did not go to church yet. while we were. In Oberschlesien, in Silesia. You were too little. You did not go to church yet? Um.

The first time I went to church was in doing summer vacation one time. I stayed with the old friends in Erfurt, where my parents had their first apartment in some apartment block outside of town.

It was a very small apartment, and they lived next to a man who was a real railroader who really drove a locomotive. And those people were very dear to us. We called them aunt and uncle, and I stayed with them.

And I remember the first time I went to a little church there while they were babysitting us for a week or so, my parents went on a trip, I guess, and I went to Sunday school. with their girl. At the time, she must have been about ten or twelve. And the preacher was preaching about how the bad people would go to hell and how we would burn, and the devil would get us, and fire and brimstone.

And I listened to every word of it, and I screamed. I cried and hollered, and I ran screaming from the church all the way down the aisle. I still remember it. And everybody in my family talked about it, laughing for a long, long time. That was my first experience with church, and I did not go set foot in a church for a long, long time. And these people, they’re good friends of ours. And they came to visit when we were in Silesia.

We had company all the time. All the relatives from Thüringen came and my, uh, my mother’s fiancé’s sister.

My mother’s best girlfriend.

She was my godmother. And so was.

The girl that had introduced had had met my dad and introduced my mother and dad.

She was still around and was one of my godmothers. She’s the one when she heard about the Wildcat. Came to see me several times. And she told my mother, what do you expect? She is only the typical gypsy blood in our family. Don’t you know you have gypsy blood?

And my mother laughed because she had the dark skin and the deep, deep black, brown eyes. Big brown eyes. And had that look that the people in the woods in Turing have frequently. There are a lot of black haired, dark eyed people there. Some of them even with Mongolian features.

And I think they are left behind from Genghis Khan, and also from a princess that married into the. Family on the Wartburg Castle.

She was a Hungarian princess and brought all her people from court and friends and followers with her when she came to marry the. Duke there. And he was a markgraf, which would make him a count. Anyway, she was the one that moved into the Wartburg Castle and later became known as Saint Elizabeth. Saint Elizabeth was.

Going into a monastery when she was older. He went to the Crusades, and she went into helping the population of town and doing a lot of welfare work. And her. Husband kind of frowned on it at first and got very angry with her at times. And one time she came down from the mountain, from the castle, to go down into the town again with bread and supplies and things for the sick in her cloak. And he said to her, what have you got there?

And supposedly she’s supposed to have said roses. And he said, open the cloak. And she was very scared. So she finally he insisted. She opened the cloak. And when she opened the cloak. There really were roses in it. And this rose miracle is supposedly made her Saint Elizabeth. And as this a little figurine I have of this little pot the size of a big clothespin. And it’s supposed to be the little castle lady from the Wartburg. And it shows her with the roses between her hands. And. This. Elizabeth is the one that bought the biggest train of people with her because she was very young.

I think she was fourteen when she came to get married there. And they settled in all these little villages in the, in the woods and bought this train of dark haired gypsy people, as my, my godmother said. And so I was a wildcat and the gypsy. And we had lots of visitors in our house all the time. Our old children’s room was the guest room, and for a while I think we had one of my dad’s aunts actually living with us because most of all our children’s pictures, she is in it, and she was a real typical old aunt in a black satin or taffeta dress with a high collar button right down to her chin.

You know. Right there. And ever so proper with long skirts.

And I remember her and she had her hair like braids around her head.

She was old and alone. I imagine she was a widow.

And I believe this uncle kun. Was a widower, too, because I don’t seem to remember a wife there. He had a son. And he lived in our.

He was a neighbor in our house. They had changed apartments there, and he was coming to babysit us. Not really during the day, but when my parents went out at night, they used to give him the key for the apartment. And he used to hear me screaming at night because I had nightmares for a while. Very bad nightmares.

And they were mostly about fire. And he would come down and sit with us and tell us stories, sometimes so long that my parents were coming back by the time before he got back. And sometimes we’d fall asleep again and he’d go back upstairs and smoke a lot of cigarettes. While he was doing it.

But he was the one that saved me from these nightmares.

And I always had nightmares about fire.

I remember we went skating to one of the nearby lakes. That was the favorite lake was a little restaurant where we used to go in the summer. Had a little bridge going and a couple of islands.

It was sort of near the Oder River, probably some sort of. Even the water maybe came from there, but it was a big pond, and you could skate under the two little bridges and through the islands.

It was real pretty.

But when the sun went down at night, it would shine in these windows from the restaurant and looked just like the windows were on fire.

And I used to stand there mesmerized and say, the house is burning and you could see people running.

And I was really worried about it. And then I would dream about it and have nightmares. Mostly about fire, I think. I don’t know what brought on the terrible temper tantrums I had and that I was famous for. I don’t know how old I was and how long they lasted, but it seems like it was forever going on while I was real little. And that brings me to the most important room in our apartment, which was the Black John.

There was a bathroom there that had a big boiler by the bathtub. Boiler had to be heated with wood and coal before you could take a bath, but otherwise it was a fairly nice bathroom. And the other one was the Black John. It had just a toilet and a tiny, tiny window, so it was practically dark inside.

This was the bathroom that was originally supposed to be for the maid, and this was to be my prison. During those years, every time I was bad and I think I was bad, every time somebody said no to me for any reason whatsoever, or I felt hampered in something I wanted to do anyway, I had a lot of tantrums, and I ended up being locked into the Black John and I kicked and screamed and sobbed and whined and screamed again and pounded with my fists and kicked again until I stopped.

And then usually I imagined my mother was the one who gave the word, but it was usually our nanny who came and opened the door and she would put me on her lap and I would sob, baby, wipe my tears off.

And I just wanted somebody to hug me and wipe my tears off and be nice to me.

And I remember that basically all through these temper tantrums, I just wanted somebody to be nice to me.

But I was making everybody madder and madder, and I did not know how to get out of it.

And I never was found any solution for this, as far as I know, except that I simply outgrew it.

I think one of the tactics that my parents tried at that time was probably when they enrolled me into the little kindergarten with the evangelical sisters, which was another disaster, because all I did was fight with the boys and play with the boys toys and ride the big rocking horse.

And I ended up in the cloakroom and I was a bad Barbie again.

And I spent a lot of time in the cloakroom with the wet raincoats and the wet rubbers, and I didn’t like it. My nanny would bring me in the morning, and my mother picked me up, and she made her usual trip to the town in the afternoon. You had to go shopping quite often because of the fact that there were no refrigerators. So my mother picked me up and took me home.

And I remember one time her asking me, do you really want to go?

And I said, no, I didn’t really want to go. And then I didn’t have to go anymore. And that was the most wonderful thing in my life. And that was when these trips to town with my mother started. And it gave me, I think, some assurance that I was getting bigger and that I could be with my mother go to town. And that’s what made it so wonderful.

It was so nice when the sun would shine through. Those trees on the little sidewalks were all paved with either big stone plates or little tiny stones set close together. I can still remember the sidewalk is so close when you were a little child.

But I loved the sun shining down. And the noises of the marketplace and the rattle of the cars and horses going by. And of course, you would imagine the horses smell and the smell of leather for my school bags too.

I remember all the smells were so nice and smells of the flowers in our garden, and the rose bed and the organ grinder playing coming by, and it was great going to town with my mother. Sometimes I went with my dad, too. And then I would hear, click, click, click his walking stick when he was walking with me. And when a lady comes by, he had to lift his hat. Good day. And take his hat off for the ladies. And there would be constantly with the hat off, hat on. And I’d have to curtsy when my dad did that. Good day. Ah, those were the good old days.

But I was glad I was out of the kindergarten.

I remember that. And it was too much fun in the summertime to be spending time in kindergarten.

There was so much fun in our garden doing what I wanted to do, playing Indians.

One day. By that time, my dad had been promoted into the big office.

The big office building behind our building. That’s where he worked. And one day, my sister, my little sister took off.

We had a big washbowl there in the garden for a swimming pool. And it was hot. And we were both splashing around in the nude quite merrily. And one day my sister took off. She put her shoes back on little patent leather shoe, and she wore a little coral cross on a gold chain around her neck. And that is all she had on. And she walked out.

I was busy playing in the washbowl and having a great time. And she walked out and away from me and went over to see her dad in the big office building. And my mother was scared to death. My nanny was worried sick. And finally the phone rang and somebody called from over at the office and said if they were missing a little Eve and they had found my sister wandering in the railroad office stark naked.

Well, I was supposed to have been watching her and I was in trouble again. Bhad Bhabie didn’t watch Little Sister. I don’t know how she got out. Nobody was supposed to get out through the gate.

But she did. I don’t know, maybe she found a way to get through the fence in the back toward the other building, but we were starting to get more toward an exploring age, because I remember one afternoon we got out and my parents were invited to the president’s villa, which was right next, after the big railroad office building down the same street just along our garden wall. And we got out and we followed the wall, and we figured it would be a good idea to climb up on that wall and get a peek at that party.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, but they had a little dachshund and dachshund. Nobody else saw us up there on the wall but the little dachshund.

But he knew we were up there, and he was barking and running back and forth and running back and forth, trying to climb that wall and get at us. He figured he was a big watchdog and yapping, and we didn’t know what was going on in the garden because we could see the people running.

But what was going on underneath us on the wall was the tulip bed was totally ruined by the dachshund because we were up on the wall.

Well, we never heard the end of it. We really got my dad in trouble that time with his boss. Ha!

And this is how it started. I couldn’t blame my parents to would say we had to stay in that yard because when we got started to get out of it, boy, we got into a mess of troubles.

But all this changed because the school years were drawing near, and life kind of changed by then because we were allowed to eat at the dinner table, as I said, and we could follow the conversations of the grown ups now. And it provided a little more insight and interest. And we learned something because you had to sit there until the last person finished eating their dinner, and then you still had to sit there until the last person finished their dessert, and they had to ring for the maid to come bring the coffee.

They were also there was an arrangement where every room had a bell, where you could call the maid for, and in the kitchen there was a little box with numbers, and it would be the room numbers that would flash. Flash. It didn’t have light.

It was like a little sign coming down for some. I don’t know how they worked.

It was like a little number coming down. They gave you the number of the room where the bell had rung, so the maid knew where to go. And this was the sign of a real exclusive apartment, I suppose.

When we moved in the other apartment in Berlin, they still had a box like that there, too. Those were the good old days.

Of course, I didn’t mention that the Christmas tree had real candles on it.

There were no electric lights on the Christmas tree. They were always candles. And for a while when we ironed, when we did ironing, the iron actually had little iron. Weights that were put on the gas to be heated. Or if you had a wood stove on a wood stove, and then the your actual iron had a little door in the back that opened up like a little oven door like a little stove door.

And you shoved that hot iron inside of that iron and close the little gate and iron until the iron got cooled. And then you had in the meantime, you had warmed another one and threw that one in there in your iron. And that’s how the iron.

But we had electric irons by that time, too, already. This was only out in the country. I saw them use the old iron, so they had the real old fashioned ones that were just a big flat iron. Iron. And you put that on the wood stove and then you use it the way it was. Yeah. That brings us to our trips, our vacation trips, where we now learned a lot because we were getting now big enough to take on trips.

We went to the seashore. We went twice to the seashore, to the Baltic Sea. Because usually with small children, the seashore is the best vacation. All they do is can dig in the sand and play on the beach. And you don’t have to do a great deal of entertaining or watching. Watching little children, when you do that and you get a good deal of rest for the grownups.

Uh, specially since we always took our nanny with us, or we took one time. We took the girl with us to our babysitter girl. And they got a vacation that way, too. And my parents could go out at night that way. And it was lovely. I loved those those seaside vacations were great.

And I remember one time we were catching a little fish. And in those days, in the in the bedrooms, you still had your stand with the marble top and the big washbowl and a big pitcher of water for washing up in the morning. And my mother let us use the washbowl to keep our fish in there. We kept the fish all the time we were living there. We kept our little fish in that washbowl.

It was terrific. I don’t think very many parents allowed people to do that.

We were pretty fortunate with our parents.

And I remember eating smoked eel and smoked flounder.

I remember one night having a horrible seizure, thunderstorm and being in our quarters eating smoked flounder and smoked eel and smoked herring for supper. Hmm. In the daytime, of course, you got fed by the place you stayed.

There was like a full pension. They called it. You get breakfast and, uh, the big meal served there.

It was always nice to walk home from the beach at noontime, and then clean up and get into a nice dining room with all the friends that you met.

There were about. Six tables, ten tables, twelve tables full of people and they were all served family style. Whatever.

The lady chose to cook for the day, and then they always gave us a different dessert. Chocolate pudding with vanilla sauce or vanilla pudding with chocolate sauce or fruit sauce or food pudding. And it was whipped cream or whatever it was.

It was always lovely. And we learned to eat very many styles of food that way.

There were many regional cooking methods.

Holidays and Journeys — The Baltic, the Mountains, and the Open Road

Looking at the map, it became quite obvious that apparently my father had planned all these vacations very carefully so that we would get to see every part of the country eventually. Being a railroad man, of course, we had reduced passes for the railroad for our yearly vacation trips, which made it easy to plan these things.

And he started out with the Baltic Sea, which is almost as far north and east as you can go near East Prussia. And there’s a ring of sea resorts, which he had gone to, the first one with my oldest sister, and then we went to two other ones. We went to Kolberg and Cranz. So we went for two vacations and these times were wonderful.

The beach is the best place for little kids. They can play in the sand and get a have a good deal of fresh air and sunshine. Sea air. And the parents get a good deal of rest because there is not a lot of supervision necessary. And the beautiful beaches go on for miles and miles around there. And while my parents rested in the afternoon, we would maybe come back and look for with our nanny, look for seashells and make little channels in the in the sand to make harbors for our little boats, and play there quietly and just enjoy the freedom of the beach.

The beach was the high cliffs above and the pine trees really are. It has a large area of dunes that made it possible for us to have walks through these dunes, and also had a big bird reservation, which we of course had to visit.

It was quite famous. And a glider plane. Station. And there I saw my first glider planes and was very impressed by this. Seemed like a wonderful thing to be soaring off into the air, and no noise of engines or motors of any kind, just like a bird. Later on, it occurred to me that also a beach vacation gives the little legs of children a great workout. Walking in the sand all day will make for strong leg muscles.

And I think if my father was conscious of it or not, he gave us great training for later on the mountain hikes that we took in the long hiking trips, because it certainly strengthened our legs to run in the sand all day.

The beach life in Germany is very orderly as everything else, and the first thing you do is you register with the the beach license plate and you place and you get a spot assigned simply by giving out these beach baskets, which are like a big cabana made out of wicker, rounded at the top like a bathtub.

And it kind of tilts back toward the sun or against the wind, whichever you prefer. And under the seat is the drawer you could pull out which has a padlock on it for your belongings. You can store it there, and you drag this little bugger down to the beach to a likely spot you like and put it down there, and it has a number on it, and that is your spot.

And for the duration of your stay, nobody can claim this place. And the next thing you do is you start shoveling a wall around it like a ring, higher and higher. You can’t make it terribly high because it will get too wide with the sand, but it gets to be about as high as the knees and up to the hips of maybe a smaller woman, which means it’s it’s high enough to break some of the wind for the kids.

And also the nice feature about it is you. It gives you a lot of sitting space because you simply drop yourself against this wall and you’re behind. Makes a seat and you can sit in a ring and have your picnic this way in the basket. You can also there’s a curtain which you can draw, and you can climb on the seat and change your bathing suit.

So this is quite a homey invention. And of course, as far as changing bathing suits for children, there wasn’t any big problem because children, I would say till almost up age six school age, usually ran naked on the beach.

It was the most practical thing to do. Rather than having them run around in wet clothes, wet diapers in and out of water. To just leave them bare and let the sun and Mother Nature take its course and dry them off. And of course, they got browned all over this way. And it was a wonderful way to live.

Uh, the goodies were a high point. They were men coming by with. Boxes in front of their bellies, full of dill pickles. Pretzels. And then the most wonderful thing with nut sticks. They had walnut meat for long sticks dipped in sugar and honey mixture like a clear glaze. And they not only look beautiful, but tasted out of this world.

And everybody was nibbling these gorgeous sticks. Which was, I suppose, a good substitute because I don’t remember them ever selling any ice cream in those days, simply because the refrigeration problem was probably too tricky.

But I remember one day a small plane came by advertising chocolate and threw small chocolate bars with little parachutes down on the beach, much to the delight of all the kids and grown ups. And it was one of the first small planes I saw. And unfortunately that thereafter another plane one day came by quite close to the beach and crashed in the sea.

It was a one seater plane made completely out of wood and varnished.

And I can still smell it. Wet varnish in the sea. This broken plane being washed ashore, and also the body of the pilot and the people standing around it, pumping his chest with bubbles coming out of his mouth. And it’s very frightening thing for me to see. And it wasn’t very long after this.

I was out in in one of the areas where the water did get quite shallow during the ebb tide, and all the children played there. And my parents had gone out for a quick dip.

My mother for a dip, my father for a swim. And a big wave came. I went too far out looking for those fish, I imagine. And a big wave came and pulled me under. And somebody else pulled me up. Had seen me.

But I remember being under and looking at the swirling bubbles and gasping for my breath and spitting and gasping and.

The horrible fright of it all. And it must have been a terrible shock to my parents running by there.

And I gather from the way they talked afterwards, that I did have quite a close call that very same day. And ever since I’ve been. Kind of not afraid of the sea, because I went right back to play and eventually taught myself to swim.

But a dark lake, a lonesome lake in the woods with dark water still to this day makes me very anxious, as if I either remember this from my childhood, or maybe I drowned in a former life.

But it was a very scary experience and was the first accident. Of many that I had during my lifetime. I have, I think, used up all my nine lives. I have been shot at, I think two or three times.

I had a car crash. Bombed out twice, I think I had bomb scared it. Uh. It’s amazing the the way you pull through life by. A hair’s breadth sometimes it’s unbelievable.

But this is going ahead in my story. And these days on the beach are probably a wonderful memory for any child.

And I wish every child could have this time, because it was a wonderful way to live. You went.

Of course. Every day to the beach. And at noontime you went back to your quarters for dinner and then had a little nap and rest, and then went back to the beach again. And if you had, you decorated your castle with seashells on the outside and fancy towers like we made the Turing towers of one of the castles and the two towers of castles saaleck, which everybody in Germany knows.

We had them on the two ends of our castle. These had to be watered down regularly so they wouldn’t go fall apart. And then came the big day, when they would have the judging of the castles and give prizes. And another big day for a children’s festival. And they had wagons and horses is decorated and the children riding on the wagons and marching in the parade with flags and balloons and girls all decorated with flower wreaths.

And it was exciting. They tried to make it very entertaining. They had donkey rides along the boardwalk. And. Concerts, of course. And in the morning, a woman came running down the beach with a tom tom and would encourage the children and the grown ups to do gymnastics in the fresh air. So these, these wonderful times were usually too fast for our taste. And then unfortunately, it was back to school again. I liked school. All right.

But I did not like the idea that you had to go home and do homework. And it’s no wonder they gave the children on their first day of school, these big cones with goodies to sweeten the first day of school. Because, uh, it was pretty bitter. What comes after to most children to me anyway. And as soon as I started to know the way to school, I started also to run away home a couple of times.

One thing that really frightened me about school was our math teacher, who was very, very strict. He carried a cane, a good old fashioned cane. And he used to beat the boys on the bottom and around the legs. And he made us stand out front and put our fingers together like little cat’s paws, and then hit us over these fingertips with that cane if we didn’t do our lessons.

And I was everybody was petrified of him.

And I was scared.

One day I didn’t do my multiplication table by seven. And he spanked me right up there in front of the class, and I peed my pants.

It was a terrible, terrible thing.

It was so embarrassing and so humiliating. That it just turned my whole ideas about school and particularly numbers, totally around.

And I turned against it. Turned it off. Didn’t want to face it.

And I think this attitude followed me for a long time because I never did well in math after that again.

But there were enough things at that age already to distract us, because by now I could have outside friends, school friends, and we had birthday parties and I could go visit my girlfriend from the butcher across the street. Her parents both worked in the butcher shop, and her big sister could come and walk me across the street first, and then we could go by ourselves across the street. And we played wonderful after school because her house was free of grown ups and just wonderful to play all kinds of things.

I had also three girlfriends from a household where they had three daughters and they were my closest friends. They lived further up the road. Those four were my closest friends. They came to every birthday party and we also had. A feeling of being more grown up from the fact that my parents had decided at that Christmas to divide up the children’s room, which was so big, into two little houses simply by the carpenter, adding a few few, two by fours and some canvas like you do on stage, and painting the canvas like wall paint.

It was all done in pale lavender wallpaper had dark, darker and lighter wallpaper pink stripes which only added to the height of the ceiling.

It was a huge room and dividing, dividing it up into two little houses which each had our bed inside, and a door and a little window with a flower box.

It was like a little stage setting and enough room for our little doll beds in there.

We had our own little house. Even that didn’t diminish the size of that room substantially. So we had our own little room that was quite blown up. And that same Christmas, I remember my biggest wish was for puppet theater. And we had a doorway that had. A bar and wings and a swing in it inside where we could play between the guestroom and the our children’s room. And that doorway was the back door for that puppet theater. And my mother had surprised me. With something absolutely adorable.

She was one for doll clothes. Oh, she loved to knit and sew and get ideas when Sewing Lady was there. They had apparently got together and had put this whole group of dolls in all the same dresses, which we wore in that kindergarten. Green and white dresses. Every one of my dolls, from the littlest two inch doll to the biggest sixteen inch doll, had that same green and white dress on for the kindergarten, and they were all sitting in front of the puppet theater watching the show.

I will never forget that sight. And these are the things my mother did. It wasn’t an easy job either, to make these kindergarten dresses, because they had bright green linen with a square cut neck bound in white linen and white stripes around the little short sleeves, and white two white stripes around the bottom, which all involved quite a bit of work.

It must have been very difficult at the smaller sizes to do so. It must have involved many hours of work on their part, and quite often I remember when we, as girls were having dresses made, that the sewing lady and my mother got together and made the same kind of dress for one of our dolls, whichever was our favorite at the time.

There was one doll that my oldest sister had that was definitely an antique.

It was made out of white.

The body was white kidskin with movable joints, knees and elbows and hands, and the head was porcelain painted. Porcelain head. So it was definitely a beautiful antique doll, but we called it dangle legs because it was so floppy, and I can’t recall playing with it much because I kind of think my mother took it away into her glass cabinet, where she kept her full costume and her big, uh, Beautiful hood with the bows and her little young girl’s cap, which was bordered with pearls. And she probably put it in there to show it off, because it was definitely a beautiful antique doll.

I had, uh, at first we both had little baby dolls that were like twins, exactly alike. And those are the ones that my mother knitted the entire layette for them. Little pants, long pants, kickers, they used to call them. And little jackets and little bonnets and mittens. And one was all in pink and one was all in blue.

And then we got our real favorite big dolls, which had sleeping eyes and real human hair. Mine had longer hair so that I could make braids on mine. And, uh, The. I also had a later on a doll boy, a boy doll, and this one was made out of a new material called celluloid, which was the first plastic doll coming out, and I thought it was beautiful.

It was a beautiful sun tan color. And when you held him, Peter was his name. When you held Peter up against the sun, the sun was almost shining through. It looked so pretty. He had brown glass eyes, not sleeping eyes, but glass eyes. So they looked real bright. And the hair was molded real, like a little real boy’s.

And I can’t remember many boys dolls in my life at all. So he was kind of special. And. Those dolls we had The old doll carriages were, of course, the old fashioned English carriages with the very high wheels and black body, and we had ruined a couple of them, I’m sure already, by having races down the old hallway.

The hallway must have been, I don’t know how many yards long in that big apartment, and it was great for using our little wooden scooters and then playing streetcar in the doll carriages running up and down that long hall. And we had wrecked those carriages, but we had now new modern carriages also. They were white and they were just opposite.

The wheels were small, the body was low and sort of streamlined, and they had hoods, really folding hoods. And my, my carriage even was the kind that you could convert into a stroller and fold up together to take it along. For moving it. And we felt like we were really getting quite elegant in the world there. So. Things were. Moving out. Toward the New World. Because there were so many changes at that time, too. Uh, there were. Whoops. That the kids used to have wooden hoops. Just like hula hoops.

But they were made out of wood and a stick.

And I remember in all the public parks, the boys used to run those hoops and kept making them go with the stick and then guiding them along with the stick.

The idea was to keep that hoop running constantly and run with it.

Well, those hoops you see in old pictures from the eighteen hundreds. You see children playing with them. You did not see them anymore. And instead, the old wooden scooter was getting fancier and fancier. They had a thing attached, like a cog. That caught on a cog wheel. And you threaded up and down and made that thing go mechanically. And they had the same idea built into a four wheel, uh, a vehicle where you sat on and you steered, steered by pushing the axle right and left.

The had four wheels and you made it go with this carved arrangement. And this was called a Flying Dutchman. They were getting very popular. And, uh. also the movies were becoming quite a thing, so that even my mother and father went to the movies and we heard of some children who had little movies with cartoons and had little movie machines at home that you could watch movies, which was really the most glamorous thing I could think of, because what we had was an old brass box from the eighteen hundreds, wherever it came from.

It was called the Lanterna magica, the Magic Lantern, and was the forerunner of movies, and probably invented around the same time as these stereoviews because it had. A peephole in this beautiful shining brass box about the size of like two bread boxes. And you looked in and there were little glass slides, colored slides. And there were different things that you could see pirate ships or different cities and fairy tales. And we had a whole collection of these slides, and we had one little gadget that you could flip in.

It was a piece of paper, hold up the pinholes in it, and when you rolled it by the viewer, it looked like it was snowing in that scene. Now that was great.

I remember that.

We were very impressed with that, and that had been our entertainment for a very long time.

But now they were getting into movies and some families instead of just taking pictures.

My father took a lot of pictures. They were already starting to take movies. And When my father first took pictures, I still remember him having the old camera where you had to put the black cloth over your head, and it had glass plates that were exposed. And he did some very fine pictures with that. And he came out with his first fancy film. And soon my mother had a box. This was really called a box. English. And the box was a box like a. And it was exactly what they called over here, the brownie.

It was just a box. You looked in the hole, you pulled the trigger and you hold the film on. And there it was on the wall. And that was the. From now on, our steady companion on all our vacation trips. All around the world was changing. And most of all, the political scene, because I remember that there was big talk again about another election and much upset and much discussion among the grown ups. And then there was another big, big parade at that time. And they had torch torches coming down the main street. And that was the day when Hitler came to power.

And I remember them telling me about that and and saying that Hitler was now Chancellor like Hindenburg had been.

And I couldn’t understand how this could be.

And I said, how how come he cannot be? A just a stormtrooper anymore? Because that’s how I felt. He had betrayed this whole idea that he was he had stood for that. He could not be one of those brownshirts anymore, and I didn’t understand it. What all the excitement was.

Well, he was supposed to be the big leader. And then there was all kinds of talk that disturbed my father very much.

There were upsets within that party, and people were found out to have done bad things and had been assigned from their posts and executed some of them, and they were what they called a putsch, which to me was just like a big fight over something.

And I understood that there was fights and bloodshed involved, and it was a very restless period. And then they said the big assembly house, the Reichstag, was burning and they had found a man who did it and he was not, uh. They said, no, he was not a communist, and he was not a Nazi.

He was a Dutchman.

And I said, now what did he have to do with this? I just happened to be the nationality I imagined.

But all these things were going on in the background and it expressed itself somehow. Now I realize in what my father did during those days, I think he knew that the changes were coming and that there would be changes in his work. And he made a lot of trips to all these railroad stations he had built, and the Polish workers there and, and the women in their skirts and babushkas that were working for him, and a couple of times he took me along and let me ride on the locomotive with him, which was a big thrill. And this is why this period impressed me so much. And we went to.

The mountains in Silesia, which is which are called the giant Mountains. Um. They had a geological structure very much like Mount Washington. They were an old, old, um, a mountainous region that had crumbled down into rocks and was bald on the top, although not nearly as high as the Alps. So it was actually the highest mountain there called the copper, uh, resembled Mount Washington when you look at it.

And it had a road going up the same way, a big hut on the top. And we went to visit that place. We went to a famous monastery on a hill called Annaberg. With one of our visitors. And there had been a battle at one time where they were fighting after the war to gain that back from Poland. And the students, uh, Free Corps had fought there, and many died there, and it was sort of a, uh, memorial place.

But there was a big monastery on top, and they sold, uh, religious items there.

Well, uh, and he went there and he went that winter we also went on vacation into Czechoslovakia, into the beautiful mountains, For winter vacation with the sleds. And it was a lovely time because we had never gone on vacation in the winter.

My father used to ski and it was as if he wanted to. He always had in mind that we should see all the corners, and he wanted to say goodbye to this corner because a big promotion had come up for him. And so he had prepared for this, and the big promotion was to the capital. Which is Berlin. And this was very exciting because it was, of course, prestige for my father, and it meant getting away from this godforsaken eastern region and be right in the middle of things.

And I think my mother perhaps was a little afraid of the big city because she was not a big city girl. And it was to, to to be quite a big change for all of us. So we prepared. We didn’t know much about the moving process.

We were too little.

But our. We knew that our maid was not going to come with us. They were going to return to Thüringen. And saying that she was close to us and we could maybe get back together later. And when we finally left, it was just like going on vacation.

We had all our suitcases. Our dolls with us, and we went into the train early, early in the morning. And we climbed up into the baggage rack. You had the compartment trains with three people. Sitting across from each other, and then a little door in a hallway all along.

The whole car, which made it a very cosy arrangement. So when the four of us sat in one compartment, it was usually considered full and a lot of people did not want to travel with two children in there anyway. So we, we had quite often or almost compartment for ourselves, and we climbed up in the two baggage racks on each side and there were nets up there. So it was almost like a hammock. And that’s where we threw our coats and lay down. And we usually slept most of the night. And then we were there. In the big city.

Well, we had been living in Poland on the Big Oder river, which is now spelled Opole in Polish, and we’d been to Breslau, which is now Wroclaw, and spelled in Polish, and we’d been in Krakow and in Kattowitz and even elegant Karlsbad on our winter vacation, and we had traveled to the seashore.

But we had never been in a car. And here we were getting off the train, and the first thing we did is get into a taxi, into our first car, and go from one railroad station to another railroad station just to get across this big city.

It was quite exciting. And my mother still said, still quiet in the back seat with her big brown eyes and a little bit scared. And my father said, just remember what your father always said. Grandpa always said, you leave one place, you’re going to cry just as much. When you leave the next place, you’re going to love it just as much here.

And so we all cheered up, especially when we got to the other railroad station and did not use the big train, but the elevated train which brought us into our suburb and was a nice, clean, interesting train, sort of like a streetcar, but faster, and a little railroad station. Every place and every railroad station in Berlin was done in different colored tile, so that if you looked out the window and saw the colored tile, pretty soon you could tell just by the tile exactly where you were.

You did not need a sign, which I thought was the most clever idea. And we soon found out that we could find our route that way and learn easily. And when we got to that station, the elevated station.

It was only about one block down, two blocks down and one corner over. And we were there at our new apartment. And our new apartment was a big, big villa divided into three apartments with the janitor’s apartment in the sort of in the basement. And it was quite an elegant place, but not nearly as big an apartment as we had had in the other place. And furthermore, when we got upstairs, they had painted the floors and the floors were not dry.

There was the typical rust brown floor paint that everybody used in those days. And the kitchen had. Dark red linoleum, all freshly waxed, looking very nice. And the hallway where we stepped in an entrance way Me was dry.

The bathroom was dry and our bedroom, which was next beside the bathroom was dry but very small. So what to do? Everything else.

The floor was too wet to even step on it and everything smelled of oil paint. And that was a fine, fine welcome. This was just the beginning of all our moving experiences. So what my parents did is they had the moving truck was already standing before the door.

He was standing right there at the entrance, and the people had gone home because we were not there, and because they also had found out about the wet paint and did not know what to do. So my father called two of them back. And with the help of these two, they unloaded the two beds.

My sister and I had our bedroom together again, and they put the two beds in that small bedroom. And they bought my father’s. No, it wasn’t my father’s chair or the old sofa, one or the other they brought into the kitchen. And my father slept there the first night in the kitchen, and my mother slept with my sister on one bed, and I slept on the other bed, and there was just one window between the two beds looking out at the garden.

Very pretty. And the windows were big, tall windows, just like in the other apartment. High windows and the double windows hooked together that open up in the middle and swing in, which takes a lot of room away.

But it’s easy to clean and. Keeps a lot of noise out. And from in front of this window was a nice little, like a window sill with a little white picket fence around it. I’ll always remember it, and it was kind of cute, and it was like a little garden spot out there later on. And that’s where we spent our first night.

The apartment had on the end of the hall, two beautiful huge rooms, which we used, one as a dining room, which went out onto a big porch that was built in under the building so that you were out of the rain.

It was like a, uh, almost like a big terrace, because it was a big. Balcony long. And it had two arched two big arches with a column in the middle, and support iron supports from that column to the other side, so that there were two iron bars there on which my sister and I used to love to swing. And a lot of times people used to ring the doorbell downstairs to warn my mother that we were up there swinging and could have fallen down from the second floor into the garden.

But we always trusted it as children. Now we trusted these bars in that old villa and we loved this balcony. Had big flower boxes on it later on. We practically lived out there. And of course, the climate seemed much milder to us coming from where we did. And.

There were big trees around this, this place and a big garden. And the garden was kind of neglected and old, and it was kind of below the street, so that it was rather damp down there. And with the big trees, nothing much would grow. And my mother did not take a big interest in it in the garden there, because it wasn’t that private, because of the janitor living downstairs and the kids like that.

It was sort of like a little jungle, more like a lot of ivy growing on the sides. And it had a wonderful lilac bush you could swing in, sit on the branch, and swing.

And I remember that my favorite spot, and I remember hunting for Easter eggs in the garden.

It was good for that. And and it gave the house a lot of trees around it and a more country feeling it was not very city like, even though it bordered on a big street that side.

The other side was a small cobblestone street. And it led past the marketplace. And the market was right across from our our balcony up there so that we did not have any building right across our view there, except we looked rather over that marketplace with the trees on the other side. So this was nice too. And of course, the market was exciting for us kids too, because twice a week it was market time there, and it was sort of like a little old fashioned old street.

There were only three more other houses on the other side, and on our side there was the infamous coal yard.

Berlin — The New Home and the Courtyard

Yes. Uh, I was speaking of the courtyard next to our house.

There was one house in between, and then there was a merchant who was selling coal and grain and firewood and sand for construction and some hay, but mostly coal.

It was mostly a coal business. Coal and briquettes. These brick size big thing that you put into your tile stove and, uh. We did not have tile stoves in our apartment.

We had a small boiler type heater. That heated the radiator. Steam heat. I imagine it was cold. And the coal yard, however, was a Paradise for all the local children. And it was strange because when we were up on our main road on the corner, we could hear the elevated trains zipping back and forth.

But as soon as we got back in our little cobblestone street, it was so quaint and old fashioned, like fifty years back. We could hear the sparrows chirping in the trees, and when the coal man came by with his horse and wagon, they would dive for the horse apples, just like in the good old days. And the chestnuts would drop off the trees. and we could pick chestnuts in the fall and in the summer. All summer long.

It was heaven in that coal yard we could jump out of.

The upper story windows into the sand pile. We could play in the barn between the coal piles and sticks of wood. And we could also, once in a while, ride on that team of horses with the coal wagon.

The men had three sons, and the mother had died, and he had a housekeeper. So that there was comparatively little supervision there, as you can imagine. And we played wild games.

The youngest boy had kind of a crush on me, and he was the one that gave me my first kiss a couple of years later, in the barn in one of those wagons. And he was my hero because he had a big gang, and we used to play cops and robbers and army games. We used to have, um, blue heads, blue blue ribbons and red ribbons around our sleeves.

And that was the two parties. And we would divide up and we’d play over about two or three blocks right down to the elevated railroad station and around the corner, out to the other main street and back into our little alleyway. That was our whole turf, as they would say today.

There were lots of girls and boys, and we all played together great.

There was no problem at all. And we had a lot of fun those days. Say the school that we went to. And now my sister started school with me, and that was nice because we had quite a long way to go to school. It was, I bet, at least two miles to go to school.

It was around many street corners, but all side streets, and it was sort of on the outskirt of the suburb. A nice modern school. New school. And my homeroom teacher was a woman, and she was also teaching math. And she gave me my test. Test standing up in the hallway when we first interviewed. And she decided that my math indeed was very poor.

And so my mother and her decided that I should be held back one class. Because with the moving and everything, she figured I would be better off. And also It was nice because it meant that I had some time to go to that school with my sister, which we enjoyed a lot, and the school also had a large gym, modern gym, and there I like to take gym, and the art room was big and bright windows and it was a nice modern school.

My parents were very happy with it, and it is amazing how we were allowed to to walk these long ways to school. Every everybody had a long way to school.

There were no school buses and never even thought about that.

There was any danger involved for us children. To walk around there every day and to walk to the corner store And to hang around on the street on the corner of the marketplace, which was the opposite corner from our house.

There was an old in a pretty large building that had been there, and I guess the people that came to the market had used it to stay overnight, too.

But it had a big ballroom in the bottom and a big stoop with stairs coming out on the sidewalk. And in the summertime the door would always be open, and you could smell the booze all the way out to the sidewalk. And sometimes the drunken man would lie on the steps, but that was all part of the local scenery and did not disturb anybody or cause any problems.

There was also a little further down toward the railroad station, an ice cream parlor and ice cream parlor was another heaven on earth because we had never seen an ice cream parlor, and this ice cream parlor was open year round in the old, smallest, smaller towns.

The old laws still held that the ice cream places had to be closed in the winter for the health of the children. They were reopened in May, but in this one in Berlin, we in the capital city in a swinging place. I guess this ice cream parlor stayed open year round and did a fantastic business. And oh, it was so good.

And it was so heavenly because they had little tables and you could sit down there and talk with all your chums while you had your ice cream, and it was quite elegant. We figured on the other corner of our street. Both the higher grade school which you entered when you were eleven.

It was like the junior high and but it went right straight through from there to graduation. And it was divided for boys and girls.

There was a gymnasium for boys and the Lyceum was for girls, and this was the girls, which would be our future school. And it was right down four houses, down on the corner of our little alleyway. And the good part about this was, though, even if we didn’t go to school there yet, we had the schoolyard to play with, to play in all the time too.

So that was quite an attraction and that was quite something to be reckoned with because it was great for Riding bicycles in and had big huge trees in the yard. And was in a sandbox also because they tried to use it for a children’s playground in the afternoon. So it was kind of a meeting place for the gang swings, of course. And so that was nice.

We had that. So all in all, it was a perfect little street.

And I met a girlfriend there right away across the street. And another girlfriend from the grammar school. And, uh, so far as children, it presented no problems.

The move was just perfect as far as timing in our lives were concerned.

I think it was probably a very good thing for us and for our parents.

It was great because Berlin in the early thirties was a very, very. Up and coming place. And there was a lot going on and a lot of modern scene.

There were nightclubs, cabarets, uh, dancing, daring movies, uh, and of course, my father went right away for a whole group of symphony concerts, organ concerts, uh, plays, opera. Anything you wanted was offered. And comedy, variety shows and dancing. Lots and lots of dancing and dining. Berlin in those days was a very jolly and rather frivolous city, actually. And also my father and mother had contact there right away.

My father had a. Distant cousin married there. His name was Karl, and he looked quite a bit like Karl Otto. He had the reddish hair and the long nose and the blonde eyebrows. Eye lashes, like. Sort of like Nate’s type. And he was a heck of a nice guy. And his wife was a rather good looking. Elegant lady. Ill with it.

She was a blonde.

But neither. Neither one of them had children, so, uh, they were the perfect couple.

There was also a. A lady cousin of my dad’s married to a journalist.

I think he was bald headed with glasses and very serious, highly educated type.

But actually they did have a child, but he was already cloned, so neither one of them had small children and they were with us almost every Sunday on our Sunday trips. And Berlin having a multitude of lakes around the city and woods and little chateaux and all kinds of sightseeing things, big bridges and yacht basins and a big, uh, beach, uh, swimming, swimming beach on one of the lakes that was one of the most modern in the country at the time.

There was so much to do that every every Sunday we had something planned, and almost every Sunday we had visitors to or we were going out with these relatives who were kind of happy to have us children around. So it was a lovely time in our lives, I think, and my father was successful being now at the at the biggest office in the country in Berlin.

And. Although his schedule was probably different because he now rode in as a commuter on the train, and we used to go down to the train station at night and waited two, three, four trains till my father would finally off and we could walk home And, uh.

But we had dinner with my mother, and sometimes he came home earlier, too. We have a little later dinner and, um, at night, we would have. We would eat together.

My father hadn’t been home. He would eat his dinner at night with us. Having supper. So I still remember our dining table. Always being together, regardless of the circumstances.

The working hours were not nearly as strenuous as they are now. No one was expected to work too late for having time to enjoy life. And my parents enjoyed life. This dining room was the big room with the balcony and it had a Sliding door also connected with the other big room.

The other big room became my father’s room. It had a little alcove toward the back of the house, toward the garden. In this little alcove, he had his desk and in a beautiful big Persian rug in the middle of the room with his piano.

The grand piano was in there, and he bought a new bookcase.

I remember. Great big bouquet, beautiful modern walnut bookcase. And for all his books. And there were more and more and more books in there. And his big upholstered chair for reading. And these two front rooms with the sliding door. They were the center of all the entertainment. My parents did in this city.

The big event, the next big event in my life was when I turned eleven.

And I was supposed to transfer to the other school, but I was also expected to join Hitler Youth. This is what everybody did. And become a young maid in Hitler Youth.

The Hitler Youth girls were wearing black skirts and white blouses and black neckerchiefs with a leather not.

But the little ones.

The young maids were wearing these black same black skirts, but attached to the blouse with white buttons So there was no slipping out of blouses all the time, which I think was a great invention. They always looked neat, and little girls don’t really have a waist for a belt yet anyway, so they were kind of cute. And of course I had to have my uniform and my white knee socks and my shoes. They were even prescribed shoes. Not everybody could afford them and had them right away.

But they were shoes that had. Uh, they were moccasin type shoes with a strap around the back and over the course, over the front. And they were underneath it. They had two little two eyes, two eyelet laces, and this buckle went over it and tied the strap when it was supposed to be Resembling the tied shoes that the Peasants War.

In medieval times. And the peasants, of course, were sort of heroes for both the Nazis in the communists, because they resisted the nobility and the knights and the feudal lords that suppressed them. And they had several revolts and wars in Germany. And on their flags these peasants had as a symbol this shoe that all Peasants War.

And I guess this was the they told us the origin of this Hitler’s shoe that we all wore. Anyway, we were very proud of it, and it was all very interesting. At least it was interesting for a while for me.

We had brown Suede cloth. Jackets they were, but they were very short, like looked in the front, almost like vests with long sleeves, very short jackets. And we had our, uh, badges on there with troop we belong to and all that. And it was very exciting and very important to belong. And you more or less had to. Anyway, everybody expected it.

And I found out a short while later that my father and mother were receiving quite a bit of pressure to join the party as well.

My father was kind of protected because of his age. His age was always ahead of his status in life, so that when he got this job, with all the pressure, he was almost on the edge of getting to be too old for it, really, and he managed to avoid it as well as he could because he was not really sure of all these things.

As I said, had been a lot of controversy going on, and some of the people that fell in disgrace with the party. Nazi Party had been strong supporters of the Veterans Union and Veterans. League, which my father had belonged to, and my father, in spite of everything, still wore his field gray uniform coat. He wore it all his life to his last day. I swear he still had that coat and it wore well and it changed after a while.

The little red, white and black ribbon that he had from World War One had disappeared, and in the epaulets disappeared. And then the buttons were changed, but it was still the same coat and he wore it all the time. He didn’t care who saw him in it.

But then came the day when they founded the security troops for the railroad. This was, uh. I don’t know. It seemed like Hitler was obsessed with having everybody in some kind of an organization or another. And so they had this railroad security troops. And my father got a new railroad uniform with silver braids and dark blue.

And hat looked like an admiral, he said. And he was making fun of it. And he had now this new status of being a leader in the security force. And he had to what it was is it gave him a uniform to do his inspections in. He still had to go make trips to different railroad stations and switch stations, which he was very fond of because he liked this part of it.

He liked to get out and into the real world, out of the office. He tried to do that as often as he could, and he loved especially bridges. Bridges were his big thing, and now they had, instead of riding on the locomotive, they had like little wagons. That actually worked quite a bit like these toys that I had described.

You pumped yourself. You had a kind of a hand pump, and you made this thing by cogs or whatever it was, go along the tracks. And he traveled to a lot of places with these little vehicles.

But he also had made his driver’s license, And he could drive a car. And he had a car.

But he didn’t ever believe in us having a car because he said the people, if they all have a car, the cars are just going to smell up mother Nature and spoil everything for everybody and spoil the people. They won’t walk anymore and go anywhere and it’s a bad thing, and the car is only good if somebody lives out on a farm, or it’s a doctor who has to go out at night, a car is fine, but there’s no need for us.

With our railroad passes and the streetcars in the subway and elevated train in front of our noses to have a car, and he strictly refused to have one. And we still made our trips going out with the elevated trains to the outlying suburbs and starting our trips from there like everybody else, and hiking around the lakes and to the chateau and to the big locks in the canal, or the beach at the lake, or the a little steamboat ride on one leg. And it was there was always something to see.

And I remember it as a really, really happy time. My parents being really happy.

The only. Uh, kind of doubt I have. Sometimes about my mother, I later on when I got older, I had the feeling that she was in Berlin, very conscious of her dialect. She had, of course, her local dialect, and not that strong anymore, but you could still tell it. And sometimes I think with all these ladies in Berlin who of course spoke Berlin dialect just as bad, but she was a little self-conscious of sticking out there with her dialect.

And it’s kind of strange to me to think that later on now, I went through all my life with this little self-consciousness of having a dialect or an accent in my case. And my father was very much against it, because it wasn’t very long when we picked up the Berlin dialect and the Berliner uh schnauzer, which is a rough word for mouth, is well known all over Germany.

They’re very loud and very outspoken and sound rather low class. And my father always corrected us. He did not want us to speak that way. So. Those were the days from nineteen thirty four, thirty five, thirty six to the big Olympics.

In those years. We made. Our vacation trip a great part of them. We made our visits to Thüringen back to the old homestead.

We were back in Erfurt.

We were back with my aunt. In Apolda.

We were back in the spa with Carl Otto and his family. And we picked up on all these old friendships.

We were back with my cousins playing soldiers with wooden swords.

We were about ten, eleven years old and my sister about nine, eight or nine.

The little ones. And we had a ball.

And I believe that this is what made all the moving easy for us, because in all the changes we saw by moving, we always returned at vacation time back to Turing where things had not changed. And when my parents were still in the same, my grandparents were still in the same town and where my parents had been born. We went back to my mother’s village and back to her old, of course, which was like a second home to all of us. This was the place where my mother’s family maid had come from and had married into, and they had a whole house full of people there.

The grandparents and this Mina, who was the maid of my grandparents on my mother’s side, and her sister and her, their family, and they all lived in this one big farmhouse with a barn and a stable with four or five cows and pigs. And we loved it there. Everybody in the village knew us, and everybody looked out of the window.

When we came. Everybody yelled across each other, here they come. They’re here again. And they came running and they brought cakes, and they would come over to talk And we would take part in all the bread baking.

The haymaking.

My mother, to all of us included. She would dig potatoes. Whatever was going on, go into the woods and gather mushrooms, blueberries.

And I especially loved the cows. And when I was there, nobody else had to clean the stable but me, because I loved to make them all nice and clean and comfortable.

And I love the smell of them and the feel of them.

And I loved the cows and chickens, and they have much to do with the pigs. I must admit. And they had the cow herd. In the morning he would walk through the village with them, a big trumpet, and blow the trumpet, and everybody let the cows out of the stable, and the cows already knew they’d go right out the yard and up the street and follow the cow herd, and the cow herd would take them up the steep hills, through the woods, up to a meadow, high up in the woods, and graze them there all day for the whole village.

And when they came home at night, this is where the expression when the cows come home, when the cows came home at night, they all knew their stable.

It was so strange to watch. They all knew where to go. And if there was a younger animal that was confused and wanted to go in the wrong one, two of the older cows would come running and stand in the way and try to drive him away and back into the street when he wanted to go in the wrong one. They knew they wouldn’t let him do it. So it is.

It was fun to see how these animals were like pets. They all knew their names too. And there were bells around their necks. And that was the prettiest thing. Hearing the sound of those bells when they came home. And they were also used for pulling wagons. They had attached big heavy boards with rings to them, forehead over the horns.

And they were pulling with their foreheads and their strong neck. They were pulling the wagons. And they became so used to this, and were used so much that they had to have horseshoes for cows. They were two little plates, the shape of their split hoofs that were attached to their feet so they could walk around the stony mountain roads. And they were cows, not bulls. Pulling those wagons.

Summers in Thüringen — The Farm, the Forest, and the Rennsteig

When it was the day of making hay, and we would be out in the field all day with the picnic lunch and drinking water from the little spring up in the big meadows high up above the village.

There was forest on either side of the hill, and these big meadows like pillows were going down into the valley. And we were up there on our piece of meadow and cutting the hay, and the men were cutting, and the women were behind them with the rakes and letting the grass dry, and then going in rows, turning them.

And then we’d take a break and all sit down and eat, and then up again and over that whole big meadow again. Row after row. Turning the hay over again so it would dry on the other side. And. At night putting it together. So in case the dew or the rain, there would be a little rain. They would not get too wet.

And the next day go out again. Hopefully the day would be nice again and start pulling them apart in rows, turning them again all day long, over and over. And you get blisters on your hands from the rake from the same motion.

But it was so beautiful with the lark singing in the field. And just be up there among the trees, up in the woods, sitting down for a shady lunch, getting spring water springing right out of the side of the of the meadow. and drinking this cool water. And it was.

It was unbelievable how a day like this stays in your mind forever. And in the late in the afternoon, maybe the wagons would come up. And the men, even the old grandpa and grandma were there. Then they would pitch in and help, and we would rake it all together, and the men would load up and on the top of it, tie a big beam across all the hay, tie it down with rope down to the bottom of the wagon to hold all the big high hay in place.

And the last thing they would toss us kids up there, high, high up above the road. And then the wagon would sway back and forth like a ship, and the cows would be pulling that wagon, and they would have to the men, keep the brakes on. And they had like. Levers that they turned like a screw against the wagon wheels to brake the wagon. And the cows would be pulling back, pulling back because they could sense, you know, the wagon starting to roll. And it was hard work and they had to lead them.

The old grandfather would usually lead one of the cows. And the grandson, Walter, Mina’s sister, had lost her husband in the war, and Walter was there, her son running the chores of the men for her household. He would be on the other side of the other cow and us kids all sitting up there. Mina’s daughters and Paula and her son Rana would be sitting up on top, laughing and giggling.

Falling asleep in the hay. Sometimes I used to get a headache from the heat of the day and the smell of the fresh hay. And it was so wonderful. That was a great, great day. Every every vacation time when we could go up to Ottawa and help make the hay on the hay meadows. And another big day would be the baking of bread, which I liked very much and did not like it too much.

It was hot.

It was very hot and kind of scary because they had for three, first four, and then only three, and at last only one of the old fashioned baking ovens working in town. And of course, when I say town, this is a village. And a village in Europe is more like a little town because the houses are close together, like a little town. They don’t have farms like in America.

The houses are all together and the fields are out all around it. Everybody knows where their fields are. And the reason for this is has always been that way in Europe, because of the frequent wars.

The frequent wars made it a better deal for the houses to be close together so that people could get together for defense. And. So I had three of these old brick baking ovens. And on the day of the bread baking, you said you started the bread at night. And the big huge truck about the size of a bathtub, almost. It would started with sourdough and the dough would rise and early in the morning.

The women that were baking, they used to be three households in one group, usually using the baking oven, taking turns. And they would start the fire in the huge hole of an oven right in there where you put the bread. They would push twigs and. Wood and start lighting it up and keep it burning for a couple of hours while they were doing the kneading of the bread and the second rising and then slapping it into woven baskets.

The bread baskets were woven from ropes of straw, twisted straw, round and round. And so when the loaf was baked, it was round, and it still had the pattern of that straw on the top, but it was carried to the oven in those baskets. And that’s where we carried our two baskets like everybody else, two baskets. And the three women that shared the baking oven. One of them left her loaves plane.

The other one would stick one finger in and the other one two fingers. And that way they could tell their loaves apart. Once they pulled them all out, when you got there, there was a rough table. You put the bread baskets on, and they had a kind of a scraper with a big red rag, and it would pull all the fire out of there, all the twigs, all the ashes, everything was pulled out and extinguished and the baking oven mopped out with that wet rag.

And in that hot, hot brick oven, which was hot for hours afterwards from that fire in that oven without any fire, they would push the loaves in there on a big thing like a big shovel, push them way back, one after another, put all the loaves in, close the door and time it. And when it came out, it was done and it was beautiful.

They would take some water and put some water on the top of the loaf, and it would come out with a shiny crust. Oh, and the whole neighborhood smell of that fresh bread coming out. And they turned it just over back in the basket again and to carry it home in and stood it up. In the attic where it was under the stairs.

Kind of cool. And as far as I know, this is where they kept the bread, and they’d have about six or eight loaves Of bread and they didn’t spoil until they were used. They were big loaves and big slices of bread.

The baskets were about. Twenty inches across, I would say good size. And when you had a slice from the middle of the bread, you had to have two hands to hold your sandwich. Germans didn’t make sandwiches. They made open faced sandwiches, mostly. They didn’t believe in having two sides of bread with all the good cold cuts and whatever was on it. So when they had bread with cheese, they had to hold it with both hands from the middle of the bread.

It was such a big slice. Oh, yum. And a good sausage they made hanging in the chimney, and the hams hanging in the chimney to smoke heavenly hams. And the cheese was made. And of course, every night they had this centrifuge for the cow’s milk. And that was my job, too. You poured the milk in, and there were these spinning things, and the cream being heavier than the milk, it would separate by spinning it around.

It would separate the milk and the cream. And there were two little funnels coming out. And you had a picture under each. And one would be the cream one the milk. And you kept that going until all the milk came out of the container and was all gone. And then they put the cream aside and the butter was made in a box, a pine box.

And there was like a paddle wheel inside with holes. Holes like the size of a knothole and a board. And. Never want it to turn it round and round. And they put you in the parlor with that box of buttermilk. In there. And it was your job. You kept going and going and going with that puddle. Until it got feeling kind of stiff and hard and there were lumps in it.

And pretty soon it was just one or two lumps. And that was about it. And you pressed it in a little mould and put it down in the cool, cool. Basement room.

There was like a basement kitchen where they prepared the food for the pigs and and prepared the sausage for getting it ready to smoke and things like that. And that cool room that was all brick floor and brick walls. That’s where they kept the butter molds with the butter and clay mold. And good part of it was.

And the cheese was made from the sour milk, squeezed, salted and squeezed it real hard. And then they made it a little like hamburger patties, a little fatter than hamburger patties. And they put them all on a shelf and just let them sit there, and they would get kind of orangey golden rind to them. That kept getting kept getting clearer and clearer through and through.

But in the little middle of it, there was always still a white heart to this thing, with some caraway seeds in it that hadn’t been quite ripened yet, and that was the best part of the cheese. When you cut it open. It made this pretty pattern almost like peacock eyes on your sandwich. Oh, yummy. And another good thing was.

When they had pork fat and they fried it in a frying pan with the little chitterlings in it. Oh, and that fat put on a piece of bread, a little bit of salt sprinkled over it. And those little, little chips, greasy little crunchy little chips in it all. Was it good? Unbelievable. We ate and ate.

The best thing was just a hunk of bread and a hunk of that sausage. It had real skin from the animal’s intestines around it, and it cracked like it was all smoked crisp. And it cracked. When you peel it off. Peeled it off. Almost like you take the paper off your crayons like that and you just bit into that good hard sausage, like sort of a hard salami. I hope that someday in your life, you’ll get to taste the taste of a true Thüringen sausage.

The hard kind.

I think the day will not be very far away, that we’ll have it over here. God bless us all.

And I hope also one of the original hot dogs which were cooked over the grill, crunchy, dark on every carnival place and on every market place and on every railroad station in Turin. They had Thüringer grilled bratwurst, and you’d see the blue smoke from far away and smell it from even further away. And big crusty buns.

And that was the only hot dogs I knew when I was a kid. And they were good, and they were one heck of a big meal in itself. And those were the joys of water. And now I come to the refined part, and that is the cakes they made in England, in the woods up there. They were the famous wet cakes. They were as big as the round kitchen table in Connie’s house. That’s where they were baked on a big tin like that. And the dough was rolled out and the dough was beautiful. Fine.

But the dough was not the important part of it.

The important part of it was what’s on it. First of all, they made the famous onion cakes that they eat in Thüringen, which is made with pork fat. Pork. Back. Fat back.

The little things cut in squares and onions and then baked like a pizza. Oh, man, what a thing. When you eat that warm for supper.

But for the holidays you made the sweet cakes. And there would be cream slathered on that. And butter and currant berries, blueberries, gooseberries, anything you want to name. And then another layer of cream and sugar and cinnamon on top. Oh, and when did they call? Just plain cream cake.

There was nothing on it but cream, and some of them had layers of vanilla pudding under it first and then the cream on top. And that whole thing was just dribbling with goodness when you got it out of that big baking oven. And this is what they did when there was a birthday or confirmation or wedding they would buy make about. Ten twenty of these big, big round things.

The whole village comes to every birthday and every wedding. And you had to bake that much in preparation. They would have racks. Like in the bakery, these big bakeries. Then you fold them up and they stand in the corner and you push those round. Tins right in there. And it would take fifteen at one time.

Every flavor you could sing. Oh, I can think of fresh purple plums. Like hot sliced cinnamon and sugar. Sitting there in a creamy, slathering wet goodness on the bottom. On top of that cake. Oh, and they cut it in little strips and ensuring nobody thought anything of making a meal, either breakfast or even supper of cake.

Fresh hot cake with a cup of coffee. Oh, my father used to laugh, and he’d sit there and he’d eat and eat and eat. And every time we had a holiday in our family, there would be one or the other from. Rhoda would come up for the occasion and bring with them two big handle, big handle bags full of sausage, butter, cream, and certainly a package of the wet cake.

Mm. I’d give anything for a piece like that. I’ve tried to duplicate it, but people here would laugh. They must have been incredibly fattening.

But so good. And a lot of good fruit. And I’m always. They also harvested the mountain ash trees that went up the highway. Everybody could own a few if you wanted to have and buy them. And they made a beautiful vine out of those and elderberry wine they made.

And I got my first case of. Getting drunk At one occasion I think it was Paula’s birthday or confirmation. Her birthday was in August, early August, and I drank all the blueberry wine that anybody left sitting around.

And I got quite drunk, and they had to bring me in that little tiny bedroom with the sliding.

The windows were so tiny, tiny. They had little sliding windows.

The house was built in fourteen hundred and it was a. Half timber, you call it half timber house. And between the timbers there were branches, thick branches like into a weave. They made the branches down and up and down and from side to side, interwoven. And then they stuck clay mixed with horsehair, or cows hair and Straw.

Chopped up straw. This mix was a good sticking mix. They pushed together from both sides onto those twigs and smoothed it out. And then they painted the squares white and the timbers black. And this is the typical house. And the house was covered up on top with tiles, clay tiles, roof tiles which were hung by one by one on the on the roof beams. And that’s how most of the houses look like in some regions they used slate.

The village where my mother came from was all slate. They used the slate shingles even down the side of the house also. So they all had this diamond pattern on the roofs and on the sides of the houses from these very thin slivers of slate, which is a very durable way to make a house. It lasts forever and you never have to paint it.

So it was an old, old, very famous house. And the house had stood a little bit corner wise, right at the way the road turned, coming down from the big mountain up top, made a big loop, and then another loop further down. And by that loop was the house sitting kitty corner. Like the corner stone sticking out.

There was still a big granite block sitting on the corner of the house to protect the house from the wagon wheels going around the corner. And this was more or less the center of the village. On the other side was a little knobby rise in front of the next house, on which stood the old linden tree, ancient old linden tree, which had a significance in almost every village in Germany. For a while that was the village green, and the big tree was where the dances were held. Under.

It was a big bench going around it for people to sit and chat. Mostly the old people. And of course the street was the inn for tourists, and also where the pub was where all the men sat and smoked their pipe, drank, and there was another pub further down the road apiece to it, the next little town. And at night everybody cleaned up.

And on Saturday night they even swept the street. And the street had to be swept in a pattern, always with the broom going in one direction and then the next direction like herringbone. And that street had to look. Herringbone. Herringbone pattern from the top of the village to the bottom. Neat as a pin. Saturday night Sunday morning everybody went to church in the old costume, which my mother still had.

The big big gathered skirt it all in kind of dark, subdued colors. And then the aprons over it and the big hoods, like, it was like a huge bull mastiff arrangement that was making your head gear tall.

The younger ones had little caps with beaded embroidery on them. Some glitter colored ribbons. Ribbons were very popular on the on the Thüringen costume. And and then after a big dinner of the traditional Thüringer dumplings, which were made of raw potato with plenty of gravy and a good piece of meat, came the traditional Sunday walk for everybody.

You walked through the fields and up above the village, and we kids usually took off through the woods, and the woods were like fairy tale woods, wide apart trees where you could just walk under and all around the other blueberries and down into the little valley where the brook came down from a spring and a a riot of wild flowers blooming.

You ran through that little valley down. You got your feet wet on the bottom from the book and up on the other side. And there were those big, big rocks, mossy rocks. And we climbed up there.

There were some handrails and some old stairs, and the legend had it that they used to be once a rubber castle up there, and that they were guarding this road that cut over the top of the mountains and around down into the little next village, which was almost a town, and had a real castle with a tower.

Not a very big one, but it was really a castle where you could see the fireplace niche and you could see the arches of the old windows. And so it was quite to us, quite logical that there could have been an outer outpost for robbers up there on those rocks. And this was a very mysterious place. And the first time I went there with Connie, when she was in East Germany, we came into this valley and she says, but this looks like a fairy tale, she said.

And another famous piece of equipment in Turin was the basket on the back, which had two things over your shoulder, and it was a woven basket, strong basket that was four cornered. Big sticks in each corner make it very sturdy. And there was a story about a town in Turin where the. Where they had invaded again. They were always invading Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun and and the Hasidim who came from Czechoslovakia.

The religious fanatics that overrun, uh, the central Germany. And there was always some something going on with the people from the East. And they came to this city. And they sent the mayor and the children out to meet the enemy, and. Asked for mercy. And he was moved by this, the leader of these enemies.

And he said, I will give you permission for the women to come out and leave the city. Or with nothing, but they cannot take anything but their baskets on their back, because he was amused by how these women carried everything and anything in these baskets. They were out gathering the wood and they were going harvesting, and they were dragging all the weight, as it always was in old days.

They were dragging the weight more so than even the men. So he said, they can go out and leave with whatever they have in their basket. And the next day, in the morning, when all the women came out. They were leading their children by the hand. And what they carried in their baskets was their husbands.

So the enemy saved that town and didn’t destroy it. That’s one of the stories told about the wild Divide. Medieval times. In Germany there were wars and devastation and plagues all the time in Europe, and people were used to a lot of grief. And this was the reason why they always lived in these close knit little villages.

And there was always a also a holiday called the Cherry Festival. That was celebrated near to the near the place that had the spa. Where they had come out with all the children carrying baskets of cherries for the enemy. And they all had a big cherry festival, and that has been continued until this day.

They have Cherry Festival in this town. And so there are a lot of stories in this part of my home, because in this part of Germany, because it was the central part. That had been settled so early and was sort of protected by the thick woods and was sort of the beginning of Germany because the other parts, the southern parts and up the river Rhine in the west was where the Romans advanced.

History in the Air — Berlin Before the Olympics

Get really far into the northeast of Germany because of all these wooded regions. And the Romans fought very much like the British over here in the Germans. They knew the way through the through the woods and, uh, they suffered uh, the Romans suffered quite a few defeats from the Germans because of their fighting.

And they soon realized that they did not get ahead in that area. And they built this big wall called the limes. It’s about the same word root as limit. I guess it was the the outer edge of their empire in Germany. Cut off the northeast corner and went over all these mountain tops right through the woods with a big, uh, like a stockade fence and wooden watchtowers And they just decided to go that far and no further, that there wasn’t anything to be gained by it back there, right along about the same line over the mountain tops and through the woods ran an ancient ancient path which was called Rennsteig.

Uh, the rent comes from running. And on some of those mountain tops they still remain the Celtic wingwalls made of giant boulders and fieldstones. Places for the people to flee to. And you can still see these big fortifications. It’s like a big ring around the top of the mountain. And big walls and big ditches before you get there.

This was their way of defense. All the people from the villages went up there. If the enemy was coming. And this was connected through all, these dismays with this pass as well.

Well, this rennsteig was also crossing over the mountains right near the road, and it was about, uh, three quarters of an hour to go up there. And that was usually the custom on Saturday night, after all, the streets were swept nicely in that nice herringbone pattern. Then the girls would dress up and they’d all, uh, take each other’s arms.

Sometimes the two girlfriends, sometimes as many as six or eight abreast. They would be walking up the main road, up toward the hill and up toward the woods, singing. And that was one of the things I remember so well, the summer evenings with the girls singing and of course, a little distance the boys would follow and they’d all go up above the village on the road.

There were a couple of benches up there and they’d sit there and harmonise. And if it was still time, they would walk up to the rennsteig through the and then come back through the woods at dusk. And that was their the weekend amusement. And then if it. Got to be holiday times or if the weather got a little cooler, they had their dances in the hall of the local inn, and the dances would be in the big hall.

Of the smaller inn which was further down, who had the the butcher of the village living there? The big animals were always in Germany, killed by the local butcher, and he was the one that usually ran the inn because he had all the good meat available and the sausages. And there was usually a pub down below where the men could smoke and play cards, and upstairs was the big hall, and that’s where the dancing took place.

There was also another hall. That served as a. Sort of factory building. They were doing piecework there for the girls, and later on the girls were going down into the next bigger village, which was almost a little town already, and it was a tobacco business.

And I can remember the. Uh, fun we had watching when they brought the big straw mats filled with tobacco leaves up to the house, and then everybody in the house, all the women would sit around the table and open these leaves up and straighten them out and put them up one on top of the other. And when they had a little pile, they would put it on the chair and sit on them to flatten them out.

And then when they were treated like that, they were bundled and brought to the factory. And that was their homework that they did. Cottage industry. And the men, they also had extra jobs. And the extra job was usually the smithy. This was usually usually a little tiny house, just like the big house, made out of half timber with the orange roof tiles and looked like a little doll house or witch’s house because they used to have a big house inside with a big chimney, and the fire was always blowing and they had leather bellows and an anvil, and they used to get iron and big rods, rolls of coils of rod and make nails, hand-made nails.

And our grandpa there made big building nails. I mean, they were almost like five, four or five inches long.

And I used to stand there fascinated and watch him, uh, he would, um. Pull on the bellows, make the fire glow, stick the end of the coil in. Till it was glowing, too. Then he’d spit in his hand, grabbed the hammer, put that thing on the anvil, and make a long four cornered tip. And then he had a little cutting edge. He’d give it a whack. So it would cut through only halfway, and then he’d wrap it on the anvil so it would bend at a right angle and stick it in a little hole that was just the size of the nail, and hammer it off and hammer the little head on the nail.

It was the head was about a little smaller than a penny. They were big nails. And then he’d hit it on the bottom and it would jump out. Out jumped another nail. And he did this over and over and over again all day long. You heard the noises from all the smithies all over town. Everybody made a different kind of nail.

They made nails for the horses, horseshoes, nails for the cows, little shoes. And they made nails for mountain climbing boots and soldiers boots and for shingles and roof shingles and all different kinds. And they made them. They got paid by the pound. And so they had to stand there and really produce. And most of them did it.

After their field work was done. And of course, the grandpas who no longer worked in the field, they were in the smithy all day. And our grandpa, he was nothing but skin and bones and sinew and muscle. That’s all he was. He only shaved on the weekends and he didn’t have many teeth left. Bony little guy in long johns and pants. Dirty work pants with suspenders.

But he wore suspenders and a belt.

The belt was for authority. Because the belt is what he spanked with. And we got in the trees into the green apple. So we got up in the barn with the machinery and fooled around. Boy, he was after us with his belt and that was his. His privilege. He kept ordering in the house. And then on Sundays, everybody would dress up. Now the old grandma and most of the girls had brown hands from all the tobacco leaf work.

But they get all dressed up, and the old people still wore their old, old costumes. Uh, the men all had these loose fitting tunics made out of dark blue linen, heavy linen. And they wore caps like the Greek fishermen caps. And the women, of course, wore their long black skirts, pleated skirts and dark blouses.

And the old ladies had a special way to where they did not wear the fancy bonnets. They wore a black kerchief wound around the head, almost like a turban. And you can see that on those two plates I have from Turin. There’s one of them is a young girl with the ribbon on her little cap, and the old the other one with the basket on her back is the old lady. And she has this this black cloth around her head like a turban.

The old ladies usually didn’t have much hair left, and it looked very handsome. And they wore that to church. And they also had when it got cooler. They had cloaks, very, very pleated cloaks, and with ribbons on the, on the borders and on the edges and lace. And they were they were very fancy. And they were also made out of calico and lined with flannel For the young women, and they wore them to walk their babies.

And what they did is they would take pick up a corner of this thing and sling it under the babies behind, and then it would help them carry the baby, and they could walk up and down the hill and stand there and gossip for an hour, and they wouldn’t get tired holding the baby because they had these, uh, cloaks.

And to this day, they still wear them. They wear exactly what everybody else wears nowadays, but they still have these these coats on their shoulders when they carry a baby. And it’s much more practical than having a baby carriage in the mountains, of course. So that was the, the wearing apparel of the, of the villages and every village, every village had a little different costume and a little different, just a little different dialect.

So they could tell each other if somebody came from. It’s amazing how in Germany there’s a million different dialects. And as kids, we could not understand much of it when they talked to each other.

But I got since I learned to speak English in a foreign language, I got a trained ear, I guess, so that now I can understand almost all the dialects in Germany without any problem. Which is a wonderful bonus that I got for my efforts. It’s really making it much more fun traveling in Germany now because I can understand all the people.

So. This was a what a road. And this was our vacation spot. Every year we used to stay there About two weeks at least. Because our vacations were much longer than the vacation. My dad got. And then they would come and pick us up there and we would go on vacation. We went to the North Sea. Then we went to the famous islands in the North Sea.

But we usually went to the smaller resort rather than the famous resort, because we like to have a more quiet and natural surroundings than the typical vacation tours that you get in the big resorts. And of course, we were still pretty small kids, so we had more fun that way. We weren’t ready for dressing up and going out to hotels and things like that. So we were in. North off of Amrum.

We were in with my cousin, my mother’s brother and family.

We were in Swinemünde on the Baltic Sea, which is. Quite close to the famous Peenemünde, where they had all the scientists working and all the German scientists over to America. For us, right there on the Baltic Sea, which is now also, I think, Polish. And. That. Brings us back first, on the way back, we used to stop by my grandmother’s.

And when we came from Aurora, she always had her maid pick us up. She give us a quick kiss, and then she’d smell a whiff of the cows and she’d say, mi mi Emma was her maid, and she said to bath, and we would have to go in the bathroom first and give us bath and change the clothes before she could deal with us.

She had this real fancy apartment and the the cloths shade big, big light over the dining table with the bell in the middle so that you could ring for the maid. And she laid down every afternoon and had her rest like a lady. And then Emma would come in, and she’d sit in front of her mirror and had her toilette and her hair put up with curling irons that were heated over a gas flame.

And we watched this whole procedure, and she’d put on entirely different clothes from the morning, and then we’d have coffee and and, uh, one of her friends was. Acquainted with the lady who made these famous dolls. Adults who are such a collector’s item now. And that first factory was right in the same town, in the same old spa town where we all came from, and where my grandparents then had their nice apartment and we were privileged to go to the factory and see these dolls made in their paint faces painted.

I still remember that they all had genuine human hair, and they got so popular that they finally made them in the size of store window dummies, and they are the sweetest kids. They were all made to look like original kids.

There was a little boy and three girls, I think, and all these different types. They were made. You could order them and it looks very sweet when you see a show window decorated with them.

But I imagine that by now nobody can afford to pay for this anymore. I don’t even think they make them anymore in that size. Things were getting a lot more commercial.

I remember around this time too, we got most of our clothes now from stores, and the first ones we got were knits.

Of course, you couldn’t make those at home, and they were the famous knits that were exported from Germany. They were beautiful, made clothes. They even made snow pants with buttons down the side, like like the the old fashioned soldiers used to have and for winter. And we had matching sweaters and pleated skirts and all, all of this knit material.

And that was the first way that my mother broke down to ready where he made where. And after that, I think it was things were going their way more and more commercial as far as canned foods and the things you bought in the stores. And, uh, we had a real gas stove in Berlin. Where in, in before we had only a gas attached to burners, like, attached on top of our old fashioned stove.

Kitchen stove. And you just had the pipe hanging down going into the kitchen. And some people had it where you had a meter if you lived in a, in a apartment, they had meters where you had to put the quarters in for the gas to come out, and you did it by meter.

And I remember having girlfriends still in Berlin who had gas lights in their in their apartments. And when you lit them, you had to buy these little stockings they used to call them. They were like little knit things, like big sums out of a mitten.

But they were stiff and they had some kind of metal on it and chemicals. And you put that over.

The core of the burning gas. And that is what glowed. It wasn’t really like a light bulb.

It was this whole little. Knit thing glowed. And if you hit that hard, it broke. And you had to take that off very carefully and light the lamp. And in the hallways, a lot of the old houses, when you went up the stairs in the hallway, still had gas light. And that was. Around thirty five thirty six, it seems to me as I remember it back now, it seems to me that the modern times came with the Olympics in Berlin.

I remember that so well because there was a big excitement. They had a new stadium built, which we went from our school class to go see and um.

The swim stadium. And then they had a big bell made which said on it I called the use of the world, and I had the Olympic rings. And, uh, it was on a, on a big truck, and it was making a tour before they put it up everywhere. And we went to see this bell, and they had guards of Hitler Youth around it and they were very serious about their job. I mean, they were like the, uh, Buckingham Palace guards. You couldn’t get them to blink an eye or smile or anything.

It was very impressive. And then, uh, I remember they used to have all kinds of souvenirs. They used to have little pads. Uh, that showed the different events. Horse jumping or running. And when you thumbed through them real fast, it looked like a movie. Everything moved. And that impressed me very much.

It was a great invention. And they also had telephone booths at a few different locations where you could watch the events on television. That was the first time I ever heard it mentioned that there was such a thing, and I could really not believe, and I kind of figured that the grownups were pulling my leg and I didn’t really quite believe it, but yet I found out later that it was true that they did have these few locations where you could watch. I don’t know who how you paid for it and who got to watch or how it worked out, but that was the first mention of TV.

But we were still very thrilled about having a radio, and that was still very, very new to us and we were not allowed to touch the radio.

My father was in charge of the radio and picked out the shows. We weren’t allowed to touch the telephone. That was not for children. We still did not have any refrigerators.

We had a little in Berlin, a very small pantry that was under the window in the.

There was like a wall of cement. Or bricks. And that made the insulation, I suppose, in a tiny, tiny little hole with a fly screen the size of a brick.

But the thing in the wall stayed cool because the houses are all made out of stone over there, and it did stay cool, but it was no bigger than the large cabinet. And it didn’t matter, because the stores were all very handy and very good, and everybody went to town every day and bought everything fresh anyway.

And we went to the market to buy the vegetables fresh twice a week. And everything was very fresh and the market across the street from us, that was always fun. When it was over, we used to climb over the they locked the gate and we used to climb over the fence and steal oranges that they dropped and stuff. By that time I remember we had food more often.

My father loved food.

We had food for dessert almost every day in the summertime.

And I remember the big banana trucks from the German colonies in Africa.

The big Cameroon bananas used to come.

There was plenty of bananas taken to school. And it was always a good feeling to get back to school, too. And get back to the old friends and back to the old routine. As far as the Hitler Youth, I don’t remember much that we did in Berlin.

I think we were just too little. I didn’t have much interest in it, and I did make a form a group of my girlfriends.

And I remember when one birthday I wanted to have matching rings for all my girlfriends.

I think there were five of us and that’s all I wanted. I wanted to have a ring for each one of them so that we all had matching rings. And that’s what I got for my birthday that year.

I had two girlfriends from my class and one that lived much further away, who was an Indian lover. Oh boy, could she play Indian. And she lived on the outskirts of town near a little woods. And oh, we had wonderful times there. It seemed like every one of my girlfriends had different interests. And the last member of the group, and this was something much more decisive that happened to me than the, um, Hitler used.

It was this new girlfriend. She came to our school. From Switzerland, and her father was a director in the movies and on the stage. And her mother had been an actress or was still acting occasionally. And they were still gypsy couple. They were well off financially anyway, because they were nobility. And this Mary von lesser joined our class and I was totally intrigued by her. She sang a song in Italian for us.

I remember when the teacher introduced us, because I went to a class that was consisted only of girls. You had a choice. And the grammar school, you had a choice between A, B and C, and the C was the mixed class of boys and girls, and one was just boys and one was just one grade was just girls. And that’s how they divided the grades up. So.

And I was always just with girls. I never was in a school that had mixed sexes. I don’t know why my mother didn’t do it since we didn’t have any brother at home, but I guess she figured we’d be more comfortable.

We were always in the girls class and. This Mary, of course, then invited me to come visit her, and it was instant. Mutual admiration. Because she played dress up and put on plays and stories, and she read books and we read.

I remember she was reading The Jungle Book and she had a cat named Mowgli. And and that’s how we got talking about it. And so we both read The Jungle Book together, and then we acted it out and it went on from there. And she had this. Her garden was. She lived in a villa too.

There was just two floors. Downstairs lived two of her aunts, I think, and they lived upstairs with the balcony. And the garden was just as sort of wildly, wildly neglected like ours was.

But it had a gazebo in the middle, and it had a gardener’s shack with all flower pots and things like that, and an old cart and an old chair in it, like a little hut and all. Could you play there? You could do anything from princes and robbers and jungle stories. Wonderful.

And I was gone.

I was in seventh heaven. This was for me. And the only bad part was that when the winter came, they always went to Switzerland. They left for Lugano.

I think one of the lakes in the Swiss Alps. And so I had to go without her then. And then she’d come back again. And. Oh, she was just so intriguing. And that was the start of my theatre ideas.

I think she is the one that started the whole thing. And then soon after that, the next big event in my life was, I don’t even know how old I was, what birthday it was, but I got a bicycle. Oh, my first bicycle. Ah, it was grandiose.

It was wonderful. And and I had to get one, too.

But she had a little old one that they bought from somebody second hand. And it was what we called an eternal kicker because you could. It didn’t have the gears that stopped. You just had to go pedal all the time. And this is what she ran around on, and I and we were off from our house, up the road to the schoolyard and in the schoolyard.

There was plenty of room to ride the bike all day.

Well, this was Connie’s telephone, and I decided to leave the noise in there for a souvenir for Connie, because her telephone is always ringing.

And I came here because of the terrific heat. She saved me from my apartment and brought me to the air conditioning upstairs.

But I am taping this down here, and I’m afraid the noise on the tape must be the sprinkler outside, which I didn’t hear much inside, but the tape took it anyway.

I think I’ll put in a date here. This is July eighteenth, nineteen ninety. So I had my bike and the bike had balloon tires with a great big soft ones, but mine were half balloon, of which I was very proud. And it had a baggage rack on the back, on the back fender, all chrome baggage rack and a net.

There was always a net that you could hook in little holes in the fender and down below in the middle of the wheel. So it was like a big fan. This net and the net was blue and silver.

It was gorgeous and I had a light up one which was also chrome and was run by a little generator, which you call a dynamo, and you clip that, you pull that and it clipped onto the tire. And by rolling the tire, you made the electricity. When you went out at night. So you never needed batteries for this light.

It was out of this world. I felt like somebody had given me a Mercedes. And of course I had this little trampler and readily. And we rode over the cobblestones of our little street up to the schoolyard, and we visited all the girlfriends, and we could now be movable. I could go out to the other girlfriend. Easy.

The one that played Indians. We all went out there. Pretty soon we all had bikes of some kind. Some of their brothers bikes, some new bikes. And we went. Much further around to go to play. And we were mobile and felt very much more grown up.

And I should add that some of the boys probably had their bicycles sooner than we did, because I remember trying riding the bikes in different places from the bikes of bigger kids, and trying my darndest to catch on to riding a bike before I got my bike. I knew how to ride a bike when I got the bike and I oh, I got to add that the net, what the net was for was on the girls bike so that the skirt would not catch in the spokes. That that was the reason for the nets. So we were now a gang of kids with bicycles and very much at home in our suburb.

It was strange. Berlin was sort of a city with two faces. It downtown area was so progressive and so lively and so. Up and coming in a little wicked with their shows and cabarets and their little risqué reviews. And yet in the suburbs, life was, uh, very old fashioned in a lot of ways, very much like it used to be in New York.

It was still the old neighborhoods, and the hurdy gurdy used to go around and the market days.

We had a man come down who had, uh. Like a one man band. He had a big bass drum on his back, and with a string attached to his heel so he could bang the drums, and he was playing like a music box in front. And, uh, he could play an accordion that he carried over his shoulder, and he had a helmet that had little bells on it and rattles and all kinds of things that accompanied the music.

It was a silver, shiny helmet with bells and and a horse tail. Red and white coming down.

It was a very grand sight to see. And quite a. Figure in the neighborhood, this man. Then they used to have the little gardens that are popular all over Germany that are on the outskirts of town. People would take a little plot and rent it and have their little vegetable and flower garden there. And they have a whole colony of them.

And everybody builds their little garden shack in them. And it was like the little summer homes. And every weekend they would go out there, work in the garden. Sit there at night. Have colored lights under the porches. And they all know each other. And then they have a big garden fest. And they put on usually once a year, a festival for all the children.

And we used to go there every year to the different clubs that had these gardens. That was still popular all over Germany now and especially was still popular in in East Germany since, uh, people could not own anything. They did permit them to have these little gardens still, and that was their little own place of their own that they could have, and they could put up these little garden houses.

And I remember fondly the many festivals we had through the years with friends of our families.

We had one only once after the war.

We were able to have a little plot.

But usually during the times that my father was working and we lived more in the inner city, we didn’t get around to it. And we we were fortunate that we were always able to travel on our vacations and weekends anyway. We also noticed the change with the Olympics. That came a bigger awareness of the world outside.

I remember my parents took a trip to Italy, went to Rome, even saw the Pope, came back and told all kinds of stories about how exciting that was. Even though we’re not Catholic, it was very impressive. And my mother told off the butler there in the chamber before you went in to see the Pope. He looked at all the ladies.

Dresses. And he’d have little pins behind his lapel. And if they were a little bit too exposed, he would suggest daintily to a pin up a little higher. They got a big kick out of that because the fashions were very free, and the shows were a little bit suggestive, and people considered themselves much more sophisticated. They got away from the old fashioned moral standards, and Berlin was the leading city for these things.

It was a very, very jolly place. And we kids didn’t love anything better than now.

When we went to town with my mother. We took the suburb train and we went to the big department stores downtown, and they were just fairy worlds, especially at Christmas time. Uh, it wasn’t like you find now boxes of merchandise piled up and people rummaging through everything was behind counters and lovely dolls and stuffed toys and different sections had different displays, and the show windows would be all full of. Christmas scenes with little elves that would actually move. And it was so special.

It was a wonderful time and it was always, in my memory, so sharp.

I remembered all these images because it was so soon before the war came, and all of this was a thing of the past. And it was in three years of this time it had completely changed. Um, I do recall one particular party we had at our house, and the parties were always noisy and very gay and and, um, singing and my father playing the piano and, uh. They would go to shows and then come back with the songs.

I remember them doing the Lambeth Walk and, um, half the night and laughing and giggling, and they were really enjoying their lives there. And then it was just a few days later, there came a man who was assigned to be the air raid warden for our section of town, and he distributed gas masks and told us that we would have a drill. in a few days and she’ll be able to have them. And that night there was a party again at my parents.

There were quite a few people there, I remember, and he knocked on the door and he said, we all had to go in the cellar and we all said whatever for?

And he said, well, you know, you have read the, the pamphlets and this is air raid practice, and we are supposed to have a simulated alarm. And everybody said, all right, all right. And everybody laughed and didn’t take it serious, but they took the gas masks, however many were available, and proceeded down the cellar with a lot of laughter, and nobody took it serious. Yes. And it was disturbing nonetheless.

It was a sour note in all this. And it was for me. Very revealing, I think. I became aware that.

There was more going on than we could really know about. And the trip to Italy, of course, into the Pope, had been prompted by the relations with Italy and Mussolini. And Mussolini came to Berlin one time. This was all still before the war, of course, and we had to practice in school, singing the song of the youth fascist movement in Italian.

And I still to this day remember the song in the words.

And I was very happy now because I knew an Italian song to like my girlfriend Mary, and we all had to line up at the side of the road and watched for the limousine coming by and holler. Douche douche douche. And then we were supposed when he was close, we were supposed to start breaking out into this song, and it went off very well because we were all trained, and the members of the school chorus, of course, were very much in the foreground, and this was one of our great.

Appearances very, uh, Important to us. We felt in Berlin. You felt you were in the middle of everything that happened. This is how Berlin was in those days, in the thirties.

There was also an invitation. Uh, that my parents got from, uh. A railroad club in Hungary. And they did an exchange program. And my parents were supposed to travel to Hungary. And, uh, have a vacation there, and they didn’t quite know, uh, for the week what to do with us.

I think it was a week or two, and we were sent.

My sister and I were sent to a railroad children’s home, vacation home, which was semi. Hemi for recuperation from sickness, and it was at that time that I realized my sister was still having a problem with her heart, from from that bad bout with rheumatism. And, um, somehow or another, they got me in to go along with her because she was they considered her still quite small for something like that.

Anyway, we got back to Silesia, into those giant mountains, into this children’s home. And it was nice because my sister and I had always been fighting like sisters are. And this time, away from home, her mother and father. And being on our own, we kind of grew together. We we, uh.

We had each other to rely on in our troubles there, and it brought us much closer together. And it was in all, a very good experience that I can only highly recommend. My poor sister had to lie down every afternoon because of her heart.

After dinner and rest and while we went to a big. Wooded lot that the home owned, and it was really pretty, with big, uh, blocks of of moss covered rocks and trees in between where you could, you could really play well there.

It was a very nice piece of wood, almost like made for kids to play. And of course, so many kids had played there.

There was a million little paths running up and down the hill and over those boulders, and it reminded me a lot of what a road and our trips to these rocky outcrops that. Also appeared there. These boulders. And then I would come home and I’d bring her. Bring my sister something. Some pebbles or some wildflowers or whatever.

And I was always thinking of her in the evening.

We had not much entertainment there, but we played jacks with pebbles, and everybody had these five tried to find the five perfect even sized pebbles, white quartz pebbles. They were. And everybody played, played, played. And for breakfast we had soup made of flour and milk, which everybody hated except me. I loved to sit. We ate outdoors and the weather was nice and the sun was shining on that soup butter in the middle, and I thought it was heavenly. I can still remember it. I actually liked it.

The Olympics Summer — Erika, Mussolini, and the Changing Times

At night we were ready to buy our counsellors and it was always stories from One Thousand and One Nights. And it really was very impressive. I never will forget the the reading of those stories every night. And the windows were wide open, looking out on that mountain range and the sun setting. And.

After dinner. Which is at noontime in Germany, I should say, after after lunch was the the laying down and resting for us? Only about half an hour for my sister all afternoon.

But the reason we had to lie down for half an hour was in the morning. We took the bath and you got pine needle baths and mud baths and. Saline bath. And then they wrapped you in towels and and you had to rest for half an hour. And this was supposed to be very healthy. And the dinners were family style. Very family style. And the meat always had a lot of fat on it.

And I remember giggling and laughing because we all tried to cheat and get rid of that fat somehow. And my sister and I used to put it under the table like I was endless variety of ways to hide that piece of fat meat. And on some occasions we had they had a little movie projector.

We had little cartoon movies. That was nice, too. Very exciting, because of course, there were no other entertainments in those days. And the music for the cartoons was provided by a phonograph That was for the rainy days, and on the good days, the children would lie down on an outdoor porch to get the nice mountain air.

The ones that had to lay there all afternoon so they were not inside in their beds. They were outside in the air. And that was supposed to be the most healthy part of all. And for the bigger kids, there also was always one big hike up in the mountains to a hut, which I took part in, and that was my first mountain experience. And the big thing was on the last day when the parents came to pick up the kids, we put on a big play and I took part in that.

It was something about the Four Seasons, and I was supposed to represent summer, and I can still remember part of the dialogue, and that was a big thing that kept us busy preparing for, and it was quite a memory to take home with, but we were relieved when we came back home to have our old freedom back. We didn’t fight so much anymore, and when my girlfriends came back, the ones who liked to play dolls now we sometimes let on to play along with us and we both laughed about the old fights.

The time we had broken a dining room chair and fixed it with glue and broken the door slamming it, broke the glass in the door, and the time we threw the ink and spilled it on the lemon yellow wallpaper in the little salon. Those days were behind us now, and we felt we were expected to behave like grown ups more.

But that did not keep us from playing with dolls. And we played dolls for a long time. Yet the old den sofa that we had Made parachute jumps onto and done handstands on and headstands on and jumped on.

It was taken out and removed and transferred to the cellar.

The so-called air raid shelter now and a nice little traditional sofa had been reinstalled in the salon and we were now taken to hotels occasionally to eat and to restaurants.

And I remember one day going with my parents to the famous Kempinski or House Fatherland. We went, which had, I think, twenty different restaurant bars in it, all done in a different style of different countries, and serving the liqueurs and wines and spirits of that nation.

There was like a log cabin for America where they served whiskey, and there was an Irish pub, an English pub.

There was a Spanish bodega and Italian place and French little wine restaurants. And it was another thing that was reminiscent of of what you would now call Disneyland.

It was like stepping into a different country.

There was one from Morocco where you said on Ottomans on the floor and on rugs, and it was really interesting.

I was fascinated by that.

I remember that I liked to go there. I went there twice.

I think my parents took me there. And then one of those places, we had a meeting with a distant cousin of ours who was a director at the at the movies by the name of Arthur Maria Rabenalt. And my father introduced me and told him about all my ambitions about the theatre, and he was quite amused by that. He said, well, keep it in mind. And he said, you’ve got a while to go to grow up.

But he said, it’s never too early to think about it. I still remember that.

And I wish now that I had taken the opportunity and gone to see him at the time when I was going to theatre school in East Germany.

But then this was already a divided country, literally, and it would have meant a big decision and a big step to do this, to go away from my family. And, uh.

But I met him there in Berlin.

I remember that very well. They were it was just so much on new things for the future, for the future outlook and so much To see it happening every day. I can just imagine all this time so vividly because there was, for instance, the big sport festivals that we had. Sports were very important, and nature hikes and health, as you, as you noticed from those kinda places, the health was very important and we were still taking our cod liver oil every day during the winter to keep up our vitamins.

And we were taking something that came in cans was called bio malt, which was heavy iron in forced vitamins.

It was like honey, sort of sweet stuff. You had to take a tablespoon of that every day regularly. And people watched and did things.

We were taking dextrose tablets for vitamin C in the winter, and all these things were new and they had health food houses where they sold only health food in stores. And this was all the new fads coming up. Having a close tie in with all the sports mindedness. And there were these huge sports festivals where we had to go from school and from Hitler Youth and train doing exercises in unison, like three hundred or five hundred girls filling the whole stadium, all doing the same thing to music, swinging clubs and hoops.

And I enjoyed these things. I enjoyed staging these things. We learned our part in the school, and then came the big days when we spent them on the field practising in the heat, and it was like a big show. And we stood there rehearsing and rehearsing till some of us passed out in the heat.

I remember it well and it was to me all very exciting. These things I liked about sports. I did not like a lot of ball games and running around with balls and teams, and I was not interested in winning and therefore was not very popular.

When they picked the teams and so it was kind of mutual. I didn’t like the sport and they didn’t like me, but I liked the track meets, I liked running, I liked throwing the javelin. Boy jump, high jump. I ran one hundred meter dash and laps around two hundred meter laps around the stadium, things like that.

Of course I liked swimming too and always have loved swimming and I kind of picked it up. It going to this lake. And there was a couple of Japanese guys that were there for the Olympics, and I used to watch them swimming, and I would try my darndest to imitate them and get to learn how to swim.

And I also took a great fancy to the new sport of, uh, the big wheel. Wire wheels. There were, like, two hula hoops connected, and you put your feet in the bottom and your arms to grips up there and rolled with them. This was very, very beautiful to watch on the field.

And I could do it a little bit.

But the you needed a great big, big strength to do the trick of, of letting those wobble down to the ground and then pick them up again. It took too much strength. I only saw men do that. And, uh, so, um, I never really got any further in the this sport because my arms were never very strong for things like that. I liked the bars and the ladders, but I could not climb ropes or the rods because of my arms.

I had to push with my legs and get them black and blue in order to get to the top, because my arms were doing no work at all. So we had lots of sports.

We had sports three times a week and never, never during school hours.

There was always extra after school. You never cut the regular classes for sport, and we had art on Saturdays and we had, I liked you could not choose your subjects. You had all the subjects all the time.

We had now started with foreign language, thought it was French and I loved geography, history I loved especially and we had to memorize endless history Uh, dates.

And I like geography, I like biology, I like chemistry because you could make pretty drawings with the test tubes and the colors and but I the thing I did not like was physics and math that just escaped me. Still did not like that.

And I had a lady who had to help me for a while during the summer vacation and in the afternoon, a couple of days when one school started to catch up with my math, it was still a problem with me.

The nice part about this lady was that one day she found a stray kitten, and of course I ended up taking the kitten home, much to her relief and uh, to the mixed feelings of the rest of the family.

We had our first cat there in Berlin And we also again, we also again had a maid. This was right around the time when the Hungarian railroad people came for their return visit, and it was very handy because it left my parents free to to go out and show them the city and. They, of course, were on the way every day, showing them this and that, taking them to the shows and showing them the Hitler buildings and in the city, the Reichskanzlei and the new airport, which was very beautiful and still is a handsome building and still in use today, and growing big Air Ministry building and the new Olympia Stadium, of course.

And we went to the zoo and we went along for that.

The zoo in Germany was fabulous because it was done after the famous, uh, zoo in Hamburg was, which was one of the best in the world.

The man who started it was a circus man, and he believed in giving the animals more freedom. And having these first three cages. Cages where the lions could roam on the rocks. And the monkeys had trees and and they were just ditches to keep them away from the people. And it was it had fabulous buildings, too.

I remember it had a big lizard house for reptiles, and it had a the big birdhouse for the ostriches and flamingos.

It was done like an Egyptian temple with hieroglyphics on the side. And every once in a while you came around a bend in this big park and there would be another coffee house that was playing music, and people would sit there and they’d come to the zoo just for the ambiance of the place, and met in those coffeehouses, the different ones. And you could walk or sit and enjoy the flowers. And it was a really, really nice place.

The Berlin zoo. We went there and we went to the Potsdam to see the little chateau of Frederick the Great, Sanssouci. And they showed some of the exquisite rococo rooms with their polished floors. You had to put on felt slippers when they took you on the tour, and you could slide on skate on those polished floors and the silk drapes, and one room was done in red and the other one in pale green gold stuck where we were and mirrors It was a beautiful place.

A big marble hall for festivities. Very impressive place. And the garden went from a terrace down and steps down the hillside. He grew oranges in glasshouses on the side of the hill. Oranges, apricots and lemons were going there. And, uh. Which we now got in plenty supply in Germany also, because through the connections with the with Italy, we sent them coal and they sent us fruit.

So there was an abundance and a joy in everything. And people had work again. And there was very little, uh, depression left and very little crime left. And, uh. You did not have to, uh, fear going on the streets at night or or coming home late on the trains?

And there were no slums. There were, of course. Some of the. Poorer districts. They were pretty depressing.

The houses needed maybe new stucco fronts and paint and.

The buildings were sometimes built over a whole city block in the square, so that you had this courtyard in the back, narrow courtyards with very little sun. And they were kind of glum, but I never saw. A window that did not have a curtain on it, or a window with a broken shade hanging or empty window or nailed up boarded up windows, empty storefronts, streets littered with trash, and these horrible empty building lots with their heaped with trash and refuse and and wires around that you see here, they just did not exist in Germany.

I suppose part of the reason, simply because the the land was too expensive and you could not leave it sitting there undeveloped and in the country you used it for agriculture or flower garden or vegetable garden.

There was just not enough ground to let anything go to waste like that. So things were kept up. It must have been simply that reason, because I do not recall seeing a single slum like what you would call a slum here. Poor districts, yes, but not Islam in that sense. So you did not get a depressive feeling in the city at all?

Oh, riding on the trains, you did not get the ugly sides. They did not have auto junkyards, for instance. Yet even though a lot of people were starting to have cars, they had started to build the Volkswagen they had been building on the Autobahn since Hitler came to power in order to provide jobs for people, and that was shaping up pretty good. And.

There was always some big festival coming up.

There was a big. Festival for all the farmers and an annual harvest event. Sometimes an old farmers would go there in their local costumes, and it was a great celebration. And Hitler always went there.

There was a certain location and then there would be another one.

The first of May, of course, was the big day for the workers. And there were big parades. And Hitler held a speech and there were mass marches, and they always said, and every time he came somewhere, the weather was nice. They always spoke of Hitler weather and every time the sun was shining.

When these things were planned, it all went, came off beautifully. And of course, they built that big stadium in Nuremberg where they had their party meeting once a year, like the big parade they have and had in Moscow every year. This one was in Nuremberg and.

The pictures were beautiful, and we used to have in the little cities. Every town had the little parade, and it was quite a sight, especially to see. What I like is I like the young boys.

There were the younger girl Hitler used and the younger boy Hitler used like the Cub Scouts. They had black pants. And brown shirts and black and white were their little flags. They were black and they had black and white drums. Not just drums, but the long medieval drums that go all the way, almost down to your feet. And they’d have fanfares and those drums. That’s what they were playing.

It was really something when they when they opened the show. And they rehearsed and then they had, uh, a different section for gliders in Hitler Youth, for boys or in girls. You could go to glider camps. And they had a special group for the boys that wanted to go to the Navy. They had little sailor uniforms and could go on these training ships.

The big tall ships and learn, uh, sailing. So there were there were a lot of activities provided for the kids. You did not sit around idle. In fact, nobody was left alone. Uh, my father and mother were under pressure, I think, again, because of not joining the party. And, uh, my father finally settled the argument by joining the old gentleman’s. National socialist. Old gentlemen’s. Association, they called it, which was for older men, older men, and there was not really a branch of the Nazi Party.

It was just a way to get them into the game. And this is what my father grabbed his age to, to get by with that. And my mother was supposed to join the women’s group organization, and she did not go for things like that at all. She said, if I do anything, she says, I’ll go in the Red cross.

And I think she finally ended up going in the Red cross. We had. A system where you gave a pound of four different things every four Sunday in the month for, uh, sort of welfare for poor people.

The pound gift was a regular thing. And You were supposed to eat a simple meal at home, and whatever money was left over, you were supposed to buy a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, pound of peas, pound of rice, whatever, and donate that. And that helped in each town and each village that helped the people that were in each town and each village.

It was a good system because that way you knew right where it was going and there was no big transportation involved. All things that are easy to do in a smaller country like Germany, I can see that in a bigger country like America, this would just completely be a big, big project. We also had direct, inter, uh, interaction with the poor people by being sent to their homes, uh, one afternoon a month.

We had to go on families that needed help and take care of the children, babysit, And kind of like adopt the family.

We were supposed to give them Christmas gifts and make, uh, try to give them clothes that we no longer needed and things like that, and get to meet them. And of course, my mother took right to that.

I was right up her alley. She liked that she was knitting, uh, mittens and scarves and hats to match what, Christmas and helping me, which I was supposed to do it, but she always bought my work alone and enjoyed this. And bringing them supplies and baked goods and whatever.

I remember that family very well, and that was our, uh, contribution. That was one thing we did in, in, uh, Hitler Youth when we were young, uh, what you would call here brownies.

But other than that, I don’t remember anything about these big festivals. That was always such a, uh, uplifting thing somehow. And it seemed so great. And it was, as I said, such a short time before everything turned. And, uh, maybe that is why it remained in my memory so, so vividly. Uh. A happy thing was that we had, like I said, by now, we had another maid again. And, uh, the story of that was that my mother had mentioned it because I think they wanted to be more independent and go out more at night. And, uh, they figured that that would help having a maid living.

There was a small room off the kitchen where the maid and I think my mother only advertised one day, and this Erica was her name walked in and she had a real sad story to tell. She had come from a she had no references.

When my mother asked for references, she began to cry.

She was very young and a very, very nice person. She became like a member of our family and my parents became godmother to her children. Um. She said she had had a very. She came from the country, uh, one of the small villages around the city of Berlin. And her first place was this woman who was a crazy woman.

She must have been a crazy woman. She beat her with her dog whip and accused her of stealing and and in general, some of the stories you wouldn’t believe. And when she met my mother, in her sweet way, she just broke down and cried and told the whole story. And she said, I don’t know if you believe me, but I do not have references from her.

But I need the job, and I did not steal. I don’t know what to say, and I just can tell you what happened to me. And she did not mention why she didn’t go back home. And my mother did not ask either. And she turned around and she and she said about when she would get her, she said she could stay and she would love to have her, but how about her things?

And she said, I can’t get my things because I don’t want to go back to this place. And all I have is what I have in this little hand bag right here, and maybe I’ll try to get my stuff later. So my mother said, well, then you can stay right now. And she actually had no place to go that night. And my mother gave her some money and said she could go to the store. And, um, this completely overwhelmed Erica, because you’re.

The first thing my mother did is trust her with money and sent it to the store. So she came back, and it was like instant love on all sides. She fit into the family. Just wonderful. And it soon turned out what the reason was that she didn’t go back home. She had a boyfriend that her parents didn’t approve of.

And the only reason they didn’t approve of him is he was older than he was. They figured he was a little too old for her, which was not a great deal of being older, considering that my father was eleven years older than my mother. Uh, but he had a car, and these old fashioned parents insisted that she just had it in her head.

She wanted to have this boyfriend because of the car, and that she would not see reason and see that he was really too old. And he was, uh, you know, not from the village and didn’t know where he came from. And he was just a city slicker, and he was probably just turning her head and this attitude and it wouldn’t it wouldn’t come off anything, come to anything with him. And, um, my mother just smiled at that and she said, well, why don’t you bring him by sometime and we’ll meet him?

And then maybe your parents will feel more confident about this whole setup here, too. And she. I don’t think Erica was that young. She. I mean, she was not seventeen or eighteen.

I think she was probably twenty two at that time. And her sister was also working in the same suburb. And so that was one reason why she wanted to stay there, too. And this man lived, uh. Had a, his own, uh, mechanic shop for cars. And he came by, and he was a very reliable, good guy that my parents liked.

And to make a long story short, Erica stayed with us for about a year, and she had a portable phonograph when she finally got her things back. That was wonderful for us girls. We heard all the latest popular tunes on phonograph. And she was sitting always in her room in her spare time, and she was doing a spread for my dad’s piano.

The piano was shiny black modern lines, and it had an old Persian shawl over it with paisley print. And she made a modern one that was on like a knit thing. And you pulled thread through to make it modern geometric design in it, in shiny silk and dull linen threads, and all in one beige color.

It was really beautiful. And we had it for years afterwards.

And I still see her sitting there with that phonograph, going away and working on that throw for the piano. And of course, she was such a nice person.

She was always right in the middle of all our parties then. And my mother and my. Aunt came to visit. Everybody got to know and like her.

And I still remember them all sitting there doing monograms in pillowcases for for Erica’s dowry.

She was keeping her hopes up and trying to get it filled up and and after about a year or so. She did marry this man and moved away to where he had his shop in Frankfurt an der Oder, which is about fifty miles from Berlin. And this was kind of a. Sign of fate for us. It seems like, because this is the place where we next moved to. So that we became once again neighbors with Erica and lived in the same city.

I think what happened with this move was that my father had some trouble with some higher ups in the railroad offices, and it had something to do with this person being an. Also a higher up in the Nazi Party. And they didn’t see eye to eye. And my father found out something that he did that wasn’t quite right.

And he objected. And there came a lot of ill feelings came to the surface because my father was still the old school with the Free Student Corps, and he believed in patriotism in the old ways, and did not think of some of the little tricks that these party boys pulled. And so I guess they gave him a choice. He got his promotion, which was due to him, but they made him take it in the city.

The other, uh, Frankfurt Oder was a pretty large city east of Berlin, right near the Polish border, and after the war, the city where I spent all my both, spent all our teenage years, uh, was divided by the river. And on the other side of the bridge was Poland after the war. And we went there to visit, uh, Erika once when she was married. And it was kind of nice that we did have somebody we knew there. And this all happened, I think, in nineteen thirty seven.

It was by that time that was the year that we went on vacation in Ramsau. This was our first vacation in the mountains. And, uh, It was a great, great experience for us and we all fell in love with the mountains, and we did almost exclusively mountain vacations after that because we were old enough to hike.

And that’s what my father really loved. And my mother loved mountains and woods and the Christmas trees, which reminded her of home, of course, of touring. And we were very much at home there, and my father did the same thing he had done with the seaside resorts he had. He picked all these different corners and went to a different place every summer.

So we saw almost all of Bavaria, all the lakes, all the famous cities, and quite a few places in Austria as well. He started where we visited all the famous sights and almost all the different provinces. On this particular trip. We came to Vienna, I think on the way home and went to Schloss Schönbrunn.

I remember and went to the famous riding school with those white horses, which was a beautiful sight to see, and apparently started my father thinking of his World War one days as a cavalry lieutenant and made him think of his joy in riding. And when we returned to Berlin, when we went home back to school, my father enrolled in a riding club in Berlin, and I remember well the little competitions they put on there, and my father always was in the show.

He won quite a few prizes and it made him very happy to get back to riding. For a while it was. This was Berlin. You had opportunities for anything you wanted to do.

It was available. So my father got to take advantage of that. And for me, I did not have my math teacher anymore. I now had started to take piano lessons, and I got to play my father’s big black grand piano, and that was a grand experience. I made very slow progress because I was rather lazy and busy to do enough practicing, but nevertheless I it was a very. Joyous thing for me because I love to play the piano and I love to listen to when my dad played and.

My sister, I think, started soon afterwards. Also my sister. Finally took up the planar recorder a few years later too, because she played the recorder quite well. Anyway, we got into music and we went back that winter in Berlin to go into concerts and, uh, shows and in generally enjoying the city once more, because we, I think by that time we knew that we had to move the following year. This was about the time that I took to dancing, uh, number one. I always tried to dance and express myself.

When my father played the piano, he was always teaching us all the classics. If he had been in the theater theatre from coming home from an opera. He would play some of the scenes and explain them to me, and tried to explain difficult operas like Wagner with the different musical motives in them.

And I had my favorites that I kept asking and asking for. And when he played Bach, even then, I tried to dance.

My father used to laugh and say, you can’t dance to those things. You can’t dance to a symphony. You can. This is made for dancing.

And I said, why not? The music makes me dance. And this is funny because now, years and years later, I went to Boston to ballets many times where they danced to classical pieces. And so it was not impossible after all.

And I knew that it was danceable music and music that made you want to dance. Also, when we were in Vienna, at this castle, I remember now Um, there was an. Uh, featured, uh, thing that summer was a Mozart eine kleine Nachtmusik, and the ballet was dancing in the park outside that one night we went. And that really was the thing that really impressed me with ballet.

And from ever since I, I loved ballet, and it was a beautiful sight to see in a summer night with that lovely music and these figures appearing from among the sculptures in the park, they came out and and danced in the middle of this beautiful park among the flowers.

It was something to remember all your life.

And I remember my father taking me, To an open house at Army barracks where they had a military riding show.

And I got to ride on a horse for the first time. They had horse rides there for the kids, and I was so thrilled to sit on a horse, just like my dad did. This riding school he went to that winter was indoor, was a big hall with sawdust on the floor, and then the commands would echo in that room. I can still see it. And they had a little balcony where the spectators would sit, and they made all these exhibitions and gave out prizes. And it was really something that made me wish to be able to ride a horse.

And I loved horses and watching horses ever since. Meanwhile, on the political scene, uh, the great thing had happened.

The Anschluss, which meant the joining of Austria to Germany. Uh, there had been a lot of talk about and speeches by Hitler that, after all, they were speaking German. They were German people. And, uh, they should be united with the rest of the country. And there were a lot of people for it, in spite of what people say now, there were a lot of spectators who really cheered and shouted and liked it, but there were a lot of them also against it.

And they were underground fighters who fought actively against it. Nevertheless, the thing happened and it was now part of Germany. And, uh, so the following year. We did our vacation in Austria. We went to Tyrol, to Kufstein. We went to Innsbruck and we were in Graz visiting friends. Graz is already very close to Italy and uh.

Uh, other Italian looking with the shutters that open up diagonal outside, you know, the buildings and against the sun. And the buildings are painted in in pink and beige and orangey, uh, colors and, uh, a very hot, warm, warm climate that had different fruit and, uh, a different way of cooking. All of Austria had a different way of cooking that, uh, rather sweet and tends to be concentrated on on pastries and dumplings and fruit. Which is something that children, of course, like.

I remember we went to Kufstein, which had. Which is a lovely old city. Um, it had a big hillock in the middle of town with the fortress on top.

And I saw the fortress many times traveling by with the trains later on. And we liked this vacation. Because, uh, we had this fortress to explore. Was a typical old fortress with a dungeon and cannons up on top. And it had an organ in the main hall that could be heard all over the valley.

And I played in the morning and at night. And the place where we stayed was an ancient, ancient inn whose one wall was connected to an old wall and gate that had been there since Roman times, which impressed me very much. And you find this in Germany everywhere that you you don’t think of history as something that is only in books. It’s right there. You can still see that’s where they actually walk. That’s where they actually lived. And you get the human feeling from it. And the, uh, the passing of time becomes very clear to you and you respect your cities.

And I think that is a different difference in Europe. You try to keep them because they have been kept for us. So you feel obligated that you should keep them nice for the next generations. And in Austria, everywhere you look, there are flower boxes in the windows and flowers all over the towns. On empty walls and bare spots, wherever they can squeeze them in.

They put flower boxes and everything looks nice and neat and kept up. We stopped in Regensburg one time on the way home and there was a pub, also an old pub that was on the foundations of an old Roman barracks, and I remember going out there, my dad telling me that this was still the actual Roman stones.

They were hollowed out big boulders for steps hollowed out from so much feet traveling there over the centuries. And the floor was all these big boulders, like in big, uh, uh, flagstones and scratched in it, where the drawings that the Roman soldiers made when they played their dice games.

Moving to Frankfurt — The River, the Town, and the Coming War

Yes, we visited many, many cities and places.

When my father went to get a round trip ticket, he meant round trip. He did not get a return ticket. We went through Garmisch-Partenkirchen to see where they had had the Winter Olympics in nineteen thirty six, and.

But we were there, of course, in the summer and I remember we went through the partner club. One of the biggest. And it was a beautiful sight to see that water come thundering down through the rocky walls And walks and steps. And you were a little wet when you got done. Also, the mountain of Garmisch is the Alpspitze, which I consider after the Watzmann in Berchtesgaden, probably the most beautiful mountain. That and the Matterhorn, I would say other of the most striking mountain tops that I can remember.

I remember one time coming through Bamberg, and the train had about three quarters of an hour stopped there. And my father just said, we’re going to go see the cathedral. And we ran to the cathedral to see the famous sculpture of the rider, the knight on the horse and we ran back and forth. Half out of breath, just in order to see that my mother always suffered terribly.

Because every time the train stopped, my father was out and somewhere, and a lot of time the train would start and go again. And my father wasn’t back yet. And then he would return through the walkway in the in the railroad cars. He turned back to us. He had jumped somewhere on the last car. And she used to say, he’s like a young dachshund. You can’t keep him from running around and nosing in every hole in the ground.

But there’s no doubt that we got to see a lot of the world through him when we were in. Bastards and bastards. Candyland in Ramsau. We also went to see.

Of course, he had to go and see Hitler’s place that was near Salzburg and.

I think my sister and my mother didn’t have any inclination to go at all.

But we went. And because there was quite a lot of hiking involved, you could go part of the way with the bus, but you had to go from there on up to the house. And my father was not out to see Hitler, but to see the house, the building. Hitler was the one who invented the picture window. And everyone talked about this huge window he had in his living room in this new building.

He had had an old Bavarian style chalet there that belonged to his sister, but he had built this new one where he received all these diplomatic guests and, uh, which had become his summer home. And this was the famous big window. And that’s what my father wanted to see this modern villa.

Of course, he had picked the best view in the country. There’s no doubt about it. He knew where the beautiful spots were. And after I. Many years after I checked into the story of how he got to be there, he had this original house.

But in order to build this big new complex, which we found when we got up there, there were barracks for for security troops, and there were houses for all the party leaders. And, uh, there were, uh, whole farm house that supplied the houses with, uh, riding horses and, and food and, uh, milk. And it was a whole little city in itself.

There were also underground bunkers for security, which and nobody knew about it at this at this point in time.

But in order to secure this whole complex on top of the mountain, they had this located and relocated and dispossessed four hundred and fifty farmers. Some of them in the beginning got paid. And later on the ones that had refused were driven out without any payment whatsoever. And of course, this a lot of people think that this was in Austria, but it was not.

It was this part of Germany was, uh, like a little peninsula that stuck out into Austria. And it is a beautiful area and only a few minutes from Salzburg. So they were Germans that were involved there. And it’s a strange thing to think that, uh, with all that Hitler did for and against Germany and about Germany, he himself really had never been a German to start with.

And many people forget that. And of course, this was all very much in the news now because of Austria joining the country. So as we came up, there were the first thing we saw fences, a lot of chain link fences. And we could go no further.

There was a huge gate for trucks to drive through. And there were SS guards and everybody had to stop there.

But there were a big crowd of people sitting on the ground and sitting by the roadside on fences and benches and and generally hanging around in a, in a sort of attitude of waiting for something. And the story was that Hitler was there because they insisted Hitler is there when the flag is up and the flag was up. So they just kept hanging around and soon they came more guards. And finally the bus came around and they said, yes, he is there, and he will let us go by the house, and he will receive the children.

The children should all line up on one side of the column, and we all lined up in columns of about four with the children on the right side, and we could march by the house slowly. And sure enough, he came out, and he was standing there on the steps, and the children rushed to him. And they were allowed to go and shake his hand. And among these children was I. And he asked questions. He turned to different ones. He asked me what city I came from, and some of them. He asked how old they were and it was a great moment when he looked into your eyes.

I had the feeling there was a great man there. Really it was.

It was a very moving moment at the time.

I was about twelve, twelve years old, I guess twelve going on thirteen. Or maybe I had turned thirteen. I’m not quite sure. Anyway, it was a great moment and something I remember all my life, and whatever happened afterwards was not, uh, we were not able to foresee it yet in those days. And my father was all smiles because he had not even, uh, counted on this. He just wanted to come and see the house. And so this was some story to bring home to to everybody that we had actually been there.

And I imagine that, soon after all these visits and all this openness was not possible anymore. So we came home quite satisfied with our mountain hike to the Obersalzberg. And of course, when, uh, he asked me, uh, what city we came from or what town I had already answered Frankfurt Oder. Because in the meantime, we had moved and, uh.

But a short while ago.

And I did not know too much about our new home yet. It was, uh, by that time we felt like old hands at moving. And it did not make too great an impression on us, and I don’t think we were really feeling sad, because I think we were looking forward to the new surroundings and meeting new friends. And, uh, we were I was only aware of or maybe even my sister too, that my father and my mother were kind of, uh, subdued about it because of this transfer being more or less a step down for them.

And, uh, but everybody turned, turned out smiling and, uh, satisfied as soon as we caught, uh, view of our new home, which was in a very nice, uh, railroad owned complex, uh, lying between a church surrounded by trees and a big boulevard with four rows of trees going right in front of our door and a big park alongside of our house.

It was lying all in greenery and a beautiful spot.

The houses were built in the twenties in a very nice modern style.

The house of the president of the district railroad office lived in, had a villa in the middle, and there were these two other blocks coming out, wings coming out on both sides, enclosing their garden and having a closed in porches, uh, toward the side of the park. And on that porch. So we had our outdoor porch again, and with flower boxes on the on the pink geraniums on the shelf there. And, uh, we lived out there again in the summertime. We moved in in the spring, I think. And, uh. It was, uh, just immediately lent itself very beautiful to the furniture.

There was a when you came into the front door. We lived downstairs on the first floor. And, uh, when you came in, there was a big entrance hall which gave room to a big oak table, heavy oak table, and a mirrored table made of oak and a big oak chest that my mother bought and had stored from the Old Forest home in in her home village.

And it made sort of like a quaint, old fashioned rustic impression. It had a light fixture out of, uh, stag antlers. And, uh, That was a very nice feature. And then to the right, you went right into the salon, which was usually the custom because that’s usually where you received visitors. And in the salon was room for in the corner for my dad’s piano and the little table and the and the antique secretary and the glass cabinet, the round table with the graceful chairs and, uh, organdy ruffled cu

rtains on the two windows flanking the piano over the corner right there.

And I can still hear my father playing there. Lots of times he would have the window toward the park open, and you could smell the roses and the big rose beds out there.

It was really a big park.

It was about as long as two city blocks, I would say. And the block wide. white. And we had this whole expanse right there in front. Then the next room was my father’s little room, which just had room for his desk and chair and his bookcase. Sort of a smoking room had a window by the desk. And, uh, the next room was our living dining room because it had the dining room table, the buffet, the server in one corner, another little table with our sofa.

So it was kind of a. Combination room. Just as much. Much as you have today. Living and dining combined. And it was always the custom in Germany that you had with your sofa, a good sized table, because people would never have settled for coffee tables, because there was always when company was there and you used the sofa, there was always too much eating and drinking, going on to have just a coffee table.

So we were always used to having a table with our sofa and our chairs. So there was that one chair and the table and sofa in one corner.

There was a window to the courtyard, and then on the out to the front was another window to at the park, and then was the big door. In the other corner was the big open door, French door to the to the porch. And that was always open in the summertime. And and we lived out there on the porch, the big porch with the red tile floor.

And it had a sturdy table out there and comfortable chairs. Even when I had my parakeet later on, the parakeet cage was out there all summer. And a reclining chair to lay down. And it was a very comfortable, uh, big, uh, apartment. Uh, we had more room than we had in the apartment in Berlin. Again, there was another little hall then, and a small bathroom and the kitchen.

And you came through another little sort of a angled hallway with one door, which was the maid’s room. And then there were the bedrooms along the hallway. There were, uh, one, two, three bedrooms in the bath. Mother and father were at the end, right beside the bath, and they were opposite. First we had a little den in the first room, and my sister and I were in one room, and then we split it up and I had the little den for my room, but there was plenty of room and the house had shutters on the outside.

So you had you could close the shutters at night, being on the ground floor, which gave us a very cosy feeling to. So it was a real nice apartment and we really liked it right away. And we could hear the church bells in the morning and at night from the from the church and the organ, the organist rehearsing, the organ playing.

And we could run over and watch when there was a wedding going on and going to school. We walked down this boulevard with all the four rows of trees, and then through another park near the post office, and then up to the school, of course, another park, which was sort of like the center of town, past the theater and up the side street. To our high school. And which was again a school just for girls and a school for boys was across the street. And.

The school also I liked right away.

It was a very good, very well recognized school in Germany. And as I heard, quite difficult and demanding. So I had my struggles there again with math, but everything else was no problem.

My father too, could walk to his work, which he enjoyed a lot. He walked through the same boulevard under the trees and it was so pretty in the spring. They were linden trees. And then through the other old fashioned park with a monument to the poet Kleist, after whom our school was named and who lived in that city.

There were some old fashioned. Buildings from the seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds. And they were all restored and looking very nice. And then you came to a modern post office building with bricks.

There were a lot of brick buildings there because the city was an old, uh, Hansa city, which was the Hansa was a trade union, uh, which had started at the seacoast cities with their shipping. And it was started to have extra ships hired as protection against the pirates, and had been in operation since the late fourteen hundreds, fifteen hundred and included many big cities Hamburg, Bremen.

Lübeck. Stettin. Königsberg in Ostpreussen and dance, which is now dance in Poland, was one was called itself a free city, was an old hunter’s stud. And they all belonged to this, uh, this union, the Hansa, they called it.

It was originally ships flying, uh, plying their trade and, uh, protecting the merchants, protecting each other. And this is where the expression Lufthansa, uh, with the flying trade, got their name because luft means air. So it’s the Hansa of the air. That’s where the name Lufthansa comes from.

Well, it was one of those old Hansa cities, and it had a brick, uh, town hall, which was a very famous building. Beautiful, preserved in a big brick church at the marketplace, which was from about twelve hundred. Old Gothic church.

But heavy, heavy brick, real sturdy looking building. And this church became our church. Not the one that was next to our house. Simply because our music teacher, uh, was leader of the church choir there. And, uh. I soon joined the church choir. And since I was in the choir there, we all went to church there.

And I remember the Christmas Eve celebrations there. They used to have a. Steps coming down from the upper choir loft, not from the back of the church, but near the altar.

There was a enclosed section where There. I suppose women with children in the South, they had a room like that for women with children up there, and there were stairs leading down and we used to come down.

It was all dressed with garlands and spruce boughs, and we were coming down carrying candles in white gowns, being angels. And we were there were like about ten or twelve, twenty of us, all according to size.

And I was always the first angel because of my long hair. They wanted to have me because of my long braids. They wanted me to have in the first angel position, because my long hair, that was about all I could claim as far as being an angel, I suppose, but it was very pretty and impressive. With candles in our hands and we stood.

We would stand around the altar on Christmas Eve. And there were two huge Christmas trees in the church with real candles on them, because all the Christmas trees had real candles in those days. And it was an old, old church. And then when we were in the choir, we would be up on the balcony singing. And it echoes through those gothic arches.

There’s nothing like a real old church like that. There’s no church in New England that can replace that feeling. I’ve been hunting for it every Christmas, but I have not found it yet. It can’t be replaced because it’s the age that. Creates that feeling, I think. And there are even much older churches in Germany, as I later found out.

Uh, but this was the sort of home church because I did belong to the choir there, and because it was my teenage years and we were many years. Finally, in Frankfurt, which is the longest time that we stayed in one city in Germany. So. We loved this apartment. And this. This complex was really beautiful.

It was like a little castle when you looked at it from the park.

There was a unity to it because it was exactly built, like in a mirror fashion. And from on both sides of the garden, the president’s garden.

There were these walkways with, uh. Grape arbors, arbors over it so that you had these, this Italian feeling to it. And on the fence there were two or three little sculptures, so it looked almost like a little chateau.

But the local people had found a much better expression for it. They could see that this was this enclosed complex with the yard and the big chief in the middle. And they called it the carvacrol, which is an African expression meaning the home of the the Kaffirs in Africa. They built three or four little huts and then a fence around it, and that’s their possession.

So this was known as the Carvacrol or the Kras in Frankfurt. All you had to say, that’s where you lived and everybody knew where it was. So they had a more down to earth expression for it. And we got to feel at home real quick because at that age, kids make friends fast.

And I soon found one friend to play Indian with, which was my friend, uh, Dorothy or Dottie or Dodo, who also lived on the outskirts of town, near a romantic hollow called the Cow Pasture.

Well, this Cow Lane was a deep hollow, overgrown with vines and wild plants and a very romantic place. A real jungle to play. Uh. Uh. Trappers and Indians and explorers and such. And we were off again, playing there almost every afternoon in the summertime. And her father was also a journalist and, uh, writing for the local newspaper.

And her mother, uh, a very flamboyant type. Artsy type. She had a little brother who was not much in appearance. We didn’t bother much with him, and he didn’t bother us much and we were usually gone into our cow. Laying there and it was very rural out there. Another thing we liked was the stars. We used to go out late at night when we come home.

She used to walk me home, and then I used to walk her home. And how it goes with little girls that age endlessly. And we used to take a flashlight and beam it up to the stars and wish we had a telescope and look at stars and tried to learn the different constellations.

There was another thing we had with the stars, and my sister and I had the idea that there would be a trip to the moon in our lifetime. And we kept saying, we are going to meet in the year two thousand. We’re going to meet on the moon. And we figured out I would be seventy five and she would be seventy two, and which was not an impossible age, and if it was comfortable to travel by then, there was no reason why we shouldn’t be up on the moon in the year two thousand.

And we and our parents laughed and laughed and thought, yeah, dream on. You know, didn’t believe a word of it. And that was another hobby.

We had a teacher in geography, too. That was her big hobby, and we used to go out stargazing at night with the class and meet someplace at the schoolyard and set out for a little hike to go observe the stars. A lot of giggling and laughing going on too, but it was all very a very well rounded education we got. I don’t I just don’t think children today get that any more because there’s either not enough time or not enough emphasis on it. And.

I think they miss a lot by being allowed to choose their subjects because a lot of the subjects I didn’t, I would have never picked, I would have never cared for. And yet if you’re exposed to it, you find something and you find later on that something stuck. Nevertheless, something stuck in your brain.

And it gave you a lot of understanding when you want to read. For instance, later on, if you never had Greek mythology, you don’t even understand half of the things, half of the things that are mentioned in books, uh, half of the things that are mentioned in, uh, exploration. You don’t know why they name a certain mountain on the moon after a certain god, or why they name, uh, you don’t know why they name a sneaker.

Nike. And of course, in Greek it would have been Nike, but it means the goddess of victory. And naturally, when you’re in a sneaker, you are in competition as a sportsman and all these fine details, you don’t get them. It just it leaves you out of understanding a lot of the things around you, and all because you were allowed to to shut certain things out.

And I think it’s a shame because I think it cheats the younger, the younger generation out of, out of a part of their world, of our world and our past and heritage.

And I think that’s what makes me so angry, because I feel that they are so poor because of it. Not to mention the ones that can’t even read and never read. That’s a whole other subject.

But it was a strict school, but I never regretted going there.

And I have always realized in the meantime how lucky I was to be able to be there and to be able to be in that system. What little mass I knew I would not have learned any other place, I am sure. I would have just completely dropped out of the whole scene. We went to school from eight to quarter of two and sportswear in the afternoon, not during school hours. And art was on Saturday, Saturday morning and there was no such thing as a study period.

There was no time for it.

We had on certain semesters.

I remember in in the Grammar school we had started and we had crocheted a little vest for ourselves. Now we had to knit a sock with the heel and everything, which is quite a trick to do.

Well, we had to knit one sock and we never thank God. Asked if we had the second one because I didn’t have the patience, and I don’t think most of us had to to make a second one.

But we did learn to knit one sock, and we had, uh, later on. A short course in the sewing machine.

We had to make a pillowcase, which a pillowcase in Germany has buttons and button holes on the bottom so you can button it over the pillow. And that taught us buttonholes as well as sewing and sewing on buttons. A very useful thing to have. I don’t remember whether that there was an extra little, uh, course that was, I think, probably part of the art course.

For a certain time. And then we had music appreciation. That was another course, along with the singing, uh, where we had to listen to music and tell the different composers, uh, different manners apart and distinguish it and read notes after a fashion, uh, outside of the chorus. I don’t think most people got very, uh, good at reading notes, but, uh, certain things we were told.

And when we listened to, uh. For instance, a Bach cantata, he would give us the notes and watch whether we turned the page at the right time, which was quite difficult because some of them go with a hard tempo and just see if he had a general idea just what these little dots and stand for and where it goes up and where it goes down and, and the different speeds and the different marks for period of repetition.

We had to learn some of the Italian expression da capo and what that means. That was also going with music appreciation. And then you knew even if you did not get good at it, and even if you never went into music, you had an appreciation for what it meant to be a conductor, to be a player in an orchestra and and how involved it was.

And I think all these things just give you a wider range of understanding. And that’s what is missing today. And. Those are just the examples for for some of the things we did in school. And history of course, was my big favorite. I mean, we started with the Bronze Age, I think three times over when we got all through down to Napoleon and wherever. By that time, I wasn’t really interested anymore.

It was too modern for my taste. But. Then we start again and we would have summaries and we’d go over it from a different standpoint, and we learn more about the trade and more about the political aspects depending on our age.

But you had always these dates in front of you. And at the end of our schooling, there was an exam. You did not just graduate because you had made so many points. Point.

There was an exam that was written and there was an exam verbal. All the teachers sat in front of you and. You had to pass the exam to, to to be a graduate. You could fail. Uh, and but they usually warned you if you did. And there was a way to get out of school at fourteen or fifteen and go to middle school and go into a business course, or follow another course and get another kind of education. And usually you were warned at that time once, and then you were warned before, uh, if you were in trouble.

But it was not that easy. And this dreaded exam was, thank God, a long way off for us, yet so we could still play. And what we read in school, we read novels.

We had to learn about different poets and poems and, uh, memorize poems, read certain subjects, and, uh, of course, then we went to Shakespeare and we went through Shakespeare and German. Then we went to Shakespeare. Shakespeare again in English, and tried to figure out the Old English, but that was later on.

But when we read these novels, we were always inspired. We should act them out and put on plays and we should do this. And then we found a new friend for me, and that was Walt Disney World had recently lost her father and got into some difficulty with school and had been held back a class. So that’s how she came into my class.

She was actually a year older, and she had all these fabulous ideas about how how we could put on plays. So we were off playing again. And then we kind of found it more expedient. Or it started maybe during the. Yeah, it started in September. So it was winter getting on toward winter, and we played at my house in the cellar, and it just became more and more of a group.

There were more and more people coming to it, and my sister got into it, and that was our entertainment, the theater club, we called it, and we had more fun.

We had slowly but surely a whole supply of costumes and all the articles that we used. And and there was an endless supply of stories from what we learned in history and what we read in German and what we read in private by then, and what we saw in the movies. Movies was a big thing with me. Still loved the movies, went to the movies probably every other week. At least the last days in Berlin.

I remember my sister and I had gotten to the point where my parents would let us go to the matinee on Saturdays. Uh. Where they had Shirley Temple movies and, uh, cowboy movies and the newsreel, of course, with the rooster crowing, all American. And, uh. We saw, uh, Laurel and Hardy usually was one thing, and maybe some Mickey Mouse cartoon and, uh.

Uh, what they called a. Culture film, which was usually about either someplace in the world, somewhere, or it was about producing something. How they manufactured furniture or how they worked. I know how they made jewelry out of the precious stones or something like that.

It was a culture film. They called that a documentary. I would say they would call it today. And all this was included in the price of about fifty cents. You were you were gone all afternoon. And we had to go about three stations on the elevated trains to get to that movie house.

But we were allowed to go alone, my sister and I, on Saturday afternoon. And that was our big thing.

But it was only a short time while we were still in Berlin. And then that was the end of that. And now the problem was to get into the movies. We didn’t really like the kiddy stuff anymore, and the big stuff was raided, and there were a lot of movies that you had to be over fourteen, and even more that you had to be over seventeen, that we couldn’t go yet, and over eighteen and over twenty one.

And so a lot of them we were not allowed to see. And they always had the pictures hanging out in front of the movie house so you could see all these glass eight by ten glossies out of the scene scenes. And that’s what gave us the inspiration to all our plays. And we had fabulous stories there. We bought the whole script and then acted it out.

So there was wild. And then there was Robert Peel, who lived in a railroad complex on the other end of town. Her father was a railroader, too, and she was beautiful in art.

She was much better than I, even. I always liked to draw, but Pilar had that fashion swing to it. I mean, she really had talent. She always made a picture after we played one of our plays, he made a costume figure of each of us and they were really beautiful, and she decided to become a fashion designer real early in the game. She already knew that, in fact, she quit school earlier than in order to do this. And so we developed to be quite a gang playing in our place of the regular clique.

And I just enjoyed life, and I enjoyed school and I enjoyed vacations. And in nineteen thirty nine we went to the vacation at, at the, at the North Sea on that island. And we went I the nice part was we made a walk with my dad, and my sister and I both remember how we walked through the. tidal flats during the ebb tide, from one from one island to another to this other village, and had a dinner there, and then walked back again.

And they had these big carts with horses and real high, high wheels to go through the shallow pools. And you could go by carriage, too, back and forth. And of course, uh, they always, uh, the tour guide always looked around and said, well, we have to hurry. We have about twenty minutes behind. And my father said he’s just doing that to make it more exciting for the tourists. And he lagged behind as much as he wanted. And, uh, it was really, uh, a lovely vacation, except that we wanted to go.

I remembered to. An island in the North Sea where everybody went to the huge cliffs and there was quite a scenic thing, and it made a boat trip there, and we couldn’t do it because they told us that that was now a restricted area, which was very strange. And so and we came home after that vacation and back to school.

There were things on the news every day about unrest in Poland between the Germans and the Polish, and that they were they had killed some Germans and that they had killed some Polish people. And there were. Bloody demonstrations and general unrest in Poland. And it was over.

The talk and the fear that Germany would claim a part of Poland in order to unite East Prussia with Germany.

There was this part after World War One that they cut through Germany right there, which was called the Polish Corridor, and that was so that the Polish people would have a sea port. And they claimed that this was the whole start of the arguments, and everybody shook their head because you never had heard anything up to then about any unrests and couldn’t believe that this was really true, because the Germans had been living there and had been living in Russia, even there, where German settlements and there never was any news of of any bad blood there.

And anyway, by September. First we knew what it was all about in Germany. You went back to school sometime in August. You didn’t wait till Labor Day, like over here.

The vacations were shorter, and here the big vacation. And by the time it was September, we all found out what the story was because they started the war in Poland and our troops were marching fast and conquering one village in one city after another, and it was all over in a few days. And that’s what they called the blitzkrieg, which means lightning war.

It was over before it began, practically. And no wonder they found out later that the Polish troops were still on horseback with lances, and they were riding against Hitler’s tanks. So it was easy to figure out why it was over so quick.

The only problem was that the Polish people had packed with England.

The War Begins — Poland, England, and the First Rations

And that was an agreement that if one of the countries was attacked, the other country would help and stand by them. So England was duty bound to stand by Poland.

And I think Hitler. Thought that since the meeting with Chamberlain went off that time so well, he kind of expected that England would not do anything again, like they were inactive when he invaded Czechoslovakia. They had not done anything about the Rhineland. They hadn’t done anything about Austria. And he was just daring to get away with Poland, too.

Well, England declared war on Germany. And my mother was very upset the first day of the war in Poland.

She was going around with big, brown, frightened eyes and shaking her head and saying, this is the end of it. Now they have gone too far. I knew it, they would go too far. She always had sort of a sixth sense about things.

When my father talked that some people were holding up their carpets and stowing them in the cellar and putting silver in China away in trunks, she said, why bother? She says it’s ridiculous. She said the Polish people will be here no matter what you do, because this is all going to come to a bad end.

And she said, this will be just like the other war. She says, you wait. There will be hunger and there’ll be ration tickets, and we’re going to get the whole thing back. Because they were not satisfied with what they had. And my sister said, what are we going to do? It’s a good thing that peeps have died, she said during vacation, because we wouldn’t be able to feed them if we don’t get enough butter and eggs. Milk.

Well, this pizza was a little special.

We had found fallen out of his nest and we had raised him on boiled eggs. And brought him along. So he was getting some sparse feathers and all.

When we were ready to leave on our vacation that year. We took him along to the North Sea in his cage, and it was quite amusing.

He was sitting in the railroad compartment with us and traveling in his covered cage, and got to be where he had quite a nice feathers and could fly around in the cage and we left, let them out in the womb a couple of times and we finally decided, but he’d always come back on my mother’s shoulder. He finally decided it was time to let him go before we had to bring him back in the cage again.

My father said he’ll probably develop into an osprey if he’s here on the sea coast. You know, a big sea eagle. And everybody laughed, and he was always hollering for food. So one morning as we went to the beach, we had taken him with us and opened the cage and carefully put him into the tree. So he should learn now that that’s where his place was, and hopefully learn from the other birds how to look for his own food.

Well, about four or five hours later, we came back from the beach to go back to our home and we heard him from far away. We heard him. Beep beep beep. And my sister says there’s pizza. What are we going to do with him? My mother said nothing. He’s okay. He just has to learn that he’s hungry. He’ll find something to eat.

Well, my sister said I’ll put him some crumbs down below. Maybe that will at least help him and teach him.

Well, she was busy putting her cookies and crumbs on the floor there on the ground, and my mother was standing there looking through the branches to see if she could see him. And he came flying down and said on my mother’s shoulder and peeped in her ear. Hungry?

So she says, well, see what happens if I walk away, if he goes back to the tree? No, he stayed right on my mother’s shoulder, came back into the house with us, and back in his cage, happy as a lark. So the next day we tried it again and the same thing happened. We could not get rid of pizza. He wanted to stay with us, but he did not eat bird food either.

We had tried bird seed. He wouldn’t eat it. So we just didn’t know what to do. Nobody had showed him how to eat bird seed and bird food. He ate crumbs, bread and egg. Boiled egg.

Well, we were pretty well at the end of our rope, and we didn’t know what to do. And we had to ask for eggs and buy eggs and ask the landlady to boil us eggs, for the bird had resigned to taking him back home, and he died suddenly before we went home.

We had a march into the dunes and had a big funeral procession.

He was buried in a big dune there at the North Sea island. And that’s why my sister said, it’s a good thing we don’t. We’re not going to have people that we couldn’t feed him and we all laughed.

But my mother didn’t laugh.

My mother was very worried. She she did not approve of this at all. And she kept shaking her head and was against the whole thing. And. It turned out just as bad as the boys. England declared war, and the war was holding out longer than they expected. And there was a terrible fight over the city. And we saw pictures in the newsreels.

Of course, then my father started going to the movies for the newsreels, and. We saw the marvelous Luftwaffe in the air, shooting down all the planes and what little planes there were, resisting them in the big blue tanks they had built. And? It was still a time that everybody was completely mind boggled and, uh, uh, upset about it and could not quite grasp the whole situation for a while.

It it just happened too soon. And we could not understand how, how this turnabout could have happened so quick. And then they marched into France. And now we realize that this was not going to be a blitzkrieg and over with. And my father said, well. It brings back memories going back into France.

And I hope they do better than in World War one, because the war in France was the most hopeless Yes, of World War two, because there was nothing but people sitting in trenches and murdering each other on consecutive days on this side. One next day, the other side. And it led to, in the end, to nothing.

And so he followed all these reports from the front very anxiously. And he was still going to school and getting a little speeches in our history classes in German class. We get little speeches ahead of time from from our class teacher about the war and about we had to learn how to read maps and, and and name the different generals and show interest in reading the newspapers now and bringing in reports and clippings and all this in a very professional and detached way and never any comments, never any remarks being made about anything.

Very careful about that.

It was quite obvious among the pupils, however, there were some that were strongly Nazi in their families and some who were strongly against it in their families. I found out there were a lot of things you found out in the schoolyard being discussed now that nobody had even thought about before, or given any thought or given any voice to before. Uh, for instance, uh, we had two Jewish girls in our class who were gone ever since the night they had the big riots and really They smashed all the store fronts and there was some ruckus going on and we didn’t really know what it was all about.

But I remember my sister getting slapped by my mother because she came home and said the synagogue was burning, and she had a book, a prayer book that she had picked up. And my mother hit her and said, you weren’t supposed to take anything that belongs to somebody’s church. And why don’t you stay away from some places?

And why do you even go see such things?

And she was really upset. And she says, this is the last store. She said, and you get to fighting about religion, then it’s really bad. And she says Hitler has never been interested in religion. And. He says he is going to destroy all religion with his thoughts. And she didn’t approve of that at all.

And that now it seemed like everything dawned, dawned on you in retrospect. And all of a sudden it became on a whole new meaning that Hitler and Eva weren’t there anymore in our class. And where had they gone and. And my girlfriend, who had three brothers and her father in the party and was always very knowledgeable about things with Hitler. They were they were Hitler people. She explained that they had all been told in thirty eight to leave the country. And she says, I guess they left.

But nobody had any idea what was really going on. And.

I remember the day.

When they marched into Paris.

My father was sitting there by the radio at that time. He had a nice new radio.

It was grey, grey wood, still modern, beautiful thing.

But it was still my father, who chose all the stations and what we were listening to.

And I came home from school and my father had tears in his eyes. And he says, the German troops just marched under the arc de Triomphe in Paris. And he said, this is a great moment for me because this is what we were all hoping for and what we fought for in World War One, and what should have been settled in World War One and didn’t get settled. Now it’s going to be fought all over again. Them. And he just shook his head and he didn’t really know he was moved by it. He said, I wish I could be there.

But he said it was too late and too long ago. And he sort of wished, I think, thinking back of that last years that had been so happy for them.

I think he sort of wish that they would not have stirred it up again. And he was very fearful of the future, I could tell. Also, he must have realized that now.

There was going to be a big demand for the railroads, you know, with all these. Different forces going on.

It was over in Poland, and it was all now in the West concentrated. And the next place it started up was in Africa. And you were going to have huge problems with transportation and big responsibility of supplying troops when when they started getting into Yugoslavia and Greece and. Then Italy declared itself on our side.

And Hitler had given South Tyrol to Italy in order to, to smooth over any disputed borders. And that was upsetting enough. And people were upset about that, but nevertheless, they considered each other friendly nations. And so you had to take certain losses, I guess. And people did not mention it much anymore.

But to think of all these lines of supplies that they were going to get into must have been quite overwhelming for somebody who was thinking in terms of railroading. And it, uh, it became monstrous, obviously. And then there was the ration tickets coming out, just as my mother had predicted. And they were generous in the beginning and nothing much to worry about yet, except that my sister.

Was the only one who got milk. Because you only got milk to age fourteen. And, uh, by that time I was, uh, thirteen going on fourteen. So that would cut me out and we would only have what little milk my sister got. And my mother was already worried about getting enough food in the house.

I remember she bought all the vegetables on the market that she could get at that time, and started to put up vegetables and glasses and fruit store apples. She put a big like a sandbox in the cellar, and what you did is you stuck carrots in it to keep carrots into the sand. And keep flour and oil on hand.

We had, uh. In the kitchen, the old kitchen buffet, the typical one that you moved around with you, the drawers and cabinets down, down below. And then up on top was like a hutch top with the glass. Glass doors for your China. And in between was your breadbox. Or a big fancy dish with for pastry or fruit.

And there were two boards that you could pull out and use for cutting boards. In the other corner there was a small buffet which had cabinets below, and draw a couple of doors, and up on top there were shelves with China drawers that were white and blue China and written on them there was a drawer for rice, flour, beans.

Farina. All these dry things, split peas and these things were all kept in doors. I suppose they held a kilo which is two pounds each. These big drawers were all up, and that was a typical kitchen.

It was all white, kitchen said. And then she had a table with a drawer pulled out with holes for two big wash bowls. And this was where you wash dishes. You had to heat the water and the rinse water, and you had two big bowls in these two openings. And when you were done with the dishes, you pushed it back and you had a work table with also another shelf underneath it for pots and pans.

And in Berlin we already had a sort of a sink cabinet with two stainless steel sinks in it. And also now a lot of houses had water heaters, small water heaters with gas that were right attached on the wall above the sink or the bathtub, and it heated the water instantly, which they still use today. And it’s very efficient and a very good system. I wish they would adopt it here, because you do not need to heat your whole boiler. If you just want to take a hot shower in the morning and at night.

The water heated almost instantly.

The gas would come on and the water would come out hot and it held about. Three gallons or so, three, four gallons and it would flow through being heated as you would go.

But we did not have that in Frankfort. We did not have a kitchen stove anymore, but a real modern gas stove.

But we did have in the rooms still the old tile stoves.

There was no other heat, I don’t think, but the tile stove in every home, which are very pretty and very cozy, because you can lean on them once they get warm and they throw a nice even heat, but they are more work. And so I can still remember my mother always being the first one up in the morning, in the winter and putting a little fire kindling in there, and some newspaper and putting in a couple of these briquettes which were stored in the cellar. And once they were glowing, you put another couple on top, scoot the oven door tight, and the thing would be warm all day. It would just go.

The whole tile stove would heat up and be warm all day until late at night. And that’s what we had in different colors according to the different styles in Frankfort. So in some respects it was more modern, but in some respects there were more old fashioned features.

We had a big pantry in that kitchen also.

We had a much bigger pantry again and a fly window, fly screen window toward the courtyard. And this is where my mother started the storing of things, expecting the big war. And one day my sister came home from school and she said, I hope you realize that this is strictly against the law because you are not supposed to hoard anything, because it will just make everything in shorter supply. If people do that and it’s not supposed to be done. So we were very surprised with the little one piping up like that.

But they were told these things in school. And, um, my father had ordered his, uh, food and his, uh, berry juices and his wine to get that into the cellar. And he received the same speech. And my sister said, you know, if you don’t listen to those rules, you will be going to the concentration camp.

Well, we had never heard that expression. And she explained it to us. She said it was like jail and you were supposed to think about your bad deeds. And also, when she looked at my mother, she says, you’re not supposed to always talk everything down and be so pessimistic. That is no longer allowed either, because that will only bring down the morale of the people. So here we sit around our dinner table and had to listen to these speeches from the little one. And of course, we were all laughing about it. And she was laughing afterwards too.

But you could tell that they had been told all these kids had been told in school. And. Our dinner was now very nice again because my father walked to work, as I said, and he came home every noontime around. Shortly after one o’clock, between one and one thirty he would be at home, and we would be there right around two o’clock. We would sit down to eat and.

After dinner, my father had a cup of coffee and a half a cigar and listened to the news or look in the newspaper for a while, and then he’d go back to work, and.

But he came home around eight. I mean, he worked later at night, but it was a very peaceful, restful dinner hour for us again every day. And it is these family meals that are what, to me represents home. These times we sat around the table, the four of us and my father always having the center of attention and teaching us this and that, telling us about a trip that he took someplace or whatever happened in the news or comments on other people’s behavior. And he always, for every situation, he had a Latin proverb that would fit the situation. I still remember he was always quoting things.

He was quoting some things from the Bible in Hebrew, and he would quote, uh, Homer in Greek, and I would be intrigued and try to pick it up and, and repeat it. And, and, uh, I thought it would be neat to learn Greek.

It was a very pretty sounding language to me. And Latin, of course.

I was sure I was going to take Latin, and my father would take me sometimes aside and get out his old student songbook with all these student songs, part of it in Latin and some of them in German. And a lot of them are very funny and amusing. And he’d play the lute.

And I got the idea that I wanted to play the lute, too. So I had, uh, not only piano lessons, but now went to lute lessons as well.

It was such a pretty thing. All beautiful inlaid wood and mother of pearl scrolls around it. And it sounded so pretty.

But it was, for me, difficult to learn. More difficult than the piano.

The funny part is, we had a cleaning lady that came once a week, and she used to bring her grandson along, and he called to sing the Jingguang, and he was deathly afraid of it. I guess it had fallen over one time and made a noise and scared him. And he was intrigued and scared, and he always wanted to go over and touch it and try it.

But at the same time he was scared.

We had a lot of fun about this thing with the gang and, uh. For a while also, my mother had a maid again, but she was a real. Awkward, uh, country person who did not fit in well at all. And, uh, soon after, most people lost their domestic help anyway because they were they were drafting women for work in factories for the war.

And and there were other opportunities. And, uh, it was not considered, uh. In good taste anymore to, to have domestic help either because everybody was supposed to have their own job. And Hitler’s saying was that your work is your sign of nobility and your badge of, of of independence. And this was a big thing. And the worst thing in the world, you could be somebody who did not work. And no matter what work you did, it did not matter at all what work you did.

But work was what gave you honor and worth and which was actually a good way. Morally, because everybody felt good about the work they did. That’s true. It really worked that way. Uh, and people were, I’m sure, more responsible and more, Conscientious in those days, but I’m sure this was not because of Hitler’s policy. That was, I think, the way in every country.

It was just a more moral upbringing at home that people got. There was. A lot of sayings, uh, to the effect that you should always be honest and you should always work hard. And if you saved your pennies, you would come to good things. And and all these little things were embroidered, for instance, on doilies and pillows and, and in the kitchen they had a towel rack that always had an embroidered front starched and ironed, and it always had embroidered some valuable saying like, if you save the pennies, the dollars will come off, things like that.

There was more. Attention paid to that raising children.

And I think it did have an effect. It’s something that is missing today. Lying. For instance, you were not supposed to lie. And we certainly, certainly were not supposed to steal.

It was unheard of that anybody would steal.

There was a huge thing about if a child took anything that was a big offense. So the parents did not defend you. If you got in trouble over things like that in school or with the police, the parents would be on the side of the authorities and you were in trouble twice for things like that.

There was no fooling around with the rules. And these dinner conversations.

I think. Was the place where I learned almost as much as in school about life and everything, and it changed after the war started. As time went by, it seemed like more and more of this private time and private talk was taken over by what happened in the war. And the war was taken over more and more of our private lives. And the only thing we had and I had especially, was my theater club and getting the girls together once or twice a week and coming to the house and playing either upstairs and, my God, what my poor mother put up with.

We had this whole box of costumes, and we used her makeup and we use the see the big entrance hall, for instance, which was kind of centrally located and had a lot of room.

There were not only the antler light fixture, but they were big staghorns around for my grandfather, the forest master. So it was a real kind of a stately hall that we used a lot for playing, and the salon we used for the castle and our imagination went just on. And then we had the cellar and the cellar.

Everybody had their little cubicle made out of two by four slats. And this was, of course, the jail and the dungeon and, and we had a cave under the stairs, under the cellar stairs. That was the cave. And when the mosquitoes got to bed, we’d light a fire for the smoke. And we also smoked cigarettes secretly by that time.

Once in a while, occasionally you had to have cigarettes if you wanted to really carry on a role in the American movies. Everybody smoked. You had to smoke or you were nothing. So we had this fire going one day. And the lady from upstairs came down with a broom with a wet rag attached to it and a bucket of water.

She was the the air raid helper for fire.

She was a fire warden. She came down and she raised heck with us about making a fire there, because it was all cement blocks and cement floors down.

There was no great big danger. They made a fire down there under the big kettle. We still had the big copper kettle where you boiled your wash on the old days down there. They made the fire and the kettle there all the time. And but she was really upset about it and my poor parents had to put up with all of this.

But we had a wonderful time.

We had we got to make a set designs and we got to making lighting with tissue paper, green lights for the jungle and red lights for the harem. And oh, it was fantastic.

We had beaded curtains and sequined scarves and all the things we could fish up and get from our aunts or from anybody. Uh, we had a wonderful time.

We had a fantasy world, I think. Into which we escaped from the harsh realities. I mean, any psychiatrist or psychiatrist now would immediately, uh. Get this, uh, reason for all this theater playing.

It was very simple.

We were escaping.

But we had a wonderful time doing it. And. About the same time now I was going to school, always past the theater, and we had a. Youth theater ring from school where you paid very little as a student and you had different groups. Some of them went Tuesday, some of them went Thursdays, and they filled the theater two or three times a week.

It was just all the students and very cheap and very reasonable. We got to see all the plays and the Christmas play.

Well, it was just enchanting with that snow sparkling and the blue lights, the blue lighting with the moonlight. Oh, and the little glowworms dancing in glowing costumes. Oh, I was transported and I said this is for me. So I said I wanted to take dancing lessons at the at the theatre. They had a dance studio there.

The local ballet ballerina and her husband. Ballet master. And my father said, okay, but you can’t have three different kinds. So you have to drop one or the other.

The piano or the lute or the or the dancing one or the one of them had to go. So I quit the lute again, and I went to dancing classes, and I was in the Christmas play the following year. And that was exciting.

It was wonderful. And this was much more important to me than. Anything else that was going on in school or in the world.

We had from the railroad a mardi Gras festival for the kids every year.

And I put on. A show. While they had to show different acts.

And I put on a minuet. Minuet, uh, with Aunt Utta and two other girls from the dancing class, and we made the costumes, and my father played the music, and then I made everybody said they wanted to have an extra number of me dancing.

Well, that was a huge success for me.

And I put on a jazzy dance, which they called a grotesque dance.

Well, it is grotesque when I look at the people dancing today. That’s the right word for it.

But I enjoyed that too.

It was kind of a swing music to it, but that was about the end of the jazz influence and the American movies, because from then on, we did not get any more American movies.

There was no more Shirley Temple And jazz music was considered decadent and was not permitted anymore. So I think we had, uh, when we were fourteen, we went to dancing school. Everybody went to the dance studio to learn ballroom dancing, and that was exciting because we had no contact with boys. This was the first contact we had with boys.

The boys from the boys school went to, and so that was an exciting time.

But I think we learned the foxtrot. We did learn the foxtrot.

I was accepted and, uh, some people were dancing the swing, but that was sort of half of it. And no mention of jitterbug at all. I guess I don’t know whether the jitterbug was even the rage yet. Then it was nineteen forty or so. And um, but there was a there were already restrictions on too much emphasis on dancing.

And there were restrictions on too much, uh, expense on dresses, on textiles. So we could not have gowns for our big ball and we could not, uh, you had to have a special permission to put on a ball or a dance evening. Except for if it was in the soldiers, uh, canteens. They were permitted to dance. They were already. There were.

There was always happening in the line of restrictions already. They were putting, uh, notes up in school where we had to go in case of air raid, who had to stay in school and who was close enough to still run home and they were putting a metal heavy metal doors across our cellar, windows everywhere to protect the cellars, and they were painting ours on the street. Big white arrows. And at first we couldn’t figure out what this was. Now again.

But it turned out they were pointing from the middle of the street to the place where the air raid shelter was in each house. So they figured when the rubble fell on the street and they were digging, they could tell just where the window was to get at the cellar.

The quickest way, which exactly did not serve to make you feel more comfortable. It got more serious, there’s no doubt about it. It’s got more serious every time you turned around. We had. A day in school or a week.

Well, there was a day.

There was big excitement. We came to school and there was no school, and we said there would be a there was room to be made for wounded coming from the east. And that was right in the beginning. And they put straw in all the classrooms and bedded the wounded in our school. And it was nice to have the day off and all the excitement.

But it was like that for about a week.

We had no school, and then we had to have afternoon classes the following week to catch up. So it was always, uh, something upsetting happening. We had, uh, our sports field, our stadium, uh, across the bridge there was a big old river going through Frankfort that went all the way into the Baltic Sea, and we had to go over this big bridge, walking to the stadium on the other side of the city. And this is where all the festivals now took place and all the school sport events. And we were tested, ah, twice a year.

We were tested for all our sport achievements, and we had to jump from the one meter board and the three meter board and the ten meter board and had to swim in a certain time. And it became a lot of work and pain and strain and the running and all our teachers, most of them old gentlemen and older ladies standing there in the heat, I can still see it suffering with us through all this sport business. It wasn’t easy. A lot of the younger teachers were gone by then drafted.

We had one lady who was had quite a history.

She was had been in Africa several times and had schools there, and she was quite an authority and a figure in the getting an association together for all the Germans in foreign countries. And there was a group called.

The club for the Germans in the, in abroad, and they collected money for them to help them out and to relieve.

I think some of them had probably been interned when the war came to. And there was, of course, fighting in Africa already the Afrika Korps was advancing at a rapid speed. And we saw it in the newsreels all the time. We saw how the soldiers were frying eggs on top of the tanks. They were so hot. And it was strange to think that these little farmer boys from Germany were now in Africa and going to all these places that I was dying to go to and see Tripoli and Carthage and, and all these ancient sites.

And I was just full of envy that they got to see all these places, and they were heading straight for Alexandria. And at the time we were reading about Caesar and Cleopatra and Egypt and all these things were going around in my head, I was determined I was going to go to Africa. They had a school. For to train you for the colonial life, where you learn to do carpentry and animal husbandry and all these things that a wife in the colony should know.

And I was really hoping to get to go there and find a husband and go to Africa. I never wanted to really go to America except to come over and see Indians.

But I wanted to go to Africa because it seemed much more reasonable since we had the German colonies over there. And that was one of my dreams.

And I was full of plans and full of dreams. Didn’t want to get married until late in life.

There was too much to do. And we had all this explorer ideas with my girlfriend there and our cow lane. We sometimes played outdoor games there, put on plays about jungle and all that, but now we were a gang of about four or five, six kids. All girls, of course. And the dancing lessons?

Well, the dance classes went by rather swift.

And I got my first kiss. And we had.

I had a tall blond guy who I didn’t care for.

He was rather boring. And. My girlfriend. Girlfriend. Her real name was Rotraut Pill, but she was called pill. She had her eye on my blond fella and we got the bright idea we were going to make them jealous and see if we couldn’t switch. And it worked all right for me.

But it didn’t work for her. And the little shorter guy was a fantastic piano player, and he when he came to pick me up, he always played the piano. And he got to talking to my dad. And, uh, it became quite a quite a nice, uh, friendship.

And I guess when the dancing school was over, we kissed a couple of times, but since we were not in school together. He went to the other school. He went not to the boys school across the street, which was the realistic gymnasium. He went to the humanistic gymnasium where they studied antiquities and languages heavy and other scientists sciences like astrology, astronomy. They prepared for things like that. Um, archaeology. They. I guess that’s what you call a literary career. More. Those were the humanist gymnasium, and everybody kind of looked down at them because they were sissies.

But I think I had, over a course of time, I’m three boyfriends from there, from that gymnasium. I also went out with the pillars, brother Arie.

But it did not last very long.

He was tall, with dark hair and brown eyes, very curly hair. And he said later on, well, when he took me to the movies, I was interested in the movie. And if he went to the ice cream parlor, I was interested in the ice cream, but I wasn’t interested in him, which showed a lot of insight because I really wasn’t. I found I really found boys at that age rather boring.

War at Home — School, Propaganda, and Young Love

Eating period with Eric was brought about by the movies too, because I made him a compliment to my girlfriend. I said that he reminded me of Mario, who was the hero of a fascist youth movie that we all had to see, and he had the brown eyes and the kind of stand up hair. Curly hair that this star had.

And he got, of course, in the movie, he jumped off the truck and got shot. And, uh, all the teenage kids, uh, were sobbing in the audience. And we had also a movie about a Hitler Youth named Quex, who was, of course, a blond German boy whose father was a communist and beat him and made him sing the international song, and that was a very tearful story also.

And anyway, I had mentioned that he reminded me of this Mario and also this. This comparison was not so far fetched because, as it turned out, Eric did volunteer at a very young age to go to the Army branch of the SS and enlisted before he ever, uh, got out of high school. He’s the one that later told me that, uh, we had to split anyway because, uh, he had gone, uh, on in a training school and was hoping to be an officer.

And as such, in the SS, he would have to marry a woman that was blonde and blue eyed, and he was going out, uh, with a girl in my class who had long blond pigtails and blue eyes and made me feel like sort of a reject German.

But I didn’t not really care. As far as the dating, I was not really interested, and I really mainly loved all of the family of my girlfriend. She had actually three brothers. They were still in class, still was going from the Navy, Hitler Youth, right into the Navy, and he played the seaman chanteys on his, uh, what we call a skipper piano.

That is an accordion. And his father also was in the Navy and played that kind of music. And his father had gray hair like mine, too. And his mother had black hair. And very, very delicate white skin and blue eyes. And she was quiet and sweet like my mother, and she came from a Dutch aristocracy background and was mightily teased by all her children about that, because this was not the aristocracy, was not aristocracy was not popular during Hitler’s time.

That was not cool. Just as the nobility, uh, which also, uh, included most of the big shots in the army and the officer corps, they did not think very highly of Hitler either. So it was sort of a mutual, uh, standoff as far as that goes. There never was much love lost between the nobility and the Nazi party.

And they all looked kind of down at Hitler because, uh, Europe has always been a lot more class conscious than America. And, uh, No matter if you were a Hitler and conquered the world, you were what you were born. And he was the paper hanger and they never forgot it. And that’s the way it is.

But anyway, they, um, this family with all the boys, uh, it was nice for me to be, uh, getting to know boys that age a little closer in the family atmosphere, I think.

I think it was a definite advantage for me, having grown up with just my sister all my life.

And I love to be over there. They always played music after supper. And all three of them, the boys and my girlfriend, uh, played, um. And the bigger kids, they played, um, the Hawaiian guitar, which is the guitar laid flat on your on your lap, and you had a metal thing that you put over the frets and dragged it along and it gave it that ringing sound, which to me was just wonderful.

My father thought it was a horrible thing to do to a fine instrument, like a guitar or a lute, but that was the modern idea. And the brother, the oldest brother, Klaus, was a movie fan like me. And he dressed like it. He always had a hat like Clark Gable and a white scarf, and played the piano and played jazz tunes and showtunes from New York. And that was very interesting. Fascinating. And of course, there was another smaller girl named Inga, which seemed to have been a change of life. Baby.

She was much younger and having five children. Uh Peeler’s mother had gotten the mother cross, which I didn’t mention he had. Hitler was very much in favor of motherhood. And if you had four, five children or more, you got a mother cross from this date with, of course, a, I imagine a cash money premium to go with this. And they were, uh, very, uh, uh, progressive and very much for Hitler.

The whole family. And it was tragic as how it turned out later on. Uh, because, uh, till went down with the ship and Klaus was drafted late because he was sickly with the lungs and died of pneumonia on the front. And Eric got wounded. Eric was in a field hospital, and his mother was permitted to come visit him and stayed with him until he died. And so she lost all her sons. And, um, later, after the war, they also took the father away because of being a Nazi sympathizer and threw him in jail for investigations. Although he had been working at the railroad offices just like my dad, he did.

He was too old to go in the service or to do anything like that, actually.

But they all had to go through, uh, tests and checkups, and he caught typhoid or whatever in prison and died. So the poor mother lost all. He lost all the men in the family during the war and after.

And I lost contact afterwards with them.

When I came to America.

But Piller made her way to the theater through the art school and fashion drawings, and she became a set designer on the television in West Berlin, and got quite famous, actually, and married a stage director and had quite a successful career.

It was funny.

There was one day it was while I was still sort of going out with Eric a few times. They had a big show put on by the Navy, Hitler Youth, and I remember all the boys sitting on the stage with their little sailor uniforms, and they were sitting like Indian fashion, and the background was a silhouette of a ship against an orange and golden sky like the sunset and the sea. They had made with transparent paper blue or illuminated from the back. And they were singing the Hawaiian songs. Some seamen songs. Some Hawaiian songs. They were singing Aloha, hey!

And the draft on the stage made that background sway in the breeze. So it looked like the ocean was really moving. And the ship was really swaying on the waves. And there were palm trees in the foreground.

And I looked at it and it was such a beautiful moment.

We were all there together, watching the boys on the stage, my girlfriend and mother and father and the little inger.

And I said to myself, this is just one short moment And it will never happen again. We will never be together like this again. And such a short time afterwards, we were all gone. Our different ways and our different faiths we all had. And every time I hear that song, I think of that moment. There is a stage.

It was dreamy.

It was one of those. Truly memorable moments. It seemed like a. We became more and more aware of the fact that we are not going to stay the way they were. And I, I believe that this is what makes childhood happy is that you have no perception of that. It will ever change, and you have this happy go lucky attitude that things are going to stay the same every day.

And once you realize that, uh, how time goes by and how how these moments are all happening over a period of time and they will never come again, and there will be an end to it. Then childhood is over. And this is the feeling that we started to, to have. And we were about fourteen or fifteen years old only. Yeah, I must have been turning fourteen because this was the time also when we were going to confirmation classes. That was another big controversy.

There were just a few people who still stuck to religion and managed to get to church once in a while, and in general in in school, the other kids made fun of you, and the ones that were going to confirmation class were definitely made fun of.

But I remember having a discussion in the yard and peeler was one of them.

Of course, she did not believe in religion. And said it was all a plot and to make poor people happy and keep the masses satisfied and whatever. And she said, you can’t prove it.

And I said, no, but neither can anybody prove that it is not so.

And I said, and if you think that it might be so, then don’t you admit that if it really is true, then it would be one of the most important things in life. In fact, it would be the biggest thing on earth if somebody could guarantee you it really was true and nobody would turn away from it. And of course, she had to admit.

And I said, well, this is what you have to take at face. And you choose to make it your face, because the whole act of choosing it is one of the noble things that people can do and have been done, have been doing, and has been done ever since the history of mankind. And I’m not going to turn away from it.

I was not totally convinced.

I was full of doubts like you are at that age. You’re almost too young, really, to have confirmation, I think at fourteen.

But I said, you have to make the first step and trust that the other stuff will follow.

We had a very nice teacher.

We had a wonderful young pastor who was had been drafted while we were having our classes, and we managed to get him out of his camp before he left for the front and had him come and do our confirmation, or the big letter to the to the district commander that we wanted to have him, and they actually did let him go.

It was one of the minor miracles that happened still in the early years.

I remember Pastor Winkler came for our confirmation, and the other minor miracle was that I did actually have a new black velvet dress for my confirmation, and I wanted to buy.

Of course, my mother wanted to buy me black shoes, but we couldn’t find any black ones.

And I liked a pair of navy blue ones with a little red piping. So much that she said it’s only one day for the confirmation by the ones you like. It might be the last shoes that you’ll ever be able to buy. And so we took our ration tickets and we bought that pair of shoes for me. And there was a little beaded turquoise and black beaded collar.

It was displayed.

And I said, oh, I would love to have that on my velvet dress.

After the confirmation, I could wear that on my dress. And my mother splurged and bought me the little collar.

And I think for the next six years, that was the dress.

I had another dress out of royal blue taffeta that my mother had made a short dress it for my my dancing, our dancing party at the end of dance class. We weren’t allowed to have gowns, but we could have short dresses. And she bought the material and had it made.

And I had that for years and years afterwards. In fact, it was my dress for my engagement party and for many, many parties. As a young wife, I had my blue dress. And then after that it was just dresses cut down for my mother’s old dresses. She made embroidered peasant blouses out of old sheets.

My sister and I and the underwear. I just got a letter from my sister. She went to a museum in Berlin and she said they had our underwear there, our little middy with the buttons on the side and the elastics with the buttonholes That fitted on that. And there was a button on our long ribbed stockings. So you could adjust this elastic with the buttonholes in it. And we wore that until we were eighteen, twenty. That was what we had.

We had no ladies underwear. We always had these little bloomers and these little middies and these horrible ribbed stockings with the darns and the heels and the knees. And you were supposed to wear them too. You were not allowed to go with knee socks. Once it got cold, it was still the same way in Frankfurt. Also, the ice cream store closed in the winter.

It was a big deal when when we used to come meandering home after school in the springtime, and they finally opened the ice cream shop and we could get their ice.

It was just two square waffles with ice in between, like an ice cream sandwich they made in a little metal holder and there were no cones. They didn’t have ice cream cones.

We had the fancy ice cream in the cafe and in the hotel. You could have that in the winter too. They were, of course, in the silver goblets and with waffles on top and doilies underneath and the whole works.

It was beautiful.

But soon, because of the ration tickets, all these things got, uh, diminished and less and less anyway.

There was an Italian, uh, ice cream place that we had in town, uh, that made fabulous fruit ices and that disappeared. This was all just a season or two. And then, uh, because every time, uh, you did something like that, you had to turn in sugar tickets and if you went to have cake, you had to put in white flour tickets and sugar tickets and sometimes even butter tickets for every piece of cake you ordered.

And you couldn’t do that anymore when you were already marking the butter in slices Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and marking the loaf of bread for the different days. Who gets everybody gets one two slices of bread.

It was getting harder and harder with the food, but I remember my father always saying to my mother, this was a wonderful meal. Even when we started out eating only the one pot dinners in the big soup plates, the one pot dinners that we used to eat one Sunday and give the pound gift to the welfare like Hitler proposed.

We were now eating that most, most days A ourselves. And you did not hear much about welfare anymore, except they were collecting in the winter. They had winter welfare that we had to stand on the street corner and sell the toys for the Christmas tree, and tried to fill up our metal boxes with gifts for the welfare.

And the grown ups used to complain about it, how they could impose on us kids to stand there in the cold by the hour and rattle our boxes and beg from people. And still, I think it when you think about it now, it was a good way because you didn’t let the government decide everything with welfare, and it made all the people conscious of the fact that there was help to be done.

But then I remember soon afterwards it turned out that we were not helping the welfare anymore. They were actually collecting knitted and woolen scarves and knitted knitted goods and pullovers and and socks for the army, because when they started going into Russia, it turned out they had not provided enough in the line of warm clothes.

Apparently thinking that it would be over as quick as it was in Poland. And it was pretty near disaster, because they were having boxes everywhere, and everybody was shipping and mailing boxes, and all the women were knitting, and everybody was going through their sweaters and pullovers and gloves and gloves, whatever you had. And then they were collecting skis, even for the troops.

My father’s old skis and my father’s beautiful new skis that were stained kind of a mahogany color. They were gorgeous. They all went off to the pond, and it was those things that kept you aware, always very aware of what was going on.

There was no such thing as being able to overlook it. And then, of course. Came the bombs. And the alarms. I don’t remember the date when it was that we got a bomb in France, but it was fairly early in the war. And it was strange. I woke up at night, and I had been dreaming that there were cats outside fighting and yelling. And when I slowly came to, I realized the yowling was not cat, but was the siren going up and down?

And then with the next thought, I realized that this was no longer drill, that this was real. And my hands began to shake and my arms began to shake, and I could hardly get into my pants and my clothes. And my mother came coming down the hall. With a flashlight for everybody. Getting everybody out of the bedroom. Making us take our little suitcases we had packed every day. They were sitting under the table in the big entrance hall.

And I said, the cat.

The cat.

We had our cat, Peter, then a big Peter, who was the son of my first cat, which we had boarded out on the farm, and she had many, many, many children and grandchildren. And this Peter was one of them we brought home from vacation.

It was a huge cat, a big head, a great height. Or it will fight for smart as a whip and spoiled. He got the hang of it from the.

After the first two times going down in the air raid shelter, he just slept all around the thermos bottle.

The thermos bottle was sitting on the table in the entrance foyer, and he just wrapped himself around that and slept. And whenever we went in the cellar, we picked up the thermos and we picked up Peter and we were down in the cellar.

But I was scared.

It was the first time we heard the deafening roar of the anti-aircraft guns, the infamous flak. And? When he came back, I played the next night and said, Dear God, don’t let them come again. Make them go away.

But they came anyway. And they kept coming. And we got alarmed every time.

There were different districts of alarm, and every time they went over Berlin and came over a certain, uh, boundary in the circle of defense. Every time they crossed one of the planes, crossed that circle. We got an alarm automatically. That’s how it was. So we got a lot of alarms without bombs from Berlin.

But we knew what was happening in Berlin. And we had. Heard, of course, what was going on in Britain and in the Rhineland.

It was a terrible bombing they had there, and pretty soon they were sending transports of children away to the country, out of the city district. And pretty soon they were sending whole families. Whole families of refugees were being put up in people’s houses in the East.

We had two, uh, two or three guest rooms under the eaves in the in those apartments.

I think we had. Two and they had one, or we had one and they had two.

There were several rooms upstairs, and we had to open them up and let these people move in.

It was a couple moving in. From the Rhineland who had lost their apartment and everything they had.

The lady had on a fur coat, and he was carrying a small suitcase and all they had. And they were very nice people.

He was a professor, and she had had, uh, a colon cancer the first time I ever heard of it.

She was had she had one of those bags, and he kept saying how difficult it is always going to be for his wife. And all he was always worried about was his wife. So day after day, we sat by the radio and listen to the news at noontime and how they were bombing in the Rhineland, where all the industry and the factories in Germany were located in the industrial region of West Germany, and how more and more people just had to lose their homes and had to go and be boarded somewhere as refugees.

And the children were sent away in the country, in children’s homes. And, uh, how our troops were. First had been so victorious in Africa and how they now were beaten back by the English in Africa. And we could not contain our hold on Africa. How they were doing. In Norway and Sweden and Norway, uh, that was Denmark.

Sweden was neutral, uh, in Norway and Denmark. That was comical because they had the ski troops. From Austria, who had an edelweiss on their uniform. They had them ordered to be the occupation force in Norway, where, of course, a large part of the year is winter time. And they needed people experienced with skis.

And somebody wrote a very humorous book about what these people from, from Austria, with their strong dialect experienced there in Norway. And it was a real cute book that I remember my father used to read to us. I can still remember at night after supper, we used to sit in a small stove in order to preserve cold. We only heat it one of those little tiled stoves, and that was usually in my home, which was later my room.

It was a little den and I can remember my mother standing there ironing. And my father sitting by the stove with his feet up on a chair and reading to us, and he could imitate the dialect and reading to us from that story. And he read other books, too.

But there was one. It’s one of the cozy memories of my childhood, because the windows were draped and the shutters closed and everything was blackout outside. And every day. We hoped and prayed that they would not come again with the sirens in their planes and their flock shooting. It’s kind of a sharp banging, much louder than a fireworks salute.

They call them these big one big bangs and they go shortly behind each other. Big bang bang bang bang bang. And the whole city echoes from it. And the ground shakes. This is what it sounds like. And this is what I heard many a night. We would all sit around on chairs and benches in our little air raid shelter, so-called with an iron door in front of the cellar window.

And look at each other and wonder. And listen for bombs. And then one day we heard the first bombs, and we knew the difference between the flak and the bombs right away. And our eyes got bigger, and we were looking at each other. And my sister said, you don’t have to be afraid of the bombs when you hear them whistle. Those are the ones that don’t hit you.

The ones you don’t hear. That’s the ones you have to be afraid of.

Well, this was not much news to cheer us up. And so it went. Every night. Every other night, for one or two hours or three hours, we sat in the air raid shelter. And in the morning, just the same, we had to get up and go to school and go to work. And another bad thing about it was when you set up like that at night, you found out that you were hungry and there was nothing extra to eat because the rations were not considering nights and days.

If you ate something at night, you wouldn’t have it the next day. So that was an added hardship. And then the stories you heard about people getting hit and people’s houses getting hit, and the house falling on the seller and the all the coal in the cellar being in, on, on fire in, and the people being suffocated from the fumes and people that were buried under the rubble and had to eat the preserves for days and days and days until they died.

And people that took a direct hit and it ruptured their lungs, and they would all be sitting there with their mouth wide open. While these ghost stories didn’t help much to make us feel better. So it seems like the first time we heard the real bombs, it was almost a relief to finally find out what it was really like. And it was about two or three times. that this happened. And then one really hit right across the street.

I remember I was getting up from my seat because, um, the professor and his wife were arriving late in the cellar, and my mother said, we need an extra chair.

And I got up to go in the in the other room in the cellar to pick up a bench or a chair. We probably had been playing our theatre stuff down there and carried the chairs and the benches out. And so I felt guilty. And when I came back, I was walking right past the chimney with its little door, where the chimney sweep opens up and gets all the soot out when they come for their visit.

Well, that little door blew open.

There was a terrific crash across the street, and the little door blew open and made me black from head to foot. And when I came back in the cellar, I kind of stumbled and didn’t know why, but it had blown me against the door of the cellar, and I came back in the cellar with a chair still in my hand and set it down, and they all started laughing because I was black like a chimney sweep.

And it kind of relieved the tension because it was a terrible, terrible bang. And soon after that came the. All clear siren. And we got right up and said, this must have hit somewhere close here. And my sister said, I’ve got to run to the town hall because I’m supposed to be a courier, and I’m supposed to tell them that there was a hit here near here.

And my mother held her by the coat and said, you are not going anywhere out there, And I don’t care who ordered you and who said so. I’m your mother, and I’m saying you’re staying right here. If that is really a hit. They’ll know it. And you don’t have to be out on the street. And my mother was shaking and I was admiring my sister. How brave she was. Because I was fired, and I was supposed to go up every half hour in the attic and check for incendiary bombs.

And I was not very punctual and very enthused about that job at all, because all we had was little bags of sand on every, every stoop going up the stairs, and we were supposed to grab one of these bags and hold it over the bomb so the paper would burn through, and then the sand would fall out and distinguished, extinguished the bomb.

This was a plan, and it worked very well for a while, until they decided there must be something that the housewives had figured out. and to stop the bombs. And so they started putting explosives into the incendiary bombs, too. And that stopped it when they found out that that happened. And nobody stopped the firebombs at all anymore.

Well, I was still considering how brave my sister was, but my mother went right to the door and opened the door, and she almost fell back with fright, because at that moment, the people from across the street were standing in front of our door, and the woman in front had blood streaming all over her face, and her whole mouth looked like all the teeth had been ripped out. And it’s the one that my mother didn’t scream.

It was a terrible moment. And my mother said, come in. And her eyes were as big as saucers. I’ll never forget her eyes. And we all kind of took all these people in. There must have been four or five people from across the street, and they said there are much, many more of us, of us down across the street.

And we’ve got to get out and we’ve got to go somewhere. And we got to look for help. And they were kind of disoriented. And it turned out later on that this woman without the teeth had only lost her dentures, but she was bleeding heavily from the mouth. And the house was one of those houses built in a square block with a yard inside, a backyard courtyard inside.

And the front part of it was almost totally destroyed except for the front of it, so that later on we could not see much damage anymore.

The street did not look very strange because that front was preserved, but behind it all the all the apartments were damaged and they got all the people out of the cellar. And as far as I remember, there were no nobody was killed there, except that the little old lady that had her little cellar store down across from us, which was our favorite little variety shop.

They lived down there in the cellar, an old, old couple. And had you went down the cellar stairs and they had crackers and pickles and cookies and vegetables and several things. And they also had a side room where they still had the old fashioned Uh, mangled where you hold your wash. So my sister and I had been going down there with our wash to have it pressed under this, this box of stones that you rolled back and forth.

It was still a very old fashioned little store and very dear to us. She had the best cheese. Oh, and this was our little, little grandma we used to call her.

Well, little grandma’s apartment was not hurt either, and they were in the cellar anyway, and did not have to go far and were, thank God, alive.

Now, we took these people in the kitchen to wash them up.

When my mother got some coffee out and some tea, and we went through our house and there was really not much damage thanks to the shutters in front of our house. Except one shutter had blown off in our little tent. And had smashed the window and all the glass from the window. Had flown into our little sofa.

It was like a little, uh, it was a little old wrecking sofa that we were allowed to jump on. That little die van that we had afternoon naps on and my father sometimes stretched out on, and my mother maybe occasionally had a little nap on it.

It was stuck like a porcupine with splinters of the window pane. It could never, ever be used again.

We had to carry it out, and we hung blankets in front of the window. And that’s how we went to bed that night.

But at least it was not a room that we used for any other purpose. All our bedrooms were all right, our beds were okay, and we considered ourselves lucky. Next morning my mother said, well, uh, little grandma across the street hasn’t opened yet, and maybe she will not be open for a couple of days, but run to the milk store.

She said to my sister and see if you can get your milk. And my sister went out with the little milk pitcher in her hand and a change in the other hand, and in about two minutes she was back again, ringing the doorbell, and my mother said, what’s the matter? She says, I’m not going out there. I don’t think anybody should go out there. And she pointed out right to the stoop past our door and there.

My mother saw between our stoop and the corner of our house in the retaining wall toward the boulevard which which had about four steps going up and was constructed of fieldstones and topped off with a heavy cap stone cap.

It was a space about six or seven feet between the house and that retaining wall, and then the rows of trees there lay neatly fit in a bomb that did not explode. It lay there looking like a baby whale. It looked big to us. I don’t I couldn’t swear how big it was, but I know how big that space between the house and the wall was. And it looked huge to us. And there it was. And my mother turned white as a sheet, and she went right back in the house. And she grabbed my winter coat.

My sister’s winter coat put him on us and said, go out and go to the next door neighbors and ring the bell and tell them to get out of the house immediately.

Well, that’s what we did. To make a long story short, we had to leave the house for a few hours and had to defuse the bomb, and we were saved. Our life was spared because this bomb was a dud. And it would have exploded right within two feet. When you figure the corner of our house, it would have exploded two feet from my father’s piano and not very far from our cellar window at all. And that was our explanation for the horrible shudder that our house took when that bang happened.

There was a terrible shudder all over our house, too, And that must have been that bomb digging itself there, right into the Adolf Hitler Park corner by our house.

There was this beautiful rose garden that looked like little Versailles.

It was had clipped hedges and and clipped trees and gravel walks and rose beds. And there was that beast laying. And forever after, when I go by that corner. And I’ve been in my hometown a couple of times since, I can still see it laying there and thinking, boy, how close we came that night. And that was another one of the times that I had one of my close calls, and so did all of us in the cellar there. Then the next excitement was.

The soldiers they did not have. They had so many draftees and so many soldiers rolled into our town, and so many people going back and forth that they were asking people to invite soldiers for Sunday dinner. And my mother, of course, thought that was a great idea, and it gave her a chance to save up whatever little she had stored and splurged and spoiled spoiled the soldiers. And my father grumbled and was keeping a sharp eye on us girls.

But it was exciting. We met these young men every Sunday, and we would bring them back. And.

After the dinner and just in general give them a little home life, talk about their families. And and that’s how I got my first marriage proposal.

There was one that was kind of sweet on, But we both were always walking hand in hand with him. We used to go for a little walks after dinner. That was my father’s thing and see something of the town, or go for a walk toward the river and show them that there was a cliff. High, high cliff by the Oder river there near us, where there had been supposedly a Stone age settlement.

And years later, when I was in Berlin, I found in the German Museum that my friend was was running. They had made a special. Showcase down on the promenade of this cliff, and they indeed had found quite, quite a collection of Stone age potsherds and flintstone.

Bombs Overhead — The Sirens, the Shelters, and the Long Nights

The walk over the big bridge to the other side of town, where there was a high dam along the river. Because the Oder river flooded almost every fall, every spring, and uh, especially in the spring. And from the bridge you could see these big, heavy, uh, barges loaded with coal and and goods and agricultural products moving slowly down the river.

There were people, uh, these barging people were living on those boats, and that was their, uh, job. They did that for their living. They owned one of those big barges and went back and forth up and down the river with them. And on the other side was this high dam also had trees on it, like our boulevard. And there was a lovely walk, which I remember we did several times with these visiting soldiers. And, uh, that’s when this proposal happened.

There was one time we had three of them there for Sunday dinner. And of course, the proposing was not to me, but to my father because of my young age. And anyhow, it was the old fashioned way. And my father got a great big kick out of it. This one boy, Frederick, was a baker, and many times after, during the war and after the war, I thought how well I would have been off if I had only married that baker.

But this was only a fleeting thought dictated by my hungry stomach. And, uh, then we because we had the also we still had the empty room from because we did not have the maid. And so at one time we had a sergeant quartered in our empty room. There he was our border, and we had him for quite a while.

He was an older man, married, with children, and, well, he probably wasn’t all that old, but to us he seemed old. And, uh, a nice guy. And we didn’t see much. He just slept there. We didn’t see much of him otherwise, but he was there too. And we just had a lot of contact. And when these boys, a lot of times when these boys were shortly before shipping out, they would say, tell us when.

And we would go to the railroad station to wave goodbye. And so we very often found ourselves at the railroad station with all these soldiers and saying goodbye. And it was always a very cheerful affair that, uh, used to upset my mother quite a bit, but she got, uh. Quite a satisfaction out of being able to do this. And, um, we also had another job.

My sister and I, they had a big soup kitchen at the railroad station for people that arrived in town without having eaten for hours and days sometimes. And, uh, for the soldiers. And we were, and I still remember cooking kettles, huge kettles full of pea soup and beef stew and, and, uh, uh, turnip soup and whatever.

We had hot soup. And my father, uh, once in a while, mentioning to my mother that he didn’t really quite approve of it. Why they had to have little young girls doing this instead of having somebody like my mother working there. And my mother used to say, because she is a mother, to see some young girls. What do you think? These boys are not much older than the girls, and they would rather look at them than look at me. And she took the thing on the light side.

But my father was always very jealously guarding our behavior. And those were all the things that we got involved with the war. And soldiers, even though we did, fortunately did not have any brothers to have to go to war. And, um, I think my mother must have thought quite often how fortunate she was that she had us around. And we were all still home and safe. To a degree safe because of the air raids, of course, kept going on. And also my father getting these marriage proposals.

I remember one day there were four soldiers there.

The two of them had come to pick up the other two from our dinner table, and my father was playing the piano for them and gave them a little two hour recital there. And we were singing songs and and they were getting mellow and, and, uh, very appreciative of this family life. And my father told of the story of this, this young Friedrich that had proposed.

And, uh, at this the boys said, uh, Well, uh, we could, uh, put in our option right away, too, because we would not be against getting married if we come back and be a member of this family. In fact, the other one said, uh, is that all the daughters you have? I wish you had more of them. Uh, and, uh, we always my father always told that story. And that was not the only time he heard that story, either.

But it was because. Of our family life, I think of our father and mother. Everybody just loved the family, uh, atmosphere. We we had, and it made us feel good. And, um.

There were other activities, too, that still kept on going just as vigorously as before, through all the war and through all this. Tumultuous living of air raids at night, and the soldiers leaving and standing at the railroad station late in the evening. Uh, in the in the dark and with the lights and the smoke from the engines and and having all these soldiers with their equipment rattling around and being herded into those trains and all these impressions you had. And all this, of course, always. As soon as it was dark, it was very dark because of the blackout.

It was added to it in the winter, seemed endless and cold and long because of it, and it seemed like everything always happened sort of in black and white and in the dark and in the cold. In the winter. It seemed from then on, it seems to me, uh, there were other moments where also the Hitler Youth was still very active and more active than ever, and there was very much attention paid. Now that we should go to the rallies and keep the people’s morale up and make marches through town. And that’s what I remember in the daytime.

I had. Become a leader of a small group. And what they always practiced was, uh, a rolling commando. They used to call that they had a list of addresses that were close to each other in a sequence, and you had to give them a certain parole, and they would carry this paper and sign at certain times when you got it and when you transported it on, and see how long it would take to get this message all through everybody’s house and back to the to the clubhouse again and whatever that was useful for or not.

It was a good training in the discipline. I guess they thought because you got that paper, it was like a hot rock in your hand. You had to go and take it and get it out of there as quick as possible and run a lot with it, or take your bicycle. And it was supposed to teach us that that commando would supersede anything else that was on the agenda for the day, and that was not always very convenient.

In fact, it was very much in the way when we wanted to have a day of our playing theater, which we still did, also with more and more enthusiasm, because we were getting bigger and we had bigger imaginations and bigger sources of stories. And, uh, at that time, I remember one day There was a exotic dancer by the name of Liana, who danced rather bare bellied and bare legged and bare.

Uh, cut out tops. And and anyway, she was a little bit frowned upon, but she was a beautiful, beautiful woman with a beautiful body. And they made two movies. Uh, they were novels written by somebody in the style of, uh, Danielle Steele. I would say it was not high, high poetry.

But anyway, it was a great adventure story. And it was always in India with these, this world of maharajahs and maharanis and beautiful costumes and glittering, uh, materials in the costumes, because they used a lot of glitter in those days. because it will leave the black and white effect of the films. It gave a lot of life to it. And oh, it was so gorgeous to see all this splendor and this rich, rich, uh, palaces.

And I was dying to go.

But because of this dancer being a little bit on the nude side for, for for those days, it was, of course, completely X-rated.

There was no person under twenty one allowed in those movies.

Well, I was dying to go see them, and I begged and begged. What could I do? I said, the only thing I can convince them, I said to my dad, is, if you take me and I go with you, and I’m going to put on mommy’s hat, and you pretend that I am your young wife. And that way we would get away with it.

My father says, yeah, I guess that would work. And he consented to do it.

It was one of those things that my dad would do. We went to those two movies, and I had on my mother’s nylons and my shoes where my feet were. All the daughters always had bigger feet than the mothers.

But now I was wearing my mother’s shoes anyway.

It was the only shoes you could get. You couldn’t buy any. So her shoes fit me anyway. And here I was in high heels and her hat was a little veil. And everybody had to have a veil in front of the hat, or you were nobody.

The veil is what made it supposed to improve the look of your complexion. And there I was, and proud as a peacock on the arm of my father going into these movies.

There was a great moment. That was sort of the moment where I started to feel I was getting along, being an adult. And the movies were wonderful and we were playing and all these things. And around this time.

I had met Ingrid, my friend Ingrid, that I went finally to Egypt with after years and years and years. Ingrid’s father was a merchant, and he had been able to travel still quite a bit in spite of the war, and he had been somewhere in. Oh, I don’t know, in the Middle East how he managed to do it. I forget anyway, whether that had been before the war or what.

But he had this whom his true studies. He had two sitting room in a study, and the family was very well off. They had several branches of a business. They had one in Berlin and one in West Germany, and they had a drugstore business. And the family was kind of cool and businesslike. I always felt the relationship between her parents.

So he had these two rooms that were more or less his own rooms, and he had them all outfitted with these gorgeous things, souvenirs that he brought back. And they also had a movie camera. I saw pictures of Ingrid when she was only about a year or two old, and she was already in family movies, which just meant that you came from a well-to-do family if that happened in Germany in those days.

But now. They had movies that were in color. And this is what he bought. And he could do it because he had he owned the dog store. He had the connections where he could get a film, and he consented to make a movie from our theater group. Ingrid had two other friends that were interested in it, so our group now consisted of almost a dozen girls. And of course, as far as makeup, we had all the ingredients we wanted down in the drugstore. So there was another beautiful opportunity. And we made this exotic movie. Ingrid was a belly dancer and I was a chic, the mean chic, and oh, it was wonderful.

I remember we had the title and it started out with this big, big, huge, uh, Islamic brass candlestick with a candle, and the smoke was kind of curling and we had the smoke dissolve into Ingrid’s belly dancing. Oh, it was a masterpiece. I don’t know what ever happened to it, but it was the most wonderful thing in our lives, that movie. It didn’t take very long.

It was about a twenty minute movie.

But the time we spent making it, and it was such a big adventure that pushed everything around us into the background. Well. There came a day. When Walt was visiting with us. As she usually did after school.

We were talking and talking endlessly. And then I would bring her home, and then she would bring me a little piece back home again. And it used to go back and forth and back and forth all on foot.

But in those days, you did not have to worry about walking out on the street. Even in spite of the blackout, you never had to really worry about walking out on the street anywhere. That didn’t enter the picture.

My mother just wanted us to get to bed and get our rest before the alarm or before school time, and they got upset quite a bit with us.

But anyway, that night I had decided she was staying late.

We were doing something again. We made plaster masks of our faces for, uh, art, and then we decided to paint them like not painted with the eyeballs. And it was quite a project. We did several ones before because we kept getting the giggles and cracking the masks.

But anyway, that’s probably what we were doing, something like that. And it was late and the alarm went off and he was still in our house, and a sergeant was in his room home that night too, and we all had together in the in the entrance hall and head down into the cellar. And the shooting started and the bombs, it was one of the worst raids we had.

It was devastating. And also, this is why I kept saying, my mother, my mother, my mother, I want to go home. I want to go home. And there were several close hits that we could hear. And so finally. It was, I think, even before the all clear sounded that Sarge said, I’m going, let’s go. And it was getting a little quieter. He says, come on, I’ll go with you if you want to get home, I’ll bring you home.

And I think shortly after they left, the all clear. All clear sounded, and. It wasn’t very long afterwards. That guys came back with her mother. And her mother had barely escaped It was a very strange story. She had gone with most of the people down the stairs toward the cellar, and had turned around to get something else.

The little suitcase she forgot or something. And while she was upstairs in the apartment, in the hallway between the outer wall of the apartment and the inner courtyard wall of the apartment in the little court, in the little hallway where there was no window.

She was standing there when a bomb hit the house, hit blasted out the two apartments below her and the one above her. Devastated the cellar, although nobody got killed in the cellar. Just injured and completely devastated the house across the street.

At that time they were dropping what was called air mines and chain bombs. Those were bombs that they put together with chains so they would all hit and explode close together on one target. And that’s what everybody presumed. What happened at that apartment? It was another one of those square blocks with the inner courtyard.

And who lived there? But Griswold’s sister in law, her brother, was in the army by then, and he had come home on leave and married this girl whom her mother did not approve of. Not a bit. And she would not go to the wedding. She would not speak to her even though she was pregnant. Not a word. She would not soften and change her attitude.

She was very, very stubborn, old fashioned lady. And this sister in law of Walt’s was killed with her baby in that raid. This is what we found out the next day when we went back to help her mother clean up, and their apartment was the only thing that was not harmed much outside of the windows.

It was the strangest thing.

It was with two empty apartments below, just sitting up there on the fourth floor. And her mother, by a miracle, had been up there.

It was weird and it was odd. And all the time we were cleaning up and carrying buckets of plaster and rubble down the stairs into the yard. They were digging across the street, digging out the air raid shelter, and there were many people get dead and never found. They were finding her sister in law dead And. There were.

There was a dead body in the house next door. They had a, uh, workshop for gravestones. Beautiful engraved stones. Two bodies had been flying across the street into that small window. And in the cellar. Everybody roped off the cellar and said, don’t go down there.

But Kaiserwald and I had been down there already because her mother’s preserved. She wanted to check. How bad the damage was down there. And there were bodies everywhere.

And I can still see them digging and looking over there. And they would find a bed, an iron bedstead and drag people out by the legs. Way up high on the top floor.

There was a toilet. Toilet still hanging by the pipes, and the roll of toilet paper was waving in the wind.

It was like a doll house. You could see all the layers and the different floors, how the houses were papered and how they were painted, where the stairs went below.

It was just a heap of rubble.

It was a terrible sight that really brought home to us what a real bombing was like and what they were going through in Britain and in Berlin and in West Germany, in Hamburg, in Hamburg. They had a raid so often. And so many. And one toward the end of the war. In the inner city that destroyed the whole old part of the city.

So bad that they just put up brick walls across the streets in a ring all around the old part, and left sitting there because there was no hope of cleaning it out and no hope of getting out all the dead. And it was just like a forbidden zone for a while. And all these stories were now in our minds, not just pictures anymore and imaginations and wild dreams, but they had become reality. And, uh, things were not going well for the war anyway. By that time it was very sad.

It was so bad that it was forbidden to wear black because there were so many people wearing black that they just did not want to see it anymore. And, uh, the losses were getting heavier and heavier every day. Every day in the paper, you saw these, uh, obituary notices with the little Iron Cross for the soldiers.

And in Germany, the soldiers are not being brought home. They stay, usually where they are. They make field cemeteries, whatever region they are. And then after the war, they fixed these cemeteries up very nice and exchanged Changed. Sometimes the arrangements were between different nationalities and. It all finally had come home to us. And things were getting more sober.

We had in school.

We had every morning twenty minutes of political schooling where we had the maps, and we had to follow the, uh, the army, the movements of the army and how it stood and where the generals were and and be able to name that and, and give reports what was in the newspapers to show that we were following this like adult people and had an understanding of it. And, uh. it was about the time where we. Came to an age where there is a law in Germany, the children now have to be called by the title of ze.

The formal title that you use in Germany, you don’t call everybody you. Uh, when when you are speaking of somebody who is not introduced to you and you have not decided to call a good friend, you use the more formal ze. And the teachers were now required to use that with us. This also had a good effect because it made you feel automatically a lot more grown up.

I forget which grade it was that it started, but the grades, uh, in Germany where started out from sexta to winter dark water torture under lower secondary, upper secondary. And there was a lower prima and prima prima was your graduating class.

There was of course, everything is in Latin over there. And they still used to have the old, uh, uh, pupils. Uh, caps that the students wore, they were caps like the police has with black visors, but they were in bright colors in every grade, had a special color so that everybody in town could immediately see you went to the high school and what grade you were in?

Not everybody in Germany went to the high school. Like I said before, if you figured you didn’t make the grade, you could quit at fourteen and go to vocational school and finish a very nice education there. Become an assistant to some trade or and you could learn one. Usually you learn one language, usually English.

I think because of business and become business and merchandise, uh typists sort of thing. But, uh, it was the high schools. When you made your diploma at eighteen, you were supposed to be completely ready to enter college without further preparations or further tests. And the tests were strict and the tests were getting dangerously close to us.

Unfortunately, we now became aware of that too. This was another thing that weighed very heavy on our shoulders because everybody dreaded it to read it, and it was coming closer and closer, and the teachers were getting anxious to cram us, cram us. Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat and have everything crammed in the history, dates, the formulas, the mathematical equations, and the roots.

Or when I think of it, the logarithm tables are how we study, how we study and dreaded it. And me sweating out the mathematics. And there was not much glory anymore because we did not wear those student caps anymore, because Hitler had outlawed them as being too class conscious and starting bad feelings.

And the old student corps was frowned upon as well, for obviously the same reason. Also, a jazz music and dancing were forbidden too, except for on the premises where there were soldier recreation places. What it was. It was.

The war in the school.

And I was still doing my dancing lessons.

I was still doing that. That was about the only thing I still followed for quite a while. Russian dancing and tap and ballet, most of all, was my big love. But.

I had no hopes of getting anywhere with the dancing and I really did not want to. That was too restricted for me.

I had by that time made up my mind. I wanted to go to the theatre and most of all, to the movies, and which was, of course, a Totally unpractical and out of reach to him at this time of the world and at this time of my life and the way everything looked a hopeless thing.

I was still playing the piano, and I got to the point where I just started to play forehanded with my dad on occasion.

But I made many mistakes, and he used to be very exasperated and I couldn’t concentrate.

And I really did not have time because between school and my play times, there just wasn’t much room in my life. And I’m sure that my parents kind of shook their heads about that, but probably figured it was just as well because we did not have many other joys in our life. And when I think of the teenagers today going around the shopping malls and buying clothes and making trips. Uh, with their friends, uh, this just was it was everything was restricted.

We were still going on vacations. For two more years, but they were usually much shorter because I now had entered into the last three years of school. And the last three years you had, uh. A division in our high schools between the science branch and the economy branch and home economics was what my mother decided I should take.

I don’t know whether it came from the fact that all these soldier boys were getting anxious to get married, and it made her think, or whether it was simply that she wanted to improve our all around education because I was sadly lacking in anything else as far as the House is concerned. And she also found out that my sister was a lot more studious and studious than I was, and taken to sitting down and by the hour and studying and having the patience to see things through more than I did.

So they had figured out that my sister should go to the science branch, and I should go to the home economics branch, which was heavy on on. R on.

We had to learn to cook and baby care and child psychology, kindergarten, uh, occupations, uh, handicrafts.

But this was only a small part of it. This all had to be alongside of what we also had to do for taking the other tests. We did not drop a single other course for that, except that some of the heavier math was omitted. And the next language that you have for the last three years was Latin, and we did not get Latin.

These two courses were dropped for the home economics class, and my sister took Latin, which, uh, was a good idea because she wanted to go into pharmacy work, and she was kind of fascinated with medical things. And, I think chemistry. And she probably had the patience and the fortitude to stick things like that out. So I was furious because I wanted to, to learn, desperately wanted to learn Latin. I couldn’t imagine anybody going through life not knowing Latin.

And I knew a lot of the basics from just from my father and from, uh, my friends and from my sister later on. And it just seemed like a sort of a hole in my education that I did not actually take Latin in the end, but I enjoyed all the other courses, and I enjoyed being. I didn’t want to admit it, but I enjoyed being in the home economics because it was kind of fun. Uh, after so many hours in the classroom to walk over into the other branch, it was fixed up like a regular house.

We had a kitchen there and a dining room. Very modern Danish modern furniture.

The only problem was we did not have much to cook.

There was not much in the line of food to learn to cook, but we did some marvelous things, and we learned about calories and healthy diets, and learned about taking care of babies and other things to entertain children in kindergarten. And all this stuff to me was a lot of fun. We made clothes. And what was what little materials.

We had embroidery stitches and it was all real interesting how to put colors together in fashion and how to work on a pattern and sewing machine. And it was all at a at a British pretty shop. Speed. When you think that all this was crammed into just the last three years and this, uh, this, uh, course had a system whereby you gave.

I think six weeks of the big vacations or four weeks of the big vacations to go out at actual jobs, like on the job training. And you had to donate this time. And the first year was in the kindergarten.

The second year was, uh. In a household in the third year was in a household with the baby. So this kind of took out my took out my my vacation time two.

But nevertheless, we did go on trips to the mountains and managed to make brief visits to Aurora because we never stayed away from there, and it helped a lot with putting our supplies of food in the kitchen to these occasional raids on Aurora always brought good things like a piece of sausage or some milk, cream, butter, bread, potatoes.

Many times I went up with potatoes and many times we ended up kaiserwald and me with the family wash. Taking the train to water and washing all our clothes because we did not have enough soap, powder or wood to heat the kettle. And we would do the wash up there and then come back with a knapsack full of the clean wash, wash again.

Come back on the train. Some of the weekends we did that. Things were difficult. Everything was getting very difficult and a big chore and it kept you busy just living. And the kindergarten experience was fun.

The first one was quite near our house and I liked the little kids. I didn’t like all the scrubbing of the chairs and tables and the floors, and there was always scrubbing to do after the kids went home constantly cleaning.

But I enjoyed the kids and the whole situation and it was only for a short time.

The second they called that the practicum.

The second year I was hired as a. Maid to a countess.

The Countess had three daughters, and all the three daughters were in our school as well. And so now I was away from home. She had a big estate somewhere out in the Prussian, uh, province there, surrounding Berlin and Frankfurt. And it was about, uh. I would say about twelve miles out of town.

And I did this distance with my trusty bicycle, uh, every every morning and every night or every weekend.

I think I stayed, I had a room, and I only came home weekends.

I think that’s what it was.

But I remember peddling that bike through the woods and through the landscape, and it was kind of a nice feeling of freedom and independence.

And I was not very homesick because it was a short time and I was home in between, and quite often I could bring something.

We had a week of berry picking and a week of being in the henhouse and slaughtering little, uh, broilers by the dozens and two dozens and three dozens and ducks. And it was kind of, uh, rough education for me. One week I was in the kitchen, which I hated, but the other times I thought it was real neat being there and being able to always being called to the dinner table and everything was all set and ready and just being able to sit down and eat, that was nice.

And the Countess was a very, uh, robust lady. Full of activity. Her husband was kind of a. Wimp, I think, and a no good and a drinker. And he had been drafted and had some sort of a desk job somewhere and was away and but a couple of times he was there and they had big parties with all the local nobility, and there are a lot of them in Prussia, around Berlin, all these young Junkers or young noblemen, as they’re called here, they say Junkers, I guess the baron is from from Stein and from Finkenstein, and from, uh, Bredow and from Bülow and, and all these well-known names.

And they introduced me as. Oh, Barbara. Oh, I was our Barbara. They were very fond of me for some reason or another. And of course, I knew the three girls and they were there over the weekends. They were home and we used to giggle around the kitchen and there were only women there.

There was nobody else on that whole estate except women.

We had one French P.O.W. helping with the heavy, heavy work. He lived in a tower.

There was an old stone tower on the estate, and that’s where he lived. And he decreed for himself that he would have no contact other than getting the food sent out there. And he would do the work.

But he was not fraternizing in any way.

He was very proud and very distant. Would not drink from the bottle with all of us in the field. For instance, even though the Countess herself was in the field working with us.

She was doing everything we did.

She was amazing. I wonder what ever happened to that family after the war. It must have been probably pretty sad because the Russians probably drove them away. from the property.

But we used to deliver cherries.

We had big berry orchards and trees. And so whenever I went home on the weekend, it was nice. I could always bring something, maybe bring a little broiler, or bring a pail of berries or bring something home. At one time, they invited my parents to come out for the weekend and visit with them, and we all had coffee in the garden and it was a nice time and I liked being upstairs maid.

That’s what I liked the best. Just clean the pretty house and the pretty things and dust. And that week was the nicest. And that went by. And then we had to write a thesis about our experiences and formulate our opinions. For the practicum. And that was a different deal that was out in some village. And they had built a actually a little house for a kindergarten, and it was not finished yet.

The windows weren’t in yet, but it was summertime and there were forty five to fifty five children. All the children of the village were there and just uh, uh, two girls, some other girl and me from my class. And we had to deal with these children of all ages, from two to about. Some of them were twelve, and the ones that were twelve and were in the kindergarten were real bad apples, because they were obviously the ones that the people wanted out of their hair rather than helping.

There was some real rough boys, and the parents kept telling, telling us you just go and hit him. If they don’t obey, they’re used to it. Just don’t. take any sides and just treat them like they were your own and give them a good whack when they don’t behave.

But it was hard because we had all the little ones too, and we had to cook lunch and boil milk for them.

The milk still had to be boiled because there wasn’t any pasteurizing out in the country, so the fresh milk was boiled before anybody drank any or cooked with it.

We had to watch the milk didn’t burn every day and this big kettle. And we were alone there in that little house at night on the edge of the village. And as I said, the house had no windows and no way to lock it yet because it was not finished. And sometimes it rained in a little bit. So we had to go for our dinners into the village to the local inn.

Total War — Hunger, Rumors, and the Dark Secret

And the lady of the local inn obviously felt kind of bad for us because she tried to feed us well. She did not have much herself, I’m sure, but they did have rabbits, too, and meat and potatoes and vegetables, because it was out in the country and she made a sick soup with flour and lumps in it, which she called Clemens, which was a local dish, and put plenty of pork fat in it.

And we weren’t very keen on it, but it was food, and we ate and ate. And the result of that was that I came down with with jaundice and got sick and had to go home early for my service in the kindergarten, and I was relieved of my duties. And. That was the end of that experience. This last kindergarten experience was shared not only by the Home Economics division, but also by the science division in our school, because by this time now, the war had accelerated to such a point that they figured they needed the help to get the people free to do, get the harvest in and do all their chores.

And so we were in charge of kindergartens in Kaiserwald, and everybody in the science department was also running kindergarten.

And I think it was. We started earlier or later or we ran later because it seemed it was longer than just the four weeks. And we also did manage to go on vacation.

But I have a feeling that our vacations in those four years than in the later years were just trips that were done in within, I would say probably ten days no longer. And they were mostly trips that my father had picked out carefully. They were all in Austria. It seemed like we wanted to get away from from all the reminders of war and everyday life, and spent all these years.

We were about five years, I would say, in a world that we went to Austria and my father picked out all the different lakes and all the famous resorts and the different mountain ranges. And he Had these trips all figured out very cleverly, and I remember so well, hiking tours, uh, that we sometimes took the little train to the next station and then hiked over the top of the mountain into the next valley and saw two more lakes and had lunch up on the, uh, the high meadows with the, uh, cow herds.

And it was so beautiful. And even when it was raining, and I remember a couple of thunderstorms and they are bad in the mountains, and it rains for a couple of days. And even when it rained, it was, uh, it was all a special feeling to be there and go hiking and and tramping around. We went up to the. To the, uh, huts up above sometimes and stayed overnight and a couple of nights.

I remember I was on the on the road with my dad hiking, and my sister and my mother stayed down below.

It was getting too much for them, but I remember those things as the best times in those years. But. We went up to way down to Villa, which was almost on the border toward Italy and Yugoslavia in the last two years. And we went up a mountain there, and I remember we came to the border of Yugoslavia and Italy and Germany, and it was kind of a point where the borders met, and that my father had picked that out.

And we stayed overnight in a hot day and came down the next morning. And those were wonderful memories. these, but as I say, they were short and I kind of think that they probably were not more than than maybe ten day tours in trips we took, because there couldn’t have been that much time left between all these things we did. We usually stopped by for a few days in order to order to.

And I remember that distinctly because. I know for a couple of seasons we came to order, and every time we were there, there were two or three houses where people were crying. And the women, you could hear the women crying, and people were running in and out, and they had lost a husband or son and they wore black. They did not care what Hitler said. They wore black. And that’s how I know that in doing those last years.

We were in water, at least for a short period every year, and probably for the purpose of. Going down and seeing them and taking some potatoes and some vegetables, some beets and and, uh, maybe a hunk of sausage, a piece of bacon home with us to tide us over for another month. A little bit.

Well, it was strange because this was now helping my mother getting through the war, just as she had helped my mother’s mother going through World War One when she was a young girl. And it was a good friendship. And they came down for all our family holidays. They were with us and we were up there helping.

I remember we went up, uh, we had potato vacations in Germany for a week where everybody had to help digging potatoes.

And I remember going up there for potato vacation one year and we all helped digging the potatoes.

It was a time when everything accelerated. It seems to me that the war had been declared total war by then, in Hitler’s words. He said this will be total war. Everybody was working and he he recruited.

There were not enough men there. He recruited. Recruited all the women for the factories they got. From the occupied zones, they got women coming in to work in the factories. They had prisoners of war helping everywhere. And then he had this grandiose scheme that he was going to have all the Germans come back home in home into the Reich was the call. And they came. They really put them on trains. They came.

The people, the Germans from the Volga came home. And the people in. In the Ukraine and from Czechoslovakia. And they had wagon trains, actually some of them. And came back into Germany because we needed the people. And the workers. And where they lived was another question. People were doubling up. And it was getting very, very hard.

It was a difficult to get enough food and difficult with the sanitation of it.

I remember in Berlin my aunt, uh, had, uh, had her apartment bombed a couple of times.

The water had been shut off and they had also lost their toilets. And the people had a little coupons with the name, the name of the hotel or the school or the hospital that was nearest to them, and they were allowed to use the bathrooms there because there were so many houses that had no sanitation.

And even the if the lines were not damaged, we had ours only for gas using the gas for two hours a day. Everybody had to cook, or you had to do your ironing or whatever you wanted to do, just quick, as quick as you could in those two hours. And, and the electric light and the gas also was rationed during the day.

There were always times when there was just a, a curfew on energy. And so everything tightened up and everything got more concentrated. In all these respects.

We had several people, kids come in and join our our class in school that came from these territories. And they spoke different languages and they had to learn German while they were taking their classes with us. And they were kind of little lost souls and didn’t really know how it all fit in.

But a lot of them were glad to get out of the areas of the fighting and get back into the centre of of centre of Germany. And the people from the Rhineland were still running away from the worms. And in Berlin it was getting worse every day and it all came to a head. It seemed like also in school we were getting ready to go and taking our our final exams, which made school more hectic and more concentrated.

And also a lot of other things happened that made me, uh, get more into the my future plans with theater, because we were getting a teenage in the teenage years where we were. Having these. Cautious on, uh, stage actors and movie actors. And of course, we were still going to our theater rings for for the grown ups.

And the youth that was considered, uh, culture was very important. Hitler, I think, did not close one single theater, uh, because that was considered important. And they were all still going as long as they could, because a lot of them were burned out and damaged from the bombing. And then that was the end of it.

But as long as they could, they kept going. And our little theater was still going full tilt. And we were going there and, uh, we had, uh, guest appearances.

And I remember going to the railroad station and, uh, having flowers, and we had even a bottle of wine for one of these actors and went to see him afterwards and got autographs and these childish things we did. And we had a crush on one movie star and I, and we decided to write to him and lo and behold, he answered.

And we had told him about our club, and that we wanted to get what we wanted to achieve and in the theater and all that. And he actually invited us to come to Berlin and meet him. Unbelievable. All these exciting things all happened right in the middle of the war and right in the middle of all this pressure.

And it was like a dream. And it was like the theater was our dream world in all this bleakness and cold and and danger that was all around us. So we, of course, begged my father that he was going to come with us. He wouldn’t let us go alone to meet a young man in Berlin.

But he said, I’ll go with you. And he did. And Piller and I went to Berlin and met him in a restaurant.

We had a glass of wine.

We had something to eat. And it was very nice. And he said to me, he told Piller about the school in Berlin.

The art school. He she should go to. And what? What she should do there. And gave her some names. And he told me to come for an audition. in about two weeks or so or months.

And I had a date to go to Berlin, to the to the stage in Berlin. This was like going to New York, to Broadway. And and and give him an audition.

Well, that got me busy right away and took my mind off mass. Believe me. In a hurry. And it seems incredible now that all these things really happen.

The big problem was now how we were going to get back to Berlin again. Because in those days, uh, you could not just get on a train and use the train. You had to have permission to go for certain reasons. And you had to make out an application to get a ticket, which my father had arranged for that first trip.

But we couldn’t do that again. So we decided that Pilar was going to go and take her interview at the art school and take a test, and we made believe that we were both going to do this. Because it seemed an audition in the theater that did not seem like a very good, uh, sturdy reason. Her saying that she was going to make a career choice and probably leave school early to do this.

Uh, so here was a job. Concerned. We figured we would do better, and we got the applications and we left. And, uh, so now I had to go with Peter in the morning and sit. Through the morning tests for this. Art school. And what we did.

And I really took the tests to. They could have checked and found out that I really did this. Uh, we we drew a pencil drawing of a chair, an ordinary square kitchen chair, and we did a pencil drawing of, uh, draped cloth. In other words, something hard and something soft. And, uh, then they gave the others a test in making a costume. They gave him some materials and some stiff. Uh buckram. And some gauze and pins and, uh, tissue papers. And, uh, they had dummies there, and they were supposed to make costumes out of this stuff.

Well, this to me was a lot like, uh, sewing and and, uh, handcrafts and I was not that keen on it. So I slipped out on that and we went over to the theater afterwards and I had my audition. And, uh, I did, uh. A play about a monologue of Cleopatra, but not from Shakespeare.

I think it may have been Shaw, and it may have been a modern author of the day. I forget it was a very nice piece. And he asked me afterwards why I chose that piece.

And I said, well, I was very interested in that in the person. And, uh.

And I just loved the, the part of it, the, uh.

The monologue. And then he had me do, uh. Uh, question from from. Foust. Foust I did the prayer of great patience prayer when she discovered that she was pregnant. And, uh, that seemed to impress him more. And, of course, I think it’s a matter of immediate, uh, association. I mean, I was more a German Grecian than Cleopatra in those days.

I was just a young German girl. And anyway.

But she did say. He says, uh, that he definitely recommended that I stick with it. And he said there’s enough there that I can see and that you should stick with it. And, uh, he talked a little while, and then we went back home and swilled and decided to leave school early to finish the year and leave and go on that art school. And she did not make her diploma.

But started in her career, which gave her a good start, which was a smart move actually, because by that time we found out that and this was why we had these heavy sport tests already. We found out that we we did not have time enough to finish our last year, that they had moved us ahead to finish the year, our graduation in February, because of the heavy, uh, call for work in the farms every year and so that we would be ready to go and start on the farms in March and help with the farmers rather than wait until, uh, I think the school year usually ended after Easter, which would have put us in the camps in May, which in parts of Germany was too late to start on the farms.

So that that rumor was already going around. So we kind of knew that this was was waiting for us for the next year after graduation, and there wouldn’t be any big plans about any other schooling, because that was duty. You had to do it for one year.

It was just like the service was called the Labor service and the boys had to go to. They had. Not rifles, but spades that they marched in the parades and they did uh, uh, projects like dams and roads and, and, uh, regulating rivers and things like that. They were sort of troops, like you would say, almost like the National Guard or. the C.c.c..

Actually there were there was no I don’t think any shooting involved. Maybe later on, toward the end of the war, they may have started drilling them, but originally it was planned to be just a a work service, labor service for Fatherland. So these rumors were already going around and.

We were expected to finish up our schooling as quick as possible. I should mention here also that another reason for early departure was that in that last kindergarten service, she had, uh, refused to. They put her in an evangelical kindergarten from the church in town. which to me seems almost like an ironical move, and she refused to say any prayers because she was one of the new generation and did not believe in religion and prayer, and which goes to show that everybody knew the Nazi leanings

of her family, and it really was a rather unfair move to stick her in that particular kindergarten.

But anyway, that’s where she ended up and had a big fight and had to and finally quit. And so failed her her vacation practicum and got herself in all kinds of hot water that way also. So these little tragedies of private life happened right in the middle of the war, and even as late as the war was, it intensified.

It seemed like the days where my sister was following the, uh, U-boat captains anxiously and had pictures of of the heroes on the wall of her room. And you heard the fanfare in the radios when another victory was at sea, and you heard the fanfares when there was another victory with the air. And when these, uh, pilots got their Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaf and clusters with diamonds from Hitler.

And these glorious days, uh, seemed like already a long time away. And people were getting weary. And, uh, I it’s funny, I remember I had a dream one night that we were all fighting the Indians.

And I spoke about it to my parents.

I think probably at dinner time or whatever.

And I said, I don’t want to fight the Indians because I like the Indians.

And I could see this picture in my one of my Indian stories, where this Indian chief is sitting on his horse in the fort and saluting the Stars and stripes and and making peace and and. With the white people, white cavalry.

And I loved all these stories. And we had a writer who wrote dozens of books about the West and about adventures in the desert and adventures in the northeast and northwest of the country and had never been out of Germany, but he was had some friends who had been and had a large collection of of Indian artifacts. And we had made a trip with my dad.

It was near Dresden, the Indian Museum, and we had been with my dad to. A suburb of Berlin. They had rather a wild landscape where they had every year they had these khamai, which was this author. They had they called my festival and they put on several of his stories.

We had been there. So I, I did not want to have any war with America or the Indians. And right after I had this dream is when America entered the war. And of course, the Japanese were in it already anyhow, and were now on our side. And we had people from India. Indian troops from India with green turbans fighting on. On the German side, we had Ukrainians who hated the Russians.

We had Ukrainian troops fighting with the Germans.

We had the Finns.

Of course, the Finnish resisted the Russians fiercely. And we had they said later on, we had Irish volunteers because of their feelings about England. And it seemed like we had people from Spain, from the Spanish War, Spanish Civil War sympathizers, and probably all friends from from those days when when we sent volunteers, volunteers there, it was like a they would call it in the Bible, a grand confusion of the spirits of people, Which was what the situation today in the world reminds me of.

Everybody was up in arms and everybody was, uh, uh, getting weary of it. And these news that America ended the war.

I remember distinctly there were a lot of people who said, this will be the end, this this will finish it, because there’s just no way that a country as small as Germany could, uh, keep up that many friends being against them, because we were the whole world was against us, no matter how much ground we had.

You cannot, uh, fight the whole world for long. And we were getting too strung out. And Hitler called up the Volkssturm. They called it the Volkssturm was the last volunteers which We’re supposed to comprise men between sixteen and sixty, and they were not immediately used, but they were organized and put in uniforms, and they were sort of like reserves. Staying in Germany. And they were expected to do the last defense. And they were training and a lot of young boys volunteered.

I remember one day there were a group of Japanese people coming and giving speeches about the heroic efforts of the Japanese and about the kamikaze fighters.

It was a very moving program, and they showed it to us girls, too, because we were always having rallies to build up our spirits. And then they went over to the boys schools. And the result of the boys said almost our entire class of boys volunteered and was already gone from school also. So this is what happened.

It was like the old order in our civilian life was rapidly falling apart and being centralized toward the war effort, which is what Hitler intended.

I was doing those days that I think we had come back either from practicum or from vacation. One time I talked to my girlfriend.

The one that played Indian with me outside of town.

She was still with our group, and I said to her, you know, we ought to go. We missed the induction of.

The Hitler Youth girls into the the bigger group, the older group of Hitler, Hitler Youth girls and we are supposed to we had supposed to be appearing there and be inducted and so on in or and I said, we going to have to go. So we thought it that one day over to where they ever had the big assembly. And it was my first feeling of.

How dangerous it could be to show a lot of resistance and negligence toward this Nazi party, because when we two appeared, they treated us like traitors, like they were ready to shoot us. And they said we hadn’t been to any of the meetings, we hadn’t done anything. They had it right there on folders. We hadn’t been to any meetings. We hadn’t done anything. And and they understood that we were very busy in school and all that.

But it showed a very. Large amount of neglect on our parts. And they refused to induct us now. And and one of them said. To us, well, uh, and you can bear the consequences of whatever happens because you did not care. And we don’t care either. And we are dirty.

And I looked a little embarrassed at each other, and she kind of grinned, but we were a little scared. And then finally another leader came and joined us, and we had this little conference up there where there’s a big honcho Huncho was sitting and she said, well, what are your interests? She says, sir, are actually you are also eligible.

You could go to the to the Hitler Youth, uh, faith and beauty. Uh lead, which was uh, group that was specially created for, uh, the artists. Like I said, the theaters and everything was, uh, still going. And the people that were the free spirit, so to speak, more or less, and people that were interested in dancing and, uh, uh, speaking.

And they tried to put them together and I suppose, use them. For putting on. Shows and not really theatre shows, but at rallies. Make symbolic dances and speak. Heroic poems and such. And they were a group that did these exercises that we used to do in the stadium, and sort of in the spirit of these movies that they made about the Olympics.

The beautiful body and the beautiful movement and, uh, body building. And it was for, for girls starting at seventeen and up. And so this is what we joined. We decided we had to get out of that grace for one way or another, and we signed up for that. And we were out of the Hitler Youth And in in faith and beauty.

Uh. We did not go to many meetings there either, but they were not as finicky about who went to the meetings. However, we were called later on. Peeler had joined there too. We found out, and we were called later on to do a play. On one occasion we did a short play. About, um, what they call the shepherds play, the, uh, where people, uh, imitated the antique old days, sitting in the meadow and playing the flute and herding sheep.

And and it was done in the days of Marie Antoinette. And that was where the costumes were hoopskirts Skirts and it was charming.

It was a real charming in a fancy. Little play that they put on in Goethe’s summer villa in the summertime. You see a nobility and his friends, his artist friends. And he wrote several of these little plays for private use.

It was not a very long deal.

But anyway, we got into that and we were in there with two boys.

There were only two girls and two boys in the in the cast, and Piller and me were the girls, and we had these other two boys. And we started rehearsing.

Well, I developed a crush on this Helmut. And because he looked so cute in his blue velvet outfit, you know, they were these this fancy fancy outfit with buttons and knee pants and lace collars and and sort of like Mozart in the movie. And he looked adorable. Although my sister said he looked like a disgruntled rat was her opinion of him.

But I thought he was adorable and he turned out to be my boyfriend for a while and got to know my parents.

And I was invited to his house and it was developed from this play. And he was also from this other gymnasium.

He was from the Humanist Gymnasium and was finishing his education. And it just seemed like during those days we concentrated more and more.

It was like almost like a coincidence, too.

There was more concentration on art. Than ever before. So it was almost like I was pointed in that direction.

There was also a big heroic play put on by the whole city, and that was about a historic event that had happened where they had defied the Pope and fought a big battle and kept the town free, Hansa city, and defied the nobility and defied the Pope and lots of troops. And and it was very hard because they went in and were besieged.

And there was a monk, I remember in the story that even turned around and put on his sword and said, we’re all going to fight. And it was a great play, and it was done outdoors in the summertime, right on the steps of the City Hall and between the church and the city hall.

We had one part in the beginning where we were just supposed to come out of church late and run across the square, and then we had everybody had several parts, several changes of costume, and we changed in the town hall, uh, lobby down below in this old building and under the lights and in the summer evenings.

It was really a great experience. That went on for about two weeks.

I think we had that play going on, and we were wrapped up in that, and when we weren’t doing that, we were studying for our, uh, diploma exam because we now had to beat another two months because we were going to have it early. It seemed to, like I said, all accelerate and. Get more and more involved with the theatre, too. And. My friend Helmut came.

One day we went to Berlin, one time to a cousin of his who had a big amusement hall. And. We went there to eat and they had a wine festival or bock beer? No, it was in the fall.

It was a wine festival. And because I remember the train was heated and we came home late and we had a little wine because this was the funny part in Germany. Uh, he seemed old enough to drink anyway, even though he wasn’t. And besides, he was in his cousin’s place. but the parents could take the children.

If parents were with you, you could drink any time you wanted. In a restaurant in Germany, it was left up to the parents, even though they ordered you around with the ice cream by closing the stores in the winter. When it came to booze, they left it up to the parents. So we I remember we had some wine there and but everything was very up and up and straight between Helmut and me. Because this was supposed to be the code of the new order. You.

It was strictly honorable and you didn’t do anything wrong, and you didn’t do anything passionate. And then everything was done with shaking hands and and with a strict moral code. And we went as far as one kiss. And that was it. And this was what What everybody expected and and thought was good for the world, which it was, I think.

And he went to my dad and said that he had decided to enlist and he wanted had decided to be an officer career officer. And he had also decided that he wanted me to be his wife. So my father hemmed in heart and he said to me, you know, I know you like him, and I know he’s a very nice guy and he respects you. And but he says, I can’t for the life of me see you as the wife of an officer.

But however, he said, it’s a long way away. Who knows what the future will bring. And at this we parted with Helmut, and I got lots of letters from him. We did not get formally engaged or anything like that.

But he was my steady friend, and. Too many more important things happened anyway. Life just came in a whirl. And in. Like a storm. It seemed like because it was just getting so difficult with everything.

The trains were completely overloaded and there were not any new trains made. So they were running these old rattle traps to death, and refugees were still arriving daily. And the news from the front weren’t good. And we had started rehearsing with my friends, with my theatre group for a piece of.

I think it was Julius Caesar And we played one scene, the scene where he was put to death. We played during the big recess in the hall of our school, and we had the crazy idea we were going to pull this off without anybody catching us.

It was really funny and we did it too. We managed to do it.

It was a beautiful marble hall with big staircase coming down and columns.

It was perfect for the purpose. And the rest of it, the other two scenes we rehearsed for putting on for my dad’s sixtieth birthday.

It was going to be my. This was must have been, therefore must have been nineteen forty three, my dad’s sixtieth birthday. Yeah, my dad was getting sixty years old. And.

When we all settled down. For the evening afterwards, whatever we had.

My mother always fabricated something like a salad. Or we made people made whipped cream out of cream of wheat. And we made cake with carrots and cake with applesauce. And there were all kinds of secret recipes. What to do? We took. We cut up. If you had a potato. Potato was very precious. If we had a potato and you had company, you took a few slices of potato and threw them on the hot stove.

Even the tile stoves used to have like a little case, a little oven door and a little metal case up on top where you could put apples in it and make baked apples or keep your soup warm, or you could put your rice in there and let your rice. Cook through like a crock pot and you throw your potato, your little potato slices on there.

And you had a beautiful snack. And when, when I came to America and I saw that they were eating potato chips too, I thought it was ridiculous because they had all these other good things to eat. And this, this is what was the height of our luxury. And anyway, we found out that we’d forgotten something. And and I had to make a quick trip to town. He took the streetcar.

The streetcar was running right past the four rows of trees down our boulevard, there in the front of the row of houses.

And I can still hear today in my ear the sound of that streetcar.

There was a switch just a little bit away from our house, and they always slowed down before they hit that switch and the sound of that switch and and they kind of slowed down and then they speeded up. Coming by our house. I can still hear that sound day and night. They used to run the old yellow streetcars past our house. We took the streetcar into town, and while we were on the streetcar, it wasn’t very far, but we wanted to do it fast and get back to the party.

But in the streetcar, we heard that, uh. Stalingrad had fallen, and Kaiserwald and I decided right then and there we were not going to tell anybody until the next day, until after the party about what we heard.

But we were really depressed.

We were old enough to understand what it meant.

It was the beginning of the end.

Graduation Under Fire — The Last Winter of School

It was the springtime and.

The whole valley was flooded by the Oder river and frozen solid over. And that was the best time to go skating for us.

I had now sluice gates for my mother that she wore as a very young girl, and they were really too small for me and pinched like the Dickens. And it wouldn’t take fifteen minutes and my feet would be frozen stiff.

But we went. Nevertheless, it was so tempting. You could skate practically through the whole valley, in between the trees and out to the little coffee house where we could walk in the summertime and we could skate out there. In between the trees and over the little eddies where the, uh, grasses and cattails were sticking out of the ice. And sometimes the water had gone down a bit, and you were skating over a sheet of ice over air, and there was more ice underneath, and it cracked like glass for miles around. When you skated over it, it was wonderful.

It was not very dangerous because I don’t think the ice was anywhere at that place deep enough to drown.

But the problem was that it would have taken quite a while to get home. Being soaking wet would not have been a good idea.

I remembered from the time of the flood. The. Remarkable. Impression we got from ants that were stuck in these floods, and the floods lasted sometimes a week or two. They were long floods before they went down. And what happened was the ants apparently did they all stuck together in a lump. And clung to each other and bit each other tight. So they made like a little round ball of ants.

And I suppose it was a survival technique, because some of them would be, of course, on the bottom and drown, but the other ones on the top would float on this ball of ants. And it made me think. How these things clung together and survived. And so many died.

But some of them were saved by this message.

There was a lesson there somewhere, and it’s a picture in my mind that I’ve never forgotten.

Well, we were skating now, over the ice. And coming home freezing. Freezing with our fingers stiff and our legs stiff and frozen toes. And my mother would get a dish of snow and rub our feet and our hands and put our hands under her armpits to warm them up. And then we would sit by the cozy stove and play cards.

But there was no more hot cocoa, and we hadn’t seen chocolate in six years. And you couldn’t have an extra slice of bread for a snack. You could not even have an extra slice of bread with your soup at dinner time. He sometimes had. Soup with cream of wheat in it. Or beans. And turnips. That was the better days. And one of my favorites was when my mother had red beets and sliced cold red beets and fried potatoes.

But those were the special treats on seldom occasions, because what people did for frying was use coffee instead of oil for frying to make the potatoes like fried potatoes. And of course, the coffee was not coffee.

The coffee was this replacement coffee they called ersatz coffee. And everybody made fun of it. And it was made out of heaven knows what burnt grain. And some people said acorns or whatever they they created these things with. I knew they were making. They were talking about making marmalade out of rags, by bringing the rags back to the fiber content and then adding coloring and flavoring.

And it didn’t take much to convince you that yourself, that this could very well be possible, because it did not taste exactly great. Everything was saccharin instead of sugar. And the day seemed so far away when I used to go in school with nice lunches.

There were no more bananas coming from Cameroon. They were gone as much as the snappy Cameron, the colonial youth organization, they called them. And they had these southwestern hats like they have in Australia. They were like big cowboy hats tilted, you know, the brim tilted up on one side, and they looked so sharp and a short khaki pants and, uh.

The days of the rallies and.

The songs and the flags seemed long, long ago already. Because the short pants. That. Were so dominant originally to win in the afrikakorps. They wore short pants and the British wore short pants and. It did not seem as. Strange in Europe, because in Europe the boys wear short pants anyway until they have their confirmation.

The confirmation is probably the day where most of them got their first long pants suit. And. You got a fountain, gold fountain pen, and maybe a watch. That was. Those were the big gifts. I got a fountain pen.

I had a beautiful green one. Mont Blanc, probably.

The ones that you see in the advertising now for four hundred dollars, six hundred dollars, they sell them again, the old classic style with the little filler unit.

And I had a silver watch. And a silver watch. I went mountain hiking and it got altitude sickness. And it didn’t work right anymore, but it was a pretty watch.

But other than that, there were so few luxuries.

I had these skates, but I had no shoes.

I had my mother’s old shoes falling off my feet. And in the summertime, they had devised a way to make shoes out of canvas. And what they did is they put, um, wooden soles on it. On the shoes. They had two cuts in the sole in the front so that it would bend when you walked And Cosby and Wood. You got two different notes out of each foot. And when you walked down the street, it made a definite sound, like clip clop. They even made a popular song about the.

The pretty girl flip flop. Because everybody was wearing those shoes in the summertime. So we made do.

But we often thought back of the times it seemed so rich and wonderful. Then, like when I started my high school.

We had milk we could buy.

We had strawberry, chocolate and straight milk and little glass bottles.

We had a little round cap on the top with a little hole you punched through, and you put a straw in and drank it from the little milk bottles.

And I thought there had been so heavily and so grown up to be able to buy something in the school and have it there. And my mother used to buy it when I was a little kid in my grandmother’s town. They had a place where you could buy chocolate milk like that with a straw, and it was so elegant. And now I just thought all that milk and I had no milk. And the straw, of course, in our days, I could still get the taste of the stores.

The stores were really from made from straw. They were cut pieces of straw out of the field, sterilized and sanitized and put in packages. And that’s what you used for straws. That’s where the expression straw came from. They were not made out of plastic. And in my days. So even the store itself was a symbol of. Those luxury days, it seems, when we had. Supper.

We had often had milk that we put up in little dark blue glass bowls. I can still see it.

My mother would put it up for two days in the summertime, and the milk would be, uh, soured like yogurt. And this is what we had for supper with sugar and cinnamon on top. And my father used to crumble bread over it, and he loved that.

Well, we could not have this anymore. We could not have spared the bread, but we certainly did not have that much milk ever to go around for all of us. Sometimes we have one little bowl for my dad. And my mother always used to bring in the dinner and eat very little and say. I already had some in the kitchen while I was cooking and we all knew she was lying.

But we didn’t object because we were hungry. She made soup with grated potato in it. And maybe a piece of carrot floating here and there. Bali was a big thing and Bali all looked great.

It was always grey soup of some kind. Blood of turnips.

But the turnips were not that bad. I figured the turnips were at least some vegetable and. You got used to them and really did not dislike them. I never did.

But when there was nothing there but just one couple of big potato be rubbed in a whole soup pot of for four people. Then it was getting hard. And not even bread with it.

We had plenty of bread with it. It wouldn’t have been too bad, but the bread we needed for supper. Because that’s what the Germans ate for supper time. And it made it possible to divide up the food supplies that way, too. So the bread was for supper, and this is where we Usually invested our meet tickets to is to cold cuts because it went further. And we had that supplied us at suppertime, at least with a fairly full stomach and some butter and.

Of course, breakfast was again bread tickets. What else was there for breakfast? I remember my mother used to always have a cup of cocoa and a roll with butter for me for breakfast.

Well, there was neither cocoa nor extra butter nor extra roll at this time.

But we did have sometimes rolls and butter would be stretched, or we would have a bowl of oatmeal.

But it was really, from day to day a struggle of what to eat. And especially what to eat for Sunday and what to eat if you had guests.

It was getting to be an art to create things with the potato cakes and the cream of wheat whipped cream. And if you could get some fruit.

But helped us out a bit. Was our friendship with Erica, of course, had been going on all along.

We had been visiting them on weekends now and then, and they had built a new house on the outskirts of town, had a big garden there, and when we went out there, it was sort of during the harvest time.

It was always sort of like a grazing law. We would take a stroll through the garden and eat whatever we felt like, you know, fresh peas off the vine or some cherries off the tree. They used to have yellow, green and cherries.

I remember when I used to climb in the trees and eat my fill. Up. And they would give us a little bowl of berries or something special to supplement our diet. And her parents were still living in the country, so she had some good, uh, sausage there. I made a trip one time to during potato vacation to her relatives. Her mother came from her. Both her parents actually came from Poland. Even though they were Germans.

But she still had relatives in Poland.

And I remember one year, I forget when making a short trip out there for potato vacations and bringing home some hefty sacks of potatoes for her family and for me. And, uh, this landscape, there was nothing but fields and fields of beets. Fields and fields of potatoes and fields and fields of grain. Such farm country.

Rich, rich farm country. Food by the miles that I never seen in Thüringen or in central Germany. Because you do not have the open spaces they have in Poland. You looked from horizon to horizon all around you, and there was nothing but fields and these little, low little brick huts of little villages, gray stucco houses with a little church in the middle, squat little church in the middle, and some trees around the buildings and some trees around the church, and then open fields again.

People traveled by bicycle because it was ideal for bicycles. You never had a hill to worry about. It made a big. Impression on me.

I remember at the time.

There was something to remember that landscape we had around Berlin too. Those flats with the rich, rich fields. Do you remember that when you’re hungry, too? All those beets. Sugar beets to our sugar was made. All of the sugar beets.

There was no cane sugar. Cane sugar came from from the foreign countries. We hadn’t seen cane sugar in years and years and years, and neither did we see any candy. So Christmas. Christmases were very, very moderate, I should say the least. As far as gifts and goodies are concerned, if you could save through the year a few pounds of white flour and maybe some raisins that you got by trade from somewhere, there was a little black market going on from the soldiers that had furloughs, and they used to bring a little, little in and sell some once in a while.

And if you had friends, they would always exchange a few gifts, like that bag of almonds or raisins or soap. Toilet soap. Soap was always in short supply. And from shampoo. You hadn’t heard anything in years either. So the hair was always a mess because you had to just use your ordinary soap for washing your hair.

And little things like that. Silk stockings and Paris. You could trade. That was the total war. People’s whole attention was taken up by what we trade. What do we eat? What? What can we get? It was really terrible. You did not have time for anything else except for watching overhead at night when the bombs came.

And now that the Americans were in the war, they came in the daytime, too, because the air supremacy of the Germans was gone by then, and they just came whenever they pleased. And the bombing was going on fierce and fierce. Worse and worse. And in the Rhineland. And worse and worse in Berlin. And what happened now?

And the front began to break down in east, in the east and Russia. Now came the refugees from the east. They came out of East Prussia. Trainloads of people, of refugees arriving every day.

My sister was on the railroad station with my mother in the Red cross. And she told terrible things. She told of kids arriving without their parents in one suitcase and not knowing their names, and mothers and fathers crying for their kids and not knowing where they were. And. Horrible, horrible stories. People come streaming inside the country.

It was getting smaller and smaller and more crowded and more hungry every day. And you had the cold. Always a cold to fear. If there’s enough cold in the house to make it through the winter, to keep warm, at least in one room of the house. And the dark.

The dark all the time with that blackout. Those were the days when you really appreciated Christmas. Why they invented this festival of lights.

At that time of year, you could see. Why they made Christmas. Because it was the one thing that kept you going and glowing there through the months of December and January.

There were no light displays outside and no more light displays in the city.

But you had this glow, and everybody had a few candles and a few branches of spruce, and you sat together in the house singing. And even if you were lucky, an apple or two and some cookies that you created together. And a few gifts for Christmas. Something that you inherited or something that somebody had traded on the black market. And books would get books still.

But gifts in Germany were never the important part, it seems to me. When you were little kids, of course. Your toys.

But the gifts were not. They were number one. We never had this custom of wrapping gifts and sitting there screaming and opening gift after gift and tearing the papers.

The gifts were always set up under the tree, the way they were not wrapped, and a big dish with goodies. And that was it. And the tree was the big thing.

The tree was the big thing about Christmas and the Christmas church bells and the church bells could still ring. And it would be snow on the ground in the town. And the town was especially dark. And when you got into the church, it was dark in the church, except for those two Christmas trees by the altar.

And you learned to appreciate what it meant to have this light in the winter time. And the church bells would be humming at New Years, too. I used to go to a new modern little church with my dad on New Year’s Eve. They always had an organ concert there until midnight and then go home at midnight when the bells were ringing. We’d come home and we’d have a little punch bowl.

My mother made some potato salad or. And some, uh, older days we had herring salad.

Now, it was once in a while there was a delivery of herring, and you got one herring for two people. And they made a funny poem at that time, too, about how you had to look for your partner to get a herring because there was only half a herring per person. And so you had these little special teasers once in a while. And then that would be the time that my mother would say, oh, we’re going to herring salad. Got some cucumbers from somewhere. Pickles. Nuts. Very hard to come by. I don’t know where all the stuff went, because I’m sure the nut trees had just as many nuts as they ever had.

But the problem was the transportation too, because the transportation was completely taken up by all these soldiers going out and the refugees coming in.

There was train loads, and train problems must have been overwhelming. And it was hard for my father. I know, because when I think now that he was sixty in those days already. Anyway, there came a day. Right around that same time. That same summer. That my father got a visitor from one of his old student corps. Friends. And this man was a white Russian that had been there since the Russian Revolution, had been in Germany. And my father knew, and he told us about it, too.

He was sort of an intelligence officer, not really a spy, but intelligence officer. And he came and it was a very. Serious visit.

We had something short, quick to eat. And my mother left for the kitchen. And we came and asked us to come with her and. Finish cleaning up the kitchen and left. Closed the door. And they were sitting there at the dining table, talking. And my sister said, what’s going on?

And she went in to see if they were finished with their coffee to get the coffee cups, and my father just waved at her to go out again and close the door. And this had never happened. And, uh. So I went in a little while later to see what was the matter. Naturally, we wanted to get to the bottom of this.

And I opened the door. And my father. Had tears in his eyes. Crying and looking like, uh. What you would Say in a cliche, a broken man. Something had happened. Something terrible. Terrible had happened. And it just seemed like, I guess, for him, at that moment, his world had collapsed and the war came to an end. And.

It was the moment. I found out later that he had found out about the camps, what really happened at the concentration camp. He never told me any details in so many words.

But there were hints made and hints made in public now, so I could put two and two together.

And I think this is what had happened. And it must have, must have been devastating to him. because he was running the damn railroads. And he felt like he must have felt like he wanted to just run away.

And I know he had admired Hitler in the beginning a lot. And and for his big plans and his. His, um, insight in some of the political problems, like, uh, the idea that Europe should be united in a common goal, which is what they’re striving for now and gone along with a lot of his his thoughts. And for a friend like this friend coming and tell him there was no chance of saying this is just hearsay and this can’t be true.

There was no way for him to evade it. It hit him right square in the face. And of course, my mother’s eyes were the size of three sources. I could always tell by my mother’s eyes.

My mother.

My mother was totally shook up.

But not as much as my father. Because my mother always felt this was evil and this was evil going to be coming home to roost. She always accepted it as such. And. Things changed from then on. In our house. It was. uh, there was a just a busyness of. Daily living and, uh. Basically a giving up. On on the war and hopes and just wishing for it to be over like so many other people had done for years.

There was no more sense in it, in other words. You could. I could definitely feel it. And it was almost a a merciful thing.

I think that my father at that time was distracted by the news that they were going to close the railroad offices. And, uh, they were having the. Administration moved into a train further behind the border than where we were living. Into a smaller town.

And I guess they feared that bombs might be hitting. Their, uh, uh, government. Offices, district offices. And, uh, so they would be in a train where they could be moved quickly out of the way and, uh, pulled back as as as the front collapsed.

There were daily news in, in the radio about orderly retreat and planned, uh, tightening of the front. And they used all kinds of. Fancy words to describe it, but what it basically what we were running out of Russia and we were running now into Poland, and the Russians were overrunning East Prussia already. And.

My father must have been thinking of the. Fact that it was the last year. Of having a family vacation. Because in the following year I would be away. In camp and. So it was my last chance. And he had promised me when he had been in Rome and the Pope with my mother, he had come home and said, I’ll take you to Rome when you graduate on your graduation trip. I’ll take you to home. And because this was now just a. Impossible dream. Because. Such travel was no longer possible.

But we went back. He decided to go back to Villa. Way back down south and out and away. Far away from. From home and from the heat of the war.

And I said. If I’m going, I want to go with me, because she has never been on any trips. And next year, who knows, she may never go on one, because next year we’ll be all separated.

And I want to go and take you with me. So they talked it over and it was probably another just very short vacation as usual. And we went. And split up.

My mother took my sister and her girlfriend to the seashore. Some seashore, I forget even where they went, but they wanted to go to the sea and just be on the sand and take it easy and let us run around through the mountains, she said. And so we split up for the short vacation, and those were the last vacations we took. I went with Kaiserwald and. We went to Vienna to show her Vienna and then to Villa in that beautiful, uh. Lake in the beautiful hot springs. And there was a beautiful swimming pool for the hot springs.

It was gorgeous. Gorgeous aqua blue water. And of course, the lakes in Austria are usually very cold. Coming from those mountains and we got to see quite a few things.

It was one of those usual trips where my father stopped here and stopped there and show her this show or that, and really. Really enjoyed this.

But there must have been a sadness about him, because it seemed to me like this trip was not the same as the others. And of course, my mother wasn’t there either. And it was hasty. Probably is the word for it. And he already knew he had to go on this train and would not be home every night with us anymore because of that reason. And for me, it was time to get through school, so it was a big change in our life coming up.

But it was nice that we had had the chance and it was amazing that her mother consented to it.

We had her come down and talk to my parents to get permission and to arrange all of that. And. They, of course, did not have the financial means to do something like that. So my father said that it would be a good chance for us to do something like that before. School days were over.

And I said, you know, this is going to be a big his big plans for the future, and she’s going to be an archaeologist, and she’s going to go on digs and put these things in museums, and, and she’ll do all these things, and she is too bright to, you know, to settle down.

She was writing to one of her soldiers to.

And I said. One time we were talking about it, and I was making fun of it and talking about all these, uh, marriage ideas, and. I said, your your soldier is not even as tall as you, and he’s just a farmer, and you’re much too smart to tie yourself down.

And I said, hopefully he don’t come back. And that was a terrible thing to say, because it was a very short time after that that I got a letter from the soldier’s family telling her that he indeed was dead and wasn’t going to come back. I felt like a witch.

And I also got a letter. I got a letter from Helmut.

But he was all right. However, he wrote me. He says I’ve been doing so far well.

But he says I’m not planning to. I’m not planning to come back. I don’t want to come back. There is no hope for Germany and no hope for an officer in Germany. And my plans for the future are no longer valid.

And I just wish that I can make a good account of myself.

And I don’t plan to come back. And that’s more or less the last thing I heard from him. So. We knew what it had meant when they said the Russian front, Stalingrad fell and the Russian front was collapsing and the communication was collapsing as well. Apparently. He went and visited her soldier’s family. His wife never had a boyfriend after that anymore, as far as I know.

Well, there were lots of them out of our class in school.

There were lots of boys already dead. And we now went into our final exam sweating it out, sitting in front of the board with the verbal exam. And write an endless test. Tests, tests, tests, written tests in all subjects and feeling like it never got.

There was no end to the school and testing. But.

There was always a big graduation celebration, and the rule was that the class below the graduating class had to put on the entertainment. So we had done it the year before already, and had had a lot of fun and a lot of success with that. And that was nice because you had all the fun of putting on the show, but you had none of the sweat of going to the exam.

It was a nice part about, uh, the class below doing the The entertainment. Now came our turn and things looked bleaker than ever. We did not know what were we going to have to eat? What were we going to wear? What were we going to do? The boys were all gone.

There was going to be no dancing. So we hit upon the idea we were going to make a costume party. Since we didn’t have any boys, we could dress as boys and girls that way. So now we were working on our costumes in between, and as we finally went through all these tests and more and more of the exams were done, the more we got involved with the costumes and the fun of the party. And it was a great party.

It was so, so great and so consuming that I really don’t know much.

The graduation is not a big thing. You do not get caps and gowns over there. You pass and you get a speech from your director and the principal, and you have a goodbye speech from your class teacher, and. You get called up and you get your little paper, and that is the end of it.

And I almost failed because I completely failed my math. And it brought all my grades down.

But they said that I was saved by the fact that I was doing well in most all the other subjects, and that actually they did not like to see somebody fail as badly as I did in mass, but that they let it go and they felt very bad. I should have gone with with an excellent mark through my diploma, but I went only with the satisfactory because of the mass.

Well, it didn’t break my heart.

I was done anyway and it was over with. Hallelujah. And we had our party going on and it was a great night. And the costumes that are the costumes we came up were fantastic because everybody poured his little heart into it.

But what else are we going to do? We didn’t have much to eat, probably some little sandwiches and cookies lovingly donated by the home economics class, and that was about it.

Well, we had a good time. And just before it got dark, we all ran into the schoolyard one more time and took a picture. Everybody had their little picture camera there. No sort of photographer class pictures. Never heard of. Took those snapshots and came back in. And it was dark, getting dark. And we put on.

We were getting wild and we were put on some records and wanted to dance, because now it was sinking in that this was really the last time we would see each other, and we were getting pretty wild because we were getting a little blue and starting to really let loose. And just then came the alarm air raid, and we all had to run home.

The Labor Service Camp — Into the Austrian Borderlands

I must tell us. Meanwhile, the gymnasium also had their graduating graduating party, and we were involved with the Humanist Gymnasium once again because they had decided what to do for the party. A big ball was out, so they were putting on an opera. And apparently this thing had developed first by simply inviting some of the girls to sing.

And then it snowballed into a great big affair. They had almost all of our two upper grades in school involved in it. They had the choir involved in it from our school and their school, and they had even hired the The school orchestra, and had even hired the military orchestra from from our town garrison.

And they got into it. And this thing was was now a citywide affair. And that had developed and we had been rehearsing for a long time, and we were had been busy with this to doing backgrounds in art class and sewing costumes, which that was about. The, the highlight of my handicraft classes in, in that, in that economy home economics course, because we had the study of costumes over the ages, and we learned how to make an ancient Persian shirt and a Roman tunic, And how the Greeks are made these beautiful tunicas.

And and the color was the gathered pleats, and the and gathered along the whole bodies in the front. And how to cut these garments and study how they were made in ancient times.

It was fascinating. And anyway, then we started to make costumes and designed jewelry, and they were putting on all fours and uh. Which is, uh, beautiful melodious work. And, uh, it’s designed for women because the part of offerings is also sung by an older woman. And, uh, so it was a Collaboration a thing between the two schools. And we had several.

I think we had two or three girls singing each part for replacement, and we had several, uh, shows of it, and we were all learning the music.

We were all learning.

I was in the chorus, and I was in one of the dances of the Furies in one of the acts, and everybody had to, uh, pitch in, you know, for whatever they were talented with. And, uh, it turned out to be a great, great show. Everybody was singing the melodies. Everybody knew the words by heart. And, uh, this whole period of of having this Opera going on was just under the influence of, of of that beautiful music. And we all still, when we get together, sing, sing the melodies and smile and remember.

And I can still see the soldiers sitting there down in the orchestra section. In their uniforms. And the beautiful dagger that always had. That we made so lovingly. And.

I was. A blonde in a pale blue gown with silver cords. And the. And the sky.

The blue sky with white clouds increase.

It was magic.

It was absolutely magic. And so, after our graduation, this went on for quite a while. We all met still.

Of course, we had nothing to do all of a sudden, so we met almost every day and we were still singing the melodies and. Having fun with our costumes. Costumes were so elaborate. Ingrid and her friend, she had a friend from grammar school. They had come as the Medicis in satin and velvet drapes. Oh, it was opulent.

This is what I, of course, came as Pharaoh And wife and I had gotten heaven knows how from some backpack shelf in one of the stores, some gold cloths, and I walked totally golden colored ears and the jewelry we made and the fancy ceremonial, uh. Skirts that they wore with all the stones on it and the and the beautiful embroidery and and, uh, ornamentation and the headdresses and.

Oh, how we worked, how we worked and how we mistreated my mother’s sewing machine. And, well, this was all still very much with us. And we met every day and talked about it and reminisced, and we were waiting to be called off like soldiers. And we knew it was really and truly the end of all this fun.

And seriously, because since we were not going away privately to a college or something, we could not even say whether we would be able to meet on holidays or when we would meet again. Except for the one year when the one year was up, we all had to go for one year and the first one to be called was Kaiserwald. And my father knew the little village that she got elected to was one of those little villages way down in the flats of Prussia toward Poland, deep in the country.

But he knew where the local train stop was, and he said he would go, and I was going to go to and we would take we would take there and get her settled because it didn’t cost my father anything to ride the train. And he got us uneasy with this impending being drafted. It more or less first choice at the train seats. So after we got settled there, I made use of this privilege because I went to see next Ingrid and and her childhood chum there. Uh, they were in. In in the town where we used to go for the lilac blossoms. And there’s an old castle there. A bishop used to stay.

And I think I mentioned it before. We used to go with my dad when the lilacs bloomed all over that hill. And the nightingale, the nightingales were singing.

It was around the time he had. You could eat the white asparagus early in the spring, when the lilac was blooming, and we would go in the local inn and eat six plates of asparagus. Oh, my father loved it. Just asparagus and white asparagus and butter. And then in the evening. Woke up in the dusk. Woke up that little hill toward the bishop’s residence. And sit on a bench and under the lilacs. And listen to the nightingales.

But the moon coming up. How beautiful his voice quiet out there in the country. And if you ever, ever hear a nightingale, you’ll know it’s a nightingale. Nobody sings like that. It just was beautiful. And they were singing like their little breasts would burst. So beautiful. And how often I remember this evening. And here I was coming, getting off the train. Coming to visit a friend in camp. One of the first weekends. They were there because I was still not called up.

And I had to walk, I would say about four miles through the woods to the camp to get there on that little town.

And I was going to surprise him.

And I spent the whole afternoon with him. And had supper with them, looked around the camp and they were both deadly. Deadly scared and disgusted with the whole setup. They were so unhappy.

It was pitiful.

It was absolutely pitiful. They were homesick. They were sick of the discipline. They were taking it so hard.

And I said, it’s only for a year. And we’d be all done. You know, it’s not like we’re going to war and we don’t even know when it’s going to end. And they weren’t even that far from home.

But they hated it.

But they were so glad I came. We went up to their room and we had lit candles and told stories. And of course the other girls were in the same room too, and I met all of them. And then of course, it had gotten too late for my train. And it got dark. And one of the girls says, well, you know, I don’t know what you’re walking through that through the woods here. There is a Russian prisoner of war camp not far from here.

And I said, well, all right, because they’re locked up. And.

The moon was very bright.

I remember I was trying to be very brave, and I said, I got to make the last train on. My parents would be worried. So I set out hiking for four miles back through the dark woods just for that visit. And when I got there, as I said, I missed the train and I managed to get a phone call through and told them I was going to sit there and wait for the next train.

And the lady bought me a cup of herb tea, and I sat there and sat there for, I don’t know how many hours, three hours, probably waiting for the next local train to get home and then get home on past midnight. I finally got home, walking home from our railroad station home to my house, and thank God there wasn’t any alarm that night. During that time we had another raid.

I remember there was one raid where they were trying to hit the railroad station, and they hit a big barracks where they had all prisoners of war, and that was the only place they hit. I won. And the reason I wasn’t called up right away was because we had gotten the right idea. My other girlfriend, whom, you know, she sat beside me at the table in school, and we had gotten to be quite close because she had asked me to help her with getting old paper.

We were always collecting old tin cans, old paper, old bottles for the war effort and recycling, if you would call it today and you got stars and bonuses. Honorable mention if you were among the ones that bought the most.

Well, her father had shelves and shelves and shelves of old, uh, uh, ledgers in his factory building, and he said, you can clean them all out one at a time, one shelf at a time, and you can get credit for them, but it’s going to be very heavy. And she had this little hand cart and she asked me to come along. And we both get the credit. So we made many trips to that office.

I remember getting all these old ledgers from her dad and bringing them to school, and that’s when we hatched our plan. She said, uh, my dad found out that if you volunteer for the labor service, before you get called, before the time you get called. You can pick the place where you can go where you want to be. You get your choice. And so she said, why don’t we volunteer?

And get to pick the place rather than being here in the sticks. So we decided we were going to go to Austria because that was, for me, the dream place. I said there would be, like, going on vacation. Great idea. We volunteered for Austria. Two of us. So when we got called up, we had quite a load to go.

It was like almost a month later, after graduation, that we finally got on the on the road and on the way. And my dad came with us to this time Because that was quite a long trip. You had to go to Linz in the in the. Uh, district of Linz, in a little remote village near the Czech border.

The former Czech border. And, uh, right in the Bohemian woods, as they called it. Oh, my father laughed and said, well, it ain’t really Austria, but it’s going to be different. And he said, that is one corner we hadn’t seen yet. And supposedly in that area, they were supposed to be a lot of German villages and a lot of German people living right on that border region.

So we went off from the big train to the local train and off at the train station at the bigger, nearest, bigger village and then walking up to our village on foot. And it was springtime and the snow was melting and it was so wet and muddy.

The fields had still little snow on it, and the roads were all puddles, and it dripped and girdled everywhere. Beautiful sunny day, but wet and not very inviting underfoot. And we arrived in the camp. And. Oh, that’s right my. Either right of way or the next day was going to be transferred to another camp, because I don’t know whether they just didn’t want to leave us together.

But anyway, we got separated right away and I came in the first group. They called it a comradeship, where about eight girls in each room, in the bunks, and I was in the first one in the first barracks.

And I now had a number, and I got my uniform, which was a skirt and a jacket, like in a sort of odd colour and heavy Lisle stockings, which I mean, most of the girls had screaming fits and woolen socks, scratchy woolen socks, high top men’s boots with laces, serviceable work boots. And when we arrived, the first thing I heard was the singing. Right from the Bohemian woods and from Austria.

And I loved it. And we sang a lot there in that camp.

It was our wake up call every morning. Please leave this on here and continue the tape on the other side. This is to the sleeping elder. Is to your face your shining. Is to define.

The singer is worthy of Christ. Sings is a close advisor Peter Townsend might not. Be buried in his fifty third degree apartment, which, given that we love, lost the love of the crown, I believe now has my name shall be moved to dismiss me for being in battle against the King, to form his own creation, and become men and women for whom he made the Amen. Amen. Amen. Oh, my. God, I know I can’t not be when you. Grew up with him, but now. He’s grown. I mean, I love my father. Shall be. With me. Oh, hey. Forgive. Me.

Life in the Camp — Discipline, Friendship, and D-Day

And that was like about before six o’clock. Six o’clock we were already combed in our navy blue sweatpants and sweatshirts and out for exercises, running around, stretching. Then we used to sit in a circle and rub each other’s backs. That was nice and rub each other’s feet. And that went on for about at least half an hour, I remember.

And then into the washroom where we each had a shiny aluminum washboard, which had to be shined to a high polish. So you mirrored your face in it practically every day. This washboard had to be shiny, shiny, shiny. And your toothbrush and your towel. And you washed up quick. No showers. I don’t recall any showers in the morning and got dressed.

And then there was another roll call again in your uniform. And that would be your work uniform for the day, which was a blue linen dress, short sleeve and a heavy grey canvas apron over it and a red kerchief for your head. And stood there shivering, getting ready, singing again for the flag ceremony.

Saluting the flag went up, and then we went into the breakfast room for breakfast. And breakfast was usually, uh, this sheepy, chintzy coffee and, um, a little thin milk. And the well-known marmalade was passed around and we had a unique way. We used to take the butter and beat it with the marmalade to make the distribution distribution more fair and more comfortable.

And then we used to smear that together on our two slices of bread. And that was breakfast. And then we were out. Lining up by the gate. And now we were told each week, uh, which farmer we would go out to help.

There were different families in the village that took the the maids, as we were called, uh, which means, uh, young, young girl and, uh, maiden.

Well, the first week when you are new, you didn’t go. You stayed in in the camp for inside duties. And that’s what I did the first morning.

I was told to go walk back to the railroad station and get the milk, and I had a little handbag and, uh. Another maid and I started pulling this little wagon off.

And I was glad I got to get out of the camp. And on our own, it was great. And through the puddles and through the mud and through the drips and gurgling, melting snow, we went back to the station.

It was a beautiful morning, but it was cold.

I remember when we went out every morning when we went out for exercises, it was usually very cold. Even in July, we sometimes could still see our breath in the morning.

We were pretty in pretty much in the mountains. Not real high, high Alps, but mountains anyway.

But the camp was so this was my first day. And then finally the next week came and I was going out. And my first farmer was not a farmer.

He was the innkeeper of the village, and I spent the first day in the cellar washing bottles for the pump, millions of bottles that they saved. And the second day, I’ll never forget the second day.

The second day they got there, they said for me to clean out the potato cellar.

Now, that didn’t sound like a very difficult job, but they showed me that little cellar there in the ground. It had like a chute to the yard, And it had all the old potatoes in it from the whole winter. Most of them were totally rotten and stank to high heaven. And here I was doing this with my hands, because I was supposed to pick out the ones that were still firm and put them in an extra bucket for the pigs.

And I did this all day and at night.

When I got home, I couldn’t eat anything.

I was so sick from that smell. Oh, what a disgusting job. And we had all our stories to exchange at suppertime. Oh, the different families and the older girls that had been there for a couple of weeks already. They would tell you some of the quirks different families they went to.

And I enjoyed it at night. Then we had an hour of singing again.

We had a half an hour off the The political schooling that we had in school, to where we had to look at the maps and name all the generals and tell what was happening in the war. And then we had free time, and the free time in the first week was all taken up by putting your number in all your clothing.

The two white blouses that went with the uniform, the apron, the blue two blue dresses you had in two aprons, uh, and the kerchief. And then you had a little white apron, short apron to go over the blue dress for dress up. And everybody had to embroider it with red threads to shades of red and do their own embroidered apron. That was your job. That was what you did for spare time at night? For a while. April was finished.

It was a cute idea.

There were some real pretty aprons there, and you could use some of them or do your own or whatever. However, they had many. They had to go around and you could write letters, but you had to leave the letters open and your pay.

I think your pay came to the price of about three stamps per week, and that was all the pay we got. And then on top of it, they opened the letter and looked what you were writing, which I didn’t think was quite fair, but that was all the pay we got for our labor service, the postage. And we had some fun.

After dinner, they usually said the leaders, the two leaders left the dinner table earlier and we were still hanging around, and we had a piano in the hallway, and some of them were playing piano, and we were dancing and singing for a while until the singing started, or the political schooling started. And it was nice because it was getting into March and the days were getting longer and it was getting towards spring.

There were places where the snowdrops were coming out of the snow, and every day was nicer than the one before. So it was a lovely time of the year to be out in the country, and I must say. That I really enjoyed myself the first week. They told me gruesome stories about some girls that had really felt terrible and had great difficulties, and one they said had tried to kill herself just in the group before us by putting razor blades on the fence posts and putting her arms over the razor blades, and they had carried her off and they didn’t know whether she was alive or dead.

All kinds of stories they told of different, uh, older groups of occupation in our camp. And it was a pleasant camp because it was made for the labour service.

It was not an old barracks or anything like that.

It was had a big room for the dining area, with a porch running alongside of it that went past the kitchen and past the big washroom. And then I was one week in the washroom too, and that was horrible because we had nothing but scrub boards and hot tubs. We also had a vegetable garden. And, um.

There was usually a half an hour where we all had to help water the garden at night, and that was really kind of nice to have the vegetable garden.

We had a pig and a goose. And rabbits. Angora rabbits.

So, uh, one girl always was in charge of animals for a week. Everybody took turns. My turn came too.

I was afraid of that goose.

The goose lived in the coal shed and was always black. And you had to take it down to the creek to make it swim and get it clean. And the trough where that pig named Franziska had to be scrubbed after every meal, which I think was a horrible way to just give us a hard time, because it was ridiculous how they took care of that pig.

And of course, the rabbits had to be cleaned and fed, but also combed the angora rabbits. You had to get them on your lap and keep them from scratching and and and comb their long hair. And we were getting them shorn and selling the angora wool for jackets to be made into uniform jackets for the bomber pilots and, and people that had to really keep warm. And also we had to keep all the hair that we combed out every morning.

We had to keep it in a container, a special container. And they collected that too. I don’t know what they were doing with that stuffing something or using that for warm stuffing in some place, but I remember they collected that and. We could sit around for about ten minutes, twenty minutes at night in our room and our comradeship.

Before we went to bed, I had the upper bunk and the little. Lockers were made out of wood. And they were made for two for the two bunks. And these lockers were regularly inspected. Everything the wash, the underwear, the shirts, and those horrible bombers we used to call them and and love killers. We used to call them these bloomers we wore. They were shiny, shiny jersey knit on one side and fuzzy flannel on the inside. Huge underpants. And are they all had to be stacked up in one straight line?

And if there was anything out of order and they looked, we had a little private cubicle with a little curtain in front of it there. Everybody, they put ketchup in front, in front of it.

But you kept your photographs and stuff like that, and that had to be neat. And they even picked that up and they inspected anything was out of order. They threw it out on the floor, the bed. If you couldn’t bounce a coin off that bed. And the beds were sacks of straw, actually for mattresses. So you had to distribute the straw before you made the bed.

You had to distribute the straw so there wasn’t a hole in the middle that wasn’t permitted, and a coin had to be bounced off that bed. Anything wrong? They pulled the bed apart again and you had to do it over again. So everything had to be kept very neat.

But I have to laugh about those underdrawers that we had more tears and more desperation in that camp, because so many of the girls just would not want to wear those underpants. And they were actually very nice and very warm and very comfortable. And we had little cloths, which we still joke about it to this day.

We had little, uh, diamond shaped cloths that buttoned into the crotch of these bloomers. And everybody had to wash those by hand by themselves.

It was sort of a sanitary measure, and I guess whenever the pooch checked out, they were thrown away and new ones used. And they also had to have your number in it. Everything had to have your number. You were busy for days getting numbers into all your clothes and possessions as number eight.

And I found out an easy way of doing it.

I was making an X and a top and a bottom line and like two triangles. And that was my sign number eight. And socks. And the woolen knee socks.

The scratchy ones. And the long Lisle stockings. Oh, some of those girls hated it because a lot of them, the Austrian ones, were used to quite a few extra luxuries because they had a good black market going on in Austria, and they had been generous with the Austrians with tickets also. They had been sort of treated, preferred we found out and gotten more goods and gotten gotten more, uh, white flower tickets in their rations because of their fondness for sweet meals and sweet cakes and sweet dumplings and extra meat rations, they used to get to forget all their sausage that’s in their diet.

So they were a little bit more spoiled, and they really had a hard time adjusting. Some of them had already permanence in their hair and used to wearing lipstick, and they had a hard time fitting into this camp life.

But not me. I kind of I kind of liked it when you got out of the dining room.

There was this long porch and the camp was sitting on a hillside. So from the porch you could look way over the valley and the barracks was the bedrooms was sort of a little below that. And between the two was a big grass plot with a flag in the middle.

It was all very neat.

The only trouble was when you were on service on the inside of the camp. You had to clean also the, uh, officer’s barracks with the little office inside. And these group leaders had their floors, shiny, shiny waxed pine floors, pine furniture and everything had to be soaked and scrubbed and waxed every day.

Every other day you were on your knees. And then they would come in and say, is this what you went to high school for? I hope you appreciate it. They used to hate the high school graduates. They really had it in for us. They always figured that we thought we were better than the others. In fact, after I was there about three weeks.

Or four weeks, they arranged a big exchange with another camp because they decided, the leaders decided that they had two large percentage of high school graduates in their group, and that we were a rebellious band and having too many discussions and jokes and things going on, trying to humor the situation.

And they didn’t like it. And they recorded this and we were exchanged. Half of us were shipped out to another camp. So you had to be careful about what you made, what moves you made there. I found that out and I got in trouble. Several times serious trouble. So that when I look back at it, I sometimes wonder that I didn’t get into real trouble with the Nazi Party because they had.

Foreign girls, Slovenian girls. They had returned to the Reich and had taken in some of the, uh, Czech girls that lived in the area as well, had drafted them. And. They were singing every night, too, but they were singing their Slovenian songs.

And I told I told them to teach me. And when the when I was criticized for it, I told the leaders that I thought, if we are supposed to make them feel at home here, why not let them sing their songs? Now? They were supposed to learn German.

I wasn’t supposed to fraternize in that manner with them. I should help them to become Germans.

And I said this was all wrong. And that they went all wrong about their planning. Having everybody in one party line in one country and a feeling of unity among each other. Because I said, don’t you realize these girls are homesick, too?

Well, then they called me into the offices, uh, barracks one time and said they realized that I had leadership possibilities. And the girls listened to me and listened to all my jokes, and I could tell them anything, and they would do it. And they were very bitter about that, too. And whether I wouldn’t consider being a leader.

And I said, no, I didn’t want any part of that at all, because that would have meant staying longer than a year.

And I was figuring that this was fine for a year, but I wanted no part of staying any longer. So their nose was out of joint about this too. And right along this time, I got a wonderful. Farmer that I went to who had a farm. Way, way up high up a mountain and a little mountain valley between two mountains. And it took over two hours to hike up there. And it was so remote and so primitive that it seemed like you went into another century.

And I loved that place.

The man and woman. They had eight children. All these little round cheeked, apple cheeked little kids and poor as church mice. And there was another neighbor.

I think there were about three houses in one church up there. And so that there were two or three of us girls going up every morning, and we had two hours to complete privacy walking up mountains.

It was wonderful. I mean, even so, our boots rubbed our heels bloody. And those horrible wounds, stockings. And on those stiff aprons, I still remember it. And they put us on. We got up there and they say, well, it’s wash day today. And we had to wash these fuzzy, stinky woolen socks off the farmers and the heavy work pants and canvas overalls and all in tubs, washboards and tubs.

Vienna Bound — Transfer, the Factory, and the Bombings

Full of steam and boiling kettles. And we did have ringers and we had an ironing board.

We had to iron everything.

We had to carry it out in the grass yard. Hang it out and bring it back in. And after ironing, it was all we folded and brought back into each room. Put on each person’s bed, their personal wash. Sort all these numbers out. And deliver the laundry. And the kitchen was another place where the kettles were boiling.

And my favorite was. We used to have dessert. We used to have yogurt with blueberries and little dishes, and then take a graham cracker cut in half like a little sailboat stuck in the top of it. And that’s what we had for dessert many days. Either that or preserve food or some fresh food once in a while.

We were still eating well in those days.

The camps were supplied with the help of the farmers around the area. They were supplied pretty well and. To me it just was the first few weeks, rather a vacation feeling. Another thing was that we were told we would have around Easter, an open house where all the parents could visit, and we were looking forward to that.

And the grass was drying up and coming out nice. And it’s just. These first impressions that stuck with me. Uh, one of my farmers had a big field that had to be Fertilized. That was the first job in the spring. And these heavy manure trucks and trucks with. Liquid, the so-called honey wagons were being pulled up and down the fields and spraying.

And one of my first jobs was taking a pitchfork in those heaps of manure out in the field and sling them around and spread them. And it was heavy, heavy work because that manure was heavy.

It was backbreaking job. And walking over these fresh, plowed clods of dirt. And they were caked with mud. And your boots got heavier and heavier, and your arms got so tired from swinging that manure around.

I remember that was one of the first things I did. And. Putting rice on the fresh green grass and sprinkling it with the watering can to bleach it in the sun and sling it, rinse it in a duck pond in one place.

We had a duck in this yard, grass yard and a duck pond, and the wash was all rinsed in that water just to save water, I suppose, and then slung over the fences. And over the clotheslines to dry. They didn’t spend much time on fancy housekeeping. These farmers. So we were practicing for this first open house with our parents.

We had formed a chorus again. Naturally, I was in it and we were singing, learning songs, and then they came up with the idea we were supposed to have a contest. Each comradeship was supposed to sing and have a contest when the parents were there. And now what? To figure out what we’re going to sing. That is a little unusual. We found a song about these settlers that were coming from the faraway countries, and the wagon trains about the Volga Germans coming home, and there was a very nice kind of slumber song.

I remember that very unusual. And our comrade leader had learned.

The leader had learned that somewhere. And she was harmonizing the refrain. In a very nice way. And then we got the idea.

We had a guitar there, too, in the camp. I got the idea I should come accompany it with a guitar. And anyway, to make a long story short, we won first prize. In the first prize was a cake.

Well, that was the big event. And, uh, the open house was great because my parents and my sister came. Since it was during Easter, I think there was a little time off a day or two. And they come down to see me. And so the question of being homesick did not come up that quick. And because we only had been there like about eight weeks at that time. And it was a nicest time of the year. And we went to church in the little village church I remember with my parents. And we went to eat in this inn where I had worked. Old old inn with huge walls.

The windowsills were as long as your arm to get down back to the window.

The walls were that thick stone, and they had still the granite things on the corners of the building for the wagons.

The wagon wheels wouldn’t knock the building. That building? That was an old, old farm farmhouse. From some probably well-off kind of citizen. From around around eleven hundred. And something, I believe.

The thing had been standing there. For practically a thousand years. Almost.

It was an old, old place. Big, big floorboards. And it was the same as that house up on the mountain where I had the family. Everything was wood.

The floor was wood.

The tables were wood, the chairs were wood.

The paneling up halfway the walls was wood. And on every Saturday we had a big scrub brush and lye, lye, soap and everything had to be scrubbed.

The floor, the table, the chairs, the paneling, everything got scrubbed down with these wire brushes. Oh my God, if you got them in your fingers.

It was terrible. And the stubborn brushes. And when we washed dishes, they only had a few tin plates.

When they ate, they ate out of a big enamel bowl with tin spoons. When everybody reached in the bowl, there was the meal. And then when I came in for breakfast, they had a little enamel cup with milk, warm milk and a hunk of bread. That was their breakfast. I mean, they lived, like in medieval times. Some of those farmers. And we’d wash the dishes.

There was a big sink hollowed out of a granite boulder.

It was all mossy on the inside because the water was. They had the water indoors. Cold water, of course. And it kept flowing through there and kept moss on these. On that rocks where you washed the dishes. And of course you didn’t. Have you never heard of dish soap? You washed them there. And if there was a lot of grease or fat or burned stuff, you. I said, well, do you have some scrub powder. And the farmer’s wife said, yeah, we have some sand.

Well, we had sand too, but that was like a white powdery stuff like Ajax.

But when she said sand, she meant sand. You walked out in the yard and scooped something up in your little enamel cup and went back to washing dishes with that sand scratching away at the pots. Oh, I couldn’t believe it. How people lived. They had only like about two outfits of clothes. I don’t think they ever changed the beds more than twice or three times a year. They had linen sheets every, linen sheets and pillows, but most of the pillows, pillowcases on them. And the kids all slept in one big double bed. Oh my God.

But it was. They were nice people and it was hard work because all the fields were uneven and up and down the mountains.

And I said to myself, well, it serves you right for volunteering, being in the mountains. And that night when I was tired, I had to go two hours to get back to camp. Looking forward to camp. By that time we were.

Well, it was down the hill at night. It was. And nature.

The scenery was beautiful.

There were so many impressions, good and bad.

But I assumed God did get to be a little homesick. I guess the reason for that was the fact that There were quite a few disturbing things happening at that time, and there were problems that had never before reached my life.

The problems of the outside world and the times we lived in were getting somehow closer into my perspective.

The first thing that happened was. One of the farmers that I worked for. Seemed to have quite an eye for the ladies. And when I went and when I was sent there, all the all the girls made remarks and said, you better watch out for this. And, and we’re joking about it. And sure enough, this this guy hung around the field after he put me to work and Can would find excuses to come in the barn if I was there and or in the yard when I was sweeping, and every time he appeared a few minutes later, his wife would appear, who was wearing a kerchief around the head and looking older than her age, like most of these women.

And, uh, in fact, he was a dirty old man in my eyes. And his wife looked like a hag.

She was old and had teeth missing. And this poor, driven soul was in fear of losing her husband and followed him wherever he went. As soon as he appeared somewhere, you were sure that you would see his wife appearing afterward. Watching what we were doing and I couldn’t figure out was Had there been things going on with other girls, or was this all her suspicious mind?

And it was puzzling to me and very unpleasant. And it was the thought that I that had never occurred to me up to then, and it seemed like there were there were more and more incidents of that nature. One of them was.

The leaders told us, or we heard through the grapevine that our male camp of the labor service, there’s always a corresponding number in of camps for for the, uh, young men in the, in the districts had been closed and they had all been drafted automatically and they were gone.

But they said there were apparently some Air Force Horse soldiers in the barracks there, and all the girls were making reference references to that and and joking that we should have the folk dances again.

We had folk dances once a week, and since our young men were not available, we had the young boys from the village come and dance with us.

It was one of the rare privileges and one of the ideas to bring the population closer with the this Nazi camp, which they called us. And they were joking that maybe now we could have the Air Force soldier come instead. And which of course was silly, because if they didn’t want the other young men, he certainly wouldn’t find that the Air Force guys had any more time for us, and instead they canceled all the dances suddenly.

And I was sad because it was one of the jolly evenings we enjoyed and we were allowed to wear the costume, costume dress of the area, which was the Austrian dirndl with the aprons and the puff sleeves. And everybody had a dress like that, could wear it on their day off on Sunday, on their time off at night, and also during the folk dancing.

So this was gone now we couldn’t have this anymore. And then I heard that part of the reason was that the people in the village had been showing very much hostility toward the camp girls. They had on some occasions just made jokes behind their back and some occasions actually spit on the sidewalk. And on the part of the young boys in the village had been throwing rocks at them, literally.

And there was a belligerence there that hadn’t been there before. And of course, our leaders in the in the camp. These girls were. Getting nervous and anxious and bitter and very suspicious as a consequence. So there was some sort of a hysterical note creeping into the camp that hadn’t been there before.

And one night I remember I woke up. And there was a whispering going on and sneaking around, going on in the comradeship, and apparently girls were out of bed and all of a sudden the light came on and everything, and there was a crash at the window and laughing and all kinds of, uh, between laughing and screaming and yelling and running back and forth, uh, all the goings on, I found out what the story was that actually one of the Air Force guys had been smuggled into the comradeship to sleep with one of the girls in bed, and the other girls had found out and kept whispering and surprised the girl.

And actually, they were driving this guy through the window and down the meadow and. Over the stockade fence. From our camp. And everybody thought it was hilarious and laughing.

Well, the leaders did not find it hilarious and they were not laughing about it. They were very bitter and very silent the next day, and there were a lot of, um, questions asked and trials conducted, and, uh, they said there was going to be stricter discipline. And the girl that in question was a Slovenian girl who was a very pretty girl. She had very, very white skin and clear, uh, blue green eyes, watery sea green eyes and raven black hair. I still remember her to this day. And this girl was, I don’t think, even Slovenian.

I think she was part gypsy. Anyway, she never washed unless we all got together and dragged her to it, and she never combed her hair. She had never, never combed her hair. And the. On her the girl, the leader girls now vented their wrath by saying that she was supposed to be held down and captured in two inches of her hair cut off, and her hair was to be combed by the girls in her comradeship.

And the screaming and protest. This thing happened, and it was very unpleasant. And she cried for a long time afterwards. And it was unsettling mostly, too, because it showed our leaders getting somehow out of control. And it wasn’t the same.

There were they were they were being forced into a role that originally was not intended. They were there mostly to punish. All of a sudden I was caught with my shoes not shined on the bottom of the sole, in between the heel and the sole. That little corner in between had to be also cleaned and polished every night, and I forgot. And they made. They tore all the shoes out of the racks. And they made me polish every the next night. And they made me polish every shoe in the camp. And it took hours and hours.

And I had made. Friends with one of the girls that had arrived a little later from Vienna. They were young teachers, I think they were about six or so of them, young student teachers that had been excused for a while from the service, and then now we’re supposed to do some service. Uh, regardless. And, uh.

I got quite friendly with her and heard from her stories, uh, about the feelings among the Austrian population. And she told me things about what was going on in Vienna that really made me worried. They had apparently a regular underground there, and she knew some of the people, and she knew the sign.

They had a secret sign and which was appearing everywhere in Vienna, scribbled on the walls and floated in the the big basins they had in the main boulevards for water, water for fire, uh, for the fire department. And they had floated little wooden, these little wooden crosses in there as a sign of resistance.

And this was all so new to me that all this was going on, and we had no idea of it. And it was it was really all of a sudden an awakening to what was really going on in the world. That, and besides the disturbing news from the front, they had given up giving us political schooling in the morning. We just read the headlines of the newspapers and we said we were too busy.

Was the word to to discuss it any longer? We had to get into the details of our upcoming shipment to the factory service away from the country, which was supposed to happen after half a year, and we were too busy for that, and we were told to send away for our private civilian clothing and get the packages in and have the clothes ready.

Which also was by the grapevine from the other older girls. We heard that. This had never been done before so early. Then one morning, a note was put on the bulletin board in our dining room, and a few days later a delegation came from the headquarters in Linz, and it was a group of leader girls. A little older The semesters, who gave us a talk on the camps where the girls could go and have a baby for the fatherland.

And they were actually talking about it, how they were kind of resort style. And the young men and women would meet there and they would stay there until after the baby was born. Also their pregnancy, they would enjoy the benefits of these lovely resorts. And then after the baby was born. They were released and had to leave their babies there.

And I guess you probably got a sort of diploma and medal and, uh. All kinds of recognition for this.

But I said to myself, how could anyone do this? Have a baby and then just walk away and give it up. I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t see anybody else do it.

But lo and behold, I think it were two girls out of our camp signed up for it. However, they never were called.

But this is why I know that you always talk about these rumors. And many times I have been asked, this is was this really true? This is one time I found out that they were actually looking around for volunteers for these camps. So I guess it was true.

But other than that, I never heard anything else about it.

And I thought this was weird too.

But so many extreme things had been going on that it was just one incident in many.

There was another thing.

There was a girl who had a fiancee already, and she had wanted to go away on a weekend trip to to meet him, and they would not give her a weekend out of the camp. No way. In fact, just for asking this, they were beginning to get very harsh and very strict with her and sort of picking on her. And she was a girl from an obviously from a nice family, well educated, and had been in line so far for being selected a leader and had been very friendly with the leaders, and this had now turned completely around.

And then one day she stayed home from outside service and said she was feeling very sick and took to her bed and pretty soon was transferred to.

The sick room which we had.

We had a sick room in the office building and stayed there, and then came back out and went back to work for a day or two and got really, really sick and said she just had to be excused and she couldn’t do it. And the little girl said this was all a put on, and she didn’t want to go to work anymore because she had found out how nice it was in the in the sick bay there. And anyway, she was ordered to clean and scrub all the toilets that day.

Well, she went And did this, and soon afterwards they found her unconscious in the toilet. And she apparently had very, very high raging fever and an infected appendix. And took her away in. A few days later her fiance appeared and demanded to speak to the officer girls, and it turned and he came in his full uniform.

He was a major or colonel or something.

He was a real high high up in the army, and they almost died when they saw him. And he raised hell with the whole group and.

I think.

She was released on sick leave to her parents after that. Anyway, she was gone out of the camp. And they probably managed to get her excused from those.

After this incident, with the help of her fiancee.

Well, this was a big story that made around around with us.

But it all it all showed this, this attitude hardening.

There were some marmalade. This had disappeared from the kitchen one day. And they made us put our full dress uniforms on on Sunday and stand all Sunday. In the flag circle there. And they were without eating. without being excused, without anything. Just stand there until one of us would say that they took the marmalade.

Well, nobody said. And we stood all day. And the leaders got more and more upset with us.

We were divided into two. Struggling camps. And that was.

It was not fun anymore. Meanwhile, I had my own problems.

I was up with a farmer who had three foreign workers working for him. One of them was Ukrainian, one was Russian, and the other one was Czech or Polish. And they all worked side by side with me in the fields. And when we came in for lunch.

We were all sitting down to lunch at one table. And right around this time, the leader had made the rounds, checking with the different farmers. I imagine in retrospect that this probably was because of this hostile attitude that they said they should try to get the understanding of the farmers and and show concern and talk to them.

But she walked in at lunchtime and saw me sitting at the table with those three girls. And. She spoke to me at the same night and said that under no circumstances was I supposed to be allowed to sit with these girls at one table, and that I should inform the farmer of this?

Vienna Under the Bombs — The Factory, the Sores, and the Dying City

The result of this measure was, of course, that I said at a table away from all the other people, I was the isolated one at the farmer’s house, and I went back and told the leader. In fact, I told all the leaders that were there that this was a wrong attitude. They had, that it was setting the US, the Nazi girls, on an isolated basis from the farmers, and it was just the opposite they wanted to achieve, and that if they were going to sit those girls, I should sit with them too.

And give a feeling of. Belonging rather than a feeling of being superior or rejected. While they did not get what I meant. In fact, they were getting very angry and they said if I did not do it, I would have to. They would see to it that I would see have have them take stricter measures. And so one night when I came home.

They told me to come and to the office building and get two buckets, put my feet in these wooden, uh. Uh, wooden shoes with leather tops that everybody wore in the farm to go out in the stables, which were practical, but for long walking. They were kind of painful because we weren’t used to walking in them.

Well, I was supposed to put those on, and I was supposed to get colds by the bucket, one bucket at a time, and filled the whole bin Under the shell of the officer building because they had they had a heat system system in there because of the sick bay. So instead of supper, I proceeded all evening, running back and forth with my four buckets, and everybody was laughing and jeering or cheering, depending on what attitude they took.

And word had gotten around what it was all about and was all in all, very humiliating. And when I finally got through. I took two pieces of coal and stuck them in the window box in front of the office. And then I quit for the night.

I remember exactly when that was.

It was the night of June fifth, nineteen forty four. Because the next day. We received a tremendous news that the Americans had landed on the beaches of Normandy. And it was, in other words, D-Day. And we were everybody was sitting by the radio and listening to the latest developments and couldn’t believe it.

And. Everybody realized that this was the beginning of the end. They were already speculating whether we would be shipped out immediately to Vienna, and they would dissolve the camp earlier, and that that was probably the reason why we had gotten our civilian clothes so soon. And uh, the rumors were buzzing around and people were concerned whether we would get home in time because one town after another was falling.

They were crossing the Rhine, heading for the Rhine. And, uh, it was a time when I felt quite homesick.

And I thought it was foolish that I had gone to Austria and so far away from home. However.

The next day, as I was getting ready to go out to my farmer. They called me in the office building again, and there stood my mother, with her handbag, all stuffed full of goodies, and she said, happy birthday.

And I remember there was my birthday.

And I was so happy to see her after that miserable couple of days I had spent. And the officer girls, of course, immediately noticed that their opportunity had come and they said no, under no circumstances was I going to get the day off because I had to visit her for my birthday and I could arrange for my visitor at night during my spare hour, but not during the day.

So. I kind of walked out with my head hanging and I didn’t know what to do. And my mother said, just tell me where you’re going and I’ll be there, and I’ll meet you outside when you go to your farm, and I’ll go with you. And that’s what she did. She had an apron in that big pocket book also, because somehow or another, she must have got an idea that could have happened.

And she walked with me. To the farmer I was at and told them, introduced herself, and I had to go in the potato field, weeding and making little piles of dirt around each plant like they do.

It was slow and tedious work, and we were at it all day, and we took a break and had some birthday cake sat in the field.

It was a beautiful day, and it was really kind of nice because we were all completely alone at our privacy there. And my mother also had her little brownie camera in the big pocket book, and she was going to take pictures of me as a labor maid, and I took this wonderful picture of my mother in the potato field, that unforgettable picture when she came to visit me for my birthday in nineteen forty four.

So after that, I felt a lot consoled because my mother had been there after all, and it didn’t seem so far away anymore. At the end of the service did not seem so far away anymore because after all, it was getting June and half of the time was gone by, and we had talked about the situation, the military situation, and my mother said, I’m sure that this war is not going to last long, much longer anyway.

Now. And she told me that my father was supposed to be moved in the train in case the front got any closer on the east side in the west. Things were moving so fast that it just was almost impossible to keep up with the news. And we were sitting there in our little village, up and away from from all the happenings. And preparing for a big march to a city. Nearby.

It was near Budweis, and there was an old castle.

It was Cromwell on the Moldova, and they were going to have a big get together of all the labour service camps and the singing contest and, uh, for different singing groups from the farmers and the labour service was a big music thing get together. They planned and it was for the, uh, I think it was, uh, Pentecost holiday. That’s right after my birthday. And the apple trees were blooming and our smart leaders were going to really outdo themselves. And they decided that we were not supposed to go there on the bus or on the train like the others.

But we were going to march to this city.

Well, that was an experience. We wanted to be like soldiers and we marched. Boy, did we march.

But it was like I say, it was a beautiful time of the year. And when we got to this town, they said we should close up ranks and sing and move through the town singing.

Well, we had such blisters on our feet that we could hardly walk, most of us.

But we were singing and we got through the castle where we were supposed to be put up quarters. And when I got to the castle and I saw all that row of beds, I said, this is it. I’m going to die here. I just didn’t want to go another step. My feet were raw, absolutely raw, from those boots and wool socks. And before hour to look for glory. We wore our blue dresses with the white apron.

But our uniforms, I remember and it really looked look nice.

But my feet.

I was using those beds side by side like crutches, and I was hobbling around for the rest of the evening. And then the next day I felt better. And it was so pretty up on that castle. And all the people marching in, singing and the flags. And we were all meeting on the town square, and they had a big stage put up there, and we were singing.

It was a nice, nice holiday that I always remembered very fondly. And it seemed like after that.

The this, this, this tense spell was broken and had been over the camp.

It was probably because we all felt like it was going to be the end near anyway. And we had one Sunday where we decided we were going to go all in the woods and play a like a. A terrain chase and hunt like like we used to have. Like we used to play army in the suburbs of Berlin, about the same way we were divided into two parties like maneuvers, and we were supposed to capture each other and hunt each other through the woods.

It was really fun too. And that day I just climbed high up on a tree and I said, forget it, I’m going to have a nice day out in the woods and forgot all about the game. Climbed up in the tree and said, there it was. So nice, peaceful. And then we marched home again from that. And then they had found a specialty for me again, probably.

They made me and put me in charge of the animals, which was not very pleasant, but it was okay. Except that one day they asked me to take the female rabbits, two big female rabbits and two baskets and take them to the nearest SS camp. They were keeping rabbits there too, to have them. Provided with stud service.

Well, if that wasn’t an embarrassing little chore. So off I traipsed through the up the road and through the to the next town, to the railroad station.

And I kept thinking, oh, if I just kept going on this road, I could just walk right home, back into the into Germany and back home and walk away from all this.

But you couldn’t.

We were under oath, just like the soldiers.

And I guess they would have given us a court martial. We ran away. Nobody tried to run away.

But it was wonderful to get away.

And I sat on that little train. And then I had to walk again to get to the camp. And the camp. Was one of the concentration camps.

And I had never seen one. And it really was kind of curious to see what they were all about.

It was Mauthausen. And when I got there, of course, they were all grinning. All soldiers were grinning at me and making jokes about me coming to see them. Male rabbit.

It was so embarrassing.

And I looked around and I saw all the barracks. And there were big, uh, Stone buildings for the soldiers. And then there were the wooden barracks, like they were just like our camp. And they had the same plan. Sheets. Sheets, apparently. And they had curtains from the same material on the windows. Same curtains.

And I thought, well, that’s not so bad. This just looks better than our campus.

The curtains on the window.

But I imagine that I never saw the real side of the camp. I just saw the the entrance part, and who knows, there may have been, uh, kitchen personnel or, heaven knows what he’d been living in. Those in those first barracks and not really the inmates, because that was all I saw of the camp. And it did have a big gate, and I did not particularly like the young men there. They were very arrogant and very, uh. Not my type. So. That was my experience with the camp.

And I have actually been in a real concentration camp. With the help of these bunnies that I had to take home again. Now. Then I was. Uh, another older couple.

I was there for a couple of weeks.

I think they did not have much help. They were in the old sawmill, and all day long that sawmill was screaming and going, and that’s always screeching. And the mother had looked like an old lady to everybody looked so old, and the mother had a daughter and three sons, and there was a little girl there, and she always kept insisting that little girl was her daughter.

But I think that wasn’t true.

I think the little girl was the child of her daughter’s an illegitimate child. That’s what I assumed. And she was always packing packages, and she had me help pack and packages for her sons. They were all on different fronts. And then she cooked soup for lunch, which was called black soup. They took a piece of ham or bacon out of the chimney, where they were smoking it and threw it into the soup, cut it up and some of the soot. They tried to scrape some of the soot off, but some of the soot always was still sticking on it, and it would float on top of the fat part on the soup.

There was all these round fat spots, which in Germany they call eyes and which was delicious.

But there was always these little, little round black flecks of soot swimming on it. And that was the so-called black soup. We ate that many a day with a piece of bread for lunch, and we were all laughing in camp about the black soup. Other than that, it’s strange that I don’t remember more what we had to eat for dinner. I guess it must have just been the typical German, uh, potatoes and gravy and some kind of meat or meat loaf or whatever.

It was good. And probably better what we would have had at home.

But the spectacular Food.

We had when we got to Vienna, in Austria, in the old Viennese Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were cooking all these beautiful, sweet meals that we girls loved. It had gotten to be fall and the weather was gloomy.

And I got a job that was really, really nice in a way, because it got me out of the outdoors.

I had been with a farmer that had had me for a shepherd.

I had sheep and goats and two cows that I had to watch all day and walk after them. So rain and drizzle and muddy meadows or whatever it was, I was walking behind this little group. And every time you come to a corner someplace.

The goats wanted to go one way, the sheep the other way, and the cows wanted to go a third way.

And I had my hands full because I did not have a dog. Most shepherds have a dog to do that kind of job.

I was doing it running. And besides, I was a little bit afraid of the animals too.

But they were pretty good obeying me. Except I had to run my legs off, bringing them home back at night. And then they got the bright idea I shouldn’t be idle doing this. So they had me knit stockings while I was doing it.

I had a ball of yarn in my coat pocket and we had heavy field jackets by then. And had me sit, had me walk through that field with the rain dripping off the knitting needles. Practically. I still remember that these gloomy days were Not very nice. And one day I went home and there was a Ukrainian girl. And she was no girl. She looked like she was about forty or forty five to me. And an older woman, skinny as a rail.

She was sitting in the potato field digging the potatoes. And it was. Rain had been raining all day and drizzling.

It was mucky and muddy and the farmers were a little piece ahead of me. They had gone home and left her there to work longer, and she was sitting there crying, and it was just a whole mood of the place. Oh, it was terrible. So I took my apron off under the jacket, and I put that heavy canvas apron around her shoulders and smiled at her, and I sat with her for a while. I felt so bad for her, and I didn’t know what to say. I say. I didn’t understand her. She didn’t understand me.

And I was miserable.

I remember that evening and I walked home. And the next morning it was the weekend. And then the next Monday they told me I had a new job. And it was with the carpenter of the village. And what he was doing was making wooden crosses, iron crosses, little iron crosses out of wood for every soldier’s grave in the cemetery with the name on it.

And the day he died. And black. And he stained them and made black edges around the whole cross. And then write this very good writing, Gothic writing, which I knew from school And. So when he found out that I could do this lettering for him, he must have spoken to the leaders. Anyway, I was the remaining three weeks of my labour service.

I was with this carpenter and it was a very melancholy job, day after day. And it was getting dark at night, early, and the lights were burning and sitting in there and painting the little wooden crosses, more and more wooden crosses in that little village alone. And the war news were getting worse and worse. And they had crossed the Rhine, and there was no more returning home to the Rhineland, because it was all taken by the enemy already. And.

It was getting crazy, and we were ready to be shipped out. So one day we were all in the square lined up. And the leader spoke to us, spoke to us, and she said. Most of us had been selected to go have the honor to fight on the front and go to a big camp for the flock, which is the aircraft anti-aircraft units, and they were going to be trained to use the spotlights, while the while the men were on the guns, they would be on the spotlights.

And it was a great honor. And she had a big speech, and we had such a large contingent from our camp being selected for that. And then she read the names of those who had to stay behind, and my name was among those who had to stay behind Miss Black Sheep.

Well, I was a little stunned, and I felt a little down about this blow. And everywhere I was about six or eight of us that stayed behind. And one of them was. A girl from the Rhineland. That I didn’t know very well.

She was in another comradeship. And that was Agnes, my girlfriend. Agnes.

She was among the black sheep, too.

But she.

I had talked to her just a few times.

She was really, really against the Nazis.

She was bad. She really hated everything about it. Bitterly. And so I was now among her company.

And I bet you one of them was that gypsy girl too. I don’t really remember. Anyway. our sad little group from then on had had to have KP duty in the kitchen for the rest of the stay and didn’t go outside the camp anymore. And the others shipped out with all the glory and fanfare that they could muster. And they were gone. And then they packed us off on a train to Vienna.

And I remember we came through Linz.

I had to stay overnight there in the district offices, and they mistook us for some other group.

It was so funny. We didn’t know where we were going to sleep, and they gave us a big welcome and kept talking and talking.

And I talked back and just made up stories and went along with whatever they said. And we got some beautiful beds there and we were all laughing about it.

We had a beautiful stay in a beautiful breakfast there, and they never found out what, really? Because now we didn’t have any uniforms anymore.

We had our civilian clothes and we just had pins. On our lapels. And it just was another example to how crazy things were getting, because people shipped out and shipped in and moved around and, uh, with place being more or less in the in the first stages of dissolving. So we shipped out and we arrived in Vienna.

We had to go in a suburb on the streetcar. And way out in the suburb was a radio tube factory owned by Philips, the Dutch radio firm, but the factory had been closed from Phillips, and we were in a French P.O.W. camp that had also been evacuated. That was our barracks, and we were supposed to go to work at the Phillips factory. However, in about two days, we found out that this was not going to be.

We had to work in some newer place, and it was all big secret, and we had to get up real early in the morning and get on the streetcar walk to the streetcars. And there was almost an hour’s ride by streetcar.

We had to change streetcars on one spot, and we came out at the old garden, which was a park, and there was a huge bunker that had built bomb proof bunker thirteen stories into the ground.

And I don’t know how many stories up.

It was a huge, huge structure. And that’s where they were making the Philips radio tubes. They were making small tubes for submarines and tanks. And we were welding with the different assembly assembly spots.

And I was on spot welding with a little welder who had two copper. Elements like that. You had to use a foot pedal and bring them together. And the little feet that stuck out on the bottom of the radio tube, you had to weld them to connections in a certain way. We did that all day long. every day for about ten hours.

And then we had to get back on the streetcar and rattle home to our barracks. And the barracks were not to be heated. Under no circumstances was there anything going to be burned, because they found out that some of the girls had taken some of the boards out of the beds in the bottom and burned them, and that was big punishment. And they all had padlocks and seals, lead seals on the oven doors so that nobody would use the stove. And it got colder and colder.

It was so cold that winter.

We were laying there in our straw sacks again as usual. And. I don’t think we had singing any anymore.

And I don’t think we had political schooling anymore. And all the trimmings were trimmed off. We came home and we went to bed.

We had no water sometimes because of bombing raids. And we had to save the water for coffee because this was such coffee in the morning. That was our only bright spot. That was hot. And you looked forward to it every morning. One cup of that coffee.

But at night we had a cook there. And at night the food was good.

We had all these sweet dumplings with fruit in the middle. And we had yeast dumplings with vanilla sauce. Our favorite.

The Last Months — Waiting and Longing for Home

Even then, it already seemed like a long time ago since we sat outside singing and harmonizing on the porch outside the dining room in our country camp.

It was dark in the city and gloomy and getting colder and colder.

But we did. Start a chorus there. And it was.

The Austrian girls decided to start a chorus with yodeling for bringing a little Christmas cheer at Christmas time.

And I had tryouts and I had the honor of being selected one of the only girls from the Reich. In other words, non-austrian that was selected to go into that yodeling corps and learned to sing with the Austrian dialect as well. So we were studying. Vienna dialect and singing Vienna songs and Austrian country songs. And it was very nice.

I was not really a yodeler, but I could do fairly well.

And I enjoyed that. And that was about the only little glimmer of hope we had for Christmas.

There were rumors that we might be getting furlough to go home for Christmas, but they usually. Lasted only a day, and then they were dashed again by the. Our glorious leader, whose name I shall never forget, was. Yes, coca. And she was a beast.

I think she turned a perfect beast around this time of her life, because she came from.

I think either the Rhineland or Alsace-Lorraine. Anyway, from way out west. And she was cut off from all her family.

She was a spinster and not very young and not very pretty. And now she was cut off from all her family. So I imagine she had her load to carry too. And it was definitely getting dangerous to be where we were.

It was a fine place to be daydreaming about the summer in the country we had. It seemed already so far away.

I remember one day we were out in the fields shortly before we left in the stubble fields with our wooden clogs on the two or three, uh, alien girls that we had.

There was a Russian girl whose name was Olga. What else? She always wore a pink dress. And then there was another couple of girls, and we were out there, sent out there to pick through the Stubblefield for extra grain, for the loose grain that hadn’t been picked up, which to us was a holiday that was easy, easy work. And it was a nice warm day, bright, bright and clear. And it was kind of hilly country.

The field went up and soft, up and down in soft waves, and all of a sudden we heard an airplane. An airplane noises overhead.

But this airplane came real fast and scared us to death. It came over one of these hilly rises so low that we were sure it was going to Morse down.

It was lower than trees.

It was a daredevil height at this because it wasn’t as low as it seemed naturally.

But it frightened us to death. And we started to run and this guy was shooting at us. Now I in the in the flight and the running with our wooden slippers on.

We were heading for the ditch by the field and we lost our slippers and the feet hurt in that field. Unbelievable. And we threw ourselves into the ditch on top of each other and in the in the confusion, I never looked what kind of plane it was. And I’m not absolutely sure that it couldn’t have even been a German plane that was just having fun with us.

But I’ll never forget the scare. And to see one as close as that.

The only time I got that same frightened feeling was years later, when I saw a hot air balloon rising very close to us.

It was sort of a feeling like a dinosaur is after you. It’s very, very scary. And then having the shots fired, well, that was some adventure. We sat there breathless and scared to death. And ever since. I’ll never forget that noise.

And I shall never in my life forget the noise. Of the squadrons of planes overhead. That used to go for the big bombing raids. They were kind of droning in the sky. And this kind of noise we heard in Vienna. We heard it now. Every day. Every day the Americans came and bombed. And then the British started coming at night.

You didn’t hear any plane noises? Mostly because when they came at night, the shooting started right away. And the spotlights were searching the sky. And the noise and in the rocket were deafening. You couldn’t distinguish any any airplane sounds. Then the Americans were high, high, high in the sky, usually.

And you could see these little silver planes glittering. And in the summertime, when the weather was fine and clear, you could see them way, up, way, way up high. And hear this rolling droning in the sky. Every day they were going somewhere. And the British started. Those raids started almost immediately after we got settled in our barracks.

I think it was the second or third night we were roused out of our well-earned sleep.

After working ten hours and coming back two hours on the train, on the tram, and finally getting to bed and then having to get out.

The siren went off and officers shouting out, out, everybody out!

And we had to put on. We slept, I think in our sweat suits we had navy blue sweat suits for exercises and we slept in them, and that’s what we had to just jump into those right out in the, in the, in the coats and uh. Uh, march over to our air raid shelter. Yeah, we did have to switch suits. We kept those because in the other camp we slept in Nightshirts, and I guess they did that because of the horrendous cold in those camps in the winter.

In those barracks, but the nightshirt were funny. They were from the from the. We call them truppführer because that was the rank of the.

The male labor service.

The lowest rank. And because these were from the male labor service, those nightshirts. They all had them over there too. And that caused a lot of laughs. Laughs. And, uh, anyway, we were marched around two corners and across the street. And the rocket and the and the anti-aircraft guns were going off and, uh. We went into this long, long kind of a storehouse, old, old medieval storehouse building that had, uh, arched cellars, probably had been a big wine cellar, and they figured that this was a very safe cellar, and they marched all of us in there.

We were about one hundred, between one hundred and one hundred and twenty girls in our camp, and that was a big responsibility for our leader also. It must have been hard on her to think that she had the responsibility for all of those girls.

In those times.

And I sometimes wonder how my mother must have felt to know that I was so far away and and. In all these, uh, many dangers, not only the airplanes, but the strange city and the the cold and the dangerous work and the many different people that now had assembled in the big cities, and the different POW camps, who were all dangerous people, essentially.

And there it never occurred to me how many, many bad things could have happened to us. And. I did get a taste of what happened to those girls that got shipped out from our camp to the anti-aircraft guns, because we now saw them every night and heard them every night. And it did not seem like a pleasant situation, because those raids were sometimes three and four times a night. We would just get back and climb back in our beds and the alarm would go off again.

It was a miserable way, miserable, miserable way of living. And then get up in the morning at five before five and have our little cup of coffee. Finding out that we probably had no water because of the bombing, that the streetcar probably didn’t run because of the bombing, and we would have to walk and then work all the hours we did. They tried to keep us fairly healthy.

I remember they gave us dextrose tablets with lemon vitamin C, they gave us calcium tablets because we had not enough milk.

And I and they had in that in that bunker, which was of course only artificial climate controlled and aired only with big fans.

There were no windows at all. So we did have several rooms that had sun lamps. And they used to give us turns. One after another. All the girls that worked there, even the even the foreign girls, were just. Everyone took a turn. Fifteen minutes, got up and went under the sun lamp so that we would not wilt away like mushrooms in there, away from the sun.

And we would work there until lunch. And at lunchtime there were elevators. We could get out and cross the big square in Vienna, and there was a big hall across the square where they had the soup kitchen. And we would get our little soup. And soup was, uh, lousy. That was. That was pretty lousy food.

It was usually barley soup with a few carrots swimming into grey soup, and it was as bad as what I was used to from home by that time, and worse. And it was pretty awful.

But we ate it with hearty appetites because we were starved. And we were told by our leaders at night that if there were any second helpings, there was anything left.

We were not supposed to get up and get second helpings, but we were supposed to leave them for the foreign workers.

We were not supposed to give the impression that we were starving, and we were supposed to leave the second helpings to them.

Well, that caused many a bitter comment among us, but nevertheless we tried to understand the theory behind it, and we were still trying to to put on a brave front, even though it was hard because when you were walking through a city like this. On the right and the left of you, nothing but bombed out, burned out buildings and many a night coming back after a bombing raid when some of those buildings were still burning and people screaming, and the fire department running around and the confusion and the mess.

It was hard. To realize that we had to stay there, be forbidden to make a fire.

There were wood and scraps of wood laying all around those rubble heaps, and yet we were not allowed to take one little board under penalty of death, desk, so to speak. And could not make a fire in our little stoves. It was.

It was brutal. In fact, there was a lovely detail that had to go out every other night. Into the coal yard for our kitchen, kitchen stove and the coal that had been thrown away in the ashes. You were supposed to sort through the scraps and the ashes and the combed out hair and all that mess, and pick out the coal that was perhaps not too badly used yet, and get a couple of buckets of coal back out of that mess so they could use it over again to try to be very thrifty with it.

And after all, they figured we would be interested in getting our was keeping our kitchen stove going. That cook we had was apparently quite happy with his job. He tried to do a good job for us and he liked the girls and he hated the leader jaskolka. And he kept saying to us, wait till the Russians come into town. I’m going to hang her from the flagpole as soon as he got there, because I’ll get even with her yet.

But he never said anything while things were going all right, because I think he was very glad to have the job he had, rather than being somewhere on the Russian front. So I was sitting there one night.

I remember doing this. This special duty was a girl from Hamburg, which we called. Uh, the hamburgers are all called hamburgers. They’re all called.

After a famous character in the city by the name of Hummel. Or you would say Hummel. Uh, he was a water carrier, and he used to teach the kids, and the kids used to tease him. And all the people from Hamburg used to recognize each other, say, in Hummel. Hummel?

Well, Hummel was with me that night at dusk, sitting in the in the in the yard behind the kitchen and sorting out the coal from the hair and ah, and the papers and the kitchen scraps and put them in the buckets. And we didn’t want to get our gloves dirty because we didn’t have any water to wash our gloves afterwards.

So we did it with our bare hands. And Hummel said, I don’t have any gloves anyway. I don’t have any winter clothes, she says. And the only shoes I have are the ones I have on. She had on these wooden shoes with the cut through soles so you could walk on them. With cloth on the top. And here it was getting on Christmas. In fact, that night I remember it was the beginning of snow. It started to snow.

And I remember crouching there among the coal in the dark yard. And freezing and thinking. Will we ever get home? Will we ever get through with this? Will we ever get out of here? Homer was crying one day as they had bombed out again on our tramp.

The stretch from the transfer station to our camp, which was a much longer walk and we were talking about all those rubble heaps. And over them and through them and the buildings were burning on one side still, and there were glass splinters, glass everywhere. And she and her flimsy shoes, and it was freezing cold.

It was terrible at that day. It had been so bad that they had let us go while it was still daylight out or dusk. At least I remember. And she was telling me on that long way home there were about two or three other girls with us.

We were all walking together from the transfer station out to the camp, and she said, I have no clothes because I’ve been bombed out three times in Hamburg already. And this time she says, I can’t write about clothes or anything because I can’t write to my parents at all. I have lost track of them. I don’t even know where they are.

And we all felt very bad. And we thought, well, maybe things were not as bad as we thought. It could be worse. And we were grateful for having still at least a hold in thinking of home. This girl did not even have a home anymore. One Sunday afternoon I met my teacher girlfriend from Vienna at her school.

One time they were having a meeting and she was telling me that they were discussing closing the schools because the raids were getting so bad, and also there was so little coal to keep the schools heated that they were debating to give up on the schools altogether and close the schools. So it seemed to me like these were really desperate last minute measures, and they would not have done that unless it was really getting near the end.

And she she seemed to have the idea to she was always talking about this was the end of the Nazis. She took me that afternoon to a cafe where I met, uh, a well-known actor from the theater there, who she knew and who was also in the underground with her. And she just goes to her show on the sly, and she was meeting somebody in a street car and talking to him. And then they both kept going on in the street car and getting off at different stops.

It was really like a spy movie. And then we went, uh, it was so exciting to me. And then, uh, we went to her to visit her mother in the hospital. Her mother was in the hospital, and, uh. It gave me these little glimpses of normal life to to be with her for an afternoon. It helped me a lot, and I was always thankful that I had her in Vienna there, because at many times she was telling me how devastated the old city was.

The old town part of Vienna, she says. It’s all almost gone. They have wrecked it completely with the bombs and it’s a shame.

And I was thinking of the year when we had been in Vienna with my parents, and we had gone to. Grinzing, which is the, uh, artist colony of Vienna. And there was a little wine, uh, restaurants and the music at night out in the garden restaurants, the famous schrammel music they have there. And oh, it used to be so romantic and so dreamy. And this was all destroyed now.

It was hard to think of this.

The place where we were. Must have been a real small, idyllic village on the outside the gates of Vienna a long time ago. Because it was really toward the the outer outskirts.

It was really rural.

We had to go from our camp down a little path, and we came into this little valley with a spring, and there were little woods, and it was really countryside. And this romantic little place was where we now had to go to get our water.

After the raids, there was no water, no city water supply. So all disrupted the sewers, the water, and we had to go with little wagons and get canisters full of water and bring them up back to the camp. You had to stand in line for I don’t know how long, and it will freeze. And oh, and the ground was so cold and your feet got so cold. And there were rows and rows of people waiting to get some water out of that spring.

And I kept wondering how that spring could be running in the winter. I don’t know what happens to Springs in the winter time, and why some of them keep running, and how long they kept running, and at what point do they freeze, freeze up. You were kind of worried about it.

It was the only water we had many, many days. And then dragged through the mud and the snow. Snow and the slush or the muddy grass or whatever had happened. Blowing and brewing.

We had to drag it home.

And I always remember it was dark or getting dark, or it was always dark and cold. And this whole time I remember like a black and white movie, there were no colors. And then. Which was, I think, to be expected. Then the sickness is set in and we all got sick in one way or another.

It was bound to happen the way we lived.

It was just bound to happen. Our feet were always wet. We couldn’t dry anything. And the worst part of it, there was no sanitary napkins, one hundred and twenty girls. They gave us the old knitted ones from grandma’s time that we had to wash. And the washing part well, it was hard enough with as little water as we had, but there was no way of drying them anyway. So.

It was horrible. It it was unbelievable. And then maybe getting a shower twice a week at the most. And then half the time the water was not warm and you just dashed in and out. No shampoo for the hair. And it started out with lice and bedbugs. And my first ordeal was scabies. And that comes from the store and the store sex. I woke up every night. As soon as I got really warm in my bed, I was itching. Itching. Itching. Itching all over.

And I developed sores.

And I scratched the sores open.

And I had more sores and more sores and more sores and more scratched everywhere else you touched. you got more?

Well, they told me it was scabies. And they said, well, that will be fixed. Easy. So the following Sunday, they sent me to a clinic. And there was a huge crowd of girls waiting already there, a men’s side and a girl’s side, and we were all listed and we were all led in. And there were some foreign girls screaming, crying, kneeling down, praying.

And I said, what in the world is going on here? We were let down the cellar through the corridor, and there were bathtubs in a row with white tiled rooms, like a morgue. And there were bathtubs in there. And they stuck. Stuck us in these.

And I showed him that they had the same sores all over their body that I had, you know, the same itchy spots, scratch spots, and try to make them understand that we would be better. And they dragged us out of the tub, and they had the nurse come with big sponges of sulfur foam and they scrubbed us. I mean, really from the chin neck right down to the tip of the toes, all over the scalp with that foam. And it was stinging and stinging.

It was horrible. And so we had to stand there for a while. And then we were led further on to another shower, which was great.

It was a warm shower. Finally, at last, and we were all done. In the meanwhile, they had taken all the clothes we bought.

I think they told me to bring as many clothes Close as I could take with me to. And they put them all into a big, uh. Uh, ovens to steam them or boil them or whatever they did. Steam them, dry, steam them, sterilize them. Sterilizing is what they did. Kill all the bugs. And they handed us our clothes back. And then we were led into a little, uh, uh, side room, and there were chairs, and there was it was like a miracle.

There were plates with white bread and honey and hot milk and tea, and we all got a snack there for our effort. I guess they did this to make people come in, to keep from keep it from becoming a horrible epidemic. To entice the people to tell other people they got white bread and honey and something to drink, and to make everybody want to come in and have that treatment. That’s the only way I can explain it.

It was so wonderful, and I was still smiling at all the other girls, and they were so surprised. They couldn’t believe it. And not till years later did I realize what happened. These girls probably had heard about Auschwitz and these camps, and they figured we were going to get the showers and get gassed. That’s the only way I can explain it.

And I had no idea, of course, of course, what it was about, but I can see where they were absolutely petrified.

But I was also I was rid of my.

And I came home and I said, I’m not going to sleep in that sack again unless they exchange it. And they said, oh, it had already been changed and burned.

And I guess there were only two other cases of scabies in the camp, and they went to the same clinic and they took care of that.

Well, that wasn’t the end of all the sicknesses. It kept right on going because now I had another problem.

I had bladder problems. And every night. I’d wake up and I was wet in my sack. And the girl under me said, Will you please change cards with me? Because I don’t like to get rain in the face at night.

And I slept on the bottom cot and it didn’t dry.

Of course, it was a stinking mess because the the barracks were cold.

There was nothing that could dry even. And it was more smelly because it was wet and my pants.

I washed them, but I couldn’t dry them. So in the morning I had to put on those damp, damp underpants, put them back on again, and get out and try to catch the streetcar. And the streetcars were so overloaded from all the streetcars that were that had fallen by the wayside with the bombing and been on sidetracks and and they were less and less cars to spread out over the city.

So they were completely overloaded, always running late and people hanging on them like grapes on the on the steps and on the bumpers in the back and everywhere. And that’s how many a day I drove hanging on the on the handrail, on the step in the wet pants so they couldn’t help by getting worse and worse with my bladder infection.

I was wet all the time and it was so embarrassing.

And I was sitting in my. And they were all my private civilian clothes soaking wet. And sitting there working ten hours and walking over to the to the, uh, soup kitchen. And seeing the American planes come over. And walking back again. And then here in the raids, we couldn’t during the raids, we stayed right on our place. And a couple of times the whole building was shaking and the lights went out. And everybody is screaming with fright. And the elevators all rattling. Oh. God. And we thought it was going to be over so many times, but nothing ever happened.

We were in the safest spot in Vienna. I guess that bunker never really suffered anything. Except scares. And it was scary. And then I remember one time we had to put on a good front, too. Sometimes we were completely out of material and had nothing to do.

But we had to go in anyway and sit there. And when they had big Nazis coming for inspection, they would run up and down and hand us some old boxes of this and boxes of that. And they said, there, go act busy. Act busy. Because I think they all figured that we still had the best spot to be where we were, and they didn’t want them to get any idea of closing that place and shipping us out somewhere else.

I really think that’s what the higher up was there in that factory. We’re thinking about making a real good impression. And so we acted busy, and all these little signs were just signs that we all figured it.

It was getting toward the end and pretty desperate.

But our big question still was, will we be able to get home? We had the Saint Nicholas Day celebration in Austrian style, which is a very scary affair that people put on, um, straw masks and straw skirts and, uh, it’s a, it’s a pagan thing where they drive the evil spirits out. And it just, it almost reminds you of Africa. They have horrible devil masks and chains, and they run through the streets scaring everybody and trying to throw them and wrap them up in chains. And it’s called Krampus. Never heard of that expression, and it has nothing to do with Saint Nicholas.

But that comes before Christmas.

The bad spirits have to be driven out. And that idea is behind the shooting.

The guns in the mountains, too, because the noise is supposed to scare the bad spirits away, too. Which is why they shoot guns before Christmas in the mountains. All these pagan rituals are mixed up in the Christmas celebration. And we had a few candles. Some people had gotten little packages, and we had some candles and some little Christmas trees, decorations, knickknacks. So it started to seem like Christmas.

We had made a little Christmas celebration singing songs, and the Austrian songs are so pretty. Yeah. It’s it’s there’s no no jolly jolly ho ho ho and jingle, jingle. It’s more, uh, a lot of them are cradle songs for For Mary and the child and, uh, songs about the snow softly falling. And there’s a lot more, uh.

It’s a more quiet, thoughtful attitude toward Christmas. And over here, it’s not supposed to be a big, noisy festival. It never was in northern Germany, either. You were supposed to sit together by the candles and, uh. Think and reflect and celebrate being together through the dark time of the year. And there were conflicting reports.

Sometimes they said we could go home and then we couldn’t go home. And then they said the ones that were from the Rhineland couldn’t go anyway because, uh, because of the bombing and because some of the all, all these, some of those districts had already been occupied by the Americans. So we were holding out on our our little post in Vienna.

And at the last minute, I was among the ones that got permission to go home for Christmas. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe now, when I think about it, that they even let us go. I wonder whether they were even secretly hoping we would just go the heck and not come back.

But at this point.

But I took off. In fact, I remember I felt a little bad. I would have liked to go home in my uniform instead of in the civilian clothes, because everybody was in uniform was sort of like an honorable thing. I’d done my honorable share, and I would have liked to go home in uniform, but we didn’t have uniforms anymore.

We had just a little pin.

And I guess they figured us to be disappearing among the population when anything happened. They didn’t want the responsibility of us girls. So there I was. I got a train ticket. I got a pass. I got on a train. Miracle of miracles. And. I got to get home for Christmas. That was before I had my bladder trouble. I’m sure I did not have any problem there.

I wasn’t sick Christmas yet. It must have been right after Christmas that I got sick. Because I don’t remember speaking about that at all for Christmas at home. And it was wonderful.

When I finally got there, and I stood in front of our house in Frankfort, and the light was shining through the shutters in our little den, just like I had pictured. And my mother was so happy. And she went and she made red beads. And fried potatoes for me. My favorite. I’ll never forget it.

It was so wonderful. And and being in the train. And it was getting just getting dark and the snow outside and standing in the train because I didn’t get a seat. I don’t know how many hours I had been on the road. Oh, it took forever.

The trains and everything. Everything was overcrowded and in confusion and running late and wounded soldiers and well, soldiers and refugees and everybody all over the place. And of course, blackout. Everything was always in the half dim light because the trains were blacked out.

The railroad stations were blacked out. Everything was sneaking around in the dark all the time. And the streets from the railroad station to my house. Nothing had changed. Nothing was damaged.

It was just like I I had pictured it a million times, coming home and standing on the stoop and right after me, my sister jumped off the stoop.

I remember. Oh, it was so wonderful. Dad came home from his railroad train and we were singing and playing the piano, and we had a tree and some cookies my mother made. And there were not many gifts. Books were. Calendars were about the only thing you could still get fairly easy.

But other than that, the gifts were small and hard to get and not the important part anymore.

It was just so great to be together. And my mother said at that occasion, when I left again, it was only a few days.

My mother said, if anything happens to us, anything happens here in Frankfurt. We will be in Thüringen, at your aunt’s house.

Now, was that she meant my Aunt Erna? My godmother, who was her girlfriend and not really a relative.

But she was there at all family gatherings. And she lived right in the center of Germany, in Thüringen. She brought me back to the train early in the morning and without my dad. Saying goodbye. And we didn’t know how we were going to see each other again. I faced a much harder time than I came back because I now got another sickness and that was another death. Who I found out several other girls must have had because when I talked about it, they were all giggling and laughing and. Uh. Being silly about it, and I kind of scared of it. It had something to do with sex.

It was very puzzling because I had had nothing to do with sex, and I didn’t know what they were referring to.

When the clinic sent me to, uh, it said. Clinic for lupus. Which I found out to be a, uh. Skin disorder caused mainly, uh, from infection of the mucous membranes. And that was probably where the joking came from. And lupus had the connection. I, I just had a bad skin rash and the treatment for it was a black salve.

Like axle grease. And it had to be smeared all over your body and left on there for, I think, about two weeks. And this was the most rotten, miserable time I spent in all the days in Vienna, because I had to stay in those smeared up clothes for two weeks. And it was my my, uh, personal clothes.

And I had no idea how I was going to clean them. How was it going to ever going to clean them again without soap and hot water?

And I was just sitting there at my workbench ten hours a day in those miserable, greasy clothes.

It was horrible.

I think that was when I hit my all time low. And I’ll never forget it. And they were bombing and the lights went out and the building was shaking. And it was worse than ever. And the rumors were flying. They said the Russians were breaking through everywhere. They were in East Prussia already. They were in Poland already taking Poland back. And it was just a matter of time when they would reach Vienna.

But we kept on working.

There was no excuse. I. Had sort of had my reputation ruined from that, from that last rash.

And I still had no idea why, but it was a funny coincidence there too. I fell asleep in the tram one night, coming home late, and went over my stop. And when I when I woke up at the last station, there was only one person on on the tram and that was a SS officer. And it was dark, dark at night and it was late, and I was very worried that I was going to now get in trouble with my leaders there because of the delay. And he said, you’re going to have to wait for the next tram to go back.

And I don’t even know it will be a long wait because it’s so late at night. And he says, I can’t leave you here alone. It’s too dangerous. So he says, I’m going to wait with you and I’m going to bring you back. And if you’re afraid of those those girls, they’re are giving you a hard time. I’ll talk to them. And he really did. He came back with me, and at the gate he even insisted on coming in with me.

But I told him, no, he better not. And some people must have seen us at the gate coming in and seen me with this SS officer. And this is how all the rumors started about my wild night life and all that. And it was the funniest thing.

And I was so grateful because I thought it was so nice of him that he had done that. And anyway, some of those girls had nothing better to do.

And I guess some of them had boyfriends and, and, uh, were really, uh, kind of starved for, for me male company and like to, to, uh, talk about rumors like that.

There were all kinds of things going on in that factory. They told me in the elevators and everything with the foreign workers and.

Well, one can imagine.

I wasn’t interested in anything like that except of going back home. I believe those dark winter days were the worst time for all of us. I felt humiliated by all that had happened and by that constant discomfort with that sound and.

The darkness and the cold.

It was like I was estranged from the rest of the. Fellows there. For my companions in the camp, I didn’t understand the other girls, and I didn’t care.

It was like everybody crapped in their own little, own little world, in their own little heart, and tended to their own worries. And you just touched out to work and back home in the morning and took the raids calmly and almost not caring. In the night, raids were the same thing, except now we had a new thing put upon us.

We had to also, uh, get up during the night and do practice marching. And, uh, this was, uh, in the line of evacuation plans for for the camp.

We had to go and, uh, hike for about an hour or two on. Not every night, but special nights during the week. And we were half asleep when we did it and marched along.

And I think that made this feeling of isolation, uh, really strong in all of us, because we were half asleep on our feet and just, uh, we didn’t were not allowed to talk. Didn’t feel like talking and just trudged along back into bed and, um, I think actually it was at that time, too, that I began to develop the bladder trouble. And, um, I had, uh.

The problem of how to keep dry at night.

And I got, uh, got it figured out by washing my underwear and sleeping with it inside my suit, my gym suit that we slept in to keep warm. And by keeping it fairly warm on my body, it was bearable to put them on in the morning. And but of course, it didn’t help my my situation at all. In fact, it probably aggravated it.

But that was the only solution since there was no other way of heat. And so everybody had their private little problems.

There was a lot of sickness in the camp, and I had begun to have terrible migraine headaches as well. Every time I was under those strong lights in the factory for a while, I got terrible headaches.

And I had spoken to our nurse.

I think we had a nurse that came around the camp once every two weeks or so, and I had spoken to her about it, and she had written me a little note that if it got real bad, I could go into the nurse’s office at the factory and laid down for twenty minutes, because I knew if I could go lay down for twenty minutes and close my eyes, they would go away.

The migraine headaches usually disappeared. And, um, I thought this was, uh, I was very fortunate in getting this, uh, dispensation, so to speak.

But there again, I found out that everybody rumored about it when when I was gone for twenty minutes and came back and, uh, it was just so humiliating the way everybody felt and acted and talked.

There was no more fun, no more comradeship. Everybody was just thinking of getting out and getting back home and and getting away. And it was dismal. And the thought that, uh, we could not make any fires.

The meanness of it. Because sometimes they called the. Called us out if it was too dirty in the barracks. They called us out and made us scrub the floors in the hall.

It was like a main floor through the middle of the barracks, and we had to scrub that part. And it was so cold that the darn cloth froze when you wanted to mop it dry afterwards with a rag. And it was ridiculous, and it seemed like the only bright spot was coming home. Back from work. A cup of that funny black coffee which they said was made out of acorns.

But it was hot and we were hoping that they would have our favorite food, which was the yeast dumplings in the pan with breadcrumbs and in in butter or fat or oil or whatever, and sometimes a little bit of that marmalade smeared in with it. This was a favorite, uh, Austrian dish, and we all loved it.

It was sweet and warm and very filling, those big dumplings. And it was always a bright day when we when the word was passed that that’s what we were going to have at night. And you just sat there and all crouched together in the cold and, and just lived around these few bites of hot food and drink. And that was the end of the night as far as enjoyment was concerned.

You went to bed in the cold room, in the cold bed. You were called out to the air raid shelter and a horrible noise all around and crashing and banging with the anti-aircraft guns. And the smell of the burning furniture, burning sofas, overstuffed furniture always smelled the worst, especially when it rained on top of it.

That awful smell of mortar and bricks and rubble, dust in the air back again, and then being called out by the whistle of the leader that we had to go for our hike through the beautiful Vienna woods. Every time I hear that voice, I think about it. And we would go for our hike and fall in bed again afterwards. And then out to the factory. And there was a day.

When we went over there to eat in the soup kitchen, and we had some great soup, and we had apparently plenty of it, Because as we walked out, the air raid started, sirens started, and the big man there in the cafeteria winked at me and said, uh, do you want a second helping?

And there were about three of us left, and of course, I was the slowest one. We sat down and started driving down an extra bowl of soup as quick as we could because the sirens were going. Yowling up and down. And the other ones were saying, hurry up, hurry up.

And I was, of course, the last one out the door. And then we had to run across the street on that square, and the bunker was in the sort of a park area right across that street.

And I ran across the street and out of breath into the bunker and into the elevator. They were standing there waving to me. They had apparently held holding that elevator for me and motioning to. Come in.

And I could hear the the noise already of the anti-aircraft guns and. And the bombs were all around me. And as I ran into the entrance, all of a sudden I found myself flying into that elevator against the wall of the elevator between the two other waiting girls. And the elevator took off. And there was a horrible crash and a flash.

And as we found out, the soup kitchen had been hit. As soon as we left, and I mean, we had just time to to cross the square when that hit happened and we did not have soup kitchen anymore. And that was, uh. Another one of the times we had probably the closest escape in my life, because if I had stayed there for another three spoonfuls of soup, I would have been a goner.

So that also made a deep impression on me, and sort of a it made me sort of melancholy because I realized, uh, that maybe I would never get home and how close you can come and how much my mother was worrying about me. And it got me thinking of the reality of really going back home, whether there really was any home left, and whether I would even find my peace.

The War Ends — Walking Home Through the Ruins

It was getting dark one evening and I was on the way home, walking through the streets again because there was no streetcar and getting deeper and deeper into my thoughts. And we had some new snow, and the city looked rather pretty with that fresh snow covering, and the dust made it look kind of bluish and cozy, and the snow made it soft and hushed.

And I kept walking and walking, not thinking where I was going.

I was thinking of home and of Christmas and how beautiful it was when my father had played the piano.

And I thought of Christmases this before, when we had the little old fashioned Christmas tree on the piano, with the angel hair and multicolored candles used to keep that tree up until my father’s birthday in February. February the third. And then my mother used to have her ladies in for coffee, and they were sitting on that beautiful, uh, satin covered sofa with the little flowers on the round table and the lace tablecloth. And the little Christmas tree was on with the candles and my father playing, and how the bells had been beaming through town on New Year’s Eve, just like Christmas Eve.

It was a harmony air from all the church bells. And my father and I used to walk after the church service. We used to walk around eleven o’clock or so. We used to walk out to the new church.

There was a new church on the northern end of town, where the organist had a midnight concert for Sylvester, which is the last day in the calendar. And this is how we in later years celebrated New Year’s. And then we would walk home and my mother and sister would be there, and we’d have a have a little drink of something for the new year, and, uh, we would, uh, have celery salad, which was, uh, something like not the celery here, but something like parsnips, sliced and pickled and red beets sliced and pickled, and potato salad with eggs and potato salad with herring and cooled crackers and cold cuts and cheeses and like a little buffet.

And sometimes we had friends over too.

But most of the time during the war, years later on, we were alone and we kept it up like this for every New Year’s Eve. Except that was the only thing we had in Frankfurt was that special service around eleven o’clock with the organ concert, and it was something special. My dad and I did, and I kept thinking about that and how nice that last Christmas at home had been, and wondering what they had done for New Years and what they were doing now and if they were still home.

The war news were all bad. At.

The battle of the bulge. And the bombing raids. And the reports that the Russians were approaching Vienna. They were pushing forward toward Vienna. And what would happen to us? All these things were on our mind constantly.

And I kept touching on through the snow, and I got into the center of the old city.

I was sure I was in a very old, old center. And where I was, I came through a big old iron gate, and I just stood there fascinated with the snow and the old horse carriages they had, which gave the tourists rides. Um, there was a couple of them coming by and looking through that gate and thinking in a little old alleyways with the snow.

It was like a Christmas postcard.

It was so pretty.

And I walked through the gate and down the alley. And then I realized that I had no idea where I was.

And I had lost my direction.

And I did not know how to get home from there, how to get back to the camp.

And I asked a couple of people, and they just shook their heads and said, uh, there are no streetcars, cars, and you can’t walk that far.

And I had no idea how far I had walked. And, uh, so I tried a couple more streets going around the corners, and my feet were getting cold and wet, and I was feeling pretty miserable.

And I thought, if I come around out on a bigger street, I’ll probably find my way, because I had been on the big thoroughfares with my Vienna girlfriend. A lot of times, and I’m fairly new, fairly well, the inner city there, but I just kept getting in deeper and deeper, and I felt more and more desperate and more and more lonely. And it all became to have a very eerie, unreal quality.

And I couldn’t really think straight.

And I became convinced that it was not really a dream, but that I probably was losing my mind and I was going a little crazy. So I thought, well, I’m going to have to see if I can find a policeman and let him put me on the right track to the train Am I going to find help somewhere?

And it was fast getting dark. That was the worst part of it. And with the blackout, when it got dark, it was pretty dark. And just at that time, I was going past the house that had assigned by the door.

It was a doctor, and I never forget his name. His name was revived and which was spelled with two A’s and Y.

And I said, that’s a Dutch name somehow. And it said psychiatrist under it.

And I was kind of smiling to myself, thinking, well, this is typical Vienna. I’m, you know, in the city of Sigmund Freud. No wonder if somebody has a little sign by the window. By the door like that is a humble little psychiatrist doing his job here.

And I decided right then and there, I said, I’m going to go in.

There were no other people on the street.

And I said, I’ll just go in, in his office and and tell him and he’ll have a phone and he might be able to figure out how to get home for me.

And I don’t know what made me, uh, seek refuge there, but I was I was really afraid I was getting a little weird there, and I did not know in those days what depression was. Nobody had any idea about these these, uh, fancy terms.

And I imagine that’s what it was. Depression.

But I was sure I was going a little weird and crazy.

And I was really. At wit’s end. This nice man took me in the office and let me tell him my story. And he said, well, that’s easy enough to find out. He says, I’ll find out that that place in the phone book and I’ll call them.

But he said, I don’t think that it’s even a good idea for you to try to go out there. It had started snowing again, and he said, there’s no telling if if I tell you where the streetcar goes, there’s no telling whether there will be one there. And he came up with a very good idea. He said, uh, don’t you have anybody in the city that, uh, other than that, that, you know, that is around lives around here?

And I told him that I had no idea where I really was, but I had gone by a street.

I remembered that where one of the teacher girls. Another one of the teacher girls had been called home early from our camp, and I had been pretty friendly with her. In fact, at that parent gathering in the country camp, her parents and my parents had really hit it off for a couple of days, and we had made a kind of a picnic trip one afternoon together.

So I said, well, yeah, I think I know one person that’s not too far from here. I came by the street and I told him the street name and he called them up. He says, well, that’s easy enough. I called him up and see if you can stay there overnight, because I don’t think you should in this shape. You should start going home. And he kept looking at me and I thought, well, maybe I’m really in much worse shape than I thought.

And I was so grateful that he was doing all these things and making the phone calls for me.

And I just thought he was wonderful. And he called them up and he said he told them what had happened, and he said, uh, she is here. And, uh, I don’t think she should try this. It’s a long way from there.

And I don’t think she should try to get home.

And I wonder if it’s okay if she could stay with you overnight. And he let me talk to them. And my friend, my girlfriend came on.

The girl from camp was there, and she was home. And she was also led the idea. And she said, sure, sure, come on over. And it was so wonderful to have this experience. So shortly afterwards, I was in her apartment and we stayed in her mother’s kitchen, and her mother made us fried White potatoes and bread and marmalade. And we were giggling and laughing and telling what had happened and laughing about the psychiatrist.

She was teasing me with that.

And I said, she said, how are you ever going to pay for it?

And I had given him my home address, and I said to just send the bill to my dad. And then I remembered again, who knows if they were even still home.

And I had told him that too, and added that to the many things that were going my going through my mind at the time and, and the things that had happened. And he was just sitting there and shaking his head. I told him about the different sicknesses that everybody had and I had, and he was just sitting there stunned.

He was an older man. And. And we talked and we talked with my girlfriend and it was so nice.

The whole apartment was warm and we washed my underpants and hung them up to dry.

And I took one of her old nighties and she said, some people always come by because you never know who’s going to get bombed out, she said.

And I sleep on the floor anyway. I sleep on the floor in the living room, on blankets, and you can do that, too. It makes no difference because she says, my bedroom. And she started to laugh and she said, don’t. Oh, whatever you do during the night, don’t open the door. And she pointed to the door to the next room, which must have been her bedroom. She says, you go three storeys down right there, because the house next to it was bombed, and they cleared all the rubble away. That door goes nowhere but out into the air. And I’ll never forget that night.

It was so such a relief to just be out of the camp circumstances and be in a, in a just in a private home. And nobody had anything fancy. And the house was half smashed and there wasn’t much to eat, but they were warm. And to think that they could go and sneak some board somewhere and didn’t, wouldn’t get shot for it, because in camp we were under oath like soldiers and and the POW that helped clear away the rubber.

They had armed guards there and anything they picked up, they would be shot for it. And they call it looting. Looting. And the same thing would have applied to us if we had stolen any boards to make a little fire.

And I know they had at times taken the little boards out from under the straw mattresses to make a fire, and that’s what started them being so bitter against it. And we talked about the camp and and the country camp together and about that parents day. And it was just so great to have that one escape. And he had called the camp and told them what had happened. And there again, there were everybody looking at me sideways when I came back, because they were there again.

I had stayed away all night and they didn’t know exactly the circumstances. Only the the camp leader knew. And amazingly enough, she didn’t seem too upset.

And I said to myself, then, this is a definite sign that we are nearing the end of this whole thing, because they just didn’t care that much anymore and they weren’t as strict.

We were called together one night and they told us what we were supposed to do if there was a a warning coming in and we had to evacuate.

We were supposed to throw away our pins.

We had pins for our labor service. That’s all we had on our private clothes.

We were supposed to throw away the pins and take our clothes, and everybody go in different directions, just melt away into the population. Which was a heck of a thing to do for a girl all alone, you know, unless there were special arrangements made where we were met by a train or something.

We were just supposed to up and run and and disperse, so to speak. And that was very serious. And she looked very serious when she told us. And we still had, I think, twice a week.

We had little political schooling sessions, and they would tell us how how the latest developments were going. And of course, the war in Italy was going on by that time. And Poland and and they said the battle of the bulge was lost. That was the last heroic effort, I guess, of the Germans and caused a lot of casualties on both sides.

It was crazy. And everybody at that time said it was crazy that Hitler was just trying too hard and it didn’t make sense anymore.

But the resistance grows stronger and stronger and stronger the closer the Russians came and the people in the West, the soldiers had just thrown their weapons away and let the West take them, because nobody wanted to be prisoner. Prisoner under the Russians. So the real strong resistance was toward the east and.

Even there, I think there were quite a few people who just saw the weapons away and deserted. And there was there were rumors that the SS was watching out. And if you got caught as a deserter, that the SS themselves were hanging the German soldiers for deserting, and they were declaring these cities on the east border fortresses.

And I thought, gee, that couldn’t be anything more on the eastern border of Germany than my home town. So now I was waiting anxiously every day to maybe receiving a letter from home explaining what was going on or what was happening.

But as bad as it was, the sadder the news got, the more hope was actually rising in us.

The hope of of being able to go free and go home soon. And there was something in the air in Vienna.

The spring came early and the sun was getting warmer. And the air had this this clear. Fresh quality that they describe in Munich.

When the snow is melting, the wind comes down from the Alps. And it gives people a feeling of exhilaration and, uh. Spirit. That is hard to explain. It can stir your emotions either to great joy or to melancholy. Thoughts which eventually showed up as an increase in suicides too. It just upsets your whole emotional being.

And this is what happened in Vienna. And this is why I always feel that when people say there is something special about Vienna, I do remember it. And it seemed so strange that this could happen in a city that was that severely damaged and bombed and smashed and under siege and, uh, the artillery, the Russian artillery eventually was shooting into the suburbs. And yet all through also this spring, I could not miss seeing how wonderful and how beautiful spring was.

And I remember going to the hospital with my girlfriend one day in the afternoon, again on Sunday, and we were gathering violets and the first green was popping out on the trees, and we were going through those beautiful Vienna woods, and I could see the other side of it.

And I thought, soon the war will be over and this will all be behind us.

And I did not know how I was going to get home, what was going to happen. My girlfriend said, if the worst thing comes, you can always come to us and stay with us until everything is over. And we knew that the Russians by that time had taken Budapest. And they were holding the line of the Oder river. They could not cause it, that there was such stiff resistance that they tried and tried, but they were stuck there.

But up toward Berlin they were trying.

The Russians were trying their utmost to raise to Berlin. And that was the weak spot. And that is precisely where my hometown was situated. So that was not a very good feeling.

But as far as we knew, there were no bad news yet. From that direction. Except that Hitler was drafting boys down to a fourteen, fourteen, sixteen, fourteen years old. And in Berlin, finally, in the streets of Berlin, they were fighting sixteen year old twelve year old soldiers trying to defend the city. And it was getting crazier and crazier.

But we were getting down to the last two months of the war. And you could almost count the days. Every days.

There were some News of this and that that had been captured in the Americans had come into many towns in Germany on the Rhine, and it was just a matter of time. So there was a whole different spirit in camp and a whole different spirit at work. At work. We got one day we got a ration of sausage. Everybody got half a sausage and a piece of a hunk of bread, but we were not allowed to eat it.

And I remember it was laying there under those neon lights on my workbench, and the Bologna was slowly turning green, and we weren’t allowed to eat it, but we could not wait to get home and eating it. And everybody got it.

The foreign workers too.

And I guess that was to spur us on to work harder.

But there was nothing more to really do.

We had run more or less out of work and the rates were still going on, but there were no more anti-aircraft guns shooting. I heard from one of the. Officers that were up on that battery on the top of the bunker, there was an older man about forty five or so, and I talked with him during a lunch break, uh, quite frequently in the in the last days there, uh, because we had to go to another soup kitchen, and that’s where I met him.

And, uh, going in and off the elevator. He must have had the same time break. And we got quite friendly because he was working. He had been on the theater for years, too, and he told me that they had no more ammunition. Up, up on top. And he says, you know, you don’t have to worry. This is going to be all over in a matter of days here.

And, uh, but he said after the war, we were talking about what we’d been doing. He says, I want you to get in touch with me because he wanted to, uh, start the first dance theater in Germany after the war. He said, it’ll be combined, uh, dancing and drama.

And I have all kinds of reasons how to do that. And it will be performed around like a circus ring, which in those days, of course, nobody had heard about it. Theater in the round is now a common thing.

But he had made all the plans and all the designs, and, uh, we were all carried away and transported when we were having our lunch there. And again, all the girls, I and me when I was talking to this old geezer, but he was a very nice guy.

But he had told me that there was no more ammunition, and that wasn’t a very comforting thought.

But again, it verified all our hopes.

It was definitely over. And. I came a day.

When they decided we could go to the movies instead of our political schooling, they gave that up. Uh, they came a day when they decided we could go to the movies, and, uh, movies were still going on as long as the movie theater stood.

There were some movies shown.

There were little, you know, propaganda, uh, injected, but, uh, not anything near of what other countries did. I noticed that, I mean, they were not nearly as biased as some of the war movies I saw over here, but. I don’t even know what kind of movie it was.

It was probably a big love story with Zarah Leander in a big tearjerker.

But anyway, the important part was the newsreels, and I saw actually. How the Russians were rushing across the Oder. They had finally crossed the Oder. Where? Right in my hometown. And apparently that was the weak spot in the line because they were holding out till the last the Germans.

And I saw them running over the bridge, and I said, That’s Frankfurt, that’s my hometown.

And I saw how they ran through some of the streets, and I saw them actually running over the big park square there by our house.

And I saw my house. Being in the middle of a war area. And now, of course, I knew exactly that I was not going to go home and probably never going to go home, ever. And that’s probably the reason why I forgot all about what movie we saw.

It was quite a revelation.

And I said, now I am going to have to stick to what my mother said. I can’t possibly go because if the Russians are in that town, they won’t release me from camp. So I was all set to go to Turin and to my aunt, and like my mother had told me what a good thing she had told me, although probably that would be the logical way I would have gone. I would have had it for during what order? Probably. And. Soon afterwards, they told us that we were going to receive our papers to go home.

The ones that could go. And it was a big, big, exciting, dramatic night because they were an unbelievable amount of tears shed and crying going on because so many of them were denied the release papers because the towns were occupied.

And I was sitting on my bunk getting my stuff ready. And just getting all excited.

And I heard this crying and screaming going on, and somebody shouting and people yelling and smashing doors and slamming doors. I went down to the next room and the next room, and there I found Agnes dissolved in tears. And she says, I can’t go home. They won’t let me go.

The Americans are there, and they have been there a long time, and they won’t let me go.

And I don’t want to stay here. I will not stay here. I’ll kill myself. I kill myself before I stay here. She says, what am I going to do, run around the streets in Vienna?

And I don’t know anybody. What am I going to do? I want to go home. I want to go home. I want I don’t want to stay here. So I told her I have an address, and I am going to tell her that your mother and my mother made an agreement. They know that we came. We both came out of the same country camp. And we’ll just say that our parents have an agreement that I that you going with me because I’m from Central Germany and that’s where I’m going. And that’s what we did. And this is how it happened that Agnes came home with me.

After the war.

After camp, I should say not after the war.

The war at that point was from as far as I was concerned.

The war was over for me when that happened. It wasn’t really.

But I mean, even not for me.

But that was all I counted that I got out of that camp and and got on the way home. And then when I finally was sure we were going to go, we both had our papers.

It was just before Easter.

It was right around the first of April. I said, I’m going to stay for Easter last week in March sometime there. No, I think it was April already. Anyway. I said, I’m going to stay a day or two with my girlfriend in Vienna and take a bath and get all my clothes cleaned up and get my thoughts together.

She had suggested it. She says you need a couple of days rest will do you good before you get on that train ride, because heaven knows what’s going to happen on that train ride. If you’re going to make it all the way, how long it’s going to take you, where you have to stay overnight and heaven knows what’s going to happen to you, you should rest a couple of days. And she said, If Agnes comes with you, she she can come too.

But you shouldn’t go right on the train this way.

And I was sitting at lunchtime telling this to this flak, this anti-aircraft officer. And the old guy shook his head and he said, you’re being very foolish, He said, if I have to grab you by the neck, you are going to be on the day you are leaving on the first train out of Vienna. And it may be the last train, but I’ll see that you’re on it, because you’re not going to wait another day here because this situation is too dangerous, he said.

They’re shooting in the suburbs. There they were in Wiener Neustadt, a big suburb, and the next stop is Vienna. And he said, you know that they’ve been shooting in the into the streets of the old city.

And I had heard that, and I didn’t know whether it was rumors or whether it was actually true.

But you could hear there was a different sound to the artillery. You could hear it now and then, and you could hear the rumble in the distance.

When they fired those big guns they called Stalin’s organ, they were like big pipes sticking up. I could.

I remember them from the newsreels. And they were coming up from Budapest, and they were capturing Vienna for sure within days. And he said, you are not going to stay another day. Extra. So I said to myself, well, if he’s so determined, maybe I better listen to him. And he did. He came with us personally.

We got into that railroad station with with the military escort, and he got us on the train and said, make room to everybody. And these young ladies got to get on here and put our luggage in. He says, I’m not leaving here till that train is pulling out. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Heaven knows that man must have seen a lot in his military career.

And he stood there and waved goodbye to me, and he said, I’ll write to you. And he did. He wrote to my parents a couple of times. And him, he’s the one that I have to thank. I have to be thankful to him that I got out of Vienna, because as soon as the war was over, Vienna was a different country. And for years, people had trouble getting out in and out from the because it was a Russian occupied country.

And. Anyway, we were out. We stood in that train by the toilet door with people coming and going, coming and going and the toilets stinking. And me with my pants wet. And there was a a sick.

There were a lot of sick soldiers with bandaged legs and arms and everything.

But there was one, uh, Romanian or some soldier. Polish soldier. He had a strange uniform on. I couldn’t tell anymore.

There were so many uniforms running around.

He was laying on a big feather bed on the floor next to us, and he had such strong, strong, disinfecting smell on him. I’ll never forget that. And all these hours and hours. I don’t know how many hours it took us because we we were probably rerouted away from the Oder, from the military area there, right toward the center of Germany. And then we had to change trains because they were all overloaded. And the boxes.

The wheel boxes, what are they for? They were overheating. For greasing. Anyway, they start to smoke when? When there’s too much of a load on the train. And then they had to stop and wait, and it went on and on.

We had nothing to eat at one time.

The Red cross came and had this thin coffee, and they reached it around in one cup, everybody drinking from the same cup.

When I think of it now, I would never, never do that now. And it went on and on. Standing up we would sit, crouch down and sit on the floor. If there was enough room to spread out our legs and we’d sit in in a crouched position, just like I used to sit in our air raid shelter. I used to go in the far corner, crouched down with my shoulders, and leaned my head into the corner and sit in the corner and sleep sound asleep Until it was time to go.

I slept every night like that. In one corner I never wasted any sleep. And that’s how I slept. And to later on, when I couldn’t do that, I remember standing up, sleeping in the train for the hour. And then finally we were there.

It was early, early in the morning and we were there.

And I remember coming down that street, it seemed all like a dream because we usually were down in Turin on vacation, and it was like a whole change of scenery.

There was no bomb damage in Turin, in that little town. And the town looked peaceful. Everybody was still sleeping, a couple of people going to work and a horse and wagon going around with the milk, like in the old days before the war. Dodger pitcher of milk from the wagon. And we went up five flights of stairs to where my Aunt Erna lived. In a little apartment under the eaves. And there were two.

There was one extra guest room they had fixed up. And my mother opened the door not because they knew I was coming, but because my mother was there. And my sister. I thought they thought. Anyway, when my mother opened the door. She took one look at the two of us, and she was puzzled, and she looked again. And then she turned white as a sheet and she fainted. And my Aunt Erna came out, and she was wringing her hands and wiping her hands on her apron and saying, oh, God willing. For God’s sakes, you made it home. And she took me and hugged me.

She was such a little, little lady, a little bitty thing.

She was my godmother. And then they sat down and they bought some whatever they had to eat. They brought it out, and my mother was all excited and she was running back and forth. And then she was crying again and she said, your sister isn’t here. We didn’t think there was enough room and we should split up.

So her sister was with Carlotta’s mother, in part because they still had school there, she said. There’s an even smaller village and there’s nothing going on and nothing changed. And the school was still going on. And so she decided to go there. And she’s gone to school with your little cousin Eva. So she’s staying with a lot, and I’m here and she says, we don’t know where your father is.

Well, she had probably figured that she won’t see my dad again, and she probably figured she would never see me again either. And that’s why she fainted. So we were home again.

But the war was not over. And we moved into that little room. Under the roof. Had a window about the size of an airplane window, and you could push up on the stick, and it had notches, and that bar had the little window open, and we could look out and hear the birds singing. And the trees were getting green. And that springtime was the most wonderful spring we had in years and years. And nicest spring that I can remember in all my life.

The trees were blooming over and over, flowers everywhere, lilac, forsythia and the weather was glorious every day.

But the war was still hanging over our head. Although it was just so great to be home and to be out in civilian life and to take daily, daily life again as it came, with all its troubles and all its woes of the day. A, uh.

The first thing happened at breakfast the next morning.

My mother told us what had happened to my sister. She had been drafted from school to go to East Prussia with the boys class of the same age, which was the sixteen year old, and they had to dig trenches to help the soldiers out and free them for other jobs. And she said, for, for three weeks, I was just worried every day about your little sister being out there alone. Just the idea of it to be there, digging trenches for the last line of defense and be so close to the front was unbelievable.

But then somebody must have got a voice of reason into this whole scenery. And it got too hectic and they shipped all the pupils back. Back to school for about a week and then school was over and they said no more school. And since then my sister had been home and had had no school, but was working with the Red cross with my mother on the railroad station in our home town.

And my father had come in one day in a railroad. One of those cars that railroad police had for their, uh, uh, use. And he had been able to get one and get away with a few other guys to make one last trip into the city after it had been declared a fortress. And there were bulletins everywhere that the civilian population was supposed to immediately leave.

And my father went to my mother and said, uh, you have to leave, and we have no time to to The pack. Anything. You have to be on this train because there are not very many trains getting out of here. He had been by our house and had grabbed a few things, and my mother insisted to go back one more time.

So I guess they made us swing by. We went far from the railroad station anyway, and it must have been just awful for my mother to say goodbye to her, her beautiful apartment, and all her possessions, and know that she would never see them again. Quite likely. And, um, my father managed to go in, uh.

After the fighting was over and came. And that was our biggest memory, because when my father told us of that story, he always had tears in his eyes. He said the Russians had taken possession of the apartment and had taken the piano and put it out under the trees on the boulevard and weren’t even using it, and left it out there in the rain, in the weather to be completely wrecked and ruined.

And he said, that is one thing. He says, I don’t care who would have taken it, but to to to have such a disregard. They were making fires on the, on the, on the hardwood floors, floors, the inlaid floors and big apartments. They grabbed the books from the library and made fires right on the open floorboards.

And they were like animals. And he said, you can’t believe how completely backward and untrained and unintelligent these people are. They have no education. They are peasants from way, way back out in some of those republics that have never even seen civilization as we know it. And this kind of frightened me. These stories from my mother. And she says my father had taken her and had said she didn’t really want to leave.

But he said, you have to think of your daughter and you have to be on this train. And he put them on the train. Very much like the way that the soldier had put Agnes and me on that train. And of course, my father knew all the train schedules and got her on that train, and they were supposed to leave. All the civilians were supposed to have left. And so they arrived in, in at my aunt’s house with just little suitcases and handbag and carry bag, and that’s all. And of course, they’ve had no word from my father or about my father since that time.

Under the Russians — East Germany and Starting Over

And so had I returned back from the war.

But the war was not over. And the following month I turned. Twenty years old.

And I had spent all my teenage years during the war.

My mother told us, right.

The next morning we had to go to the ration ticket office and get our tickets so she could hand them to Aunt Erna for our support. And she was very happy to do that. It helped out a lot in her household.

My mother felt kind of lost of what to do. A lady of leisure, suddenly with no possessions and no house to keep and worrying constantly, day and night about my dad and my sister. because, uh. Uh, but of course, uh, the little town that my mother called a sweet cow village, the little town where the spa used to be, and a pretty little resort town lay east of us, which meant that the Russians would be there sooner. And.

The Russians were advancing rapidly. And so were the Americans. And now everybody in town was talking, whether the Russians or the Americans would get to us first. And everyone was hoping that it would be the Americans. And the battle in Berlin was raging.

The Russians had finally broken into Berlin. And were fighting street by street. Like I said, with the boys twelve years old, pressed into being soldiers and the last defenses. Hitler was raging in his bunker, still talking about a secret weapon that would turn the war entirely over into victory. He had had the V1 secret weapon that was fighting the air war over Britain, and had caused such disaster in the British cities, and then the V2, which was a true rocket, which was even deadlier and bigger and not as noisy.

So you could not hear it coming. And he promised that he was going to have the big super weapon. And of course, we later found out what they were working on.

It was the atomic weapon that they were working on on the shores of the Baltic Sea there, where they finally captured all the scientists and brought them over to America. And they must have gotten them out before the Russians came, because the Russians and the Americans united on the river Elbe. And then they made the Oder river, where my hometown was, the border between Germany and Poland. And the city of Frankfurt was taken, that is, Frankfurt in the east. My hometown was taken by the Russians. They stayed.

The Russians had stayed there. So I heard later for about a week or two when they had a big revolt And, uh, the Germans were trying to throw the Russians out, and they were trying to live up to their old history. And the result of it was that the Russians came back and burned the whole inner city, burned it completely.

It was completely destroyed. And what wasn’t burned was being torn down, as it was a complete outrage.

It was such a beautiful old medieval town.

But they ripped everything, gutted it, except for the old town hall and the old church. They got it the whole inner city and robbed it of all its nice old buildings. And it is a horrible sight, horrible sight to see and sorrowful sight to see. To go back to this town, the disconnection between those historical buildings and these terrible new building blocks they built for the apartments. It is a town that has lost its soul, according to the architects.

But however, I did not return there for quite a while. We stayed with my Aunt Erna in the Russians, where settling down around Berlin and slowed down. And the Germans. So we heard say, we’re asking the Americans to give them their guns back because. And go and keep fighting and throw the Russians out of Germany.

And General Patton was one of the Americans who had quite the same view and was actually a reader of Hitler’s books and Hitler’s ideas. This this is all I heard much later than at that time. And he had the view also that they should give the Germans the guns back and throw the Russians out right now, before it was going to be too late and did not want to have all of Germany fall into the hands of the Russians.

But then there was already the conference where they had agreed on certain areas to be divided up. And the Americans, of course, wanted Western Germany because of the heavy industry and all the big companies, and some of them actually having heavy dealings with America all through the war. And we only heard very little of this at that time. Almost everything had stopped.

The mail service had stopped.

The trains had stopped, everything came to a grinding halt. And the people were traveling by foot like in medieval days.

The soldiers going back home west were on the roads, on the highways, and the soldiers going back east, going home were on the highways.

The ones that were captured and managed to get away wearing civilian civilian clothes or wearing parts of uniforms. You could not tell anymore who was a civilian and who was not.

There were a lot of uniform pieces being worn by civilians for the lack of clothing. And thank God, in all this confusion, the weather kept on being just as wonderful as springtime. Blue skies, sunshine, warm temperatures, and everything was greening and blooming. And it was such an elated feeling to think that the war was over and the war was officially over. On May seventh. On May eighth, Eisenhower made his declaration that the war was over, and on April twelfth, I think, was the day that Roosevelt died. This must have been. About only a week.

After or two after I came home and the Americans had finally arrived in town, and we were thrilled that it was the Americans. And watching them, you know, big eyed the jeeps and the trucks. And then, uh, a few days later, they were all driving around with these black ribbons on their trucks and their jeeps and everywhere.

And that’s how we found out that Roosevelt had died and the rumors were flying because some of the girls had already made the acquaintance of the Americans, chit chatting and getting bubble gum and candy, and and the kids were all following them in droves wherever they went. And, uh. So we were pretty well kept up on whatever was going on.

There was a big, uh, field hospital in town also. And the problem was that, uh, a lot of the people there had left, and it was no longer. Had any staff of nurses or was no longer cared for or cooked for. So the women organized a group that was relieving each other, taking turns taking care of these wounded and and cooking. And we went and I went cooking in that kitchen for about a week. And then came the bed, and we had very little to eat ourselves. And then came the terrible news or wonderful news that we could throw our ration tickets away, that they would not.

There were no more organizations to take care of it.

There were no mails to deliver them to.

When they were printed. And that was the end of the ration tickets. Everybody was in a, in a just in a dither over it.

It was wonderful. Except what? We didn’t realize that after the ration tickets came complete confusion and black market. And there was in a few days, nothing left in the stores, literally nothing. And it was up to the individual to see how people were feeding themselves, which was a terrible situation.

There were stories that people were going out to farmers begging and farmers giving and giving and giving and finally driving the people away and driving them away with shotguns. And it was really terrible.

It was a terrible time. You lived off potatoes? Potato peels. We used to dry on a cookie sheet and grind them up and make soup from them. And, uh, the hunger was constant. Constant? My mother used to go at night and steal a cup of flour for my aunt, and put hot water in a little bit of sugar in the cup and stir it up and bring it to us.

It’s a sort of dessert soup. Sweet drink. Just so we had a little extra nourishment because she felt bad for us. Growing girls with practically nothing to eat. And everything was divided and shared and counted and weighed and weighed everything before she put it in the pantry. She weighed it so that nobody could snitch anything out of the pantry. Oh. What days?

And Agnes was still very unhappy. She says, I want to go home. I want to go home. She says it’s nice that I’m here, but I belong home. And if it’s now, the war is over. I should try to get home as fast as possible. They will be worried about me. And, um, I said, uh. Why don’t you? My father had, uh, my mother had advised against it, and, uh. So she she said, why don’t you write a letter?

And Agnes had written a letter and gone out to the highway and spoken to a couple of soldiers going west and given them the letter. And lo and behold, a short time after that.

It was not very long.

It was amazing. And we could not believe it.

It was like a miracle. She actually got an answer back from another man that was traveling the other way, just like in ancient times. This is how the letters traveled. And she got an answer from her, from her mother and her sister that they were all right, and to come home whenever she could, and that they and they wrote to my, my mother that they were very thankful for, for keeping her and having her brought out of Austria And, uh.

So, uh, this was good news, but I think it gave my mother reason to be more worried about my dad, because she probably figured out why didn’t he think of getting in touch with us this way if he was all right?

And, uh, she was getting skinnier and skinnier and thinner and thinner, I could just tell by her eyes were getting bigger and bigger all the time. And she said to my sister and me.

My sister came home, uh. Right around, uh, the beginning of vacation.

It was toward the middle of June, right after my birthday, Agnes and I decided we should walk to a bad Curzon. Walk on foot. You couldn’t get on a train and you were forbidden to leave your city. You forbidden by the Americans to use the road.

There was a curfew, and you were forbidden to leave the place where you were to, because they did not want people going from one zone to the other like it was happening now. And. Because they kept an eye on all the civilians because of, I guess, terrorism, black market, several reasons.

But we sneaked away and we walked through the countryside and through all the villages to Bad Curzon. It took us about. Oh two. I would say about probably six hours. And we got there and I was so glad to see my sister, and she was so thrilled when she caught sight of me, and we told her to pack up her little two little suitcases and come with us, and she had come home. So my sister was now home with us too. And.

My mother was sleeping on the sofa. In the dining room.

There was like a a little sofa there. Divan. And she slept on it.

We had the the little extra room with a little window. And that’s where my sister and I then slept too.

But first she was laying on the floor and it was blankets, and we didn’t know where we were going to get enough room, but it worked all right. And my mother said, well, girls, I guess we can no longer count on your dad coming home and we will have to decide to do something soon. And she says, I thought, what we have to do is when the refugees start leaving town, there were refugees put in every spare room in town where you could even think of.

She says. And the third thing, the first thing we have to do is get you a job. And she meant me so that I could get a job, and we could save a little money to support ourselves and maybe pay some on one room and start having our own home again, or even just pay some rent. And. Somehow or another, she says, we got to make a home for ourselves again.

And we were saying, yeah, how wonderful that where we were already making plans. We said if we had just like a little room, like where we we were in under the eaves there and had a way for cooking.

The bathroom was on the was all the bathrooms in that apartment house were on the where the stairs turn in the in the stair stairways. That’s where the bathroom was between the floors. So that all the people from the apartments had to share that bathroom on one level. And so we could have at least some place to cook. We would be all set. And, um. So we were starting to decide how cute it would be and how we would fix it up, and trying to cheer my mother up the best we could. And, um. I started to work. Then I got a job. In a little place that was starting up. Making glue. Chemical glue.

It was white glue. Like Elmer’s glue. And this man had made the formula, and they were mixing it up there. And they made it in big buckets like paint buckets, big buckets with lids on them and handles. And there was a bright pink label on it with his name. And that was his. Probably a commercial glue that he was shipping out to other little businesses starting up.

And, uh, he had me first. He eyed me and he looked me all over and he said, well, I’m a high school graduate. He stuck me in the office, and I was supposed to keep book of the postage going in and out and the in and out, and I was going crazy, and it was the most boring thing, and I hated every minute of it.

And I knew I didn’t do a good job and I had no fun at all.

And I just hated it. And he finally got.

I think his wife came in and did the bookkeeping. Anyway, I got out of there and he put me into the production line where we were, uh, filling the cans and by weight and putting the lids on. And then we pack them into big cardboard boxes, six at a time, and sealed them off and get them ready for packing and shipping. And then we put them on, put them on a two wheeled hand cart and had to wheel them down to the train station. And get them shipped in.

The freight trains by that time were running again. No, no passenger trains, but freight trains. Freight trains were starting to run with some of the supplies and some food for the cities, and it was slowly the railroads were working again.

The railroad people had come back. And things were slowly starting rolling again. And still no word from my father. And, uh, so I had this my first job, and I was the big breadwinner in the family. And then one day.

My sister and Agnes picked me up from work. And there was big excitement. And we ran all the way back to the apartment because my dad had come home. He had come home on a bicycle. We just sat there marveling at it. Aunt Anna made some pot of coffee, and it was so cozy in the little, little dining room there at the table.

And my father was telling stories like it used to be. He loved to tell stories. Sitting at the table. And he had been with his train all the way up to the shore of the North Sea, which he decided was going to be the British zone. And he was, uh, more or less stuck in that British zone, that they had the same restrictions we did.

You were not supposed to leave the area. And, uh, he did not know exactly what the status of our area was. Until just a short time before he had left. And there were no trains for a while, and so he had managed to get a hold of a bicycle from one of the his railroad friends there, who was actually a native of that area.

And on that bicycle he had made his way down home to us, because, of course, he knew also about our meeting arrangement with, uh, my aunts. And he was hoping that my mother and my sister had made it all right. And he was so relieved to hear that I was there also. And it was the greatest reunion. And we were so fortunate. We thought in spite of losing everything else, We had each other and we had not lost one member of our family to the war.

We were fortunate indeed. And right away, the old feeling of home was back.

It was like some great big bird had come home and we felt safe again under his wings. What a difference it made. I mean, even me going to work, it was not the same as going out to work and thinking that everything depended entirely on me.

We had our daddy back again. It just is a different. Spirit in the family. And my mother’s eyes were sparkling and shining and Aunt Erna made a potato cake. And, uh.

My father unpacked a he had. All he had was one of those briefcase thing like you, like the men used to carry to work. And the older kids in school used to carry these leather cases. They did not carry the things on their back anymore. They had these big leather cases with locks in front. And the things he brought out of there. He had a photo album that we all looked at and uh, uh, a box of jewelry and, uh, he had one. Uh, set of silverware.

My mother had a couple, two or three teacups in her in the bottom of her suitcase that she brought out these Collection cups and cake plates that all the ladies had. Oh, and there was an R and O. And then she said, I have something special for my birthday. She came out with my baby doll and she says, this is what I have for Barbie. This was her nickname for me, Barbie. Everybody called me baby and that’s what I always was.

But when she was really fun, she said, Barbie.

And I took one look at that baby doll. And a flood of memories came back to me because the last time I had played with this was not very long ago, because we used to play.

We had our dreamland Egypt, and we used to play Pharaoh and love stories. And in this child was the child we still played with.

We had made a handcrafted cradle kind of thing for him that we hung in the in the door frame as a, as a, as a, a swing cradle, which we thought very quaint. And anyway, I took one look at that doll and I said, by the gods, you saved the the Crown Prince of Egypt. And everybody laughed. Oh my God, by the breast of Arthur. And the great Amun-ra. She saved the heir to the throne. And from then on, I had only one idea. How am I going to find my Giza wife?

And it was just like we were all feeling younger and happier again. And like the whole war experience of the last two years was just a blur and a bad memory.

It was so great. And sitting there in Thüringen with the embroidered tablecloths and and the cups with my Aunt Erna, it was perfect. So we now had to make some moving arrangements with the sofa where my mother had been sleeping into the big parlor, and the table and our beds from the small room under the eave there moved side by side into the little den living room.

And that was to become my mother and daddy’s bedroom. And now what are we supposed to do for beds? We decided on the couple of bunks that were down in the air raid shelter and also an extra cot. And we transported them upstairs all the way into our room. And there we were and moved in as three girls together. And now we were quite a full house. And it had a bed after effect, because, as it turned out, we were now beset with bedbugs in our little room.

The three of us, probably some of the people traveling through, had been using this room in the cellar off and on to stay overnight, and some of them had bought the bedbugs in. And so now we were having quite a few restless nights there, uh, hiding a flashlight under our pillow and trying to shine the flashlight on the bedbugs and trying to get them and kill them.

But there is nothing harder to catch than a bedbug. Believe me, I found it out. They are almost impossible to catch. By the time you put the light on and find out where they are, they are long gone. So it was a daily, or I should say, nightly battle with bedbugs.

But after a while, I think we got some spray or something. And of course, since this was a common ailment in those days, you could find it available in places and things were getting. Uh, picking up as far as, uh, daily life was concerned not in a line of foods, but other things, like there were strange things appearing in the, in the, in the shops.

There was, for instance, piles of clothesline and baskets and pottery and crafted pottery. That was the kind of original stuff. And China in stainless steel silverware that was obviously army issue stuff, uh, canteens and little, uh, footstools that were used in the barracks. I imagine you could have any, any amount of them brooms appeared from nowhere and some medications, a lot of medications, actually.

Uh, some of them may have been even stockpiled, uh, because of the war and were now given out for the civilian population, and I think it was all due to the fact that the railroads were running again. And also the mail service had started up again, which was a great relief. Uh, Agnes received another letter.

From her folks. And after that there was no more holding her. She wanted to get home and she wanted to get home. So my father said he would arrange it for her, see if she could get on one of the freight trains and get a ride at least a little closer to where she lived into the Rhineland somewhere. And she was determined she was going to go. And so she left on one of the freight trains. And it was still a confusing time, because two days after my dad arrived, I remember.

When the war was actually declared over, there was a big bang one Sunday morning. Huge crash bang and there had been no air raids, so everybody jumped out of bed, confused and saying, what is going on? Are they shooting? What was happening?

Well, it turned out there had been bombs dropped on the railroad station and nobody ever figured out or nobody ever heard among the civilian civilian population. Why and who and wherefore and whence from these bombs were.

But anyway, they exploded, and they wrecked quite a bit of the, uh, track arrangement there and the freight in the freight railroad station. And it took several days to clear that up again.

But after that time.

I had left on her train anyway. And, uh, It really was of little consequence to anybody because nobody was allowed to go anywhere and travel anywhere anyhow, so we didn’t hear much about it except a few days later, Agnes came back.

And I don’t even remember which way she came back, whether she had come back on a train again or had hitched a ride with somebody. Anyway, she was back home again because I was still working every day, and she had appeared back here, back with us again, and had lost one of her shoes, was walking in these peasant, uh, wooden shoes, wooden slippers with the leather tops like the peasants wear. And only one of her shoes. Her shoes. She had lost one. I don’t know, Warfield after the train was strafed by aircraft. He said, how could this be? The war is supposed to be over. And what is going on?

And apparently there was in certain areas there were pockets of resistance still, and there were a group fighting. They called themselves the werewolves, who were guerrillas and guerrillas had maybe been responsible for this and sort of this strain to keep things confused and not have the country go back to normal. Anyway, a few people had been hit, and Angus was really terribly shook up. And she says, I’m not going to try anything again until I hear more news and until the regular passenger trains train. So she was back with us again. And my father was now in touch with the railroads.

I think that kind of spurred him on also to find out what had happened there. And he went and signed in at the local railroad offices. And of course, this was all more or less his own old stomping ground, because our home city airport is not not far from there at all. And where my father had started, and I’m sure he went there too, as soon as the trains were running.

And the result of all this was that my father was put back on the job with the railroad, and they were thrilled to have him and see him there, because they needed all the help they could get, getting everything organized again. And, you know, considering that my father by that time must have been. I imagine sixty two, three, maybe even sixty five already.

He was he was working and he was back to work. And he soon came with the news that they wanted him to move into the railroad offices and be in the district of mining, and which is further west from airport even. And. So. He had, of course, had been the age he was.

He was glad to get his job back, and under the circumstances he had lost everything.

He was glad to get this position back, and without much ado, had said of course they would do it. And here we were again, getting settled and established and. Ready to move on once again. Uh, he had, uh, agreed to be there at least before the school started.

The schools were opening up again, and my sister, after vacations, would be starting in mining at the high school. Meanwhile, it was quite jolly in a folder with the Americans, because I remember one day everybody was watching them. Everything they did and how they acted, and we were trying to catch glimpses of of them and hear some words and phrases in English. And, uh, there was a lot of curiosity and there was a strict order of no fraternization.

Of course, at that time. So that made it all the more interesting. And a lot of the girls were going for walks at night through the park with them. And the thing that stood out in my mind is that they were always they looked very well fed, fat and healthy and that they were always laughing. They were always joking and laughing. And it seemed so strange because everybody else, and especially the men in Germany, was very somber and, and uh, and, uh, down. And it was such a contrast to it, I think.

And I remember going having to go to the well, uh, at one of the city’s little city squares to get water. A couple of times, because the water works were not working right, and there was stuff in the water that wasn’t considered right, and there was broken water mains or whatever it was.

There was always something.

But I remember several times having to make these trips for three or four days to the well, and they were always a lot of people at one time, a truck pull up, and there were a bunch of young soldiers on it, and they stopped, and one of the youngest of the guys jumped off with a canteen. They’d be gasoline can.

It was almost like getting water. They apparently had talked him into going. Standing in line with all the women. And he was red faced and embarrassed and looked, looked up and down the line and knew what to do. And then just stepped in the back of the line and we all looked at each other.

We were really impressed by this because he could have pushed everybody aside and everybody would have let him go anyway and got this water first.

But he chose to get in the back of the line and wait. And it really impressed me a lot about the first American that I really saw close to. And then I came another day.

There was one time when they came in their jeeps with loudspeakers through town, and they announced that all the women should go with brooms and mops and buckets out on the road to somewhere or some country road lane. Um, there was a little outside of the city, a big school, one of the district schools, high school or whatever it was.

It was a big building and. They were going to clean it out and use it for barracks.

It was supposed to be more troops coming in and had to supposed to, uh, be billeted there.

And I guess they had gone through the whole town to make sure that enough women were showing up and they hadn’t counted on every woman and every young girl showing up.

There was such a mass exodus of housewives with mops and brooms and buckets that it was getting to the point of being hilarious, and we all started marching. It was, like I said, the most beautiful spring in history.

The weather was gorgeous and we all started singing, singing spring song, marching songs and marching out that that country. Country hold out toward that school or whatever it was. And there was such a long line waiting to get in to get to work that they had to turn most of us back anyway.

But it was an unforgettable experience, and I think they were quite embarrassed with the results, because they did not expect that the Germans would respond like that immediately. Standing in line had become a way of life with us anyway, because you had to stand in line for anything you want to get to eat or to buy or to have done in an office. And so we were used to that.

There was always a line that went to the butcher shop real early in the morning, and they would sell the broth that they had to cook their sausage in For stock, and it was just a watery broth with a little meat flavor in it.

But everybody stood in line for that precious stuff by about four o’clock in the morning.

Now, the Americans had proposed a curfew, and you weren’t supposed to be out on the street before seven. So they came down there and tried to rope it off and try to drive us off. And finally they had one day, two guys come down with whips and whip the people away from the door.

And I was really disgusted with that sight. That was not very pretty and very nice, and it was really no need of it because we weren’t doing anything there but standing and waiting for a little bit of soup. And they also did not let anybody raid the garbage containers. And people were telling fantastic stories and stuff they were throwing away. They were throwing milk away in pancakes and bread and all kinds of things. They were throwing them away by the buckets for peaches. Things they got in rations and nobody cared to eat. Ended up there. And of course, the American cigarettes became.

The currency, the only currency that really counted was, uh, cartons of American cigarettes. And people bought with that silver and sets of China and furniture and paintings and all kinds of fur coats and all kinds of valuables you could buy with so many cartons of cigarettes. And they used to get a carton at least a week, once a week. Every soldier got a carton of cigarettes, so it was easy for them to pay for anything. Cigarettes.

And I had now received, um, another. Thing in the mail. And that was a postcard from his wife. That was our big excitement, too. And, uh, I had to go and she was in Tubingen also because it turned out that when they had, uh, evacuated Frankfurt, they had ordered them all into Thüringen. So all the people from my school were somewhere in Turin and near me. And, uh, I immediately decided I had to go and visit his wife. And his passenger trains by that time were running again, not very reliable, but they were running.

And I went to and I First of all, I sent her a card where I was, and then I took the train down and visited her with her mother, and they were sitting miserably there, lonesome. She had nobody to talk to as refugees in a little back room apartment. And it was really. Very dismal because they were not with relatives, they were just being put into people’s homes, and they had to put up with whatever they got.

And so did the people in the home have to put up with the refugees. So it was sad, but it was a very joyful, joyful thing for us that we found each other and we were delighted. And right away we were making plans to go see the housing authority and moved to our hometown so we could be together.

A New Life — Theater, Auditions, and Weimar

So this started a whole new activity in my life and in everybody’s life because I was still working. And this, however, was not. So she came to visit and started standing in line at the Housing Authority. And in every spare moment that I had, I did the same. And we worked on it and worked on it, and none of us would believe that we could actually achieve this.

We were going to trade apartments for the refugees, and I guess the reason we finally won out was the one thing was that he insisted she wanted work and she could not get it there. Uh, the little town where they were in was more or less a resort and spa town with old retired people, and there was really not much work there. and also the fact that her mother was a widow and her father a war veteran and and, uh, um. Employee of the state. He had been with the, uh, Telegraph and Mail post office business. Uh, and, uh.

So, uh, being the new state, the new communist state, they sympathized with the workers and the state employees, and I’m sure that this had something to do with it. Lo and behold, they did get a place in my aunt’s hometown, and they were going to be able to move. And of course, moving was no problem because they had no more to call their own than, uh, my mother and us had. So it was just a matter of getting packed up and getting on the train. And her mother came over and looked at the apartment.

It was as dismal as the other one, unfortunately.

But it did have a cooking opportunity. So they had two rooms and they had a little niche for cooking, but it had no real, uh, sitting or living room. And it turned out later on that the lady in the apartment was a real drag, and she really did not like anybody to sit at night with her and listen to the radio, or have a cup of tea and talk or anything like that.

She was really, uh, a witch. They had a pharmacy. She and her husband and she worked in the business, and I guess she was tired at night, and. And, um, she had that typical attitude. We worked hard for what we had, and she had really no feeling, and she was a typical bad example of the ones that are better off not understanding what it’s all about. And we hated her. And we promised her this is what we promised her mother. We would find other places as soon as we could, uh, as long as they were there.

We had the biggest problem behind us. And, uh, it turned out that, uh, my aunt and uncle also talked to friends about it. And, uh, the lady in the house next to us, the houses were all built side by side down the main street, and the apartments were quite similar.

It was like a block of. four. Three or four floors. And each floor was a different apartment. Uh.

The bay. I very much like in Boston, where one room has three windows out into the street, like a little bay window, a little pretty. And the one next door, the lady next door had a three room, and she said she would not mind at all having them move in there. And one could have used a divan in the living room, and she would enjoy the company. So she had lost some refugees that had left. And, uh, so this was wonderful.

We were so, so now we lived right next door. For me, that was better than we ever had it. And of course, uh.

The mother kind of lost company by that.

But she she came over and my mother used to go over visiting her once in a while, and she was kind of lost because she had been a homebody. And she came from the country somewhere, uh, around, uh, Poznan, which was actually in the Polish country.

There were a lot of Germans there, and so did her husband came from there, too, and all her relatives were still behind in Poland, even though they were German. Uh, so she had always been a little cut off from her family, and now she, she had even lost her neighbors in Frankfurt, where they had lived since they got married. So she was a little lost and lonely there.

But she did like the area, and she got used to it, and they actually lived there until. She died.

So, as I know. Long after I came over to this country that was still, uh. Her otherwise mother’s address. He’s a white. Went on. To college, getting a college education for the same reasons. Because her father was a veteran. And, uh, her mother had been widowed early, and she had, uh, they were just simple people. And they were right in front lines to get, uh, government loans by the, by the communist regime. And she went to the famous university in, in, uh, Jena. Vienna, which was one of the oldest in Germany and very famous.

She was going to actually go through, through it and and become an archaeologist.

But that was a little later in the story.

It was about the same time I went to college, and right now I was still going to that glue factory and I could not. Get away from this job. Uh, even when my parents moved to my father’s new job in mining. And my sister started school there, and I was moving with them.

I was moving in and being all thrilled.

I had my own room. And now we had this, great big apartment again and no furniture practically.

It was quite an experience.

We had again, the help of the beds and the cellar that were in the air raid shelter.

We were very careful about the mattresses this time, and we had the whole place fumigated too, and it was in very good shape, very clean.

I think they had the railroad, uh. Had helped with the cleaning service going through there, because I remember it had, uh, linoleum floors in the kitchen, in the hall, huge hallway, because it had originally originally been an upstairs office, I think years ago.

But the front rooms had hardwood floors and there were three big, big rooms. A smaller room, which was my sister’s room. And then over the corner there were two small rooms that I had as my domain, and the only door to that came out into the kitchen. And there again was brown linoleum, but it was all waxed and the floors were clean.

The woodwork was clean. Maybe they had, uh, had tubes in there for a while. And anyway, some, uh, cleaning service from the railroad, I’m sure, had gone over it to clean it up for us.

It was really a joy.

It was a nice big stove, big table in the kitchen and a couple of chairs. And, uh, I think for plates, we had enamel plates, heaven knows, only maybe out of a railroad station kitchen for the help or someplace like that.

There were some plates and pots and, um, I mean, it was a bare minimum and we had four beds. And that was about it. And my sister and I got a great idea with all that clothesline that was in the stores everywhere. We were, uh, using one doorframe. And nailing nails into the frame, which was really a hard thing to do.

But I said, well, what? We have no other way. It’ll work. And we made rugs. We got into production making rugs out of clothesline weaving, and we had we got some dye from the from the pharmacy, a deep red and brown, and we made stripes and we made different rugs for a different rooms. And it helped a lot having just having those rugs on the floor.

And my, my parents got a big kick out of it. And right, right around that time. My grandmother was getting a lot of pressure. In her apartment in the spa on our hometown, nearby Tantalate. Their elegant home was being invaded. And the whole villa was being confiscated by the army. Uh. For the Americans. And, um. She had to move, and she decided to go into a home. My grandfather had died. During the war, I think in To. Anyway, one of those vacations that we went. To. What a road.

I remember that we got the news that my grandfather died, and my mother went to the funeral, and I cried a lot that day because my grandfather was a very. Fine figure in our family.

He was so neat and so exact.

He was just the same as my grandmother, a typical gentleman and neat as a pin. And he had always been on these hunting trips. But, um, with my dad, but hiking trips with us kids and walking through the woods was an experience with him. He always carried a little hammer because he was, um, checking the geology.

And he was collecting a specimen of old seashells and fossils and ferns. And then he would sit home and and make, uh, little cases with little drawers and every drawer labeled, and all these fossils according to age, registered and registered in little books, in neat as a pin. He had a stamp collection. Coin collection. Butterflies.

He was such an interesting person. And as much when you say he was a forester and going so his, uh, forest and hunting.

There was only a small part of his job.

He was strictly a an office person and executive type, uh, gentleman.

And I remember one Christmas he made for all of us. A walnut shell dyed gold. And he put little tiny, tiny hinges on it so you could unhinge the shell. And inside was a little gingham check pillow and feather bed and a tiny, tiny little plastic dolly. And he gave that to all us girls to hang in his little gold thread, to hang on the Christmas tree.

And he did neat things like that. They also had a piano. And of course, my dad asked right away about the piano, but they said, uh, they wouldn’t, uh, they couldn’t transport the piano and they couldn’t, uh, uh, guarantee that, that it would arrive there because the only way they could inherit anything, they would have to quietly transported on a truck and quietly transfer it from the truck to a freight train.

So now we were negotiating my grandmother’s possessions. And it was too bad because it was so nice that I can I can remember my my grandfather playing on that piano, but it was fruitwood a kind of a swirly fruitwood.

It was a beautiful thing. And my grandmother also had a glass cabinet with mirrors like my mother had, which now went to my mother because I guess because she had lost everything. And she also got the couch with the oak end cabinets. And it had like the couch was surrounded by a set of bookshelves in the back and two side cabinets with glass doors and wooden doors on the bottom for bookcases in China or whatever, which was real handy in our case, since that thing was representing any kind of storage we had.

And there was also another old chest. Which we had, you know, become used to as as her inheritance. Maybe it was even from, uh, from grandpa’s side of the family, also out of the old forest, because that was one of the first things we had.

We had another big chest again. And so we we started over collecting furniture slowly. And she got the dining room set for my grandmother. And that that sofa.

But no piano.

But lo and behold. the second day after we moved in there, I was there just for a few days helping them move in. Then I had to go back to work and then I was there on weekends.

My father found that the upstairs apartment had a piano, and nobody was using the upstairs apartment, except there was some file cabinets in one of a couple of the rooms. This was also a railroad office building like, similar to the one that was next to our apartment in the first city there, where I was a child, and there was my dad, now in charge.

So we had some guys come over and the piano was transported downstairs, and my dad had a piano again. Oh, it was wonderful. So that filled up the one room pretty good. And the other room was my sister. She only had a bed And we had, uh, the little, uh, stools that they were selling everywhere, the little wooden barrack stools.

She had one like that by her bed, and I had one by my bed, and I had three in the corner. And we made a. Table out of a piece of crate with legs on it and whatever, and the cloths over it. And anyway, we kind of, uh, improvised.

It was more like a stage setting than anything thing else. We had, uh, old drapes from my aunt that she gave us to make the big windows a little more cozy, and it was cheap enough. And anyway, it was a place of our own, and we had our own stove, and we had our own kitchen to sit and eat, and we didn’t. We ate very seldom in the dining room during those first days.

It was just so good to have that stove in our own. There wasn’t much to eat.

It was a big pantry there too, with very little in it.

But it was an apartment very similar.

The flavor of it was just very similar of our our apartment in Oakland, where I was a child there in Silesia, because they had all these dimensions, these big windows and all double windows. When you opened the window, they open in Germany like a door toward the in toward the inside of the house so you can clean them.

But they have hinges so that the two sashes move together. And move out again.

And I guess they unhook these hinges so that you can clean it.

But they are really double windows and they’re nice to have even in the summertime, because they do cut down on the street noise. And, uh, and there were no problem to maintain as big as they were because they opened toward the inside. And that was the only windows we had.

We had no nobody had flyscreens except the little window in the pantry usually have flyscreens. And there weren’t that many flies that I can remember sometimes Sunday morning in bed, you used to lay there and look up at your light, and there were two flies buzzing around.

The light made kind of a cozy sound, but I can’t remember them ever bothering you much in the kitchen. Or at the table? Unless you were sitting out on the balcony and then it was usually yellow jackets.

But anyway, A we were having a home again, and I was now figuring, what could I do to get back home?

And it was kind of sad because now I had arrived there in a folder and we were moving again, but I was still in a folder working. And so I stayed with my aunt and uncle.

The uncle was, I haven’t even mentioned him much before because he was even smaller than my aunt.

He was a very small, roundish looking gentleman, always well dressed, impeccably shoeshine, retired, and he was sort of bald headed. Almost. And very quiet and very sweet.

We were quite a gang of people, all in all, with all the refugees and everything. So thick and thin and starving, going out on the weekends to the fields and picking grain and picking apples alongside the road and hoping that nobody would catch us. And going to the little gardens were starving again. Everybody was starving.

The little gardens outside of town that I spoke about before. Anybody that could possibly get a piece of land and they were flourishing again. And you could go there, flash your money around and buy a few things direct out of the garden, tomatoes and carrots and stuff. And they’d start having the garden fest again.

I remember going with my aunt to one of those gardens.

I was probably the last time I remember those things.

The children had a parade, and it was so nice to think the war was over anyway.

But then came the bad news.

And I think that happened right during the time while we were still in the process of moving, because I remember watching it from my aunt’s house. So I for sure was still with my aunts, but it seems to me like my mother and dad were there with me that day too, and we were making many toys. They sent out and me up toward the road quite often too, to get a little help, some potatoes or a piece of sausage or something, and visiting.

And they had said we could have, uh, two big stag Horns for my grandfather, for our apartment. Everybody was trying to contribute because they said they had a lot of them. They had three or four all over the house, and they said we could have two of them for our apartment, for my mother and whatever everybody had. They had another chest.

And I remember riding on these overcrowded trains with these out on the platform between the buffers, with the trunk tied down onto the boards and the damned stag horn laying on top of it, tied with the clothesline, and us with wet handkerchiefs tied to our nose and mouth because we had to go through this long tunnel. We went up, up the mountain and down the mountain a little bit to get there.

There was a big ski resort there, A medium sized mountain, really, but they trained a lot of good, good skiers there, and they always had snow, good snow and that little town of Oberhof, you had to go over the pass to go into the Thüringen woods on the train, and you went through a long tunnel before that.

And we just about died in that tunnel because it was all the old trains, steam trains, the soot and the coal flying all around and the sulfur fumes. And we are hanging on to the, to the trunk and in the deer horns there was a big stag antlers sitting on the platform. And then we would go again with big knapsacks full of wash again.

Getting the wash done up there. They had plenty of water. They had plenty of kettles and wood to heat the water and all the things that were hard to get back in those days to soap powder. They always put a few things.

The farmers always managed because they always could get a little butter, a little piece of bacon that they could trade things for. They were always doing a little better. And then they would come to town, and my mother and dad would take them to the theater or do something like that for that, for the exchange.

And they would always be there for all our family party during those days. My parents celebrated the twenty fifth wedding anniversary in that apartment, and his wife and I prepared a big, long, uh, we had, uh, charades, and we had a song and we had music, and we composed the story of all our refugee days in the war days, and how we came to my aunt’s hometown.

Well, anyway, as I said, we lived during those days was when they had the agreements in Potsdam, the famous Potsdam. Decision that they were going to trade West Berlin for the province of of Thüringen. So which meant that the Americans were leaving our province and the Russians were going to get it. We couldn’t believe it. And my mother said, we have run away so many times. And so far. And she says, now I’m sick of it. All that moving and all that moving. I am not going to move again. We’re going to stay here. So and it was hard to believe because I think from where we were in mining.

The border wasn’t more than ten miles away.

But we were going to go with the Russians.

And I remember the day when the day came, we were in my my aunt’s town, and they were coming down the main street, and they were coming with ponies in wagons, with rags on their feet and straw in the wagons and and pots hanging behind the wagons, rattling around just like it was fourteen hundred or twelve hundred. And Genghis Khan arrived and they looked fierce. They were Mongolians. They had these funny pointed capsules, flaps. I couldn’t imagine these people winning the war and coming over Europe again.

And I thought, what a thing to do to us, to do to Europe, to even agree to let these animals take over.

It was unbelievable.

And I thought, this is going to mean trouble for years to come. And it did. That’s what everybody said.

There was no peace in the world. And they had stolen bicycles in their wagons.

And I kept saying, I wonder if my bicycle is there.

I was missing my bicycle.

My father shipped the bicycle back to his friend.

He was in the British zone.

The French had the Rhineland. And as I said, the Americans were there in the West and in in West Berlin. So now Berlin was divided in half, too, which meant that we could no longer go to West Berlin. We could go to East Berlin, but not to West Berlin.

The subway trains were just not even stopped in the stations that belonged to the West. And everybody was watched carefully. And any trains that went from Berlin to West Germany started in Berlin and never stopped until they got to West Germany. They sealed all the doors. That was the famous inter zone train that ran one at noontime and one at twelve midnight. And now came a whole new order, I said. I used to say we were now communists.

It was rather pinker before. Like I said, they were kind of prejudiced already because in all the housing authority and all that, because they had put a lot of people out of the concentration camps, they had founded the Anti-Fascist League and gave them posts and gave them apartments and gave them preferential treatment.

And they were more or less running the show as far as the direct contact with the Germans was concerned. Anyway, so it wasn’t all that big a change, but the the Americans disappeared and with them disappeared the good food that they had, the chocolate, the chewing gum, the cigarettes, and most of all the sense of humor. And the laughing. And that was very noticeable.

The only thing was different.

The Russians were singing.

I remember they were hanging around the streets when I was home in mining weekends, and they sang. They had the most beautiful voices. They would sit half the night drinking and singing in that on their trucks. And some of the women soldiers would have to carry the high voices. And these deep bass voices like the Don Cossacks had.

And the Ukrainians and the all the different nationalities. And their music is beautiful. And they always had a squeezebox and a harmonica handy. Some of them had Like us, but most of it was the squeeze box. And the Germans are very fond of accordions and squeeze boxes too, as are the French.

And I like the music, and it made me wonder why you never heard the Americans sing very much with all their laughing and joking and kidding and.

But they never seemed to sing much. And there’s a poor verb. In German that says where people are singing, you can rest with ease. Bad humans. Bad people. Do not have any songs.

And I always wondered about that. So I said, well, next time I’m going to meet an American. I’m going to ask him about it. So.

But I didn’t meet any anymore. We got. A lot of black bread and those first troops that came in. Some of them were billeted in, in people’s homes. And we heard terrible stories. They would, uh. Uh. Because the Germans tried to give them good food and try to treat them well, because that’s just the nature of the beast, because they said, well, they were soldiers away from home, just like our boys were.

And, you know, that’s the attitude they had. And a lot of them got deathly sick from the food. They were not used to food even as well as what we had. And people couldn’t believe it. They had gone into some of their, uh, community kitchens they had for the Russians and cooked and they couldn’t take the food. I mean, it was weird. And all they were used to is pieces of bread and tea. Water with tea.

And I guess that’s all the rations they had. And we kind of came to the conclusion that really, the Russian army must have been on their last leg, and how they fed all those troops was done in a very slipshod manner.

And I mean, you could tell too, when they come out with their rags on their on their feet.

But that changed because as soon as they got settled down, you could start seeing brand new boots. And they got the supplies from the they found the storehouses for the German army. They found the leather goods, they found the cloth and they had cloth shipped, and they had cloth made. And there was a regular commerce starting up.

They all had to have new uniforms. And the big thing was they had to have map pockets like pocket books. They were cases. Map cases you see through on one side and leather on the back. And it was just really a fad. Everybody had that. And just like the Americans, everybody had, uh, shawl or kerchief, uh, long shawls actually out of parachute silk with their monograms embroidered in them. That was a big thing too. That’s what the Americans did.

Well, the Russians had the map cases and the big, beautiful high boots made and tailored stuff and cut in a in a typical Slavic way.

The tailors kept telling us. They always insisted that they had to have that the blouse was full and it was belt.

The belt around it. And then it would be pulled tight across the belly and all the pleats in the back. And so.

After a while you got used to them, too, I suppose.

There was a terrible, terrible wave of raping and looting, and the things they had done in Frankfurt and Berlin were atrocities practically.

But we didn’t find that out until much later. By the time they had come to our town, it had kind of quieted down in the headquarters. Executed soldiers for doing these things. And there was everything was punishable. And there was also no fraternization. And nobody paid attention to that either. And soon, where the Americans had moved out, the Russian officer settled in and had their girlfriends and and cigarettes and American cigarettes were still the favored currency. And the black market flourished.

And I was trying to get away. If you didn’t work, you didn’t get any ration tickets. So now I was looking for a job and I was looking to get out of mine, and, uh, I got transferred out of mine to a shoe company. I worked in a different place. And that’s what gave me the idea. I figured if they were. So we were moving me around into another factory. Maybe they could move me around in another factory in mining and, uh.

So, uh.

When I came back home, I was talking to my parents about it, and, uh. About still wanting to be an actor and what I was going to do and and how I was going to do it.

My father says, well, you want to be an actress. You are in the most perfect spot because there’s no stage has had the fame and renown than the miners.

The miners were so good at one time in the late eighteen hundreds, they had made tours in America even. They had toured all of Europe and they were well known companies and great names had worked there. And he said there could be the best start you could have. So he said, I think what you should do is go there and talk to them.

And I said, I can’t do it. I still have my job and I don’t know if they’ll let me go and they won’t let me go until I have a job in mining. So what my father did. He went straight to the director of that theatre and asked for a job for me. Asked what the chances were and asked him to sign a paper. He says all I want is a promise that she can find some job, useful job that she can use the paper to get released from the job back in the other town. And she can move here. And the guy said, well, there’s no problem with that. I can I can give you that to start with anyway.

But have I come and talk to me?

So my father was elated and satisfied, and when I heard it, I just went crazy.

I was so excited and I was so, so I could not believe it. That my dad had done that. And that it went that easy.

And I was out of that job, and I could move home and have the job opportunity to, because I was a little scared of meeting this guy.

But I said even at the worst, if this he said now that he couldn’t use me, I didn’t have a job holding me in the other town anymore. I could just go out there and look for a job. So I couldn’t lose. So I went to meet him. And he said they were just starting up again after the war and to get really rolling. There hadn’t been much going on during this confusing time. A lot of refugees had been there. A lot of people had gone back home, some other place and were busy involved getting their families settled. And. He had now an opportunity to get people together.

The trains were running again, get people on assignment from other theaters. And yes, he would find a spot for me.

Well, that’s all I needed.

I was hopping and skipping through that part.

There was again, we were on the corner and there was a park right next to us, Great Park, going up to the railroad station. And on the the other corner of the park was the theater. It couldn’t have been more handy. And the famous Meininger theater. And here they said, yes, they could use me.

It was another miracle. I couldn’t believe, I couldn’t believe the way my my life was shaping up. I felt always, always in my life that I was favored. By circumstances, by design, by divine providence or whatever you want to call it luck? It wasn’t by being particularly pushy. Because if anything, I think I was rather laid back and lazy in a lot of ways. And. And shy almost to try to do these kind of things.

But it always happened anyway. And I’m still that way till this day. I don’t, uh, I don’t even like to take a telephone in my hand and make decisions. So it wasn’t, uh, by showing any special push on my part, it just things always seem to happen.

And I was very grateful for that.

I had a lot of trust because of that, too. All my life.

I think.

I had a lot of trust and faith, which is a very foolish thing to have for people anyway.

I think in retrospect, but it is very comforting. If you have it.

And I was in seventh grade.

I was absolutely in seventh heaven. This man, he was such a guy. Oh. He joked with me and he, uh, he wanted to hear more about what happened and where I came from and what I’ve been through, and and we sat and talked and he said, uh, well, how about. He said, number one, you should take lessons and there won’t be any problem, he says. There’s all kinds of teachers here in mining. They take speech lessons and lessons and.

But he says, I think you should get right into it. And he says, right now, uh, I think you probably got the idea because of my name. He says, we’re going to do Faust. And he said, how about you, uh. Trying out for barbershop.

Now, my my nickname was Barber, and maybe that’s what gave him the idea. Uh, no, not for for, um, for, uh, what’s her name? Lesion. For lesion.

But the first line lesion says is. Her from Birmingham. Didn’t you hear about Barber? Uh, Babel is pregnant and so forth and so on. And she’s telling this at the well to Gretchen, who is who had gotten pregnant and who thinks that this girl is gossiping on purpose to embarrass her, obviously. So it’s a real small part, but a real important part in the story, in a way, because this is how the audience finds out what’s cooking here.

She is pregnant by this big professor. Poor Gretchen. Gretchen is the heroine of the story, and this lesion is standing there at the well talking to her. And they gave me. Braids. Because Gretchen is always wearing braids. So they made my braids go over the ears just like Princess Leia. That’s how I looked in my.

Leia from Star Wars.

I had braids over my ears like that, like a headset, and I had little cap. It wasn’t decent for women in old times to have their hair exposed, so I had little embroidered cap, and I had a typical peasant dress with puffed sleeves and a fairly long skirt with the apron, white stockings and little Mary Janes.

And I looked so cute.

And I couldn’t believe here I was with this big actress they called from Berlin or Düsseldorf or someplace. No, it couldn’t have been Düsseldorf, because that was in the West by then. Weimar probably was another big theater city. And the director of the play. Was the man that we had seen on the stage in Berlin with my dad when we were in high school.

He and I went to see Anthony and Cleopatra, and he had played Anthony and I knew him. He had directed the play and starred in it, and I couldn’t believe it. And here he was supposed to be my first director. And of course, uh, here comes my big scene and my my big lines.

I think they were about fifteen lines. No more than that. And he just sat there in the front row, you know, in a dark theater. And he comes on the catwalk and up to the stage, and he’s waving me with his finger and puts his arms around me and walks me off the stage a little bit. And he says, uh, you know, you never read a line in your life, did you?

And I said, no, I’m just starting. He says, now, don’t you worry about that. You’re going to take lessons, speech lessons, as I here, and you’re going to be all right. Now you just think of what you’re doing. Don’t think of what you’re saying. And enjoy it. Standing there by the well and giving her the zing.

And so we did it again. And he came over and he said. And he stayed on the stage that time. He says, we’re just going to run through it a couple of times. Stayed on the stage and then he came and said, that was very good. He says, you take direction. Beautiful. Don’t worry about your speech. He says you’re going to be all right as long as you can take direction like that.

And I always remember that. He says that’s the most important thing. Do you understand what I said?

And you did it. And he says you’ll be fine.

Well, needless to say, I was floating home on cloud nine.

He was this big name, giving me special attention. Oh, it was also so unbelievable.

It was like a dream.

And I had said to the director there, he asked me what kind of a job did I want? I said, I don’t care, I just want to be in a theater.

And I would clean the johns if that’s what I have. As long as you give me some kind of a job where I can be here. And here I was on the stage with Paul Hartman. Couldn’t believe it.

And I went to my speech lesson, and he was a typical old actor. He could have been straight out of a movie.

He was so old fashioned. He had all this typical, uh, tone of the pear shaped tones in the state, which is what we later learned. Totally fake and all that.

But it does teach you to speak distinctly. I’m not speaking distinctly very much right now anymore. Number one, I have so many teeth missing by now. I should have done this tape a little sooner.

But he had. I still remember the one thing he said was the umlaut, the letters that have the two little dots over them in German. And it was. Similar. To Hal. To my father. Firstly we. Goodness. How delicious. There’s the two cages. There’s two kinds of cages. And in German, they were in there, too. Delicious.

Dutch. And we did that over and over again. And Barbara sosna. Um, abhang. And then we had the t zee sound yet. Letzte, der letzte and zest des missus flitzer spitze stores. Bruce Lutz writes Streit des now writes Hertz the straightest hits. Yeah, that’s how it was. And he had to say that real quick, over and over again.

Oh, all these speech trials. And it still makes me, to this day very nervous when people drop the T’s and say, look at the gifts I got and and drop the T and things like that. I, I still hear that every time. It hits me hard when it happens.

The slurred speech of the Americans.

But like I say, I can’t brag about mine anymore either. In fact, I noticed on the tapes that some of the words are not very clear because of my mealy mouth here. I only have two teeth left on my uppers. Oh well, all the glamour is gone, but it’s wonderful to remember it.

And I was so happy and I had so much good fortune. And these were one of my most fortunate days. And my sister, when she, she was going through the last year of high school to finish up. She got an apprentice job in the pharmacy. That’s what she did right at the marketplace. This this town was like a picture book town.

A sample of Germany. It had a little castle, a castle park attached, and it had a marketplace with cobblestones and quaint old churches and quaint old houses. And it had a bandshell in a big park. And the theater was in the classic style, looked like a Greek temple, a beautiful thing. And it was just nice in every way.

The countryside was hilly around it and it was nice.

It was just a very, very nice place. And our apartment had a real prime position again.

Well, the Russians knew this too, Two. So the Russian put their railroad liaison in the same building upstairs from us, and we now had a big Russian sign on our iron gate up front. Bureau Zelyonaya Doroga railroad office. And we had to go and answer the telephone. And maybe that’s where my telephone fright came from.

We had to say whenever they called our number by mistake, we had to say. First we had to say Bureau of Jelesnia Doroga with the railroad office. And then we had to say Z for the M, Z three hundred number three hundred and eighty or something like that. Oh, what a language. Anyway, we worked it out and the Russians were very pleased with our efforts. And.

The officer lived upstairs, was very popular and very, very elegant and good looking too.

My mother said. And he came down every once in a while and played the piano.

He was really in love with the piano, and it was wonderful for a while. And then he decided he liked the piano so much he commandeered it out of our apartment upstairs. And that was the end of my dad’s piano.

But nevertheless, we went. It went along in harmony, and that’s what counted.

We had a little garden behind the house, too, and my mother had rhubarb and strawberries, and we started to grow a few things. And my sister and I had to go down.

There was a big farm outside of town.

We had to go down there with a little wagon and a clothes basket that we used for the purpose, and get horse apples to bed our strawberries and straw. That was our farming, but it was nice.

My mother enjoyed it.

We had raspberries later on too. She took care of some of that.

The garden had gotten kind of wild, and we did get some berries and some goodies out of it, especially a rhubarb. And we all loved rhubarb.

My father was a little fond of it too.

The only problem was we never had enough sugar to cook the rhubarb and fix it.

Well, there was never enough of anything to go around. Still, it was pretty starving days, but we had fixed up my parents bedroom in the meantime. Uh, on the weekends, we were always busy. We got up the lockers from down in the in the air raid shelter, and with the lockers and a board in in between. And one of those famous footstools.

We made a dressing table for my mother between the two lockers, and we painted them. We painted the beds in the same color, and she had the lamp out of my grandmother’s bedroom, which was pink chiffon, rose and rose like a bunch of circles, smaller and smaller and lower and lower. And this was a heavenly look, this pink chiffon.

I thought it was so elegant and so pretty. And in the meantime, several other things had arrived that my father had had stored away and put aside in the train. As we found out later on when he was there on his last trip, like he had a couple of feather beds, and he had the pink feather beds of their of their beds.

Bids. So that went very nice with that lamp and our our precious clothesline rugs on both sides of the beds. Beds were just the typical your ordinary old fashioned hospital bed. Those iron things like our yellow beds. That’s typical government issue bed. That’s a metal frame. Like they have them all over the world. That’s all we had. My home was done, repainted in gray. My bedroom and I made. Out of old rags and stuff. I made an appliqué wall carpet that I hung against behind my bed against.

There was a door going actually from there to my sister’s room, and I covered that up the wall carpet. And my bed was there in that corner.

And I painted the stools gray and black and white And a little table was. A hexagon in the corner and then the other room. I said, I guess it came from from being in this medieval play. We painted. We taped it with electrical tape, the window into paint and shaded all the little things with with paint to make them look like old lead glass windows.

I was very striking. And then I said, I want to have a corner bench and a table in there, and a board on top of it with pottery. Like I said, pottery you could buy pottery was available again. And we bought some pottery. And my old ship, I had an old Would one of those medieval ships like this Santa Maria or something like that?

A hunter ship that I had got on a visit to Hamburg with a college friend of my dad’s. I fell down a flight of stairs with that darn thing in my arms and almost broke my legs, but didn’t break the ship. Somehow or another, that ship had been in one of the in one of the chests too, because that was back again.

And that was there in that room, and it was turned out in the in the locker that I got, I painted, uh, different coats of arms from, from the north northern German states, the Hansa cities. Bremen. Hamburg. Kiel. Lübeck. And it was a fine piece. And then we put dark, dirty lacquer over it to make it look old.

We had all kinds of projects with whiskies.

We had a lot of fun. We also had made playing cards out of old made cards. Lover couples we had drawn, and we played with them constantly. While we were sitting around at my aunt’s house.

We had nothing to do. You couldn’t buy anything like that. You couldn’t even buy a deck of cards.

But we made them and we still had those. And my mother then by then we did have cards. And my mother loved to play rummy and, uh. Twenty one, I think we played things like that. Hi-Lo. Jack.

My mother played cards by the hour. I didn’t have much patience for it, but those were the days and things seemed like there was a holiness to it again, to everything. And we had a lot of company for that twenty fifth anniversary, too.

I remember that day.

And I slept on a blanket under the kitchen table and played pretended tent because there wasn’t enough beds to put everybody up. Oh.

But it was shaping up. And, uh, yeah, another thing that had arrived to with my grandmother’s furniture was a big the big grandfather clock. And that added a lot to that room and added a lot to the coziness of the house to hear that grandfather clock blowing in away. So it was becoming a home again gradually.

And we were getting attached to it again. And that’s how it was a way of life with us. And, uh, I was thinking, and I’m sure my mother was thinking, that my father was getting older and nearing retirement age, and as a result of that was that we probably would have to move one more time anyway. We couldn’t stay in the railroad office once he retired, but we enjoyed those years.

We were there forty five, probably through the whole year of forty six. Forty five was the end of the war. We stayed at my aunt’s till around.

The time school started around Christmas. Yeah, we had a Christmas in the New Year in that house. And my mother made the salads again, and we all talked about how things were getting back to normal. We could buy a few things. You got a herring. Once in a while you got. Cabbage head and things like that. And usually there had to be two people got one for two people. So we were blessed with two cabbage heads or two herrings between for four or five people.

Well, anyway, life went on. And, uh.

I was in many productions.

I was in, uh, Electra. I played an Egyptian slave, and I had to be painted cinnamon from head to toe. Ah, I remember that.

It was a nuisance because every time I had to take a full bath when I come back. A luxury, but we did have a that was one of the beautiful features to.

We had a beautiful bathroom again.

Of course I was cured of all my sicknesses as soon as I came back to an orderly life. And we had some not very good soap, but we did have some soap, and we had hot water, and we had this bath tub and we had a toilet. Nice, warm. Everything was heated, like in the railroad buildings. Usually everything was central heating, nice and warm.

And I didn’t have to go out in that ugly, cold hallway, like at my aunt’s to go to the John and never mind bathrooms.

There were no bathrooms. And in that old fashioned house, there was, um, one of those typical houses in the inner city. It belonged to my aunt and uncle, or had belonged to them. And then when they hit the depression after the World War one, they had, I guess, more or less lost it and kept it as, uh, uh, I guess, for the bank. I don’t know. Anyway, they collected the rent and they got the apartment very much like, uh uh, my father’s landlady later. Did they? They got the little apartment up under the eaves, and they rented out the three expensive apartments, the nice ones.

But the house had originally belonged to them. And, uh, because as soon as the war started, nobody could fix any plumbing or buy new bathtubs or anything like that.

There was nothing manufactured factured for for civilian use. And it was just like even here in America. They didn’t make any new cars during those years even. And when we married in forty eight, you couldn’t buy a refrigerator that was new or a car that was new. That just started up very slowly. So anyway. I found it so sore that we had all kinds of luxury by having this nice warm bathroom.

The way they used to handle these problems, they used to have public bathhouses in the cities where you went and paid fifty cents or whatever, and you went down and they call it the City Bath. And they had rows of bathtub. And, uh, uh. Ladies there, they took care of it and collected the money and cleaned up the tubs and LED you into your little cubicle.

And when you rang the bell, he let you back out again so that nobody would walk in there by mistake. And it was, uh, it was very nice in a way, because it helped all these people that did not have the facilities, because my Aunt Erna, she just took a big she had a big, uh, tub under the sink, and it was big enough to for a child to sit in anyway.

And that’s what she did the best with your your bathing facilities. You could take a sitz bath in it. And that was all the luxury was taking a bath. Never mind. Showers were not very well known at that time at all. That didn’t come till after the war either. I guess his soldiers had him and his cousins had him, and we had him in camp, but there was no water coming out and the warm water. So they probably were considered unsatisfactory by the public opinion.

But it was no fault of the showers. We didn’t have a shower in the morning either.

We had a tub, though.

It was nice. And then we had those things that you used, those rubber hoses that you held, those hand-held showers for washing hair. Everybody still uses that kind of shower head anyway. In Germany. Telephone handle, they call that. It’s much more practical and nicer and more efficient. And of course, the toilets were still the old fashioned kind with the chain, because the basin high up and you pull the chain and open it up and the water comes down, and then the tank filled up again and the whole thing worked by gravity.

You don’t see that anymore in this country either. You don’t see that in West Germany anymore either. Only in East Germany. Oil paint on the walls. In the halls. Things didn’t change much in East Germany. One of the times my sister and I decided we were going to take a trip back to Frankfurt and see our old hometown.

We came back. That was a revelation because it was like an excursion into the past, and it was also like an excursion into the future. Because I said, it makes you feel like if people came back to ancient Rome now and couldn’t find their streets anymore, and the grass was growing in the streets and some streets, there were a few tracks from the streetcars still there, and the inner city was so destroyed at the time we went the first time that I could not even find.

The streets where the where the corner street corners were and where the house of my girlfriend was or anything like that.

It was the most eerie feeling.

The big marketplace was a heap of rubble. Because we were used to seeing rubble. When you went to Berlin, that’s all you saw was fields of rubble.

But they were just starting to clear out the street corner so you could kind of figure out where you were. And they had these women, which they called rubble women. They used to get a regular pension in West Germany. I wonder if they still get it. Anybody who had served as a rubble woman later got a pension from that job, because they had done such a months and years of labor, of getting those bricks and chopping them clean and using them again so they could be used again. Stacking them up and clearing the rubble away. It’s all done by hordes and hordes of women.

There were seven women, women, women for each man in Germany after the war. And the rubble? Women did all the cleanup jobs in those big cities. And this is what we saw in Frankfurt, the old church where I had been singing in the choir had no roof and grass and little trees were going out of the side of the walls.

The town hall was not too bad.

But all the other houses, they had just burned them down systematically, and we heard the most awful stories. We found out that two girls in my class had committed suicide after being raped. That one girl had been abducted by the Russians. One of witches girlfriends. That only two boys from my class had come back. I mean, not my class, but the corresponding class in the boys school.

There were only two boys left over after the war. And Agnes had been in touch with some of the old friends from from the Labour Service and had written to me. And she said, all these girls that went to the anti-aircraft had been shipped out by the Russians and had never been seen again. They all disappeared. So there was another narrow escape I had. Thanks to the fact that I was a black sheep in the company. And the Russians, she wrote me later on. She had gone back one more time.

The Russians had killed all the peasants in town that had had the Nazi worker maids like like us. They had killed all those peasants and dispossessed them. And burned our camp. Our country camp. It is all gone.

It was just like a weird feeling.

It was like gone with the wind. That’s about the one way you could describe it. So it was a very shaking experience, going back to my hometown and cause my, my father was still talking about the time he had gone back and his beautiful grand piano was standing under the linden trees on the boulevard, black, modern looking, shiny deco grand piano with the rain falling down on it.

And our house still had all the. All the houses still had the pits from the shots and the holes, from the shells and the bashed out windows from the bombs and the bare naked walls. Some of them no fronts on the houses. All they are untouched, just overgrown with weeds. And it seemed like centuries, centuries ago that we had gone to school there and had so much fun. So we were glad when we came back to our little town.

There was had not been touched by bombs or anything.

It was just wonderful. It was. And the world was free and the world was without war and life seemed good. Then I went to work one day and they told me. They Told all of us there were about, uh. I would say eight or ten of us that were what you call, uh, assistants or eleven. They call them pupils of the theater. And we were all invited to go to a big audition in Weimar. They were going to start a theater school there. And that was the excitement of the day and the month. And, uh, of course, I decided immediately I was going to go if I had a chance to study, I wanted to go.

My father said, it’s okay. And, uh, unfortunately, it meant that I had to leave again my home, and moved to Weimar and became a college student. And at that time also went to her college. And we both became college students.

And I passed the audition. Not for what I was given in the audition. What I was saying, I forget what we did there, but they didn’t pay much attention to that. What you had to do is, um, do exercises. They would tell you a story and you had to act it out. They were going to open a school. That was run in the modern style.

According to the Russian actor Stanislavski, which is a system that was shortly after taken up by Hollywood, too, I noticed. And the, uh, the method acting, they call it the method acting and method was to just put yourself in the mood of the thing. Not say, well, you want to express love. You want to express hate, but they tell a specific story and you put yourself totally in the mood of it, whatever you are supposed to be.

Well, we didn’t go so far as to be a tree or a chair or all that nonsense, but they did tell you a story. And the thing that I had to do was I was a Russian serf that belonged to this aristocratic family, and I was supposed to watch the baby all night.

The baby was sick, and the baby kept me awake and kept me from sleeping.

And I was getting more and more tired.

And I had been up for two weeks every night with this crying baby and not being able to sleep. And, uh, anyway, the the gist of it was, in the end, I was getting so worn out and weary and tired that I pick up the pillow and smother the baby to keep it from crying.

Well, I guess I could sympathize with that somehow. Probably because of all the nights I had spent without sleep. And Vienna was the sirens going.

And I remember you had to imagine everything very vivid. I didn’t find that out till later, but I did anyway.

And I was thinking of that grandfather clock that we had at home now, and I was watching the clock ticking and getting drowsy. And anyway, I smothered that baby. I killed that sucker. I never knew I could hate the baby so much.

And I really impressed him with that. I could tell they were really impressed. That’s what. And they told me later that that’s what made them accept me, and I became. Actually one of the. One of the group of better students.

There were a group of girls and a group of boys that were predominant. And we did some good ones. One of the boys that I had several parts with, which became later the director of the theater in Düsseldorf, at a very odd name. So I remembered him very well. And this particular peculiar school right after the war was in Weimar, in the old, uh, uh, old um. Building from the town ministry or something like that. It had not a window in the place in the beginning.

It was cold as a morgue in that it had used as a library building, as a school, as a selectmen’s offices and all that.

It was a very rather glamorous building. They called it the House of youth. And right around that time, the Russians started their flag deal. They founded the Free German Youth, which their colors were blue and yellow, like the Cub Scouts. And it was a son, I think a yellow sun with beams or something like that was their symbol.

And there were two big flags like that. If they fire you, you hanging in the front and everywhere on the post office, at Town Hall, over the streets. Any railroad station had at least a dozen of these red banners that pronounced that the Russians did not mean any evil thoughts to the German people. They had only fought fascism and together with our Soviet brothers, we would build up a new future. And it went on and on. And until you didn’t even look at those things anymore.

But windows we didn’t have. And the, the, uh, plaster was falling from the walls and it was dusty and scratched your throat. And we had to do all our lessons and all this acting and all this emotion freezing with blue knuckles, shivering and in our coats and ski pants and boots and wool socks and whatever.

We had hats.

It was very peculiar atmosphere.

But we were going to school and we were making headway in our lives. Education, which we had lost three years off by then. And here we were, probably the bunch, the biggest bunch of old virgins in the history of Germany. Oh, God. All out of the camps. And some of the boys out of POW camps. Some of them had been in the Air Force had come from the Americans. Some of them came out of Russia from everywhere. God.

But interesting, interesting young people that were talking endlessly about the theater, religion, Hitler and politics and the future and the Russians and the world politics, the world in general. We could talk and talk and talk.

I think that’s where I learned to chit chat and to argue and discuss And weigh all points. And oh, how we enjoyed it. Nothing to eat. Everybody was starving. Always starving. And everybody was living cold in some cold room. Some little garret that somebody rented them for a few bucks. And most of us didn’t have heat. And if we did have heat, we didn’t have anything to throw in the heat. It was. And. Oh, God, we had our little ration tickets.

There was a tea room. That opened up for the students.

And I remember that tea room and had a sardine paste and dark bread. I mean, they were really gray rolls with that, that fish paste. And there were two kinds. One kind was just a fish. They were gray, and the other kind were, uh, Fish and beets and they were pink. And those were. And we used to order like a whole plate of one kind and whole plate of the other kind.

And we all had our bread tickets and tea. Hot tea mostly. Ah. Something hot. And that’s where we sat. And they didn’t bother us. We could sit there for three or four hours and argue and talk and discuss and go to somebody’s room and sit there.

But twelve of us, fifteen of us all around and talk. What interesting times. Those were the college days, but we did not have booze.

It was very hard to come by and expensive.

The beer was very watery anyway.

The boys always complained about that. It wasn’t worth the money. And, uh, every once in a while, we’d have some little special thing. Somebody would bring home a chicken from their parents, or somebody would.

We had one boy whose father was a vet, and when he had killed an old cow or an old horse, he would come home with a hunk of meat. And we cooked this horse stew.

I remember one time, first we all went in the park and stole wood. And there too, the Russians were on patrol in the park. They were number one, watching the civilian population. They were watching against people stealing wood. And they were watching against Russians attacking German girls. And they were watching against the black market people making dealings.

But it was dangerous to get wood.

But we needed that little potbelly stove. And we sat there and we cooked that horse stew. I still remember ours. We cooked that stew and got hungrier and hungrier.

We had like two carrots to go into it. And it was good spices. Little red wine, they said to add. Make it tender and tasty. What a feast! Those were the student days.

The girl. Another girl and me. They had a room together.

It was right off the park where famous Gerda’s garden. Garden house was.

The little park near the. Near the residence. Castle. And you went over the little bridge and up the hill a little bit. And that’s where. Where we lived. And it was a very nice room. Except the corner of the. Corner of the house there had damage in the roof. And when it snowed, it snowed down on our blankets. And in the morning, the water was always frozen. We couldn’t wash. We just had this ice in our washbowl.

But we used to make a thermos of hot coffee or coffee water that that fake coffee. And that was all that sustained us. Our landlady used to make that and put that on our dresser at night. And that’s what we had for in the morning. We sit there and hold these little metal cups with that fake coffee and get our nose and our fingers warm. And then maybe a piece of bread and butter and marmalade. And off we were for the rest of the duration, until we went to and hit the Russian tea room with those sardine sandwiches. After.

After the war, we all.

When we met, we met a few people again. Uh, after the war, I should say, after the, uh, the worst of the starving times were over, when things got a little more normalized. And we talked about the old times. They were later on on a on a theater in Berlin. They ended up the ensemble. They founded the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and.

But first they were on tour all through Russia.

And I wasn’t too thrilled with some of those future prospects because I didn’t really care for the communists. I thought they were too low class for me, and my professor knew it, too. He says you’re looking down on all these things, and he says you’re trying to run away from these problems and you’re trying to run away from the revolution. And he says, they’re going to get get here and get to you and change everything, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

But I didn’t like it, and I wasn’t looking forward to any trips to Russia by a long shot. It wasn’t where I was going to go. I wanted to go in the movies. I wanted to go to West Germany, to a movie studio.

The stage was just I regarded that as a good basis for for the training and education. And we had long talks and talks.

There were some that were what you would definitely call dissenters, and they kind of gravitated all toward one corner. And it seemed like, strangely enough, it was all the important people. They were sort of a leader clique, and they were all the ones that wanted to go west.

Well, anyway, those were the student days. And they went by fast enough when the weather got warmer. We walked a little further out for lunch and they had a student table there, they called it. They cooked a hot meal at noontime like it’s a custom in Germany. And this lady had several tables in her big room where she served the students.

And she collected our ration tickets, and she really put out some excellent meals. And that made you feel a lot better. We did have ration tickets again given out by the the new Russian government, but there was more variety coming and we had, for instance, dancing did not take ration tickets and tea didn’t. So we had a dance tea twice a week that we used to go to that was very popular. And of course we had to walk also to some other building.

It was the old, old university from fourteen hundred or whatever was an old, old, big high wall, medieval looking university where we had our speech lessons now taken by a woman. And, uh, so we were, we were, uh, enjoying this mobility of it when when the weather got warmer, it wasn’t like being herded in a cold, cold building. And in the morning at six o’clock, we had fencing lessons. And that was always the coldest of all six o’clock in the morning. And no windows in that big, dusty hall.

I remember that so well.

But thank God spring was coming. And by that time they surprised us with a new subject on the faculty.

We had to take Russian language.

The Stanislavski School — Art and Communism in Weimar

The Stanislavski Seminar was part of the Music Conservatory.

The son. In the romantic little old town of Weimar. Or where there used to be a duke and a bishop holding the rein.

Before Goethe. And Schiller, the big dramatist. Poets and thinkers of Germany. And it was the quaint little town with this old, old university being still used as the. Conservatory building. And when we had speech lessons. Addiction lessons. Even the Russian classes. Dance classes. We used usually one or two of those rooms.

And so it happened to our curriculum being rather extensive. We spent a great deal in this old university, and it seems like whenever I remember my student days, I hear the sounds of all the musical instruments and human voices possible coming out of the different rooms. Trumpets and violins and ha ha ha ha ha ha!

And of course, we had to take a little singing also. They always kept in mind that some of us would go into musical comedy. So dancing was not very prominent, but neither was it neglected. And, uh, the next, uh. Play we were going to work on.

When we finally got to it, we thought we’d never get to it because these forever improvisations that we did, uh, they decided on Cervantes.

The Puppet Theater, I think, was the title, uh, translated. I don’t know if it’s the same in English or not, but it was. It had very, uh, political and to a lot of historical background and political, uh, comment in a, in a way that, uh, you could tell it was very, uh, slanted toward the, uh, the views of the suppressed people.

And, uh, it would have been a play that definitely they would have picked it, uh, was supposed to represent that this this puppeteer. Uh, was to represent Hitler, I think getting everybody under his spell and so forth and so on. And we all were assigned roles that we had to study. And you only learned the lines. For each scene that would be rehearsed. So the progress seemed unbelievable Small to us and made you very impatient.

The faculty consisted of a professor. Lung and a professor. Gaillard. And the lady was a speech teacher. And.

The Russian language teacher was a lady. And, uh, the fence fencing director who loved his his sport and loved his job.

But otherwise, uh, I think he cared very little about, uh, he tried to ignore it. What is what? I think he undoubtedly had been a poor student and had been in the service. And, uh, all these other implications with the the Russian cultural liaison officers being present at every, lesson. Whenever they chose, they could sit in and observe us and they observed the fencing. They, in fact, made us break our rapiers and whatever we had. What do you call it in English? Uh, break them off the tips, off to, uh, so they wouldn’t be counted as weapons.

Well, I found out one day that they were still quite a formidable weapon because I was fencing for fun.

After the class, we were all supposed to put them away and put them in the closet, and and, uh, we were fooling around, still practicing and pretending to act.

The boys.

Of course, it was all for, uh, A stage drama. And so I was I was fencing with this boy and but not a little serious. And he wasn’t either. And we were just clowning around.

And I made an advance and he did one, and I did the riposte and I was laughing.

I had my head back laughing. And his foil, I think you say in English with a broken off rusty tip, went into my mouth on the top of my palate and ripped my whole palate down from the teeth toward the back.

Well, it bled like no tomorrow, like I was dying the next moment because I guess everything in the mouth always bleed. Terrible. It didn’t hurt all that bad that day, but I found out I could not eat anything for days, I couldn’t. Oh, I said what you did to me with our fine noontime meals we were having.

I was at that time when we opened that, that student meal day. Uh, noon day. Uh. They call it the noon day table. Yeah. And, uh, and here I’m sitting, and she made potato salad, and I couldn’t eat a bite. And all I had to do was thin soup in a cup.

And I said, oh, how you hurt me deeply. You could have. I would have rather die.

But it was. It healed up good, I guess. Things in the mouth, too.

But I thought, what a thing. This broken off tip. There wasn’t even a tip on it.

But there’s whipped off thing. Wasn’t very good either.

But it made you realize that, of course. Needless to say, we were downgraded down, right down below the floorboards by our fencing teacher, and everybody was kind of subdued. And. I still remember that. God, I shouldn’t fool around with weapons. And to this day I can’t. I don’t like boys fooling around and and pretending and hitting at each other with sticks. And because, father forgive them, they don’t know what they do when it gets serious.

But there was one episode I remember very, very vividly, and I had trouble anyway with my speech.

I had trouble with my nose. being too thick inside. They decided I always and when I got nervous, I got stuffed up and I was always carrying these drops around.

And I think that’s where they made it worse instead of better. And to clear my head and I finally said something has to be done. I asked my speech teacher and she says, it seems to me like you have to have. Somebody, a doctor, look at it and see if that can be surgically corrected. And he did. He said, yeah, well, it’s an easy thing to do. You do it by, uh, burning off layers of this mucous membrane in your nose.

Well, that sounds just delicious.

And I said, well, can it be helped. And for a while I went to the doctor every two weeks, I think. And he would numb it. He had long, little long wooden sticks with cotton swabs on it, and he’d go up my nose with them and numb that whole area and then had a little. He had a little thing, like a miniature hair curler or whatever, and he’d go up in there and burn air and you smell the burning flesh.

Oh, oh. And then for about four days, you would get these long threads of bloody tissue out of there. And it worked. I, I think I still do it sometimes from habit or whatever. Natural inclination. Maybe it goes along with my soft Slavic s that my Russian speech teacher went crazy over.

But it was just a thing of Single mind, and I was willing to go through all that torture for just the speech lessons and to be able to. Have a clear head.

But I probably made me feel a lot better and was a lot better in the long run.

But now, much later in my life, as I’m thinking of all the possible ways of where could I have done wrong to my body with the cancer and all, and the cancer being in the food line, so to speak, from the Eustachian tube down through the throat and into the bile duct. Who knows, maybe it had something to do with that. I don’t know, but that’s probably far fetched.

But I mean, it just goes to show what I went through. I didn’t shrink back from anything I went to the dentist faithfully, took care of my teeth.

I was determined and I was happy as a clam. Except for all these political side plays, just like the other six or ten in our group that were the dissenters. We kept talking about what we really should do is go west and get out of there. And the leader of this. School had been in Russia since Hitler came to power. His name was Maxim Valentine.

He was quite well known, very famous, very beautiful. He looked like Doctor Zhivago. I swear he was a handsome dog.

And I liked him.

And I knew he liked me. and, uh. He, uh, he even arranged it that when I went on to her. First she was somehow or another, she started the university, and then she was pushed back again because they had too many. Or they were. I don’t know what happened.

But anyway, she. She found herself without employment one summer, and she came and joined us, which I was thrilled because I had more or less hoped something like that would come along. And he said, yeah, he could use, uh, publicity editor. And she, uh. And he got her a job, uh, on the newspaper, which of course, was Communist newspaper, the only kind they had. And also Weimar. In spite of being this, this, this high romantic little town, uh, historical town had become one of Hitler’s main babies. They had built all these big Nazi buildings.

And I think it became Hitler’s baby because Weimar was very well known for being very communist before the Nazis took over. And, uh, he wanted to get maybe he wanted to just smash up that whole communist setting there. Anyway, they moved a lot of office building, administration station buildings into the made it the centre of the goal, which is the province under the Nazis.

And, uh, he was often there visiting and uh, Meeting and he always stayed in this famous hotel called the Hotel Elephant, which was the one that was all renovated and and had fabulous modern conveniences and was the place in town and had a wonderful chef and wonderful restaurants. Upstairs, downstairs, down in the, uh, the cellar of Hotel Elephant was the address.

And sometimes, uh, the boys would go out with us, take us down there because it wasn’t a matter of money, it was a matter of ration tickets.

And I can still remember all the lovely dishes we got, every piece of meat and some home fries and green and red beets and or greens, and it was exquisite. And they tried to save up your stamps once in a while. Splurge because we were still on ration tickets. And the Russians were all around.

Of course, in those buildings they were the best in town.

There was always oodles of Russians around. And we felt kind of. Closer to them, in a way, because of the Russian liaison officers who really some of them were real nice guys and interested in the arts. And the Russians all loved it. In Germany, it was so much better than what they had at home. They just adored it. They all loved to be there. And, uh. You didn’t hear too much anymore about, uh, bad things happening, like, uh, a rape in the park, you know?

And a lot of times the guys would get caught in the Russian officers would step right behind the guy and shoot him right then and there. No witnesses needed. He saw it and he. Ah, he dodged and executed all in one minute. This happened. And they had brawls among each other too. They had very wild and rude ways. That kind of scared you. I’d hate to have to go to war and fight them.

And I know that the SS officers used to say about the Russian women, they said they were more afraid to fight them than any soldier at all. They were fierce.

But there weren’t too many women around. They were more, uh, a few more dependents of the Russian soldiers or Russian officers at that time then. So people got. Used to having them around, marching through town singing. They had a song. We knew all the songs and the and the Russian songs were catchy. They were singing Katyusha and calling, calling, calling my love. And they were singing a song that we all called the song.

There was always one singer in the beginning who started.

It was really pretty to listen to. One voice would start. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. La da da da da da da da da da da da da. Anyway, that last part, they would all fall in and join in and sing that last part together. And it was really. They really were good. And, uh, they did, uh, put band concerts on, on the square. And they, the banners always said, we do not hate the Russians.

The German people, we are your Russian brothers. And, uh, we we wanted to liberate you from the Nazis. And they were very good at it, I think that judging both the American occupation and the Russian occupation that the Russians had, uh, knew better how to, uh, put across their propaganda.

I think the Americans always have been great, great salesmen all over the world. And the thing they could sell the least was, uh, democracy. I don’t know, they failed somehow in the in the years after the war, they failed to come through in peace as well as they did in war. They just didn’t they didn’t have the.

Appeal across ethnic lines. Maybe that’s that’s what it is. They just were two isolationists still in their thinking to know how to handle handle it. They should have. They went out up to the job. Like they always say now. They won the war, but they did not win the peace. And of course, they did not have any peace.

Needless to say, we had endless political discussions. Every meal, every break in, in the lessons, any, uh, any spare time activity was sometimes up late into the night was, uh, centered around political discussion. There was, of course, seen from our ambitions with the theater and all that, but nevertheless, it boiled down to For the moment, for political discussion and what to do next, and in our personal opinions on all these things that were happening around us.

They were they had approached us about the Communist Party. And as I found out a little later, she didn’t tell me right away was that in order to get that job on the paper, I think Kaiserwald already had joined the Communist Party. Which probably helped her the following fall to go right back to the university again.

It probably made all the difference because, as I said before, her background being from a poor government officials, that was just a bit above being a worker in the eyes of their scale social scale. She had the best chances, her mother being a widow and all. So she got right back into that again. And, uh. And while we were still raging of what we were supposed to do, if they expected us to join, what would happen if we didn’t?

And, uh, what happened to all the people we knew that had been our teachers, our neighbors, our co-workers or whatever, who hadn’t, uh, who had joined the party under the same circumstances.

The Nazi party I’m talking about. And, uh, we’re now sitting without employment, coming home from a war that they lost and being in general, very miserable.

It was not a very good prospect to now have to join another party. So there was never any shortage of subjects for conversation. In fact, I don’t think there ever has been. In Europe. I have never seen. So many people. Of being. At a loss of what to talk about and talk so little about politics and the world around them as, uh, as people in America do, and walk around so blindly as it seems to me.

Of course, I must admit that they were a little far removed from what was really happening because we were right there. We could see the houses still destroyed, full of bullet holes, and very little be done. About it. Fixing the damages of war. Making the lives of the people more bearable.

We were still standing in line for potatoes. A few turnips for coal every year. You had to stand in line with the little wagon and drag them home yourself. It, uh. It made it hard to swallow their work as Paradise, for instance.

But we did have to say they did start renovating the old historical places. And the houses being fixed up as far as, uh, putting windows and doors back and, uh. Bringing back some normalcy in that respect. And if I am speaking about the big fancy hotel, this, of course, was not one of the high rises that are now, uh, so progressive in West Germany. That happened much later in East Germany.

It was at this time it was an elegant place because Hitler had fixed it up.

It was a century old, famous, established hotel, and Hitler had fixed it up and brought it up to the current splendor, not the Russians. And the same was true of the administration buildings. Most of them had been built new under Hitler and where whole complexes in places. And had not been destroyed since we were in central Germany.

And this is what made it. Probably at that time and still in the days of the Russians, also a very good place to to put all the these offices because simply because the offices were still there and available. And still the Hitler governor of the province, the Gao, who was who was Affectionately known as.

Sao. Leader. Gaucho. His name was Zorka. And they just turned the two letters around and made out of cow leaders. They made Sao leader. So leader of Sao of course means pig and gaucho is a charlatan. Somebody that like a cheap magician. That will make things appear. Uh. What? They’re not what? They’re not really are.

And, uh, have a bigger do about it. And this, this is what apparently his flamboyant style was. And people in Weimar still made fun of him. And the whole Gaue of Thüringen still hated him and talked about him And blamed him for being so highly communistic. And then so highly. Nazi. Upstairs, I am sure, were served the finest cuisine and and all available wines, beers, drinks in the world.

But it was quite obvious these things were not for the for the common people down there. In fact, uh, the whole restaurant business to this day. Was not regarded as a prominent, uh, important thing except for the few places that were usually reserved. You could not go there unless you had a reservation, and that usually meant you had to know somebody to even get in. And, uh. there were never enough. There were.

There were never enough facilities for recreation. Because that simply was not as important. And when it happened that they opened a new swimming pool in some town, or this or that, a new restaurant, then it was always explained over three or four paragraphs in the newspaper that this was to the benefit of the working people and for their joy and and for their strength that the workplace. Or they could. Uh, work better and feel strengthened by these things that were made available to them.

It happened that our school eventually moved to this lovely little, uh, summer castle outside of town by the name of Belvedere, and that became the home of our school eventually. So we profited by that, and we felt rather fortunate we had tickets to go. They had opened the theater now. In the meantime.

And we had tickets, uh, passes to go to all the performances as well as all the rehearsals, whenever we had spare time in our schedule, and we could go and travel to our hometowns in the surrounding area, we could go to Berlin with this pass and sit in on our rehearsals and, uh. So it seemed to me like where I spent my teenage years a lot in the movies. Uh, I ended up in the in the years when I started being twenty, twenty one, twenty two years old, I spent in the darkened theater.

But it was wonderful. And it was like a a great big, uh, my world was given to me.

It was a great big present to me.

And I enjoyed it. Except. For these political, uh, things always going on in the background, we now had, of course, had to have, uh. Political schooling. They figured they’re going to get us into introduced to the Communist uh. Uh line, which they called dialectic. And began began to reform our minds, so to speak.

And the pleasant aspect of it was that we then were considered to be. Ready to be introduced to the inner circle. And therefore we could go to these, uh, to the dance teas and, and, uh. Several of those concerts and, uh, in the hotel, restaurants, bars. Although, uh, we never did go out in bars. I don’t think we ever had time or the inclination.

And the boy said the drinks were terrible anyway, and the beer was lousy and thin. And we, uh, most of us were not into this drinking mode, which is strange, because it was an ancient privilege of the students to be drinking. That was what it was. Uh, the happiness of youth was all about, and I. You know, I remember my dad with his songbook and his beer songs, and.

But that part of it was very subdued in my time, and it it was anyway shortened by the curfew. You had to be by order of the Russians had to be home by nine o’clock anyway, so it into the night whenever we had a little party or something and our into the night discussions had to happen at somebody’s, uh, pad, and, uh, we all had to sleep over and.

I got to be. Quite friendly with this boy Ulrich, who had. Hit me with his sabre there. And we got to talking and I heard some of his background. He had been in the Air Force and was a prisoner of the Americans, and he had a lot of bad tales to tell about that, about, uh, not physically, but mentally.

Very derogatory treatment by them. And, uh, then on top of it, when he came home, he was in constant fear of being shipped out by the Russians because young men used to disappear just right and left and older people that had been in a Nazi party were hauled in for questioning. And there was a big court of what they call the de-nazification, who you had to go and.

Make yourself accountable. And a lot of the men and fathers and husbands disappeared into prisons. Among them for a time was Carlotta’s dad. And of course, the simple result was that they were simply after we came back, they were simply dispossessed of more or less all they had. And, uh. Aunt lotta was now living in the old villa in a small two room apartment. They left her, uh, the whole other rest of the villa was settled in with other people that were we’re looking for living space.

And I think, I swear, they took care to have the lowest, uh, kind of, uh, class people do this to show off what they were all about, just like in Doctor Zhivago.

It was very similar to that used to live up there.

But she was happy. She had her two little favorite rooms and she was away from the downtown goings on.

She was living up there on the hill, and she kept that part of her own home at least, which was much better to so many people who had lost all their homes and all their possessions anyway.

So, uh. In Julie’s case, he was, uh, he was the son of that veterinarian that where we were blessed with our dead horse once in a while for stew meat meet. And when the when there was a real imminent, imminent danger that they were going to haul him away by the Russians. His father had taken the heavy waxed mop that people used on the linoleum floors, and had put his leg between two chairs and broken his own son’s leg, and thereby prevented them from dragging him away.

So he said, he told us that that was the fortune of circumstance that helped him get into the theater school and stay out of, uh, Siberian labor camp. And such stories, uh, came to the surface now, and we used to go. He missed flying very much, he said, but he hadn’t been flying for several years anyway because there wasn’t any, any, uh, uh, fuel for the airplanes or any ammunition for the airplanes.

But I remember we used to go up to a monument in the park that was sort of like a. Seal or dolphin or like creature, I remember. And we used to sit there on that big stone sculpture, and he would pretend to take off, to take off flying. In harmless entertainments like that, into the interaction and exchange of thoughts and common dangers and common ambitions that we shared.

I think where at this time much more important than a sexual consideration, I swear I wasn’t. It wasn’t just me.

I think we were all more or less in that same frame of mind because it was under Hitler anyway, had been Very much put much emphasis on this thing being a thing of the spirit, and it should be a handshake and should be done with the best of the fatherland in mind and all that.

We were still brainwashed by that, I’m sure, because just running around, there were only certain people, certain women who did that, and a lot of them were married women, widowed women with children who had gone out with the Americans already before and were now going out with Russians simply out of loneliness, because it is very hard. Once you have had companionship in a marriage, it’s very hard to go without it. Plus, the extra little benefits they had for their kids from from foodstuffs and all that, because it had been a lot better under the Americans.

The Russians were not very much better off than we were. If somebody was questioned overnight in the jail and they were telling horrible tales, what they got to eat, and then added that what they saw the Russians eat was not all that great either. And so times were still very drab and very poor. And all this time we were keeping on with our study and our play and taking dancing lessons, Spanish dancing or Portuguese dancing, folk dancing, which occurred in that play.

And also we had to learn to make lace on little pillows with pins and a very old fashioned way they do in Brussels and in parts of Europe. You had the thread on little wooden spools hanging down from that pillow on pins, and it cost them over in certain ways, like sort of like making miniature macrame.

And we had to learn some of the steps of that, because there was a scene where all the women sat together and did this. So they went really into depth on all of this, and we were getting very impatient with making headway on this. We took some sections out of famous, uh. Plays like Shakespeare plays or Schiller or Goethe and worked some on that.

And we still kept doing our improvisations. And of course, the Russian language progressed and so did the Communist indoctrination. And this is when I first heard of the fact, how much they did believe in subjecting the whole world to communism, And how much they kept active in it and be an activist was to be a glorious person, a glorious rebel.

And that was the greatest form any human being could, could take in in his society. And they were telling about the activists going to West Germany and starting unrest there, and how they did it and what what they plotted and how it was done, and all the wordings of their lines of propaganda. That forever and ever slogans that they brainwashed you with.

And then they are forever and ever putting down religion. That was just childish ignorance. And to even believe still in religion. And we could argue about that for hours. So there was a lot of, um, beside the studying.

It was a lot of, um. Shaping up of your world opinions and world philosophy. And.

It was never you were never at ease with a certain way of life, or there was always everything in progress and everything changing. And they kept promising great things.

But we did not see too much happening. And here I was. I felt like I had been on the stage.

I had been in several plays.

I had been in the chorus of Fidelio.

I had, uh, had this, uh. Mexican play about Juarez.

I was then and I had done all those things and that Egyptian handmaiden there to when we did Elektra, she was not just a slave girl, she was a courtier.

She was always whispering evil things in her ear. And.

After doing all those things and and really being into it, it took a lot of patience to settle down and study again. And we were all learning to be very patient, because the whole of East Germany had to be very patient because things were just not moving. You did not see anybody moving in any direction to recover or build or. Organize things.

The only thing that happened. Was, of course, we were known as the collective, not ensemble like in the theater, but the collective. And everything was collective. Now it was a collective glassworks, and there was one place that made all the paper in one place. It made all the wooden toys in one place that made, uh, rope baskets.

And, and all the farms were divided up and put together into great collective farms. All the animals were taken out of the stables and put into great big fields. And those pampered little animals, from what I could just see them. I heard them telling us when they came to visit at home on weekends, visiting with my parents, how they had taken these pampered pet animals that everybody kept in the stable and just drove them up there on big exposed meadows.

These cows were never used to being out all night, and they took them out early in the spring. How the cows were by the dozens being born dead or died because. Because these were not cows. And so many mistakes being made, planting all those things and then failing to organize that there were enough pickers available at the right time and all these horrible failures you you create when you do something so quick.

And just shaking your heads and you learn to be patient and say, well, it will take time for all these ideas to take hold. And. So you had to be patient in every way anyway. For instance, I did make a couple of trips to Waterford, and just to go on a railroad trip was a horrible experience. You had to go.

First of all, they had old, old trains. They had, I guess, been smart enough, the Americans to move all the goods trains right over before they left the area, moved into West Germany, and what we had left in East Germany was pretty much junk. They were the old cars that you still see with running boards on the side where the little door opens on each side of the train, and how many times you rode on those running boards, and there would be Russians hanging next to you, And you were sitting anxiously in one of those little compartments.

Oh, everybody always tried to sit with a lot of other people because the girls were constantly scared being raped in these compartments. Are you supposed to go jump out of the train?

And it was so scary. And and just to get into the train was the first obstacle you went down there two hours before? Three hours before departure time. And there were people sleeping in the tunnels under the railroad platform all the way.

The platform covered from one end to the other, with solid people sleeping with cardboard boxes and baskets and stuff. And you just took your your seat in the line wherever the line ended. And the line kept grown and grown and grown until the last minute, the train left, and it was obvious to see that all of them wouldn’t even get onto the train. And a horrible fight. and it started when the train rolled in. And it was all being accepted as well. We went through the war. Six years of it and we had seen better.

We had seen much worse. And at least there were no bombs falling on us while we were sleeping and waiting for the train. And everybody was so patient. For a long time, it seems. Everybody lived by their few potatoes and turnips and herring. Once in a while. And a little sausage and meat.

But whenever it was available. Stand in line for everything. And what? His students were concerned. Was for not concerned. Was closed. We did not have any. He couldn’t buy much. Sometimes you get a notice in the newspaper and it say shoes are going to be available. And at such and such a time, such and such a store.

And you went down and hope that they had your size, and there would be all one type of shoe or two. No selection, nothing fancy, the crudest kind of workmanship. And they throw it out like they threw it out of a railroad freight car. And you picked it up and you saw it. Oh my God, how lucky I got today.

And most of us were still wearing the same children’s underwear, our mother’s clothes, our mother’s shoes, or the old wooden shoes with the soles. And we used to make Take two old dresses and make a new one out of it just to have something different to show. Once in a while. And that was great when that happened. Nobody had time to pay attention. If you had a warm coat and a scarf and a hat. You were lucky. So it was that, uh.

And I was still wearing the same coat that we wore the last two or three years in high school. She wore one that was green and had big lapels, which I called Napoleon’s coat. And mine was like a monk’s, uh. Coat, uh, wrapped around. And it had a hooded. Appointed hood to it. And that was my trademark. I wore that for years in high school, and I was still wearing it to call it every day, and I was wearing it for many days to come yet. So it got to be. Christmas time.

And I went home. And we had a lovely Christmas that year because we had that big room with my grandma’s furniture. Grandma was still in her, uh, lady’s hospice or what? What they call it home for retired ladies.

And I used to go down and visit her. They were still in the same town. And Christmas came. Not much presence.

I remember having a nice time for a new year.

My mother had tried her utmost to make the goodies for it, with the herring and the beets and cold salads and. Having a carp was the thing. You bought a carp home live from the market and we had them in the bathtub, fed him breadcrumbs, played with him. He loved to be tickled. Aunt and I. And then came his demise.

I think it’s what we usually had for.

The last day of the year, we had lentil soup with a penny under the plate. And the carp. Was for. Christmas Eve, I forget. Been too many years of of different food traditions, I guess.

But I know there was one day you had to have calf New Year’s Day, I think maybe. And my mother made it with boiled potatoes and boiled and tender, tender. Oh, beautiful white, sweet meat and a mustard sauce with it. Oh, it was always so delicious because we did have a little bit more vegetables where my mother and dad lived there.

Now, our home, our hometown in Meiningen, which was the other big, uh, theater city and this lovely old town. They did have a beautiful market from the surrounding area. And we did have, I think, better vegetables than they had in Weimar. Weimar was was more city like it had been, after all, you know, the Weimar Republic. was named after this city of Weimar, with all its administrations and all their political, social and political goings on.

But in mining it was more rural and more peaceful and much more gracious. And you could actually sense in the air how close the border to the West was. I swear you could.

There was what they call the small border traffic. And you could the people that lived in the surrounding area could go on short hops over the over the border. And, uh, that part a little more, uh, opportunity for shopping and some of the niceties and, and the surrounding countryside was not as strictly regulated and grimly communist as the, the inner part of doing.

My mother really liked it there, and we all liked it there, and we were happy with our new home there. So came Christmas Eve. I opened my packages.

And I did have. Usually you didn’t wrap the presents for Christmas, but I did have.

We had made a package for my dad and brown paper, and I got a package, and my mother was looking at me so expectantly that I knew she had opened the package and knew what was in it. What was in it was the greatest story.

It was a shoe.

It was a suede black suede shoe. A gorgeous shoe, I hear.

It was suede shoe I had on when I went for the audition for the theatre school in Weimar, and we had stayed with our friends there. Their daughter had been married and had a small apartment, and her husband had fallen in the war, and she was there with her little daughter. And that’s where I stayed overnight.

She was up under the eaves. Her husband had been a baker, I think, and the family was not too bad off. And there was there was a good trade, and they had a little fairly modern house outside the country. And of course, the parents lived downstairs, and she still lived upstairs under the eaves with her little daughter because her husband was gone. And that’s where we stayed overnight. My my girlfriend from mining and who had been on the theatre with me.

I had met her there.

She was a theatre pupil. Eleven. They used to call it the French pupil. And the two of us had passed the test and were going to this audition in Weimar together. And that night, coming home after the test, she was home earlier than I was, and she took us there by the hour. It took hours to do it, and it was must have been in the winter time, because it was getting it was dark by the time I came out to that suburb walking. And there was a time when I came into a very perilous situation that I never told my parents about.

I was stopped by a Russian patrol. And he said to me what my name was.

And I said, Barbara, um. And he looked at the paper and he could read very, very little.

He was turning it over and over and over.

But what he could read and what you can read in Russian pretty easily is. Anna. And it said, Anna. Anna.

And I had said Barbara, and he saw the Anna. And he yelled at me, you lie, you lie. Why you lie to me?

And I could tell from his voice that he was drunk and I was scared. My heart was beating up in my throat. I said, oh my God, this time it got me.

There were a couple of people across the street talking and laughing under the lantern and I shall. I scream and run.

But it had happened.

We had talked about it in school. And we had talked about it before Or in mining.

When we found out all these horrible things that happened in Frankfurt, we had found out how often it happened that, uh, if something like that happened, there would usually a guy or a man get involved and try to defend the damsel in distress, and that would usually end with the guy getting shot. So you had to really think twice to do this. And he had a girl with him too, so he was obligated to make a good showing in case of a showdown. So I just kept talking as fast as I could. I kept saying, no, no, I got two names on this. Holding up my fingers, talking to him, and he started pushing.

The Americans — Dick and My Private War with the Russians

So every time he said, you lie, you lie. He got more angry and he kept pushing me toward the fence.

There was a garden around that little house, and the bakery was downstairs, but everybody was already.

The lights turned off and the little garden gate I knew was locked.

But in my fear, I said, I’m going to have to make a run for the front door.

I was so close.

I was so close. And finally I just pushed him back and ran.

And I had pushed my arms in front of me, running against the gate and hoping that they hadn’t locked the little gate in the fence. And then I heard the shots. This guy was shooting at me, but fortunately being drunk. He didn’t hit me. However, when I got to the front door in the house, that house door was locked and there was a great scrape your feet on and I fell on the grate with my shoes, who I had borrowed from the girl upstairs.

They weren’t mine. I lost my shoes, and the guy caught up with me and started to trample me with his boots all over, and I tried to roll and rolled closer to the door and kicked and pushed on the door. And just then the door opened and I got so mad I.

I was just furious. I ran up the stairs screaming. And this was the floor. You know where you went up on the first floor to the second and up under the roof to the third was all stairs.

And I ran up the stairs and I screamed at him, turned around, and I said, aren’t you ashamed to act like this?

And you hang banners all over the city. How you want to be our friends and all that. And you can’t act like this if you want to join civilization. And you. And he was an officer to some kind. Not a big, big deal.

But he was some kind of an officer, I could tell.

And I said, I ought to have to go report this whole thing, because he probably didn’t understand the word, especially as drunk as he was. And my girlfriend appeared on the upper landing and she said, come on, come on.

The door is open. Don’t talk anymore.

And I ran up and ran in. And then she said, where’s my friend?

And she ran out and I ran out again. And the guy was gone. And Eric was standing behind the open door crying. So apparently on the way out, he had found her there by the door and got her batter too. So black and blue and aching all over. We went upstairs and made some tea and sat there shaking, shivering, and just being glad.

We were in the house with her in-laws and not all alone in some little apartment.

But nobody came back.

And I told her, I said, I don’t know where the other shoe is, but please don’t tell my parents because I passed the test. And if they find out what happened today, they will never, never let me go out on my own to go to that school if they know what’s going on here. And so nothing had been further said, and I had been there for a long time.

I guess the shoe had been in the snow and in the summer in her garden for months, and she finally sent it to my to my mother when she found it as a joke. Because naturally, she had thrown the other shoe away. And so my mother had found out the whole sordid, sordid story.

After a while. And that was my Christmas surprise. And there was another time where the bullets were flying, and I did not get hurt.

But I can still hear those shots, and I can still feel those boots.

We were black and blue the next day. You could see the nails from the bottom of those boots on my back.

But I figured that was not a great deal of harm considering what could have happened. So the incident was soon forgotten. A lot of other things happened. Uh, my little student loft where we stayed. I finally roomed there with Elke again to, uh, was finally being supplied with a new corner of the house and a new roof. Not a whole roof, but it was patched up, so it wasn’t snowing on the blankets anymore.

But while this was being in progress, in progress was always very, very, very slow.

We had to move out and find another place. And, uh. My boy trusty supplied the address and I moved into a another ladies boarding house there by myself this time. And, uh. I did not like her. I don’t think she liked me. We just did not hit it.

She was a very common person. And she was Snoopy. I thought I had this feeling. And, uh. Although I didn’t have anything to fear from anybody being Snoopy, but it was just this.

Well, low class feeling about her. And this was what my whole problem was with the Communist Party. I just didn’t like all these low class people feeling like they were running the show. It just went against my grain. I’m a snob. Maybe, and I’m old fashioned, but I didn’t like this whole appearance. For instance, the Anti-Fascist League.

They had. made for the. Victims of. Faschismus the victims of fascism were practically running the towns, and they were in all the high places, and they were controlling all the apartments and all the ration tickets and anything, what have you. And so you had to just keep your mouth shut and go along with that. And of course, it was terrible what what had happened. And the stories now came out.

And I remember going to visit my, my aunt in Apolda one time and saying to her, how come? You have lived all these years here through the Hitler years, and you can look over practically to see the, the hills of Buchenwald and you do not know what has been going on. And she said, of course we knew what was going on. We knew there was a camp there and their camps all over Germany. And she says, of course we knew we could see the smoke when they were having the ovens going.

But she said nobody really believed that they did any more than burn too many dead bodies if they had an epidemic or whatever. And she says that people didn’t think there wasn’t anything much different than what they did in Dresden, where they piled the corpses up after that terrible raid, or in Hamburg, where they bricked up the whole inner city and left the people there to rot because they just couldn’t keep track of all of them. So she says, in those days, she says, it seems like hard to believe now already.

But she said people were just numb to the realities of war, and the real bad stories didn’t even appear until the last weeks of the war, when people started to feel the end coming and were no longer so afraid. So here in Weimar, we could see the monument they were building to the victims of of the concentration camps.

It was right up the nearest hill. And we lived under that. And it was always, always mentioned and always. And people were dealing with it, and it was not easy to deal with it. And it wasn’t easy to deal with us for sure, because, uh. We didn’t know we were children when the war started.

We had a few people in our class who were older because the war had slowed everybody’s course of education and development down quite a few older guys. One of them I didn’t like and the dissenter said he was definitely a spy, was his main objective in the collective. He used to say. That he was a nice guy and he had been in a punishment company in the army, which means they had to clear mines and do all kinds of dangerous work, and they were considered the lowest scum because they said that they did.

But I was pretty sure he was really an activist. And there were a lot of rumors now that we were all being watched. And it was real uncomfortable that we had to be on our toes. And To think that anybody right in our group, which was so close, could be doing anything like that. Seemed hard to believe.

Then one day, something happened that brought everybody closer together, and that was that. One of the girls from our school was raped. She had just started a job with the local radio station, because they had asked for somebody to be tested for radio voice addiction, and she made the grade and she, I guess, had some connections through her family.

I think she came from a from. A journalist, radio theater background. And somebody had gotten her that job and she had left. And another girl from East Prussia had left because she had contacted Uh, and, uh, tuberculosis from the war. China was out. She used to write us cheerful letters, but I’m sure she was really down and depressed.

And she was in some kind of a clinic and, uh, beautiful Beata, who was the most gorgeous, talented girl in our group, I would say, and was one of the girls that definitely wanted to go west with all of us had left already. And, uh, the way she had done it was she found a, a friend of her family’s, an older man who took an interest in her and got her a job on theater in West Germany, and I guess she eventually ended up marrying him.

And she was gone. And we had we were beginning to get a feeling like we were going to be left there and more and more people were going west. And you heard about this and that and this one going, people that were afraid of being in front of this committee for denazification.

There were people disappearing all the time for one reason or another, and it was becoming urgent to make up your mind where your stand was.

And I could have so easily gone to to Munich, where my uncle was. My last name was still a director, and that’s what I should have done. In retrospect, now.

But how could I have left my family in this conditions? We were. And everybody said it can’t last. They are not going to last. They can’t make it that long because things weren’t getting better. They were getting worse. It became more and more obvious. And we just didn’t want I didn’t want to do that to my family.

And I couldn’t part for my family after missing them so much. So that year of of camp and turmoil that I’d been through, and it seemed like we had just found each other again. And also in the meantime, my sister was starting. On a on her training and education, and she was going to college with a, a boy from Dresden that she apparently cared a lot about because she kept coming home and giggling and talking. And they had been on camping.

He was a camping trip.

He was a whitewater canoe, kayak man, whatever. And they always went camping, going through these streams and asking to be dumped in the water, and it all seemed like very exciting.

But he took prizes.

He was quite a champion in that sport and she thought it was great and she was right there with him. So my sister was getting settled in East Germany because his parents had a business in Dresden, and she came home and told the terrible stories of that one raid in February, February thirteenth and fourteenth, I think two nights they raided Dresden and killed three hundred thousand people.

And how he and his dad had laid in, in the bowl of a big fountain in the square and escaped the terrible heat, the incendiary bombs and intensive strafing, and where they just destroyed the city. And two nights into two hours. They were coming down with blockbusters, which were bombs chained together, destroying whole city blocks, setting them on fire, strafing the people that have had fled to the park near the river, and finally creating what they called a big firestorm.

The heat was so intense that it was pulling the children out of people’s arms into the fire. It must have been an inferno, and it was strictly a terror raid to end the war in Dresden was a beautiful baroque gem of a city, as everyone knows it. It’s now been rebuilt. Thank God the Russians did that, Death. East Germany did try to rebuild their historical sites. You have to give them credit for that.

But these were the terrible news. And then there were terrible news for us, because one morning all the teachers came in, and the word was that the girl that was working for the radio had been raped. And they were all very mad and determined. And this time I could tell our professor said, this time they picked on the wrong girl, and he was ready to really raise the roof.

And it went on. And the boys were all upset. And we decided to make it. Home safe now by having boys escort the girls home first Right before they went home. And going in groups only. And they of course, uh, we went to visit, uh, the girl and she was very shook up psychologically. And, uh, the professor said it didn’t make any difference what difficulties she had to come and just sit on in, in on the lessons and take her lessons and keep on trying to further her education.

And but she couldn’t work. And her mother called and said she couldn’t work on the radio station anymore because she couldn’t talk. All she could do was stammer. And she never regained her speech right again. And she had to leave. And it made it just so much more tragic to us that she had to had had had such promise already, and it was taken away from her. And one night.

She was a pathetic thing to see. And I’ll never forget it. And when they talk about rape cases, now I know what they’re talking about. It does a terrible thing to a person.

And I know how it feels to be afraid because I have come so close to it, too. And all this just made us more determined to just. I mean, how can you feel interest in sex and in things like that when things like that are going on around you? It was just not any fun. And here we were, over twenty years old.

All of us. We have had very fun. Yet, as they say here. Are we having fun yet? We aren’t having any fun yet. Not the kind of fun that you should usually normally have at that age. So. More and more, the suspicions were growing among US members too. And around Easter time, Woolley had come and asked me to come visit his parents and go out to the country and and stay for the holidays. And he went to my parents and asked permission. And, uh, while we were there over the weekend.

My father is usually called up. And played his him on the on the piano in the morning. It must have been where we still had the piano, because I know this is what killed my alliance with Uli. Because he was playing a hymn. And he was making fun. And he was grinning and and nudging me with his elbow, making fun of this little family meditation. And my father says, yes, yes, I could go with him. And he thought he was a nice guy in the pounds, you know, where respectable people.

He was sure. And.

But He shook his head and he said, he’s not for you. Because of the way he acted when we played the music. And that kind of. Sort of without really accepting my, my, my parents judgment on that. It kind of fell into my mind and stuck there.

And I was wondering, well, he was a gentleman.

I was convinced because he had stayed overnight with Elke and me one time, and he missed the curfew at night, and we’d set up half the night and talked about things, and, and he had slept in our we had double beds. Nobody had double beds in Germany, I should say. Two beds pushed together like a married couple. That’s the only way you could get two beds in that room. That’s where Elke and I slept and he was in the middle between us. Anyway, nothing had happened and I said, well, he is a gentleman.

And I had kind of given him credit for that. So I said, okay, and I told my dad about it. I always told my parents everything.

And I said, I think.

And I had known him a long time by then.

And I said, I don’t think there’s going to be any problem. And it was a lovely weekend.

The weather was gorgeous and he had bicycles for the two of us, and we went bicycling, bicycling all around the village and, well, the long and the short of it was that he kept insisting and trying.

And I finally gave in and he said he wanted to get engaged, and that he had told people that they were going to have a little party at the house. And we had a little champagne and his parents were really nice. He must have had a lot of conversations about me with them, because they acted like old friends, cooked wonderful meals because they were out in the country. They could get a lot of things that I hadn’t had, and they had ice cream.

We had peach ice cream. Oh, it was so wonderful.

And I was just all kind of in the excitement of the moment. And it was sort of. Like a big teddy bear.

He was sort of lovable, a big, robust kind of guy with heavy eyebrows. He looked sort of like Max Schmeling, the boxer. I mean, he was not exactly a gorgeous hero for the theater.

He was going to be playing the heavy. For the most part.

It was quite obvious. And he wasn’t all that good.

But there is a call for types like that in in the theatre, and he supplied that element in our collective. So anyway. It’s really remarkable when you think about it.

I had no plans to get married, at least not for a long, long time. So the whole thing was a a whim, I would say. And he was the closest guy I knew. So it’s funny how little you know and how some people get into marriage because of that. Thank God I didn’t. Anyway.

We had a lovely weekend. We came back and the big news and and the boys were all looking at me. And nothing much was said about the engagement or this or that, but I’m sure That everybody in the school knew it.

And I couldn’t quite, quite figure out what the deal was. And unfortunately, I didn’t find out much later or fortunately, what the deal really was. So. Around this time.

There was much more happening than, uh, all these, uh, puzzlements with the Communist Party, because for my life, something wonderful happened, and I met a new girl who had been in our class all along.

But I never got close to her because she was kind of a a good time, Charlie. Cute looking. And she was definitely going to go into musical revue. You could tell it she was singing, she played the accordion, and she was joking all the time. And she could do comedy improvisations. Unbelievable.

She was just comical to start with and we were concentrating on comedy for a while there because there is quite a bit of comedy involved in that play too, that we were working on, and I didn’t find it easy. I found comedy a lot harder than anything tragic.

But anyway, everybody kind of liked her and I got a little closer to her.

I think we had art history together in theatre history together and music, of course. We studied a lot of music and and I think the teachers felt we needed a little boost in our low feeling. So they gave us jazz. And of course, all the time during the camp it was forbidden to dance, jazz, listen to jazz. So this was now the big thing. And she with her accordion, right Leading the way at Jesus. Come over my house. I’m going to play tonight and we’re going to do some dancing and. So this was a nice, nice, welcome distraction. And like I said, we hadn’t had any fun yet, so. I went over.

It was just me she invited.

It was not only there were no boys there at all, as far as I remember.

We were just singing and making music and she was mostly sitting in the window and she said, have you met any of the Americans?

And I was dumbfounded.

I had no idea that they were Americans in town. She said, well, of course they have. They have eight or ten of them that have been here all along, she said. They didn’t go home. They stayed here because they’re watching the telephone lines from here, from the border to Berlin, Ah.

I had no idea. So that was all that was said that day. And then about a week later, she came to me and she said, would you like to go to a party with me, to the Americans. And this is where my whole life took a completely topsy turvy turn. And when I really started to have fun, and they were probably the happiest two years in my life.

And I remember those days fondly and with lots of sunshine. And it was like a reversal of time, because the times when the Americans were there, I had nothing to do with it. And the time went by and I thought it was gone forever.

It was gone.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and the flowers out in the garden, and the birds and the trees and a nice breeze. And she was hanging her legs out the window. She lived on the ground floor. And of course, there are no fly screens in Germany, as I told you.

The window was open wide and she was sitting on the window sill playing the accordion, and we were singing along, having a great time. And. All of a sudden she turned around and looking at us on the inside of the womb, and she said, look who’s there. There’s Red going by in his jeep.

Well, I had seen the jeeps in town, but I always figured they were traveling through on special permits Between West Germany and West Berlin and just traveling through.

I had no idea that these people actually lived there. She says, oh yeah, they’re living right up in our section, up the up the hill a bit in one of those villas. And, uh. In the Kleist Strasse, which is the name of the street, was the same was named after the same poet, uh, who had lived and died in my hometown Frankfurt, where I graduated.

In fact, our school, uh, was named after him. Kleist. So it was sort of like a nomen est omen, I suppose that I became involved with Kleist Strasse. Normanist omen. This is one of my my father’s typical Latin quotes that he used to always throw around and that we grew up on. That means your name is your destiny.

Well, this this is a good time to get into the destiny thing because Barbara, my name means. Stranger. Somebody who has a funny accent. And that turned out to be the future of my life and my destiny. Because naturally, as soon as I found out about the Americans, I was curious to meet them. Speak English.

And. You also have to remember that I had probably been in the car only about two or three times in my life at that age, and it was kind of thrilling to see them whipping around in their little jeeps. They made a sport of it to go to the post office in the, in the, in the jeep and go and drive up the roads to the post the steps to the post office like it was so much of a rough road and they were a tough vehicle and cute to look at.

And everybody got a big kick out of the jeeps. And, uh. So she said, watch after a while. If he he has seen me sitting here, he’ll be back. And sure enough, after a while, the soldier came back, tooted his horn, drove by the window again. And, uh, and we were all waving and laughing and. She said to me, didn’t you know that, uh, I’m going with one of the Americans?

That’s why, she says. And she laughed. That’s why nobody in school will have anything to do with me. Because I’m a bad girl, you know, and I have a bad reputation. And so I said, no, I hadn’t heard anything about it. And, um, later on, after a couple of more girls had left, she said to me, what happened between you and Oolie? I thought you were engaged. And she says, I, I can’t understand why aren’t you making any plans to go to West Germany together?

And I was very much surprised she knew all this.

And I said, uh, who said anything about going to West Germany?

Well, she says that’s what everybody wants to do. You don’t want to stay here, do you? With the communists. And she laughed again, and she thought it was all hilarious and it just felt so good to have somebody so, so outspoken and open and happy. I couldn’t believe it.

And I said, how could you go away? What would you do with your mother? Take your mother with you.

Well, she says we’re only renting this house. This is my aunt’s house. And she says we have another aunt in West Germany. And my mother would go with me. Her father was not alive anymore. And she said, we’re just waiting for the right moment. And. She says, you come to the to the party that I told you, and you’ll meet all of them, and and you’ll see what it’s all about.

But she says, I wonder about wondered about you and Uli because it seemed to be cooling off. And she says, I don’t blame you because you probably found out what it was all about.

And I said, no, no. What did you find out? I didn’t find anything out. And this is when I found out what the story was between you and me. They had actually. Told Dooley to get involved with me, to keep me in the collective. And this whole thing had been sort of planned.

Now, I’m sure he wasn’t against it because he liked me.

But to just use that whole situation in that way, I couldn’t believe it was like, uh. The, uh, the blindness went from my eyes and I could see the whole thing so clearly.

He was having a pretty hard time staying in, so it would help him along, and at the same time he would get closer to me, further his career, whatever. We would stay together in the collective. And he’d done all of this deliberately. I couldn’t believe it.

Well, that was more or less the beginning of the end. There had been a couple of times when I had thought of moving in with Uli, which was, uh, uh. More or less it was very accepted in Germany, if you were engaged, people more or less assumed that you had, uh, you had sex at the same time. That was all right as long as you were engaged and had always the same boy. And not just one here, one there.

So, uh, we were actually considering that. And a couple of times at noontime, we had been sneaking away to his pad there where he lived and, uh, had our little afternoon games, but it hadn’t happened very often because I really wasn’t, uh, it was not a very strong bond, which was fortunately, now that I found out, fortunately, it hadn’t been. A heart breaking love affair.

But boy, did I see the light. And, uh. I told Brigitta that I had been with only, you know, seeing him, uh, and and all this, but I said I really haven’t been that serious. Because I tell you the truth, it’s because I know that my parents don’t approve of him.

Well, she said, that’s very smart because she shouldn’t get involved with deals like that.

And I thought the whole thing was crazy. And she says it’s about time somebody warned you because she said that landlady of yours, she’s a spy. She tells everything that goes on. I mean, it was just like such a revelation to me. I couldn’t believe it. They were actually having us watched, too, wherever we lived. And it’s quite possible that this nice, old fashioned lady we lived with before, where they’re working on the roof now, refused to do that, and they kind of discouraged us. From going back there and staying with her because I could just see her.

She was from the old school. I’m sure she didn’t like any of them. Uh, in her old fashioned, quite class conscious little old town where they’ve been playing the the theatre plays at the court of the Duke and had their famous theatre to themselves and all that. I could just see it. So I was out of there and put in with that lady. So I said, well, if I can help it, I think I should try to find a new place to stay because I personally don’t like her either.

But now this was the second best land and it was not coming from our side.

But they had definitely dealt dirty with me and us. So my outlook had changed at that moment a lot.

And I went to the party a couple of weeks later. She says, well, now you know how blind dates are. He is not much to look at, but he’s a very nice fellow and he doesn’t want to get involved and you don’t want to get involved, which I had told her. I said, I just want to have fun and hear some jazz music and speak some English, and but I don’t want to get involved in anything like that.

To tell the truth, I was kind of scared. And because I did not want to be one of those girls, you know, like I’m a bad girl. And she said, actually, it’s quite safe because she said he’s shipping out anyhow in a month or two. He’s going home. So there’s going to be no danger. So.

It was arranged. And when I. Got picked up. For the party at Brigid’s house.

It was not by my blind date. And he pulled up because he was out of town. And he pulled up in front of the house just as we pulled up in front of the house. So my first look at him was I saw him getting out of the jeep, looking at me, and he had glasses.

And I said, oh my goodness.

He was very tall and very, very thin. I mean, not just I mean skinny thin. And it was a strange thing. I looked at him and I saw him only for a second, and then it was just like our eyes met, like they say in the novels. I just saw his eyes and we just kind of stared at each other, like. Like the snake and the rabbit, I guess.

It was fate.

It was fate, I swear.

It was strange. And we had the party.

And I was shy because it was all strange to me and new.

But I loved it. And he was shy, apparently by nature, and I could see that he was being very careful and retiring because, uh. And but it didn’t surprise me because Brigitta had told me that he was going home and he had specified that he didn’t want to get involved. He had had a girlfriend in Germany that he had broken up with and told her, that’s it, I’m going home at the end.

And he was very serious and very quiet, but he spoke very good German so we could once we got going, we were speaking on many subjects and we could talk and we talked and talked and talked and I got my fill of trying English and and after a while he said, you can speak German, I understand all, all the words.

And he told me how they arranged the telephone connections, that they had these different repeater stations, that they had to be living near and supervising Anything and that they have been if there are trips between the line. There has been a system where they call from one station ahead to the next station, so that they know when they arrive.

And if anybody has car trouble, there’s any hold up by the Russians that they could get help right from the line. So this whole line stretched through several different towns from, uh, all the way to from the border to into Berlin. West Berlin. And, um.

Of course, they had their sector in Berlin, because that was the famous Potsdam Agreements that had made our home province belonging to the Russians, where it belonged to the Americans before, and the cause of the whole So a subject. So my head was just reeling and spinning, and I told him about the school and he said, yeah, he knew about that. He heard about Bridget and all that, and and he kind of laughed and he said, she’s a big clown and everybody loves her. And he said, have you met Shira?

And I said, no.

Well, Louis Shira was her fiance, his fiancee.

And I didn’t know. She hadn’t told me that she was engaged to the American. So we now had a little secret between us, Bridget and I. And it brought us closer in one way, as personalities. We really did not have all that much in common. But, uh, it was so such a relief and so nice to have somebody who just was out to have fun to be with, and that’s all the soldiers wanted. They didn’t want this or that or upset anything or or they they just wanted to have fun.

The war was over. And they were most of them were still the original crew. They had been through the war. Some of them through the invasion. And they were all waiting to be relieved with their, uh. Their state of mind more happy also, and honest to goodness. I don’t think people would believe it, but our favorite thing was playing hide and seek at dusk. It was.

It was a typical German villa, very elegant, very new stucco building. Two.

There were two apartments in it one day, one that the owner apparently had and one that he rented out. And then there were extra rooms for the owner upstairs under the roof and all finished up and they had enlarged the kitchen on the upper floor. For cooking.

But it was used more or less for snacks because the actual station was a repeater station, and they had bunks there in different rooms, and they had a common dining room there, and it was all heated by the same old cozy tile stoves.

But everything was brand new. It couldn’t have been older than two years at Villa before the war, and all these changes came around.

It was a beautiful place the Americans picked. I’ve got to hand him that.

It was right at the last end of the street, and you looked right out into the fields and woods and over to Buchenwald concentration camp, and, uh. It had a A vegetable garden and berry garden and elderberry trees. And the road went right by the side of the field, up from there up to the hill, to the repeater station.

And one of the houses next to there was the house of uh Gauleiter Sauger, or had been. He was, of course, long gone, driven out to Nazi crime trials. I don’t know what ever happened to him, but it speaks for the neighborhood as well to realize that he lived up there on that end of town too. And and probably there was a reason for that, too, that it was near that that very modern underground repeater station that was closed during the war, very important to keep these telephone lines secure.

And most of it was underground and very advanced technology for the time. And that’s where. My friend, my new friend Dick, was at home and had been at home for about two years.

Now, and they didn’t. Most people did not call him Dick. They didn’t call him Richard either. They called him farty. Everybody called each other by their last names. And my mother made when I first told them about it.

And I went home on the weekend.

My mother made Freddy out of this one, and he remained Freddy for my mother. She never changed it. She never caught on to that party.

He was Freddy for as long as she lived. And, uh, because we could not see any way. anyway how? How I would have loved to meet them. Have them meet my my new friend and have him meet my parents, because these were the most important people in my life at the time.

But we couldn’t figure out how we could arrange this because they only had passports to go between these certain checkpoints. They were not allowed much in town. They weren’t allowed at public places like movie theaters or the theater or any place like that dances. So they were more or less relying on being entertained and having fun in their house there.

And, um, this was the reason why the girls always went up there for parties. That’s the only place the Americans could be to have a good time. They had a phonograph there and radios, and they had a projector to play American movies. That was a big attraction, too. Because we did not see much of the American movies being in East Germany, of course.

So my whole world had changed. I couldn’t believe it was really me sitting there in a jeep on a sunny day, and with the breeze blowing and going up to the autobahn and zipping around town. And then when I saw the road signs, I knew where the Americans all referred to Ben Map. That was the name of Weimar, spelled in the in the Russian letters, and it spelled Ben Map.

And that’s what they called it. And just this fact alone. It just seemed to express the. Happy and carefree way that they looked at things. I mean, for us, if we had been driving by on on the autobahn and had seen that Russian sign, we would have probably felt bad. Because now with my Russian lessons, I could read that it said Weimar, but that carefree way of just saying, hey, this is Ben Map. It just represented a whole way of free and happy way of looking at things.

And I think that was the big attraction with with being connected to the station and to the Americans, because like I said before, They were laughing.

The German men were also beaten down and sad, and they were happy and laughing. And that made all the difference. And it’s sorry because, uh. It’s a bad way to, uh. To let your your people down.

And I felt like a traitor. That’s what my sister called me when she found out. She jumped up from the table and said she was not going to eat with the traitor.

And I was very aware of it, but it was just irresistible. And these times, uh, were very, very sunny. Happy times for me again. And and just as it started out with finding out all the bad things about the collective, and it had been going on under the other system all this time. I found out all the good things about about the other way of living, and it was like a, a barbed wire being removed from around my life.

They weren’t all pleasant things, I realized either, because with the concentration camp out there, for instance, found out that the camps were all open and in operation again being operated by the Communist Party, that they were installing memorial. Plaques and monuments and and having some of these, uh, barracks saved for, uh, historical sites and showplaces to expose the Nazis. He’s found this all very understandable.

But to to see in what? Monstrous proportions. This all had taken place, and at the same time to hear that business was going on as usual. Only the ones that were out used to be in. And now the ones that were out. Were the ones that ran the camps. You ask yourself, well, is there no hope in the world?

And you were hoping that after all the other ideals had been smashed, that the answer was the Americans?

And you really wanted to believe that with all your heart? That the good has won.

I think every person on earth wishes for that. Deep down. And anyway, those are the problems that was so typical that we could discuss. Between the Americans and the girls and some of them were more serious and some of them were more shallow.

But with Dick, I could sit up half the night discussing things, discussing Hitler, discussing religion, and discussing politics. Anything, anything we could talk about. And we talked endlessly. And it was amazing.

It was so amazing to me. And it was funny too. When he was talking to the German workers on the telephone lines, they had several Germans working for them, and he would he would know how to get mad and yell at them or joke with them. And he would do all of that in, in the, in the touring and dialect.

He could do it perfect. I used to laugh so much about it, and so many of the Americans that came to visit from the West. West Germany and West Station, they would come in and say, oh, they had a German girlfriend too, and they could speak very well, German. And and as soon as they opened their mouths, you could tell where they were stationed, because they all reflected the local dialect in the German language.

So we had a lot of good times and a lot of laughs, and we saw a lot of movies together at night, and then all the girls would go in in the little kitchen and make snacks, and we made peanut butter sandwiches. I never had had that much white bread, and I never had any peanut butter before. I’d never seen or seen or heard of peanut butter.

And what we did, it was so sticky. We said it stuff is too sticky. And we used to do is we used to put it in a big bowl and mix jelly and evaporated milk and peanut butter and make it into a smooth, creamy spread. And that’s what we spread it on a whole pile of sandwiches and made a whole plate and tea and coffee.

And that’s what we usually had at midnight for the boys and us. Our midnight snacks. And then some of the boys had sausage and it was very typical. They had their peanut butter from America, but the cold cuts that they ate, they were from Germany and it was good stuff. And then I found out that the chef they had up at the station was had been the chef at the Hotel Elephant.

The Elephant Hotel in town had provided their personal cook. And oh, and this poor man now had gone through six years of war with hardly any supplies. And here he had all the supplies he wanted a few guys there they would send down a shipment for a month’s supplies, and it was huge amounts, because they were only a few guys at the station.

It became quite obvious to me that probably a lot of these soldiers had never eaten like that before, and he was accommodating. This chef was ready to try anything. He made wine for them out of the elderberry bushes. He cooked their rabbits and deer and birds. They shot in their little hunting trips and prepared them perfectly.

He was willing to try their favorite family family recipes and he could produce anything, any region of America. He could produce a super meal, and they were all raving about it and he was giving them for breakfast. I heard German pancakes was peaches and powdered sugar over them. Hold up omelettes. Souffles.

When we had been through playing hide and seek in the garden, they could be sure that they were served some of the green beans and some of the cauliflower they were hiding behind, laying on the dirt. And there would be hollandaise sauce with it. And there were berries picked out of the garden and bought from the market. And pudding made with berries. And the best, I am sure very few had ever lived like that before. And they were grateful. And they were fun and they were friendly. And actually everybody that came in touch with them. Loved them.

It was that way the first time the Americans had come to Turin, and it was still that way.

There was an instant. Accord between the Americans and the Germans, and a lot of the Americans said to us that they liked the Germans best, too. They were not very happy with the. Stiff lipped Tommies, and they were not at all enchanted with the French. They said the French were all very young, clannish, and very much bent on their own business.

And they didn’t think too highly of them. They were telling us how the Russians had had that house before they did, and how they. Had more or less demolished the place before. How they had used the. Goldfish pond to urinate in it and sorts of that thing. And laughing about them and laughing with relief in the privacy of their own home.

Because from an official standpoint, the Russians and the Americans were allied. And the biggest, biggest concern there was in those days not to let any incident happen, that that was the number one order of the day. No incidents because they did not want to have to take a stand. And the Americans were told that all the time, which was also the reason for this, this really close watch on the vehicles on the road, in case they should encounter any trouble with the Russians or have somebody being hauled off for questioning in front of the Russians.

This happened all the time, and they were very annoyed at this not being used to, uh, very much, uh, police action in this country and being put under suspicion and put under guard.

The Americans reacted very badly to any of these questionings, and it always led to bad blood.

And I found all these things out. Now that I heard some of the details, what was going on behind the, uh, the allies among themselves. And apparently all was not love and brotherhood. And there really had been just a recent incident. I heard that, uh, the captain was going home, and there was much hush hush and excitement about it, and something had happened, and, uh. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. And the understanding was the language difference wasn’t as as clear or it was purposely done.

But I didn’t really find out until long after the captain was gone that there was something that had happened with his girlfriend. Apparently had been hospitalized after being locked up in a hotel room with three Russians and being raped. And there was a very, uh, nasty, uh, feeling between the Russians and the Americans.

At that time, and, uh, the Russians had moved into the house next to the Americans. And the obvious implication was that they were there to observe and watch. And the Russians were always, uh, kind of angry.

The girls told me they would say, uh, why are you smile? Why you always smile for the Americans. You don’t smile for Russians, The soldier, and there was bitterness about it. And there had been another incident. Uh, the housekeeper told me they also had a German army nurse who had. Been in the kitchen cooking for a while, and she was now just a housekeeper.

And she told me that there had been a time, uh, another incident where, uh, something had happened. Uh, on the road, on the Autobahn. Uh, and there were girls involved and soldiers involved, American soldiers involved and Russian soldiers. And that one of the Russians had hung himself apparently out the window.

The windows kind of have like a big. cross in the middle of smaller panes are up top and the bigger panes on the bottom, and they open up like double doors in Germany. And so you always have this big cross shape in the middle of a window. And that’s apparently where he had hung himself. And that was kind of a gruesome thing to think about, I think. And it was not comfortable anyway to have the Russians right next door.

But they were watching all the comings and goings and wanted to know everything that was going on.

And I realized that the war was far from over as far as these soldiers were concerned. And and that there was this undercurrent of, of rivalry and war going on now between the Russians and the Americans. So the Cold War was approaching. apparently. Meanwhile, they were trying to have a good time. We used to go out on picnics, and part of that was probably to is to.

Be able to get out from under the Russians and get away. And they could not they could hardly tell them that they could not go anywhere. And taking out a Jeep and going on a picnic Sunday. How were they going to determine? Where they’re going and what they’re doing?

And how could they really warn against that? Because the Russians had many, many places where they didn’t want no civilian to go and no American and no outsider to go? It turns out more and more over the years.

Now, how many secret installations were operating there aside from the concentration camps? I became familiar with this. This, uh, the whole horrid detail of all of this now, because I heard a lot more from the Americans. They had, uh, movies and they had, uh, pictures of the camps, the concentration camps.

And the pictures that I saw were just. Mind boggling to see that all this had gone on without so many people knowing about it, that somebody would have just absolutely stopped it. I don’t know if everybody was afraid, which is of course true, but nobody seemed to really have stopped it. It seems to me like even the foreign nations could have done more to stop it and didn’t do it. Not to put the blame away from the Germans, but I mean.

There were reporters that were telling everybody, and we did not hear them.

We were we were under strict control by our party.

But the free press, the Red cross. I don’t know. I also saw a book that was interesting that in in East Germany, I saw a book that they had given out the the League of Anti-fascism had given out about the murders of the Polish officers in the woods of cotton. Thousands of officers were shot and put in mass graves, apparently to get rid of the ruling class in Poland. And they said the Germans did it. And it was all one of those things that all came crashing down on our heads, and we could just stand there. Bedazzled by what could have happened around us.

And I found now a book in the American building on cotton. And they said it was under investigation, finally, by the Red cross. And they were exhuming the bodies and finding out the circumstances. And it was not done by the Germans, but it was done by the Russians. This would have made the communists in Germany feel very bad to find out that, uh.

And how about the Polish people that were now under under the Eastern Bloc to find out that their communist brothers, when they had that pact with Hitler and Poland, was split up for a short time between Russia and Stalin and Hitler. This was just before Hitler invaded Russia. You know, typical. Stabbed him right in the back.

And. That they all had participated in a way. Everybody. Had participated in this general killing and fighting. Race against racism. And the Russians hated the Polish and the Polish hated the Russians. And the Ukrainians bitterly hated the Russians. And still do. and the Finns and the Latvian countries. It just made your head spin.

But on the other hand, it was a good feeling to all of a sudden get. Information about all these things and not be behind this. Blocked or concrete and barbed wire that we had been in in East Germany.

There was a breath of freedom around the area there by the station, and I think that was one of the big attractions. And they were able to forget about it and laugh about it and go out on Sundays and have a picnic and take her along with her accordion and a basket of food. And it was such great fun. Except that I found out once.

And that was that Dick. Did not really like to join parties like that and outings like that, and having a good time with the other people. He’d rather sit in the room with me and talk and. We still had no sex. I want to put in here at this point, because we both insisted we did not want to get involved in any way, and the best way to do that was to not get involved.

And even though I think once or twice I had stayed overnight, even because the parties went late anyway, the parties went on to two o’clock at night and the curfew ended at four, and I had to be at fencing at six, so there was not that much time involved. But, uh, we really did not get involved.

But he enjoyed sitting with me just in his room and talking. I talk about the problems, talk about the problems that he had with the men, too, because they were now talking about all the officers leaving and he being in charge.

He was a tech sergeant by then.

And I said, uh, why aren’t you going home? Because I thought that the whole reason you even wanted me at that party was just for company. Party?

And you were going home. That’s what I understood. No, he said I would have gone when Lieutenant. They had a lieutenant there, too. Handsome dog from Mississippi. And he went home. I would have gone too, he said. I enlisted again for another extended time.

Well, that was a surprise to me.

But he didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t find out until a year later that the reason he re-enlisted was me. Because of meeting me and wanting to stay with me for a while. Quite an honor. Which he probably would have totally denied if I had said it then, and if I had said it ten years later.

But nevertheless, that was the reason, because his mother said, that’s why she was really mad at me at first, because. He had stayed. Longer than he really had to. Because of me. And then he said, of course he had to be more aloof from the men because he says, it’s very hard here to keep order and be a leader. Uh, if you mix in to become too familiar with the men, it’s very easy to become too familiar in a setting like this, which I totally understood.

He was right in that respect. So. I joined in with all the other girls in keeping keeping the house a homey place with a lot of fun. And the girls used to do the typing for the guys and used to do the, the duty rosters and, and type the reports to Berlin. And they said there was a girl named Crystal on the telephone lines.

They said if Crystal was out sick, the whole telephone lines between Frankfurt and Berlin were interrupted because she was more or less running the show. And the Americans were busy, busy with the black market. So I think in that spirit, the whole thing came along. Now with the reform of all the money. Everybody had to turn in their money and get different money.

The soldiers and I think the Germans too, was all turned around and turned over. And also what happened next was they were trying to get all the old guys out of the occupied zones, the ones that had been through the war, and they figured there was just probably too much fraternization going on, and they were getting too comfortable.

So they began the big turnaround and now a big different crew moved in and all that good, nice guys that we knew were replaced by some new characters that had really not been in the war. Had most of them never left their country, were entirely different kind of breed of Americans.

The first thing that happened was they were very friendly. A lot of them were from the South, and they said they wanted to learn German.

And I said, oh, that sounds like fun. I said, when, whenever I said to myself, whenever Dick is on the road at night and comes in late, we can sit down in the living room together and have German lessons. That would be fun.

So, but the first thing I found out, I gave them all pencils and papers.

The first thing I found out that these guys couldn’t they couldn’t write. They. They couldn’t read and write English, never mind learning a second language.

It was really weird, and I got to know a lot of the American background and the way of thinking. And the Europeans always had the impression the Americans all lived in skyscrapers and lived like New Yorkers with hats and business suits, and had plenty of money and lived at night in bars and went out and bought glamorous clothes. And you did not hear about the real Americans, which for me are the real Americans. Really? Uh. They had been here the longest, I would say.

The old settlers and they were a different breed. And a lot of them were German. And they all had nicknames.

And I remember one called, I said Ida. He.

He was such a hillbilly that he had holes in the in the pants and the knees. And he had a girlfriend too. A lot of the girls just switched right over and the other boys moved in.

It was like I say, it was good food. You know, we got good food out of it, and we got had a lot of fun out of it and dancing and music and all that. And it was an irresistible thing. Uh, to to turn your back on it, I think would have been very hard. When you compared the living conditions in East Germany And, uh.

And the general. Psychological well-being, I should say you cannot really blame anybody that they would find that irresistible and hard to quit once you had been there. But, uh, so she his girlfriend, was always trying to fix the holes in the pants and down his socks and keep him. Keep him clean. And all this. I on his shirt, and and he didn’t want it.

He was furious at her. He did not want to pass this on his pants. And he didn’t want socks. Darned. And he he he just didn’t like that all his cultivated living was going against this grain. And and Dick was always up in arms about it too. He says how? What am I going to teach these guys? I can’t tell them anything.

They don’t know. Know anything? He was just shaking his head, and there was not that much brotherly love there either, because they were no rebels and Yankees. And that’s the first time I heard that expression. And everybody always teasing me. I said, at least I can understand when Dick speaks English.

I can understand you guys. And they said, well, that’s up to you if you want to have a liking for a damn Yankee. Naturally, they all talk funny. So we learned a lot, and it just seemed to give us a bigger slice of the world. During this period of my life, I guess I did not meet very many famous people, but I sure met a lot of characters.

There was a blitz who worked in the motor pool and. This nickname, which means lightning, was given to him undoubtedly for the questionable speed of his work. And there was Archu, the guy from Hawaii. And Bryce. And handsome, handsome little kid. And of course, Louis. And we knew all these. Guys like like brothers. And it seemed terrible to think that they all had to leave.

Now, there was a sergeant. Named Ed Edward too.

I think he was kind of a rough character. I did not like him too much, but the rest of them, we really, we really all hated to see them go and have such a turnaround happening. And, uh, one of the ones that had to go was Bridget.

And I said, what are you going to do now if he’s going away? Are we going to go west? She says, you’ll see that I’ll be gone someday. And, uh, uh, we’ll get together and he’ll get me out of here. And she was pretty confident and not very upset and very determined. And, uh, at that same time, I realized that there were a lot of other girls leaving and going, And there were a lot of people already considering being engaged and considering marriage.

And I just, uh, observed everything. And they kept saying about, uh. They liked the German girl so much better because this and that. And I’m sure that one of them was that, that they were waiting on them hand and foot. And part of it was also that we had a lot of, a lot more in common than their American girlfriends or wives, even, because we had seen the things they saw during the war and after the war. And there was this common bond that the American girls could not share.

And I think that was one explanation for it. And of course, there was a lot of bitter feelings about it and talking about how bad the German girls were, and that they all had been sleeping with the soldiers and and about their loose morals.

But from what I saw later, when the occupation was more solid and the new people from the States came and brought their wives, they had been living under much stricter scrutiny over here in America. And then once they were over there, they were really going over the boundaries more than anybody else, I would say, because I did not have too much occasion to observe it, because this would have been only in Berlin, West Berlin on our trips, when I sometimes accompanied Dick on trips because I could

not go to to West Germany and see what was really going on there, where the Americans really now became settled as permanent occupation forces.

And I like these trips to the different stations because it gave me a feeling of freedom. And at one occasion I remember we went, uh. To, uh, uh, the hometown where my grandmother lived.

There was a report that a lady was flying the American flag from her, from her kitchen window, and she had a small apartment up there.

She was an old lady, and they wanted to check out somebody there. Had a right to fly the flag, and Dick asked me if I knew where the place was, and I knew I said I knew the town. I told him about. My grandmother, who still lived at that time, was still living in that little home. Home for Christian ladies, very proper place, and is still lived up in her villa.

And so it was fun to just ride around the town. We went up to the castle, of course, and I showed him the the park with the health resort from the old hotel with their saline inhalation structure that is still in operation from the saline solution out of the ground in hollow wooden tubes and transfer it to the spa.

Dick liked to go for rides as much as I did, and we tried to do it as much as we could get away with it. And he loved to take pictures and develop his own photographs, and he took pictures of several of the Thüringer castles. They were ruins and abandoned ruins and preserved old castles. On many of the hilltops. And he had quite a collection of pictures.

And I was quite impressed by the interest he had shown in all those things. And that kept us going.

We were constantly. Checking out new. Cameras and testing different lighting settings, and taking more pictures and more pictures of each other of the surroundings of the gang at the station, the technical installations and the motor pool, which had gotten more important and bigger. And they had built a new great garage building and almost.

All the persons of a little higher rank could afford it, had their own cars. Uh, some of them they bought for their jobs, so to speak, as inspector or we also had a now liaison to the Russian officers at Dick’s side who spoke Russian, was Russian by descent. His name was Dave Kruszewski. Chayefsky.

Now, he was the person that became, uh. Known to an extent, somewhat by writing an article of of these, uh, wild times in East Germany entitled My Private War with the Russians. And it was published in the Saturday Evening Post. Uh, I had only once heard of the article and had no idea that, uh. How and that it was possible to maybe get a copy of this.

It was among some of the papers and books and photo albums.

The album that got lost in one of our many moves in later life. And here I was, years and years later, I think it was. In Littleton nineteen eighty five eighty six, went to the veterinarian across the street with the kids to pick out a kitty for them.

We were in the waiting room there, and there was a picture of a little boy with a doggie on his lap that he had brought to the vet’s.

It was one of those Norman Rockwell pictures that were so, so appealing and so popular in those days. And it was the Saturday Evening Post.

It was a title page, and it was framed in its entirety so that I could read.

The year, the number of the magazine and across the top was a little band saying, my private war with the Russians. I couldn’t believe it. What a coincidence. I said, here it is. I got out my little notebook. I wrote down the year the number, and I said, I am trying to get this magazine.

I was such a surprise after all these years. And sure enough, I couldn’t get very far in Littleton with that up north.

But I called, uh, uh, Connie, my daughter in Boston, and she went to one of the big libraries, and there they had all the magazines over the years. And lo and behold, at Christmas time, she presented me with a Xerox copy of that article again. So it was quite amusing to read this article again, and Dick was mentioned by full name in the article and some of the things that had happened before I met him, because they had been there for quite a while two years, two and a half years, three years, an

d uh, all the things that had happened, and I gave a good impression of, of, of the times we were in and some of the episodes that happened on the road and in Berlin and India, higher up offices with the Russians. And it is a beautiful souvenir of those days. And, uh, it was it was like a miracle to me to find this in this unlikely place just because of the picture on the cover and my going to the vets at that particular place.

Those are the small things in life that happen that make you wonder how much of it is coincidence, how much is fate? How much? Is luck? How much is, uh, maybe we’re dreaming all our lives. Who knows? But there are strange things that happen through the course of a lifetime. And that was one of them. And that brought back everything so vivid.

Although everything has been vivid on my mind ever since. Because these are really rare, very unusual times we witnessed. And the adventures that he describes were not over by a long shot because we had our own. Because in the meantime. Life went on. As usual in my theatre school, and I don’t want to give the impression that, uh, all these interests were put aside.

Uh, as a matter of fact, uh, it all got, uh. Stepped up to a faster tempo now because we were now in a well along in our second year. And, uh. They had called some of us to go on the road with the mining theatre during a semester vacation. Uh, they took. Two shows, I think, on the road. And, uh, I got to go along on the road show, and, uh, the way they got in touch with me was at Christmas time when I was home.

They had a New Year’s party, a ball at the theater. And we had all gone. My dad and my mother and me had gone to this ball.

It was a great affair. They were showing the house and afterwards there was dancing and the buffet. And it was a glamorous affair because they had been so little of these things during the war that everybody went in, all out for this. And in a theater party, right in the theater itself and the fun of it all.

And the second or third act, everybody was getting a little tipsy, obviously. One of the girls fell off the stage into the orchestra pit, and it was such great fun, and they had gotten back in touch with me there and told me about this tour and offered me to go on the tour with them. So that’s what I did.

And it was great fun in the bus, going to the smaller little towns and putting these plays on and making do with the smaller stages, and it was fun. And meanwhile our, our play that we were studying was making progress now and shaping up. So that was not put aside by any means that was still going on. Except that of course, Brigida and my involvement. With the Americans did not go unnoticed, maybe with the help of Willie too.

I remember one day I went. We went down as usual at noontime. He said he wanted to go back to his place and talk about things, and I knew what it was about.

I had a fairly good idea, and we talked all the way there, and the talk got more and more developed into an argument, and we went into his part more or less to get off the street, because you had to be careful what you said on the street to everywhere. And, uh.

Well, the, uh, to make a long story short, it developed into a horrible fight. And he told me he knew all about it, and he said, how can you do this to me? How can you do this to your country? How can you do this to the German soldiers?

And if I didn’t have any pride and any honor and, and, uh, anyway, I said, uh, that I considered our engagement off anyway because of what I found out what the whole setup was. And he should have known the first day I acted strange, what the story was. And the time I got together with Bridget, I said, was the time I found out. And it’s a well known fact.

And I said, and if you and I was going to go out and go home, and he stood in front of the door and didn’t want to let me go out, and he lived on, on the ground floor kind of high off the little garden. And the window was wide open. And. Anyway, he wouldn’t let me out the door. So I made a dash for the window, and he grabbed me and he choked me.

And I jumped out of the window and ran, and I couldn’t believe I had really done it.

And I said, now the fats and the fire, he will do anything now to stir up trouble.

And I went straight up to Dick and told him about it and warned him, and warned that they’re going to call us down in school and this this is going to really come to a head.

So, uh. A short time after the next following week, they apparently had enough of their powwows, and they were going to call us before a council of the collective. And all this, when you figure that this professor and in the ones that were in this school were obviously party liners and could send us to Siberia at any moment, Home.

It was not a very pleasant aspect. And so we had we felt a little safer. Having told the Americans about it.

But we were about to create an incident, no doubt. And that was a definite no no. Was anybody Americans or Russians alike?

So we were feeling pretty poor. And, uh, anyway, they decided to give us about an hour lecture and said that they were hoping that this would straighten the situation out. And if we didn’t realize that we were far too Western oriented to, uh. Expect to stay in the school and get the education and that we were having political schooling to get these to avoid things like that.

And we should have known better. and our contact docs should be flawless. And we were giving a bad example to the German people and the German neighbors and to the Russians as well, and that they expected that this was automatically going to cease.

Well, we had. A density that weakened from the school in one of the nice little cafe restaurants in town. That was one of our joys that we had, and that was one of the privileges we got along with it. Uh, jazz, uh, classes.

The jazz was actually music history. And what we were doing is comparing Bach, Bach’s polyphonic Form compositions with the original jazz. In other words, the Bach more or less invented jazz and getting into the Negro jazz thing and the elements of composition and comparing different composers. And then we had, uh, a style in architecture and, uh, fashion as far as, uh, set design is concerned, that we understood some of those aspects in art history. And we had some, some heavier subjects now and many, many more, uh, lectures than we had in the first year.

The first year was mostly all these improvisations to. Get into acting. Now we were seriously studying. Studying. And, uh, it would have been a shame to break it off. It’s what they were trying to get across to us. And, uh. So we were kind of stirred up. In fact, everybody was. And of course, we got from some of the people in the collective, the silent treatment and stares or hostility.

And it was definitely not an easy time for us. And we had gotten ourselves in trouble, no doubt. So at that afternoon dance, we were told that we were going to have the end of the following month. A big dance, a real dance with the band. In a little summer chateau outside of town, which is called Schloss Tiefurt, where the local duchess had entertained Goethe and had written a lot of his little plays for her stage in the garden.

And it was a lovely place for people to go on Sundays and walk in the gardens there. And there was, of course, a café and a big, uh, room for functions in that little castle. And that’s where we were supposed to have our dance. So when we went up to the Americans and talked all this over much too much.

Much to my surprise, Brigida was not half as crushed as I was. In fact, she was downright defiant. She says this is the last straw. And she says, now, I talked to my mother and we are going to leave. And at that time, uh. Louie, her fiancee, had already left. I’m pretty sure he was gone already. He had shipped out to West Germany anyway, and was in another station, ready to go on the next leg home.

And she was probably itching to go anyway, but she was very defiant and not not the least bit. Subdued by this. And, uh, so she came up with a fantastic plan.

We were going to go and have the Americans drive us out to this dance in T4 and we were going to show them, no, no, no. They said they didn’t want to do that, but they were having a party that day. I forget what the occasion was. Maybe it was a holiday. It may have been things. Pentecost is always a big holiday in Germany.

It’s sort of like a spring festival. Because we celebrated all the holidays, we celebrated May day because it’s all about Hitler. And we celebrated the, uh, Red Revolution Day in October. Red October, we celebrated the seventh of November. That was an Army day. And, uh, all the church holidays, which the Russians, of course, don’t believe at all.

They always kept saying, uh, I still remember the arguments about religion. You give us a half an hour to talk with you, and we will smash your guard all to pieces. They used to say those activists, but they never made much headway with that.

I think it was probably one of the hardest things to fight. And it turns out now that two, that in Russia they never fought it in fifty years. Totally. So anyway, it was a holiday and the Americans said we were going to do a different we were going to go down there and they were going to pick us up so we could still go to whatever they were doing, having a party or a picnic or whatever.

They were going to pick us up from there. If you really wanted to go there too. And that’s what decided we decided on because it sounded like so much fun. Never thinking that. That was, of course, a total act of defiance and silliness. And, and we really, really got ourselves in trouble with that. Our glorious leader, Professor Valentine, who has recently died and become very famous as running the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and being the one who introduced the Stanislavski system in East Germany and traveled with his collective and made a very well known name for himself.

And had numerous articles at his death in every, newspaper and faithfully sent them all to me just recently. Our professor sat down and wrote a letter to the Americans in the villa out there. To Dave Krzyzewski, as a matter of fact. And the reaction was swift. He was. Furious, of course. And the reason for that was not only had we created an incident.

But the wording of the letter had called the villa with the Americans a bordello.

Now, this went very much in everybody’s craw, and they were all up in arms, and Dick was beside himself, and so was I, because I had a pretty good inclination of what would happen next. Professor Valentine called a meeting. Of our school. And it was a very terse announcement, and that he would have an announcement for us and that this would be his last warning. And we were all supposed to attend.

Now, this was more or less like being called into court. And we were upset about it. And the Americans were in a rage because this sentence, of course, accused all of them and all their girls, and it was the perfect opportunity to Let out all the anger that they had stored up for each other. And the feelings against the Russians were no longer held back, and the situation was definitely unpleasant. So the next day arrived, and I must confess, I went in there shivering and shaking.

I was very glad that I did not live with my old landlady anymore, but had moved closer into an apartment, closer to the house with the Americans, with the help of Dick, who knew somebody who had moved out.

And I was not under the. Eyes of Mrs. Neugebauer there. I could just see how she would have triumphed.

The old black market here. And. Apartment spy would have just been in her glory. So we went to this big. Court martial. I should call it. It was. It definitely had all the the aspects of a trial. And the Americans now pulled a very flamboyant gesture. And what they did was, just as we were starting, the door opened.

And eight of them strode into the room with their forty fives, belted on just like a sheriff’s posse, And took a seat in the last row to witness the whole proceedings. This, of course, was all that was needed to make an impression of. Solidarity that they were not going to let us down in our hour of need.

And just to show up was the greatest thing they could have done. And that kind of tone down the tone of the the whole scene, I am quite sure. Nevertheless. Maxim Valentine gave his speech on how he could not tolerate under the circumstances. And after all, we were sponsored by the Russians, and he could not tolerate this, uh, leaning toward the the West.

And deviating from the communist line in such a flaunting manner, and he would come to a decision which he would announce the next day. Not right to have the Americans and their guns in the back room, I guess. Nevertheless, we were very shaken, and we all went home very agitated that night after after classes and went right up to the Americans and said, discussing the whole matter.

And I already knew, as I said, I had a good idea what came became of it. And the gist of it was he wrote us a letter and said we would have to decide to either stay in the school. Or stay with Americans.

But in order to stay in this school, you would have to cease going up to the villa and having any kind of contact with the Americans, with the explanation that it was too Western and influence to tolerate for the school. And that was that.

The decision was in our lap, and that’s what I was afraid of. And Dick and I were very, very miserable because we had, of course. Been struck by this accusation with the bordello made to realize what was really going on, especially since by that time, of course, we were getting together. Ever since the incident with Willie and the breakup, and we had begun talking about a possible future for us and how we could arrange to a to do this. Going west and continuing my school in West Germany. Him signing up again and all these things.

But how how could we get, how could I leave my parents behind?

And my sister already being more or less engaged to the German boy and there were so many things to consider. And now I had made myself so suddenly and so quickly come to this conclusion where I had to definitely reach a decision. It was. Very upsetting. And, uh. I did not know what to do. I knew I would not give up acting, that I would not give up, I was sure. And we were considering. Should we just break off and try not to see each other for a while?

And we were miserable. However, a few days later, all these uh, uh, long decisions were interrupted by some dreadful news. Brigitte. Had been arrested and had disappeared.

Decisions — Brigitte’s Arrest and the Choice to Leave

Because the German housekeeper had received a phone call from Brigitte’s mother that she had not been home for two days, and that she was very concerned. And it had turned out that the last one to have seen her was one of the boys riding through town in the jeep, and Brigitte had waved to him, flagged him down, talked to him for a while and given him a note to Louis in West Germany and asked him.

Asked the soldier to see if they could take it to Louis at the West German station, where he was still staying with the next trip. So apparently somebody had observed them there and had called the member of the People’s Police. Nearby. And Big Brother probably had a hand in it, and they had probably been watching her anyway.

She disappeared. From then on. They had dragged her off somewhere to a jail to question her. And the Americans were all worked up about that. And, uh, Kruszewski said, uh, let me handle that. I’m not even going to the Germans. I’m going to go right to the Russians first and tell them of it, and tell them that it was a matter if there was anything wrong going on, it was a matter for us since the American was involved.

So here there was a new thing to worry about. And? Everyone was making guesses. What happened. Was this just a smokescreen?

And had they actually left by now for West Germany or. Was she in jail or was she indeed maybe taken somewhere else already? We were all hoping that at least she was still in jail in town. Several days went by and one evening when I came up there, there was big excitement. A girl had arrived at the door of the station and brought a letter.

And the letter told. Me For me to go to. Uh, Brigid’s mother’s house. And try to get some warm clothes and bring them. Have my mother bring them to the place where she was being held. So that was the first news we got from her. And, uh, Dick was very, uh, uh, uneasy about it because he said, I don’t like the idea of you going there.

They know you are up here, too. And he said, uh, to be very careful. I said, well, I’m only going and bring the note to her mother. I’m not going to do any further. And her mother can take it from there. And that’s what I did. And, uh. And. As it turned out. While I was still away, the same evening in the dark when I came back.

There was even more excitement going on and everybody said, Pegida is in the bathroom taking a bath. She just got here herself.

And I was glad I was so relieved because. To think that she was needing warmer clothes sounded terribly ominous to all of us. He said, well, here she is, heading for Siberia. And what apparently had happened, she had talked him into letting her go home and get this stuff. And she headed straight for the station and the safety of the Americans. Dumping the incident and all the troubles in their lap again.

It was really getting bad.

But when I saw her, I realized how desperate her situation was. He looked terrible. She had been beaten. She told of being in there with seventeen other girls in one cell, with one bucket and a drink of water a day and no food. And she was a mess. And the boys all laughed and said, you should have seen her when she first got here.

And they were all mad and very determined. And what we did is she was immediately put up stairs in the room of the German housekeeper. And none of the other girls ever saw her there and never knew she was there. And. To overnight. They got a big crate. And they nailed her in a big crate. And the next morning she got into the crate and on the truck, and the boys made a trip over the border to it, to West Germany, to the next station and took it out.

And, uh. According to everybody, we never saw her, didn’t know what happened to her, and, uh, I guess. Her mother had gotten the news later on once she got to her aunt in West Germany.

There was no real. Strict border control as later on between East and West Germany, except for the patrolling Russians and patrolling and checking people on the train and so forth. So this was still possible, and it was certainly possible with the Americans in their trucks who went back and forth all the time. And thank God it went well. Nobody got caught and she was gone.

And I now was left to decide my fate for myself. Should I stay in school?

And give up everything?

And Dick and the Americans again? It was a hard decision.

But when I thought about all the time I had put in and all the dreams that I had about the theater and the movies. And my future. And thinking that I never really wanted to get married right away. I never really wanted to settle down until much later in my life. I finally decided. I should try to break it off and see what happens.

I was still going to school. He did not say anything. They could not really check that course, because I now lived right across the street from the Americans, and it was very easy to just run over there after dark and nobody knew the difference.

And I was quite sure, since the landlady there was right across the street, she would not tell the Russians anything.

She was being discreet and tested. So I was still getting away with it.

But how long would I get away with it before I was caught?

And so I finally said, I’m going home for the weekend. And I’m going to have to think this over. And. Meanwhile, I had heard from his wife that she was going to visit her mother that weekend. In Apolda. And so I did not go home to my parents, but went to my aunt’s in Apolda and cried on his shoulder. What was I supposed to do?

And she said, why did you come to me? You knew very well what I would say. And that’s why you came to me. She said, I don’t think you should give up on all that you planned and all that you wanted to do in all our life because of what happened. She said you had your fun. You had your good times. Brigid is going away. She’s going to settle down. You don’t want to wait till Dick goes to and then find another boyfriend. That’s not what you had in mind, anyway. And Dick is going home. So why don’t you let it be?

And if it is meant to be, who knows what will happen in the future? This sounded like good advice to me.

And I said yes. Yes, yes. All the of our crying and crying and crying and being totally unconsolable. Until she finally went and sat down at the piano, her mother’s place next to my arms. That nice new apartment that her mother had. Now the bigger one had a piano in it, and my father and mother had visited her mother quite a few times because of the piano. And my mother had talked to his wife’s mother, and my father was playing the piano.

And I had many pictures from their visits getting together. So it was more or less like home still. And she was playing the piano and singing the next day and trying to snap me out of my gloomy mood. And while we were sitting there at the piano, the doorbell rang.

The next day. And who was out there but Dick with the jeep. He says, I come to take you back.

I was dumbfounded. I would have never expected him to do that. That was the last thing on my mind that he would have the determination to come and get me. I said, how did he even find me?

And what he had done is he had asked Ursula, the housekeeper, to go over to my room and look on my desk if I had the address somewhere. He knew I had gone to Apolda and not home, and they had found my aunt’s address, and that’s how he had found me. And he did not even have permission to go to that town. So he took all of that upon himself just to come and get me home.

I was so touched and I flew down the stairs and grabbed my bag and I was gone. And Jesus was left standing there just shaking her head. I still remember that day what was going to become of us. It wasn’t very long after that. That Dick found out. That he could not re-enlist and stay in West Germany like he wanted to and like we had planned. He had been too long there. Over there. He had been too long overseas, and he was supposed to be rotated. And if he wanted to go back later on, he might have. It might have been possible, but he could not stay.

At that time they told him. They did not want all this fraternization and marrying and engagement going on that were popping up all over the place, I’m sure. So we just. Figured that it might blow over and it might not be that way. And Dick started actively talking about there should be a future for us and we should maybe go home. And and I asked him, I said, are you homesick? He said, no, I never was homesick all the time I was away. I don’t know what homesickness is. He says, I really want to stay, but what can we do?

And I know when I go home I have a job. Of all the veterans had been promised that their jobs would be waiting for them. And he hadn’t. He told me that he hadn’t finished college, that they had given him a temporary. Uh, diploma of some kind because he enlisted, volunteered, and that he probably would go back to college for half a year or a year. When he got back home to finish it up. And that the job was his anyway.

Well, this was getting very serious talk, and I knew I was getting in deeper and thinking about it and thinking about marriage and children. And it was pulling me in a very different direction.

And I went home the following weekend and talked to my parents. And my father was very serious. And he said, we don’t like to see you go away.

But he said, how could we not let you go? Because you see what things are like here. And how many chances have you got here?

And if anyone can get away, they should be glad they have the chance. And I’m sure that’s how my mother felt. She must have been heartbroken.

But she felt how could she stand in my way with the way things were in East Germany?

And she should be glad that I had a chance to go. And they couldn’t go with me. They probably wouldn’t have even gone to West Germany with me and left us alone in East Germany. So it raised all kinds of questions and problems that I didn’t have before. And meanwhile. Kruszewski had also a girlfriend in Berlin. And they were going to get engaged.

He was going to get engaged to his German girlfriend. And he invited, invited Dick and me in the party that they were going to have the engagement party. And we packed the car full of presents and baskets and picnic baskets and coolers than boxes full of food. And we took that whole party to Berlin. And had I had my hair done, I had my first permanent for this occasion.

And it turned out terrible. Oh, my hair was curly and stood up like a circus horse. Oh, and afterwards the lady said, you should never, never again have a permanent in your life because your hair doesn’t need it and your hair certainly does not take it. And she was awful sorry. So I had to have one of those nets that were in vogue at that time, like they called it the Juliet net that goes over your hair and holds the hair. That’s what I was wearing.

And I was wearing my blue taffeta dress that I had for my first dance party back when I was fourteen or fifteen. I still had that.

And I was terrible self-conscious about that messed up hair and felt very awkward.

But Dick and I had a wonderful time. There’s no question about that. In fact, as we were dancing, he said. This could be our party. And let’s pretend that this is our engagement party, too.

And I was floored.

I had never seen him like this because he was always so quiet and it wouldn’t come out and speak.

But I think the incident with frigida had kind of got him to stop and think that, uh, our position there could not go on forever, and it was dangerous to keep it going on forever.

And I remember the first time we danced, we had these cute, cute combat boots with the two leather buckles that come up high with the two little leather buckets. He had them buckets he had them made in Germany with the rubber soles like the regular combat boots.

And I said, he said, well, I’m really clumsy, I’m not a very good dancer.

And I said, who could dance with those rubber soles in the combat boots?

And he said, those boots are all right. He said, they danced all the way from the Rhine to Berlin, and really impressed me when he said that. And so we were dancing, and I was thrilled that they invited Dick and me, and the food was out of this world. We ate all this. Dave had bought Krichevsky had bought Are like a Santa Claus bag full of toys.

There were at least ten pieces of expensive jewelry for Rita, and there were canned goods and food for her mother in chocolate and goodies and soap and all that stuff. Nuts, crackers, cheeses.

It was unbelievable. And in fact, when she unwrapped one piece of jewelry after another, I said to myself, this guy is not just being liaison officer. He’s got a good black market business going too. And Dick said to me, kind of disgusted, is he is he getting himself marrying himself a wife or is he buying one? He was getting kind of disgusted with the two because he was strictly, strictly against all the black marketeering. He had bought a tea set for his mother and some little, uh, all nice, beautiful China, and the tea set was hand-painted. They were kind of brown. Fallen leaves.

It was very, very good taste, I loved it. And then he had two little horses and two deer that were made out of frozen South China. They were they were exquisite in such good taste. And he said he had bought them to bring home for his relatives, but that’s all he had.

But he did have a whole suitcase full of all the rations he had gotten. Extra soap and extra candy. He never touched. He had a whole footlocker full of it, I remember. And one day, one day, I was embarrassed. Every time I came up, he would put a planter’s cashew nuts, which I’d never had tasted, or peanuts.

And I would demolish a whole can of those nuts. And so one day he finally came. Came down to the nitty gritty and said to me, are you hungry?

And I said, hungry.

Of course we’re all hungry. We’re always hungry.

And I said, why do you think I’m eating all your goodies every time I come here? Oh, he said, I never forget that. I couldn’t understand how anybody could be that way. He said, oh, he says, well, look at here. And he opened the footlocker up and he said, take whatever you want, eat whatever you want, take some home. I don’t need it. And. When he had at one time I was itching all the time.

And I was telling him about my seven year itch and how afraid I was it was going to come back from the camps.

And I said, it comes from having poor soap all the time and not enough hot water. He says, you want to take a bath? You want to have soap? Open the footlocker again. He says, take anything you want. So it was nice for me to. I could bring a lot of nice things home whenever, whenever I went to visit my folks. And that was a nice feature, too. I could be sort of being a little part provider there.

But this is all the graft and corruption that threatens a good girl, I suppose.

And I felt very guilty about it, but not too guilty because everybody was doing it. So.

And I met some American women there at that party. Because in Berlin, as I said, they were there were some new, uh. Soldiers and officers there now that had been really stationed there, garrisoned there for Occupation forces, and they had brought their families and they’d all sit together and talk. How horrible it was.

And they couldn’t have this. And how in the water pipes didn’t work yet. And the city was so destroyed now dismal it was. And and all the hardships they were going through and how terrible the war had been over here, that they had rationing, and they could only buy so many nylon stockings, and they couldn’t buy many times no meat in the stores except chicken, chicken, the terrible hardships they had gone through.

And we were just looking at each other, raising our eyebrows. And meanwhile they were buying everything with cigarettes, wholesale silver set, silverware, tea sets, precious paintings.

The Germans were selling everything for food and cigarettes. They paid with cigarettes and the Germans needed cigarettes. Thank God I didn’t. Ah, those were the wild times. And meantime, we felt like we had a common bond because we had been the the original guys that had been through the war.

We had seen a lot more and had a broader outlook than the others.

And I think it was sort of a a bond that held. Held us together because they were even after after the war, they used to write articles about the German war brides and the British war brides and they said that they were so little. Poor marriages. And they figured that it was the bond of the common experiences they had lived through.

And the inability of the American women to. To give them that feeling that that made the difference. So this time was always very precious to us. And it wasn’t very long afterwards. In fact, my birthday came up in June, and, uh. We decided to have a little engagement party of our own. And that came about because my parents all of a sudden had to move again.

They were constantly revamping the railroad and trying to. Bring the new government in. Making collectors out of the farm and redoing everything in their in their style. And part of it was that they had stolen so much stuff.

I think half the railroad cars were in Russia now, and even the tracks, they had taken up, the tracks everywhere, the double tracks, they were all gone, all over East Germany. They were gone. And they probably still are, because the Russians took all the second set of tracks and took the rails and shipped them to Russia.

They couldn’t use them. They had to build them different anyway, because the gauge on the Russian railroad is wider than in Germany. So they took the tracks and they started adding on and off into Siberia. Heaven knows where. And we had to struggle with what was left and the new trains they built where. All they looked like. So. Poor. In quality compared to the trains in West Germany and the ones we had before.

The only thing they finally got through to them is to tell them there were no more third class trains in West Germany, and so they didn’t have them in East Germany either. And the third class was wooden benches. They did not make them any more.

After the war.

But they had a new idea since they had so few trains. They were always overcrowded and they built now wagons that were double. With the second story on it, like the buses in in England. And there was quite a novelty, but it made it seem more cramped and more crowded too. It just that didn’t have the luxury that the old trains had and the quality. And everything that the Russians touched. Seemed to end up that way. Anything they made and produced always seemed shoddy by comparison. Because. Because there was no competition.

All the factories and businesses were government owned. That is what they called people’s owned. And the people’s paper mill.

There were one or two of them, and they made all the paper and there was no competition for it. So they made it as poorly as possible and nobody complained. And the string was poor and the yarn was poor, and the glassware was poor. And the China. And even the, the optical. Things that they did in the most famous optical works, they had made the most famous cameras. They did not have the touch with the rest of the world, so they missed out on a lot of improvement and I could never get over it.

The simplest toy, you couldn’t guarantee that the paint would not come off, or that it did not have a decent coat of lacquer on it. It has no had no appeal. They made nice things, but it was always poorer in quality than anything made in the West. This does not go and hold true for the food products I want to mention, because we all agreed that the sausage, the butter, the vegetables, a lot of it had more flavor.

And more home. Homestyle cooking Appear, then many of the things in the West who were influenced later on by the fast foods and the and the paying too much attention to the, to the looks rather than the taste that came along with the West. And you could go in the restaurant if you did get something to eat.

It was always good food, excellent food, and it was not too expensive. So it all had its good sides and its bad sides. In some ways the progress was too slow, and in some ways it was good to hold back on too much progress.

But this was anyway was very evident in the railroad cars, and it must have really been kind of a letdown when you saw how they. Treated these people’s trains.

It was all for the masses. And that’s what it was. That’s what the whole society was. And. It wasn’t that a lot more money would get you a lot more luxury. It just did not work that way. This system. Except for the party members who could get into the clubs and the fancy hotels and the stores they opened where you could buy Western goods for Western money.

But who had Western money?

So they muttered on and muttered through. And my father was transferred to another town closer to the border. Uh, In trying to get.

The railroad all revamped and running as it used to. And they did.

The railroad, after a while, was just as punctual and just ran just as smooth as it always had. And people now could, could get on trains without fighting over seats and laying in the downstairs tunnel, waiting for the trains to come in, and hundreds of people with all kinds of goods to transport jamming into those cars.

And I was very conscious now of the fact that. Possibly I would not be home much longer. And so we took. A few trips. And of course, the first trip we took to the town where my father and mother were going to go and start this new job.

But they couldn’t move yet because there was no place for them to move to. So my father was traveling back and forth, I think twice a week to start it, get it set up. And my mother and my sister and I took a few trips. We went to. Frankfurt and Berlin. To see our old home. And it was dismal because at the center of the old city was all they had torn down rows of old houses that were apparently endangered by by the artillery and the bombing and the shooting.

And they did not want to spend the money to build them up. So they were they had been torn down. And there was just like this open square with the historical old town hall and our church without a roof still demolished, boarded up with boards and weeds sprouting, and all the big main streets that had been crowded with people and shoppers and and, uh.

It was such a lively, lively city.

There was now nobody walking. And the weeds were growing in the in the streetcar tracks.

It was it was sad.

It was like. Coming back to Pompeii. That’s how I felt when we went to Berlin. We went in front of the old Parliament building, and there was just this huge, huge open space where they had cleared away the rubble of other things, and you could just see the weeds growing out of the places where there used to be the sidewalk and the curbstone, but you couldn’t picture any more how it was and how it looked, and the lovely parks and flower beds all gone.

It’s a totally, totally different atmosphere. All the the life and the glamour had gone out of it. We went out to to visit them in Frankfurt to visit our old maid, Erika, who now had her boys growing up to quite a respectable age. And they had, uh, and it was so nice being back in her house, in her back garden and, and pull the vegetables out of the ground and munch on carrots and peas and, and cherries off the tree, just like in the old days.

And the house was still the same, but they had another family had to move in upstairs. They had to share the house. And, uh, he was running a service station and car repair business, which was very thriving because now it turned out there were so many cars now. And, uh, he also had all the Russians for customers and the army. So he was doing a good business and they were well off. Until some day.

After that, a few years after that, after we had been there, uh, there must have been some Russian officer that had his eye on that pretty house. Anyway, they arrested him and questioned him, and he never came back. And it was really a sad story, and I do not know whether he got away and went west and and send word to her. Anyway, they were gone. We completely lost track of them and, uh, and they were gone.

There were other people too.

There was my. Godfather. Who? I found out as I got older, this old auntie that was living with us for a while.

The old, old lady. Uh, she had been married and had a son. And he was. He became my godfather.

He was a a writer and a journalist. In, uh, one of the towns in central Germany. And he had a wife and twin sons by the name of Volkmar and Wolfram. Beautiful old German names. And, uh. He must have done some writing that did not. Agree with the Yeah. Party line. And he was one of the people that disappeared. And nobody knows what ever happened to him. He didn’t. They picked him up, and he never came back.

There were many people, and people just said, well, you couldn’t ask questions because if you ask too many questions, you would get in trouble yourself. And it was just a thing that people took with a shrug. And it was just one more of the many things that had gone wrong in the world. When it came to our move, finally.

Uh. My parents decided they had to move, and they were moving into a small apartment up in the railroad offices. Which was practically the attic. And it was just, I think, three rooms. But. Since I really didn’t live at home anymore, it was plenty of room for them. And and they moved first.

And I don’t know, Aunt Uta. Was staying. With her family, her fiancé’s family in Dresden for a while and was thinking of going to to college there with him, Which I think she started. Yeah, she had started that. And, uh, so anyway, when I found out that my parents were going to be in Eisenhower, which was one of the stations for the Americans, that’s what gave me the idea of the engagement party.

I said, oh, how great. If they’re going to be in Eisenhower, we can go visit them every time you go there. And, uh, we’ll all have a party. So it was on my birthday or close around that, maybe a week before or after that. Uh, we all got together with my Aunt Erna from Apolda and, uh, my sister’s boyfriend, Dieter. And Gisela was there. And my cousin. Which was the cousin. By my mother’s family.

My mother’s brother. Little girl. They only had one girl, Eva. Her name was Eva too. As like the youngest one of. She. Her name was Eva. And the other one was Eve. Everybody called her Eve.

She was there. And Dick and I came with a jeep, and he bought me a ring.

And I was floored. A beautiful ring, the onyx with the two diamonds, little diamonds on each side.

And I was overwhelmed. I said, this is too big a gift. I said, we are not, uh, you know, you don’t give gifts like this until you’re married. He said no, everybody in in America gives a diamond ring for the engagement.

And I couldn’t find a diamond ring. So he he had this one made up. And designed it himself. And it was beautiful. And, uh, again, I wore my blue dress, the blue taffeta dress. And, uh, it was nice.

My mother had baked cake, and we had course coffee because, uh, Dick bought the coffee along, and, uh.

It was lovely, but it was a little sad because there again, we had a lovely time all there And the place where they lived was rather central. To all the relatives. And now in Eisenach they were further away. They had by that time moved into an apartment. We came there one time.

The first time we came, we were visiting them still in that apartment under the eaves. There in the railroad building. And I’ll never forget. Forget my entrance there.

We were coming through the field with a jeep. And there was a rabbit running around in the field. And the guy who was with Dick. Dick was driving. Shot the rabbit. And Dick says, here’s your Sunday dinner. And he handed me that dead rabbit. So when I entered the house down there and of course, they had also Russians in the in the railroad building, you always had the supervising Russians at your side. He came out and stopped us and stopped Dick and wanted to know what we were doing there. And here I’m standing there with this rabbit dripping blood on the floor.

It was like they caught us poaching.

And I explained that we were going to come visit my my parents and. So my mother made the rabbit for the next day because she was used to all kinds of game to be cooked from her forestry home.

But there was one reason why she actually did not like games. She I guess she had too much of it and seen too much of it, but she knew how to fix it, all right.

It was delicious. And.

We had a the rabbi at that time and then. They they took me. I guess they had to go on on his business with the car, and they took me over to the apartment that was already assigned to them, and agreed that they would be able to have it as soon as the tenant moved out.

And I was all excited.

It was really a nice house.

It was as nice as the one where my grandma had lived upstairs in that villa.

It was also the upstairs apartment and it was such a nice place and it was similar.

The layout of the apartment was a lot like the one, uh, of the house where Dick lived and the American guys lived.

It was a big hall when you first came in, and all the doors to the different rooms had these glass French doors like glass. So you couldn’t you could see the light through, but you couldn’t really see through them. And really, everything was very nice except a woman and her daughter lived in there and they were Russian, I think, or Polish.

And they were one of some of those people that had come out of concentration camp. Now they were not Jewish. They had been in the concentration camp. I know exactly why I could just picture it. They refused to work, I’m sure, because there were a lot of Germans in the camps, because a lot of them refused to work.

And you couldn’t do that. This is how the biggest thing that the way the camp started out for us, this is the first thing we heard about it. If you refused to work and take part in the war effort. And these people were still refusing to work. When it came to their apartment. I never in my life saw such a mess. And we were joking about it. Mrs. Lubetkin and her daughter, they were sitting around all day.

I think they went through every dish in the house before they finally decided to wash a few, a few. Everything in the kitchen was covered with dishes and everything in the small room where her daughter lived was covered with dishes and clothes, and it was unbelievable. And, uh.

My mother said, well, they said we could have the two front rooms and move our furniture in because we have this date with the furniture man, and we have to be out of the other place. And it’s all arranged with the railroad.

And I explained it to them. Oh yeah, yeah, she says, we know all about it. And my mother said, I’m sorry that I have to inconvenience you like this. She says, it makes it such a mess for you. Or she made some sort of remark whether she could use some help with packing, or because it didn’t look like they were in any hurry to do anything, because they could have started washing some dishes and packed them.

And, uh, and they both said, uh, no, it wasn’t any inconvenience because they hadn’t really used the front rooms much anyway. And apparently they lived that way all the time. And my mother says, oh my God, when we came out, she says, we’ll never get them out of there. She says, we might as well give up and look for another place and explain it to the people at the housing administration.

They will never get them out of there. So. We went in the next day. We went over and scrubbed the two front rooms inside out, did the windows, all the windows. We could even some of the windows in the kitchen, I think, and cleaned the hallway, cleaned the stairs. You’re supposed to clean your part of the stairs when you live in a place like that and got it all cleaned, and then my mother says I’m coming back the middle of the week whenever the furniture arrives.

We put the furniture in the front rooms. Tombs.

And I said, maybe you can push the bed in the, in the there was a like a living room. And then there was another room, like a dining room or what you used to call a salon.

There was an extra room and then there was a balcony, very pretty sunny balcony off that room with the big French door was really nice. And funnily enough, they also had a piano sitting in there. I said, the piano is already here and my mother said, yeah, who knows how long that’s going to be here this time?

And I said, if you push it, you put your two beds in that room, you can just move in and just pile, pile the lockers and pile all that in one corner. And she said, that’s what we’re going to do. I’m not going to keep going back and forth, and that’s the only way we’re going to get them out to be here. And she says, and I’ll just ask her if I can use the kitchen once a day and cook a meal. And that’s all we really need. And she says, maybe I can give her a little hand and wash a few dishes. Oh.

And I thought, this will never work out.

And I was so disappointed. But. As I said, within a couple of weeks or I think it was about five or six weeks, it took a while. They did finally move out and got out, and my mother tried to fix it up, and there was a small bedroom there that the daughter had. And that’s where I got a little small bedroom.

And whoever me and whoever was there In the middle room from the hall was a bedroom, and then to the left, where the two other rooms and the balcony was a really nice place. And in the kitchen they had put my. Uh, my bench and table. That I had wanted for my second room in mining. They had, uh, the carpenter built me a corner bench and a table for my old, old German room, and that came in now very handy.

That looked really, really nice in the kitchen there and just fit in perfect in that corner with the lamp over it. So it was very cozy and my mother was very happy again. And Eisenach is a nice little town.

Of course, it has the castle there, uh, Which is famous for Saint Elizabeth’s and is famous for Martin Luther, having been up in that room in the tower in that castle, when the Pope had excommunicated him and was hunting him. They hid him up there and pretended that he was one of the young knights. And that’s where he was, up in the tower translating the Bible into German.

So of course, we went there many a summer Sunday up to the castle. And there on that little balcony where we took that picture of my engagement party. And it was a happy time now, because we could I could visit, uh. A lot of times now with Dick and they got to know.

My mother really liked Dick because he was nice and quiet. She says she liked him.

And I said, well, he’s quiet, he’s shy. And my father said, well, I don’t know, maybe he’s just kind of stuck up because they won the war.

And I said, no. That’s that’s not the way he is. He’s just not.

The kind of guy that likes big parties.

And I said he’ll probably like it better once he gets to know you. And we’re just among ourselves. And he used to call my sister the little werewolf. Talking about the guerrilla fighters.

But they they had long gone by then. Those days were over.

There was nobody fighting anymore. In fact, it was funny.

One day the jeep wouldn’t start and the neighbors must have got a big kick out of it.

There was my father and my mother and me pushing the jeep, trying to get it started. And everybody. This was all supposed to be so hush hush. And there we were in the street pushing a Jeep. And one morning, Sunday morning, my father was playing his hymn on the piano, and Dick was listening, and he had a couple of requests. And then my father says, why don’t we all go to church?

And we all went to that old church, the old, uh, Romanesque church they have there that was built in nine hundred, I think, ancient, ancient church. Still remember that we all went to church together. And my father approved of that.

Of course, that was good. They figured at least if I was going far away, I wasn’t going to be a heathen. And so the time went by.

And I knew the time was coming where Dick had to leave and go. Back home.

And I would be alone.

And I didn’t know what was going to happen. And the next thing that happened was that they came down from the station one day and said to me. You know, they just posted a big note on the board. That anybody who had been in the Nazi party. Could not go. And go into into America, but be an immigrant and. Be naturalized citizen later on. This was. Serious sad news. Because I said, well, I never really joined the Nazi Party. Remembering the day when I came there. To the school where they had the meeting.

Well, I now remembered coming to that school. That day and renewing my vows for the Nazi Party and finding out that they did not want me because of my attitude and how grateful I was, the way things had turned out without my trying hard. Although I said to Dick, I have been a leader for a. Shaft, which is kind of like a squad. And. Then I had three squads at the time when we were making all those marches.

I remember I had advanced to that, but I never made a group leader. So I was never. An outstanding member of the party. And as I said, they then transferred me anyway to this other connected group of artists and. Creative flakes, so to speak, which was called the. Faith and beauty. Workshop.

And I hadn’t done anything in that either, other than stayed home and played with my girlfriend, uh, in our theater club.

And I had put on. A play. Of one time with two boys from the Hitler Youth for some kind of a holiday.

It was a. Small. Good play. Done in hoopskirts and in high hairdos. And. And.

I remember Helmut. In his blue velvet suit with a lace jabot in front of his face. Oh, it was so pretty. And he was so. Charming at that time. And there was another guy in it that I had to kiss and give a long kiss.

And I had startled the entire school with this performance. Everybody came because they all knew about the kiss. And we said, well, let’s give them a real treat.

I remember. And he was kind of a dead guy. Was kind of a nerdy guy anyway. And everybody bet probably that I couldn’t manage to kiss him.

But he was a good actor. And with me in this play was my girlfriend, the redheaded girlfriend, Pehla. Pehla played a role at that time in my life because she had graduated to the art school, and she was at that time. Going through auditions with different schools. And, uh, when Dick and I were talking about going to America, he said, you’re going to have to go to Berlin, to the consulate to apply for your papers.

And, how are you going to do that? Because it’s still not, uh. Not perfectly free to leave your job and explain your absence job wise with your your ration tickets. Unless you have a good reason to go to Berlin.

Well, I said, I hope it does not take that long that I can go just for a day trip. And he said, in any case. Is there any way you can find an excuse?

And I remembered Pilar and her trip to that art school, and that’s how it happened. And I, I went to that art school with her. Once again.

And I met her boyfriend and her future husband. So this is how it happened that I, uh, went to visit her again and took up connections with her. And Dick and I were hoping for the best. Seeing that I had been in the labor service, which is also connected with the Nazi Party.

We were wearing a swastika with years of grain around it for our symbol.

But there I had a very, uh, definitely Career without any glory behind me because I was not transferred to the. Flak, the anti-aircraft and the spotlights.

I was hoping that they could prove that they had all kinds of, uh oh and intelligence guys working for the army and and screening people, which Dick knew and which I had heard rumors about it, too. And they were compiling lists, and I am sure they knew everybody’s background by then.

And I said, well, they can’t get me on on my record in the, in the labor service because, uh, I had nothing but black marks there. So we were trying to get new Hope. And then one day, Dick again came with the directive from Eisenhower that nobody that had been in any connection. Associated with the Nazi Party, would be able to emigrate for twenty five years. This really was the end of it. We really thought this this was the final straw that day.

We were really devastated. We broke down. Even Dick, he talked to me for a while and he said, my goodness. He said, if we want to wait for each other, he said, we’ll be forty five years old. We will be old people before we see each other again and before we can have any kind of future plans. They won’t let leave me here and they won’t let you go. Whatever shall we do? When he walked away from me and lay down on his bed.

And I was crying.

I was sitting on the sofa crying. I said, I don’t know anymore. And now all of a sudden, the big decision that I had to make, I had made and had to make was all decided for me.

There was nothing further I could do. We could do.

And I walked over to Dick, and I saw that he had been crying because the pockets on his uniforms were all wet, where the tears had been falling down on his uniform, and he still had tears in on his eyes lying on the bed, and I hadn’t even noticed it because he had been standing sort of behind me. And so I just threw myself at his neck and we both cried and cried.

It was the saddest day of our life. Here we were. He was. Twenty two.

And I was twenty one. Going on twenty two.

He was always a year ahead of a half, a year ahead of me, because he was born in December and I was born in June. So sometimes it seemed like we were the same age. And then sometimes he was half a year ahead. And we didn’t ask for this, and this had happened to us, and it was such a tragedy.

It was just like being in the war and losing somebody. And the next two days, three days, we. We just went around in a daze.

And I called my mother and dad, and I told them about it, and I’m sure they were kind of relieved in a way. As sad as they were. And sorry for me.

And I said, I’m coming home. I’ll be home as soon as Dick leaves. I’ll be home. I’m not going to stay here, and I don’t want to get back to the school after the way they treated me. I’ll be coming home and and, uh, maybe go back to the theater and mining. And, uh. Go from there. And of course, this was not as a nice arrangement as before because now my parents went in that town anymore, which was theater. But.

It was just like we were frantically looking for ways out. And how we could go on from there.

It was the end of our beautiful summer, I guess. And something else happened. It just, uh, seemed like everything went sour. I stayed in the house and made a few more trips. And something. Real. Disgusting. Happened. Something real ugly that never had happened in that place. And that was that, uh, a couple of officers came down from Berlin and I found out that through Rita later, later on, through Rita and the engagement party and the talk in the in the group, apparently, and putting out all these feelings about being transferred there or staying there, that they had information that what we planned to do getting married and that I was getting seriously involved.

And. Anyway, I don’t know what how this all came about, because it just happened to me the way I saw it, completely out of the blue. Dick was on the on the road and I was there alone waiting for him.

He was supposed to come in at eight or so.

And I was there already. It and was the day that the Russians had also arrived in the morning and the liquor ration was locked up in his closet. It wasn’t that locked up, but it was locked up in his store.

And I had the key to the door for the door in his room. And because he did not want any of the boys to get Ahold of his liquor, he said, don’t give them out any of it. Even if they ask you confidentially, just say you don’t know where the closet is or bleach cabinets are locked. Whatever. This guy arrived.

He was a captain or major, and there were two other men with him. Accompanying him, and he was obviously drunk when he got there. And and we were sitting in the, in the, in the day room.

There were about three or four guys there with me.

The Eddie that I didn’t like was one of them, and the other three were all rebels. They were all from the new group. And this writer was there with the holes in his pants. And they were joking because they were all joking, because he walked this, this, uh, high mucky muck walked in there and we had a big set of antlers hanging between the dining room and the living room.

There was like a big arch, and there was a big antler hanging there, and there were two bras hanging off the antlers horns. And he laughed and he said, well, this goes hand in hand. What I heard about this place, it seems to be like a country place.

There was two other girls coming in at that time, too, and one of the guys introduced all of us, and. Uh, I won’t mention the name of this office. I don’t know. I don’t want to get sued. In my late. Stage of what you say, the late Barbara. I don’t want to get sued back in the grave.

Of course. This guy. Any grief? But anyway, he was drunk, and he now started whispering with the other fellas. He said, where’s your liquor?

And he said, well, we’re all out because it’s ration day today and we can’t get at it until father gets here. Everybody called him party. Uh. So he starts talking to me and getting quite chummy.

And I figured, what am I going to do? Go upstairs. And walk in and lock the door behind me. That would be really rather obvious and maybe hurt his feelings. And and how am I going to get away? But if I if he comes with me, I’m unlocking that door. Which means that will mean unlocking the liquor as well.

Because the cabinet was not locked, just the door to Dick’s room. So I kept sitting there and he is giving me all this talk he heard about me getting engaged and what did I want to do was that little lousy little Sarge, he said, talking about Dick. And he could give me so much more and I should come to Berlin with him, and he would set me up in my own apartment, and I would do everything I wanted, everything I needed.

And he’s kissing my hand and carrying on. And the other guys got embarrassed and walked out, but Ryder was sitting on a chair by the desk.

There was a test by one of the windows, and he was sitting on the chair backwards like a cowboy, you know, with the chair back between his legs and just sitting there, walking back and forth, taking it all in. And his face was getting madder and madder and madder.

And I was hoping and praying that he wouldn’t leave me alone with this guy. And he didn’t. He never left my side. God bless him. And at one point he got up and he said, now I had enough of this talk. You know that she is engaged to Dick. And if you say any more about Farley, I’m going to hit you square in the kisser, whether you’re a big shot or not.

And then we had another brawl on our hands, and the other guy had apparently been out in the dining room talking quietly and listened to it all, and they came in and they talked to him and said, come over here, come over there, and I gotta talk to you. And they dragged him kind of away. And at that point I could hear outside the commotion, Dick head, thank God, come back.

I heard all the doors slamming and people walking through the hall and, uh. Oh, by that time he had dragged the other two guys up the stairs and he says, I know darn well where the liquor is. It’s up in father’s room, I’m sure. And they were going up the stairs and I was coming after him.

He was going to smash the door. And this door were glass doors like glass you couldn’t really see through.

And I didn’t want the damn door broken. And another rock was being made. So we were all sort of on the stairs. And apparently somebody had already run out to the Jeep. One of the boys and had told Dick and Kowchevski was with Dick on the way back, had told them what happened, and they came in. They were white. They were so mad they were white in the face. What a scene.

And I was shaking.

I was so scared I did not know what to do. That was the first time I ever got in one of those situations and and it never had happened. Nothing like that had ever happened in that house. And that’s what they both lit into him and said, you son of a B. And we never had anything like this going on here. If that’s what you’re looking for, you go back to Billy and oh my God.

And I remember that time he had hurt his arm. He hit his arm in his house and in a in a cast plaster cast. And he must have had they must have had a slight jeep accident at one time, maybe. And he said, if it wasn’t for that arm of mine, he says, I would beat you stuffing out of you, because he says, you don’t outrank me.

He says, you outranking Farley, but you’re not outranking me and I’ll beat the stuffing out. So they subdued him. Put him in bed. Up at the station, out of the house. And it was a very ugly scene. And somehow or another, it just did something to me. It just spoiled the whole impression of the place.

The whole summertime romance was short.

And I thought, well, that is the last straw. There’s just no sense. Of living this life. You’ve got to get out. We got to get either married or we got to get split up. Because this. This is not anything that can go on. And. Dick just sat there smiling.

And I said, what are you smiling about? What are you grinning about?

And he says, we got good news. He said, Eisenhower just released a new law, which they call the sweetheart law, and by which you can. Anybody who is engaged, anybody who is promised you can take your bride to America and get married within three months on a visitor’s visa.

The ones that don’t get married have to go back.

The ones that get married can stay and have two years.

After two years, have the chance to become naturalized citizens. They don’t have to wait five years. Just two years. And after that, he said, we could probably apply and try to get back to Germany.

Well, that changed the whole picture again after all that night of fright and and hassle. I couldn’t believe it. Everything was changed again. So naturally, I stayed. I didn’t go back to my room. I just stayed there and laid awake all night, making all kinds of plans for the future.

And I called my parents on the phone and told them we were so excited. And we printed engagement notices to. Send them out to everybody. And it’s funny, I should have that. I mentioned from from that place. This is where I met Herman again, because I sent him a note to his parents because I had no idea. I still did not know what happened to him. Uh, because I had really been more or less formally engaged to him. Uh, but, you know, my father had said, well, we won’t make it. Definite till after the war.

But I had written to him all through the war, and until I got that note that he planned to stay and kill himself, more or less, he stayed. He didn’t come back from Stalingrad. And in a way, I thought he was dead.

But I thought I lied to the parents.

Well, from him, I got nothing back but a short postcard. Penny postcard blank. And on it, it just said one thing. It said the rats are leaving the sinking ship. Helmut. That was his opinion of me. And that was one of my congratulations for my engagement. And but now I knew that he was alive.

And I sent the car to my parents, and I was all excited. And they said they had received a note from them, from him to, uh, that he had come back. What happened was he lost an arm and was shipped back and recovered and had married a widow with a bunch of kids. I forget how many. It seemed like four or five or more. A widow on a farm. And he was going to help her raise the children and run the farm with her sons or whatever, and do that for the father. Fathom it.

Well, Kyle. That was good. That was good news and bad news.

But that postcard I will never forget for the rest of my life. So that are leaving the sinking ship. And on that note, we said goodbye. And it was the end of a lovely summer. And he cried, and I cried and cried, and we didn’t know what was going to happen. He said he would send all the necessary papers to Berlin, and that’s where it has to go. And that was. In August, I think.

It was toward the end of the summer. Forty seven.

It was gone.

And I went back to Eisenhower. And just stayed home. I don’t think I got another job. I can’t remember doing a job there. For the life of me, if I did. I can’t remember it.

I remember doing other things. Like going with the little wagon with my sister to stand in line for coal and stand in line for potatoes, and stand in line for whatever herring or head of cabbage. They were real, real hungry. Green days. We used to go to the fields again and pick up grain.

We were visiting in in in the spa again. And we were walking down by the sea line installation. They had, they had restored it and they had children there again in homes to to walk around and breathe the air. I guess it was for asthma. And. We played on the old swings there and it was so nice and I was feeling now very keenly the tugs of homesickness already.

We went across the bridge and I told aunt, I remember how we used to walk here with my mother in in looking up to the little vineyard house, and there was a little milk. Wagon, a little milk store on the end of the bridge, and they used to sell milk in bottles, and it was chocolate milk, milk and strawberry milk and little glass bottles.

They had like a little round cap with a hole where you could put a straw in it, just like we had in school. And in those days when my mother and we were little, the straw was really a straw, trough a piece of straw from the fields. You know, it was just washed and bleached and they had them in a big container. And that’s what she grabbed, a little straw. Oh, but that milk was so good. That pink milk.

My mother brought us. And we went up to Idaho and ate bread. Fat bread with a big slice of bread with fat and little, uh.

The little. Crumbs of bacon from the fat bank were still would still be in the fat. All nice and crunchy. A little bit salt on it. Oh.

Last Days in Germany — Goodbyes and the Long Wait

Sit on the steps, going up in the little hayloft above the smithy and eat cheese, bread, corpse finger cheese that was orange on the outside with a little white bone like heart in it. All were good cheese and we would sit and watch the cows come home after a long, hot day in the upper meadows, and hear the bells ringing from the cows neck and think, how long is this beautiful life going to last? When will time change all this?

And I never suspected that some day I would be back there with my children. And times hadn’t changed that much then. Because we were praying for that.

I think that it would never change.

It was so lovely. And we went to the castles. We went to the Wartburg. We went to the Rudelsburg and set up there.

There were no tourists there. Very seldom. Maybe on Sunday afternoon, the locals. And they had a little. Restaurant there that served coffee and cake and beer and a few things, but that was always closed during the week.

It was only open weekends. So it was always quiet and deserted up there on a weekday, and you could hear the wind going through the empty window holes and sit in one of those niches. Niches with little columns, and look out over the whole valley and over to the other castle with the two towers. And think you were back in thirteen hundred. Twelve hundred. Strange. And that hadn’t changed.

There were no more people living there.

But the castle still stood there. That’s the feeling I miss.

The feeling of continuance. That you never get around here very much unless you live in New England. And of course, two hundred years ago is not a very long time in history, but there is a bit of that feeling anyway.

But if you live down south and out west. You don’t know. That kind of feeling.

I think it gives people security.

I think there’s a lot, a lot of the security of today stems from the fact that.

There was no past giving you strength because changes are so swift. People are moving. And always moving, and I think. You always a little homesick. for the place you leave behind. When that happens. And all these things were going through my head on these trips. They were beautiful trips, but they were always mixed with a little sadness because I was sure that I was going to leave. I never doubted that Dick would write and that the papers would come through. And they did.

Of course, when I got letters from him all the time and he wrote how. Early. They had snow that year. How it was the worst snow that they ever had in many, many years past. And it was piling higher. And he had to shovel it out of the driveway to clean the path for his car. Which was new to me because we never had to worry about a car when we had snow.

It just meant the landlord had to push some of the snow out of the sidewalk, and that was the end of it. And it just meant getting bundled up warm. And when I went to the train, you had to wrap yourself very warm. And trudge up to the station freezing. And we went on our little trips. And we made a visit with Aunt UTA’s.

Future in-laws went to visit them in Dresden, which was terribly destroyed also. but all cleaned out of rubble more or less already to a great extent. They put a lot of effort into it right away, and I remember going to a dance hall for an afternoon and evening and all of us dancing.

I was dancing with Tito, and my mother with his father, and my father with his mother, and we had a lot of fun. And then I said to myself, how foolish is this that I should leave? Because now we are getting to be a bigger family and all getting along so well.

My father and I next day went to the Indian Museum, which is outside of Dresden, in the suburb where this man wrote all these Indian stories about America’s West and the cowboys and the Indians.

And I had read all of his thirty three or how many books he wrote. And. It turned out he had never been in America, but he had studied a lot, and he had two friends who had been. And he wrote all these children’s boys books. I should say, about the Indians that were so exciting to us and that we had. Always kept for inspiration to our plays and our games when we were outdoors.

And I thought, will I ever really get there? I will actually have more than he had because he only wrote about it and I will really see it. And one of the first books I had read was The Leatherstocking Tale, because my father says you like to read about Indians. And that was the day he took me to his big new bookcase, and he said, I think you’re old enough now. Everything that is in here, you may read, whatever you want. Pull it out and read it. And there’s nothing in there that you can’t read or shouldn’t read.

And I read. About the settlers on the springs of the Susquehanna.

And I read about the Painted Desert and the Mohawks. And the rivers in Canada. And the Rocky Mountains. And it was so exciting to think that I should see all these things.

I had read just about everything in that bookcase.

I was reading a lot of times at night with the flashlight under the blanket. And one of the things I came across in that bookcase of my dad’s was magazines from a nudist, uh. Club association that he had belonged to when he was a student. He firmly believed in health for the body and and that it was good for you. And he was he was into that.

He was into a lot of hiking and walking.

There was another club and apparently he did not mind me reading about that.

And I gained a lot of insight because I read a lot of books that were above my age too.

But whatever. Struck my fancy, I could read.

And I had told Dick about all those Indian stories and said, do you think I’ll ever go there? Do you think we’ll actually go and see that? Or would you take me on vacation to see these places?

And he said, of course you can see everything. And he said, there’s no better place to come to in America than Boston, because people are interested in art and people are interested in history. And you can follow the history. Right there is where it all started, and I’ll show you the places where the Indians lived and where the pilgrims lived. And we talked about that. That was one of the last things. We spoke about what we would do when I get there, and he was telling me about getting me a banana split, and he described it all to me.

And I said, you’ve been fooling me because I said, you never said you were homesick, but you were, because I can tell by the way you’re telling me all these things. Now.

There was another thing that happened. Just before I left.

I was upstairs in the attic in the house, while two more or three more of the guys were packing also. They were leaving together with Dick. And.

I was just hanging around waiting for Dick to get back off duty.

We were trying to make the most of the last days.

I was eating all my meals there then. And, uh, I don’t think he ever ate. And we were joking around because the boys were in an elated mood, you know. They were packing to go home and kidding each other and running up and down the stairs and doing a lot of hollering. And they were a little nostalgic, too, about leaving because they had it’s like always in a group like this.

They were homesick and homesick, and you hope to get out of there. And then when the day comes, you realize you had a lot of good times, too. And they were in high spirits. And this little fat guy was sitting on the bed cleaning his pistol.

He was forty five, and he was fooling with it and fooling with it. And the other guy had his pistol laying on the table. And.

He was calling one of them. A cowboy to tease him. Anyway, they grabbed the guns and ran around and I was standing there talking and laughing too. And he took the gun. One of the guns and shouted at me. And of course, nothing happened because. We figured the gun was empty, and I ran around and pretended that I was hit and fell over on the bed and laughing. And he then turned around.

He was under the eaves with a skylight, and pointed the gun out of the skylight, and pulled the trigger again, and a shot rang out. And Austria was just frozen.

It was a terrible moment, a terrible, terrible moment.

When we all realized that he could have shot me a second before that because that gun was loaded.

It was not the same gun he had picked up.

The other one, I don’t know. I never knew what exactly happened, and he didn’t either. I don’t think whether somebody had clowned around the same way and played Russian roulette. Anyway, the shot rang out clear as a bell and we just about died, all three of us at that moment. And he said, of course, Jesus Christ, what else would anybody else say, and so that the other two and nothing ever was mentioned about it.

But I had an idea that Dick heard about it. Because Dick told me he wanted me to leave right then and there. He says, I don’t want you to ever take a chance like that again. I don’t know how he found out. I didn’t tell him because I said even to the other boys, I said, I’m not going to tell anybody about this, because I could see that this guy could have been court martialed and delayed for a year before he could go home over this stupid Clowning around an accident.

But I suppose they figured they wouldn’t either say anything.

But anyway, Dick said after that he wanted me to go, and that was the crowning end to it. In another time, when it was another time for me. To appreciate the fact that I had nine lives and a shot had just missed me again.

And I took it as a warning.

And I didn’t put any arguments. When Dick says, I think we should say goodbye and you should go. And he said, I don’t want you to see me off anyway. I couldn’t stand it. And that was the end of the cowboy game.

But I remember he said he was going to take me to see real cowboys and Indians.

And I did.

And I didn’t have any doubt that I would. That’s what I find very strange to think now. I really had no doubt at all.

It was just a long time before it happened. And it was only about seven months in all.

But it seemed like an awful, awful long time when you’re young.

And I was home. Scrubbing and helping my mother in the kitchen. And being very domestic. And my mother says, I can see you’re getting ready to be married because you’re getting so domestic, she couldn’t do anything good enough for me. And. Right. And. And then I got a kick out of it anyway, to make her rest and take it easy.

And I took care of it. And when she was there, she always had the real heavy duty jobs, like chopping wood and bringing up coal. She always was stronger than me. And, uh, I we did so many things.

We were we were laughing when we went with our little wagon and get cold or stood in line for potatoes. How we had carried the clothes basket with the horse apples to our garden and mine. So we had strawberries, but we didn’t have a garden there, although there was a lovely piece of land around that villa that she did have fruit trees downstairs.

We could have had a very useful vegetable garden in that backyard, but she wasn’t inclined to to. Having that kind of a green thumb, I guess. Even though these were very hungry days, very hungry days after the war. It seemed like it was getting for a while worse than before, because the organization of the the whole structure of the market and the selling and the shipping was in such an uproar that some towns just did better than others.

But we were doing very poorly. And also we had no connections there. No friends, no relatives, no, uh, people in town that could, uh, give you a break or had a garden on the outskirts of town or anything like that. So I remember peeling potatoes and putting the peels on the cookie sheet.

After they were cooked and drying them and putting them through the coffee, the old fashioned coffee milk, grinding them up and making soup out of that.

And I remember making what everybody loved instead of a roast. We used to have this thing called a napkin dumpling. You used to take if you had potatoes. Heaven help us. You were lucky to have potatoes, but if you had them to to shred them up, grade them and mix them up with a little bit of flour and putting that whole thing in a napkin and hanging it in the pot and a napkin would shape this dumpling into a huge form.

And then if you had some bouillon or some Flavoring left in your cupboards. Some spicing, uh, sauce or something. You pour that on it, or you make a white gravy out of a little flour and, uh, some little butter or fat. You had whatever. You had onions. If you had an onion, you made a sauce and you’d serve that thing on a platter.

And it was just like. And slice it like a roast, but it was just a huge potato dumpling. And this was the big feast, and everybody was making it like crazy when company came.

It was a big fan for a while because that’s all anybody had. Potatoes. And you were lucky if you had them all for you. And it came back down to turnips again some green beans in the market. Sometimes cabbage, mostly cabbage heads. You had to stand in line for them. Or cauliflower? They were heavens to Betsy.

Close enough to my hometown where they grew vegetables in fields. Huge fields was the town of cauliflower and beans. Lima beans. Are. I grew up in the town with Lima beans and never saw Lima beans until I saw it served by the Americans, because somewhere it said that this was the original puffed bean. They used to call it people from Africa.

But I guess that was the big beans that we call Limas. I never had one because my parents may or may not have liked them, and later on you could not get them. I never saw a cauliflower either. And the cauliflower was growing all around, uh, where we used to live.

And I was about three years old, but I didn’t see any when I was old enough to look what’s in the kitchen when I was starting to be hungry in the war.

There were no more cauliflower. I don’t know who got them all.

But we didn’t get them. It’s strange In times like that. Come. We used to go out in the country and steal turnips out of the field and apples off the tree and plums off the trees, down, down by the, uh, country roads they used to have usually fruit trees on trees on both sides that belonged to some farmer, but they couldn’t watch them all the time. So you would come back and try to fabricate a little apple cake or little plum cake. And we just stick them in our pocket. How much? It meant a handful of plums. And one time I was in Berlin.

I remembered the. Cuba that we had in mining in our garden, and how bad my mother felt. She never had any sugar. So I went and bought on the black market. Saccharin cost twenty eight marks for a little tiny bottle. And then I didn’t have enough money. To buy my ticket home. How embarrassing. I sold my little gold bracelet. Right there on the black market, on the railroad station so I could go back. Get back home. Yes, those were the days, but they were very lean days.

I remember after the war, my mother got thinner and thinner.

And I thought, if I go and leave now, go to America, I’ll be able to send packages home and they’ll all be so much better off. And so Christmas came, winter came and Christmas came.

And I had a bad cold.

And I was still sleeping on the sofa. Whenever my sister was home she got the fancy room.

And I slept on the sofa when she was back in Dresden again. Then I got back in the other room.

But I remember laying there on the sofa, and the Christmas tree was right at the foot end of the sofa.

We had a red and silver tree.

We had all new balls because we couldn’t save any of those things, of course. They were just plain silver ones and plain red ones, and some little bead things that were white and red made in Czechoslovakia that my mother bought like little stars. And tinsel. It’s all silver and red. And that was the last Christmas tree I saw at home. And every day when I looked at it, I said to myself, this is the last Christmas tree I did not even know whether they had Christmas trees in America.

I had never asked anybody. Maybe I would never see another one again. It’s a terrible thought.

And I used a lot of time to stay up at night late and wait till twelve o’clock, and then put on the American Forces Network and listen to the Star-Spangled banner, and think of Dick and listen to some jazz music. And then I was longing for America, and that meant I had already turned into a gypsy. I did not know which way to turn because I would be homesick.

Either way. It meant I could not stay in any one place for long. If I stayed in one place, I began getting homesick for the other one. What a terrible fate. I believe. This whole country. Especially out west and here too, by the pilgrims, was founded on homesickness. All these mothers. All these women. Carried this burden of homesickness around with them. Sometimes it was the men who were more homesick, sixty two. I’ve seen it. Whoever was the most practical. Was less homesick.

But mostly the women. I imagine they must have felt awful being out there in the prairie and thinking back of if they had grown up in Boston. Of their times here. And if they’d come from.

Of course, even more so. Maybe if you’d come from Russia or from one of those steps out of Poland. This is flat, flat field. So even further away you could find a similarity.

Of course, this was the old days where people did not travel and I figured I would be altogether different. And better off because nowadays you could travel and I was sure I would be able to travel back home. And visit. And have them come visit me. It would be adventurous and fun.

But I noticed that. In general, I appreciated the little things more every day, knowing that the days were Renumbered and even cleaning the house for my mother was a great fun. And great satisfaction to me. And it was nice to feel that this was home and make it our home that way.

I had gone home on weekends anyway, and usually done some of the chores when I was there, and especially the the hallway in Germany in apartment houses always was maintained by the women in the apartments, and each had their section of the staircase, and then each had their turn and cleaning the cellar once a month or so.

So when? When after I knew that schedule I would be there to to do the the hallway on the weekends or I would be there in time to do the cellar downstairs. Everybody had their little cubicle in the cellar downstairs to store things and preserves and coal or whatever. So. That’s what I usually did.

And I loved the bathroom.

The bathroom had the kind of sandstone tile that it was not really, really shiny like tile, ceramic tile.

It was really like polished stone.

The floor in the tub surrounding and the back of the tub. And it was very attractive and it was also no longer a full chain toilet.

It was a nice toilet, a modern one. This was a very nice house and it was fun to clean it up. And. Plant flowers and flowers and flower boxes on the balcony here. And it was nice when my father played the piano. Although one day he received a letter. From one of the railroad officers out west, and the man inquired if he had to vacate his Apartment and he inquired about the piano. And my father said, yeah, he would arrange for the shipping. And send it out to him.

But I noticed he was in no great hurry to do it right away. I don’t know when they finally got around to it.

But it was nice. And my mother had a glass cabinet over here for my grandmother, and so it looked like the old home. It started to shape up nicely.

And I loved the old grandfather clock from my grandma and grandma’s house. In India. Boiling water. Our half hour. Three quarter hour. And then for Boeing’s for the hour. And then the number of hours. So at twelve o’clock it just kept on going away for about fourteen minutes. And on the fifteenth minute it started all over again.

It was wonderful. And, uh, also, Dick had left his radio when he left. He had a very nice German radio with Blaupunkt. That was a shortwave. What do you call it? Whatever they did get some some other foreign stations and which was strictly against the law in East Germany.

But he said, oh, I’m going to set this up for you and I’ll drop these wires out the window. And if anybody comes to inquire. Uh, I did it when I left. And you don’t know anything about those things. And if they want to take it, let them take it.

But at least you’ll have it for a while. And on the front of it. They always had this in front of the speaker, this beautiful piece of cloth with gold threads woven in or something.

It was very nice. Radio. Uh, Dick had, uh. Stuck the picture of the new Studebaker.

We had a lot of pictures of cars over his bed in his room, which makes me smile now when I think of it. Because I never realized how young we were. We really were at that time.

But that’s exactly how Nate had his room. He had pictures of cars all over the wall. And there was this new Studebaker.

It was bright turquoise. And the idea of it was it was supposed to look like a plane. It had a pointed nose, sort of, and the trunk pointed in the other way. So it was kind of streamlined, extremely low. And it had sort of a shape like a little airplane. And everybody thought that that was just the most stunning thing.

It was this is what started to come out now in the fifties. Everything had to be streamlined in order to be modern. And. We did. It. It’s funny now, when you see old movies and those things, and you look at it from the from the standpoint of streamline. That’s exactly what it is. That’s why everything looked the way it did. Everything was the corners were rounded and like everything was going to be ready to fly away.

The frigerator were round on the top and the radios were rounded off and jukeboxes in.

The houses and everything was streamlined. So I still remember that picture that that was there was a nice souvenir was right in our living room And when I listened to the radio more often. Because we had that nice free time.

Before the table.

But it was not a big. Thing like they had later on that said, on the floor and all that.

But it did have a powerful receiver. So. One of the surprises we got.

One day we received a telegram from a man. At a small railroad station.

When my father’s district. And apparently. We didn’t have any idea that this thing existed.

There was a ham radio operator, uh, close to where I live, that he was friendly with and got involved with. And he knew the whole story about me waiting to coming over, and, uh. He looked up somebody with the closest call letters, and he actually called overseas and got a hold of this ham radio operator that was operating in this little village near the railroad station. And so he had gone. And witnessing down the message down on a telegraph sheet and send it to us. And it said, what’s the hold up on the exit visa or something like that?

And it was absolutely mind boggling to us that something like that could be possible. That this thing actually got through, and you could actually talk all over the world with these ham radios.

And I guess it was quite a hobby in this country, but we’d never heard of it.

It was so funny. We did get that telegram all of a sudden. And Anything you. Once more. That Dick was concerned and was really wailing.

And I was going to Berlin. For several, several occasions. One of them was. A tooth exam. Real thorough tooth exam. They didn’t want to pay for any tooth dentist work or false tooth or whatever came up. They didn’t want to be financially responsible. So they said, before you go, you have to get your teeth in oil. So I had to go to the dentist once or twice and then saw I was okay in that. And then we had a very thorough physical exam. That was the most embarrassing thing. But.

It was nothing that didn’t happen before.

The Russians. At one time went to a movie theater.

When my sister was in the movie theater and took all the girls out and gave them all physical exams for venereal diseases, and my father was outraged over that.

But then again, everybody had. A. Personal ID passport, and they could ask you any time to show their passport.

And I mean, you were watched all the time and they said that all the they knew all the prostitutes and they had to go for regular exams anyway, so they didn’t think that would was going to make much difference. You know, in the, in the scheme of things where it was all sorts of things.

But of course, my little sister was mortified by it, such a thing. So. Anyway, that’s what they were doing, that in one of the army barracks in Berlin. In the, uh. In the clinic downstairs or whatever. Then we had to come back for shots. Finally, toward the end, when the first paper came through. One was the exit visa and then the other one was the visa for entry. And as far as the. Uh, the German side of it. I said, what are we going to do there?

And they said, nothing. You come back here one morning and, uh, go directly to. Tempelhof Airfield and get in the plane and leave. And that’s all there is to it, because there is no government to give you a permission to go. There’s nobody here right now that has the authority or. Set up for foreign travel or anything like that. And, uh, you’ll be gone. Now I thought. They think that that that’s easy then just fine with me.

But as I said before that we had to go through two other things. And one of them was this horrible grilling by the OSS and the intelligence service and De-nazification services. They asked me about my father, and they said, how come my father was not in the party?

And he held his post for so long and got away with all of this. Because he didn’t have any party connections, everybody that did any kind of a job. had to be in the party, and that’s all part of it.

I think it was my father’s age. And then I told him about what had happened. I said there wasn’t all that wonderful because I said, as you see from the records, we were in Berlin with the main offices and he got transferred. And the transfer was. Because him have. Some quarrels with the Nazi Party and he was not that much. In favour of it.

But he got away with it because of his age. So I guess they checked that out and they found that was a pretty good explanation. Apparently in sex hormones, everything was okay. And then just before we left, we had to come back for shots. And that was.

There was something that. These young doctors and medics they had there. Have been given shots to a million recruits. And they were so embarrassed. They were blushing and it was terrible.

We were giggling. And.

It was funny. One of them fainted. And then after that.

There was a group. Three or four or five of us. We all decided to splurge. And it wasn’t the money.

Of course it splurged.

It was a meal. Tickets, fashion tickets. And we all went out to lunch someplace in Berlin.

And I met a girl there.

She was a refugee from. Some other part already that they had flown from. Or come home into the Reich or whatever. Slovenian or. Ukrainian, Germans or whatever they were. And she was. Her mother was very nice, too. I went over there, we had tea. Afterwards and talked, and she said, how do you really feel?

And do you really think? Aren’t you? Didn’t you ever get second thoughts?

And she gave me a long talk and she said, where are you going?

And where she was going.

I think it was Connecticut. And she said we could meet over there. That’s not that far away from each other. And she says, because I’m a little afraid. And she says, We won’t know anybody there.

And I said, no, we won’t know anybody there. Aren’t you? She says, I’m starting to pack some stuff and I can’t make up my mind. It’s so hard, she says. I haven’t got much anyway because I didn’t drink much the last time we left.

Well, who of us didn’t? Almost all of us. Refugees. So.

But I thought it was kind of strange, and it kind of felt me out.

And I think the mother wanted me to stay and have tea because she wanted to hear my objection. Anyway, to make a long story short, this girl in the last moment decided not to go anywhere. She changed her mind. So that still happened too. But. It seems strange to me. I figured maybe she wanted to go more out of curiosity than anything else. And, uh.

The the. It just didn’t seem worth the risk. In the long run. To be so far away. So she never went.

And I really don’t know whether they had just. Our airplane load or many, many airplane loads.

But I think one. Ours must have been one of the first. Because of the. Reception we eventually got. But. To me it was all a great big miracle. And it didn’t matter how and when. And. How?

Well. I would travel. As long as I was going to get here eventually. That was all they counted.

And I was still writing letters, and Dick was still writing letters, and I was still going around, and I think I never did work is true because I went I made a lot of little trips. It probably got better and better all the time with the trains and the connections. Because I went to see the world a couple more times. I went to Berlin and I’m pretty sure I saw Ingrid in Berlin. Oh, they were opening the, uh, second, uh, the branch in Berlin. name of their dog store. And they had. They were working on that to get back on their feet. And they had an apartment. In Charlottenburg.

And I went to visit her there, but she said she can’t remember anything about Berlin at all.

But I’m sure I did see her there. Had a balcony in the front. Nice, elegant old apartment.

But of course, they didn’t have much left either of their stuff. A few things they got out, maybe ahead of time. And? Probably because they also had to worry about smuggling out some of the merchandise, you know, um. Merchants are always quick to to make a jump and. Always know how to secure some of the things some other way. They also had this little summer house in Frankfort in the garden. Which had very nice furniture, and I’m sure that nobody knew of this place. And they went and cleaned that out. In the first confusion. So they were set up pretty nice.

But I mean, it wasn’t anything fancy like they had, and they were struggling to get back on their feet too. And they had relatives in West Germany, so they eventually left altogether and went to West Germany. Which was good because later on nobody could leave anymore. So. I went back to Frankfurt. And, uh. I met, uh. Daddy, my Indian hunting companion.

She was working in a toy factory. Make a little train.

And I said goodbye to her. And she said, I wish I could go with you. I would like to get out of here, too. And that’s.

I remember that so well, because she’s the one that now is in Switzerland. She did get out. She went out to West Germany with the folks and. Taught one of her daughters married a Swiss citizen. Otherwise you can’t. You can’t even emigrate into Switzerland unless you have somebody who owns a piece of land. You have to be a. Settler. In some way or another. In order to be accepted. So since, uh, her daughter and. Son in law had, uh, a piece of land and built a house, I think. It’s a three unit house. Three or four unit block. You got a converted factory, in fact, or something like that.

But she has an apartment there in that block. And and they do. And and they own it. So she could immigrate. And that’s where she is today. She also got divorced. She had a lawyer for her husband.

I think lawyers must be hard to live with.

Well, we were all sort of on the brink of life and love and marriage. Going to college and still was going to college. And.

She was engaged now So things were taking their normal course. Except for one thing, they weren’t very many of us with their boyfriends because.

There were seven women to one man.

After the war in Germany. So I was quite aware, from conversations with relatives and neighbors that there was a general amazement. How fast my sister and I. Had found our niche in life, where we, in the eyes of the old society, were at that point the absolute have nothing because. So after the war, even what you had saved in the bank was reduced by a surge to a surge.

And my father later on received only a third of his pension. And what we had saved was very, very little, as everybody knew. Because they had always kind of. Uh, found it a bit foolish that my father spent so much money on our vacations.

And I know at that time he quite often said at the dinner table how glad I am. We went on all our wonderful trips because the money I would have lost it anyway. You see, it wouldn’t have helped me that much if they cut down our savings to that point.

Welcome to the New World — The Flight to America

January and the coldest month of winter, and it was gloomy and cold. And in that apartment there was an apartment here in the kitchen.

But they had disconnected it because of the war, and the amount of cold followed me, and they had installed the tile stove in the second floor. And. So because there was, um, a fire that could be made in the kitchen, too, and, uh, to keep warm cheaply. So every morning now my mother had to go and uh, light the stoves again and get up. And we had to load the stove with the briquettes. And in the, uh, around noontime, they would get really warm and start throwing the heat. And at night it would be so cozy.

But you always had to go out in a cold howl and in the cold bathroom. And the bathroom was only heated when somebody was taking a bath. And with the hot water heater.

But it was cozy. And it we appreciate it still being together and getting together as often as we could, and talking about how it would be in the future. And every time I came back from Berlin. I. Had more encouraging news than it was getting toward the end. And then one day as I. Walked out all elated. I saw somebody in the hall that I knew, and it was that man that had been in Weimar after me. I don’t know whether he was checking on me or not, but he smiled at me and waved at me and he said, you’re still going for it, aren’t you?

And he had a couple of Ah, I guess they were case files in the sand and it looked like a big. Big gun in this whole operation. He walked into one door, walked into the other door, and I thought, oh my God, this is where it all going to. End. It’s all going to end right here. With this guy. He’ll spoil it for me at the last moment.

And I felt terrible.

And I didn’t know what to say and what to expect. And for a couple of weeks, I was really sweating it out without telling my mother and father what it was all about. And my mother now had a new fear. She now began to show that her biggest concern was the airplane trip. He was. If I was going to survive this airplane trip, that was her big fear. And she couldn’t understand that I was not the least bit concerned about this.

But she apparently had been all along very worried about it. And so we celebrated on the third of February, my father’s birthday, and we made it very nice. A lot of the relatives came up to congratulate And my cousin, and it was a nice family get together. And right after that, I received my note that I was leaving on the sixteenth of February, and I quickly wrote a note to Dick.

And, uh, now my mother’s worry was what I was going to take. And the big suitcase packing started up. So I had to report. A day or two early, earlier. So I was staying in, uh. Probably with my girlfriend. And sailed off in her parents because that’s where my parents were going to stay. To my old school friend there.

And, uh, I remember I still sent a telegram to my mother to not forget to bring me that old German ship and my hat. I don’t even know what kind of hat I had, but I had a hat. Maybe my hat from. You know, I wouldn’t have had my beautiful hat from the labor service. That was a beautiful hat. What hat would I have had? I had a a big velvet hat. Sort of stand up hat. Like a big, big parade on the side of my head.

I think Ginger Rogers wore one in one of her movies and black clothes. For dress up, I guess, I don’t know. Anyway, I told her to bring them when they came to say goodbye on the sixteenth and we were going to meet, probably in Salem and all go to Tempelhof together. And on UTA, of course, came along too. And so came the big day. And it was a cold, bitter, cold day. And, uh, gloomy. Ah. So gloomy.

And I was subdued, I was I had been subdued, subdued ever since I seen that other man. And and also because it always seems when you’re looking forward to something for so long, when the day finally comes, you’re not as excited as you thought you would be. It’s like your, uh. Your anticipation doesn’t live up to your expectations or something. It’s. It’s always been that way.

When I finally went to Germany. Uh, until you get on the plane.

So, uh, we were standing there in the hall waiting and being called by name and being called forward and checked and checked again and counted again. And most of the girls were engaged and some of them were married, and some of them had babies already, and they were little kids. And it must have been very harassing and stressful to those, uh, port guys and most of the military guys who had to send this group of sheep along overseas. And my father stood there not saying much.

My mother was my mother was kind of sniffling a bit, trying very hard not to cry.

My sister was just looking around with big eyes and seemed very glad that it wasn’t her that was going away somehow. And, uh. So then came the time to say goodbye.

And I could see my father had thought. For a long time what he would say to send me off. And my mother too. Because he had tears in his eyes.

But he didn’t cry. And he put his fist in my back like he so often did. And he said, I know you’re going to be all right. He said, whatever you do, never forget that you’re a Prussian, and a Prussian never gives up. And then he kind of choked up. In other words, he was hoping more than anything for strength for me.

I think he had an Inclination that it was not going to be easy for me. And my mother said. She gave me a hug and she said, I want you to remember one thing. When you meet his mother. Be easy and understanding, because always remember that she was his mother first before you met him, and go from there and you can’t go wrong. And then she really cried and she cried. And then I started crying. And we waved goodbye with handkerchiefs that were limp and wet and soaked.

And I tried not to cry too much because I saw my father was trying so hard, put on a big smile, and didn’t even Went to that out on your airfield. You didn’t go in a bus or a tunnel or anything. You just walked out onto the airfield and up those rolling steps.

And I walked there and I decided I never looked back. I’m never going to look back. I’m going to go right in the airport, in the airplane. And then when I was inside, I took my white handkerchief and waved it across the window. And they wrote me that. They saw that, and they waved and waved. And then I really cried. I cried and cried because I was alone.

I wasn’t disturbing them, and I fell apart. And on top of it all, it was such a bitter and gloomy grey day. And on top of it, at that moment it started to snow. These big cold flurries dancing around in the bitter wind.

And I knew it was going to be all murky up above.

And I would not be able to see a thing of the city or anything, any sights at all, because within seconds we were in the clouds and gone. And it was done, and there was no turning back. And it wasn’t a big airplane either. It I still have the feeling it had only two to Rangers because we landed. Number one in Frankfurt the first time.

Berlin, Frankfurt and in Frankfurt when we rolled around, taxied around our wing, hit the cockpit of another plane. That was a bad omen right there. I’m glad my mother didn’t see that happen in Berlin. Because it caused us a delay of about at least two and a half hours before they had all the paperwork and everything cleared away.

There was nothing wrong with our plane. And we took off. And the next stop was. London. Where are we supposed to have been for tea?

And that’s all they had prepared for us. Uh, we didn’t have had any dinner. Any any any noontime meal, which is the big meal for the Germans. Uh, because of transferring over to the airport and standing in line and all that. We never had anything to eat at noontime. And then we didn’t get anything in London except tea and crumpets. That’s what they had prepared for us, and that’s what we got.

But it was all very good because it was something warm and something refreshing. And the best part was the bathroom with the hot and cold Forces and all tires and all beautiful. Ah, what a beautiful bathroom.

The outfit. He could have spent an hour in that ladies room, and, uh.

But they didn’t let us go out. They let us go look at anything, then let us out of the building. Our tea, our comforts. And back in the plane again. I guess all they did was refuel and we took off. And the next stop was. Prestwick, Scotland. For Shannon, Ireland, one one came first and the others the second. I forget now. Neither place did they let us out. It didn’t make any difference. By that time it was dark. And then we went for quite a while through the night, and it got awfully cold. Oh, was it cold? My feet were cold. Right up to my behind.

But I was glad I was wearing that big army gray coat. That dick had left me and we had died it black and put a handcrafted bronze. Buttons on it from from sort of like Bavarian costume buttons. And it was a very good looking coat.

And I had, uh. Fairly warm shoes too, with woolen socks over it, because my mother had said, no matter what, your feet will be warm and how right she was. And she also had given me two sandwiches and some apples. And now. Right, she was with that too, because we never got anything to eat on that plane. It wasn’t like today and we never really got anything decent to eat that day. Because of the delay in Frankfurt with that accident. And, uh, we landed in Iceland.

Now, that was an experience.

There was nothing. Nothing there but a white expanse of ice and snow.

It was like a they had fooled us all along. And they brought us to some gulag in Siberia. It wouldn’t have been any different. We wouldn’t have known it.

It was a little shack of an airport.

There was a bench inside and a table and a Coke machine. That was the extent of the amenities. I guess they did have a bathroom, but you had to go outside and around the building and you went.

Of course I went outside. I said, here I have a chance looking at the landscape. I could swear I could hear the wolves howling.

There was a bright moon out by that time. And the snow all looked blue. And it was like the end of the world. I said, oh my God, oh my God. What if something happens to the plane here? We get down in that cold water. We’ll be dead in two minutes.

But anyway, it seemed good to get back on the plane and get the heck out of there. And the plane was exciting.

It was beautiful and I wouldn’t mind going for three days. I thought it was wonderful and the little bathroom was so cute on the plane and it was nice. Strangely enough, I don’t remember talking much to the other girls. It seemed like everybody was thinking their own thoughts and dealing with their own feelings. And of course, some of us were dealing very heavily with the babies because I don’t know if they had pressurized cabins in those days.

But every time and all these frequent landings must have hurt those babies ears something awful.

There was a lot of crying going on with those babies, and the stewardesses had their hands full, and we got out of there, and I did fall asleep after that for a while.

I had my sandwiches. And. Then all of a sudden, I woke up and it was getting dawn.

And I knew we were now completely wrong with our time and that it must be some other time, and that we’re over on the other side of the ocean. And we came to. A door. Fairly early in the morning, pre-dawn, and the wind was blowing. Oh my God.

I think that was Thule Air Force Base. Is there? Anyway, there were three or four, five, Five six F airport Air Force men come running out and they actually grabbed us under the arms to bring us into that hut because we couldn’t walk. We absolutely couldn’t walk in that wind. They were so strong. You couldn’t stand up unless you weighed at least one hundred and eighty, two hundred pounds, which most of us didn’t.

Of course, after the war.

We were a light load, probably so. And there they had coffee, and I think it was doughnuts. We never seen what they had, but it was probably donuts. And the coffee was good, real coffee. And we all kind of woke up and started talking And getting excited and washing our faces in the washroom and putting on makeup and getting back on the plane. And they said, well, well, it’s not going to be that quick yet. You got to go to Greenland yet. So we must have been refueling every time we had such one of those hops, unless we came with a mail plane, I don’t know.

But it was an interesting trip because after we left, uh. There, of course, when we hit the bad weather, that’s where all that wind was coming from. Oh my God. And everybody on the plane got sick one after another, after the first one threw up and the smell got bad. It just grabbed everybody.

And I wasn’t I didn’t get sick, and I think it was because I was so excited and so elated, and I didn’t even think about it.

And I was when that first smell came up, I felt a little woozy. I started eating them little apples my mother gave me, and I kept my mouth fresh, and I kept chewing the little apples and helping the other girls with it throw up bags and helping the stewardess. They couldn’t run fast enough with all those bags.

It was awful. And the kids all screaming and crying and I thought, oh God, now I wish we were there because I got to get out of here.

It was murder. And the sun came up all sunny and red. And we came to gander, Gained a new found love. And then? I could see we were dropping down.

And I could see the new world. Then I saw it. I hate this, this. Nobody here. There’s nobody living there. All I could see was words, words, words. Sandy beaches. Seashore. More words and wrote a few words. Going this way. That way you could see it real clear from up above. Nothing. No farm, no village, no city, no little town. Nothing. And it went on and on and on. I said, where the heck are we? Couldn’t be Canada. They got cities there.

Well, we were in Canada, all right, but we were way, way up. And there wasn’t much. And it gave me the creeps. I thought, what a great man. What a free country.

It was too lonely. I hope it’s different when we get there. And we came slowly down the coast.

And I never went to the to New York. We went straight to Boston. So I never did see. I didn’t see the Statue of Liberty or anything. She wrote it like that and never came to New York. Came straight to Boston Logan Airport. And then it went faster than I thought and I went in the bathroom.

I had my makeup on, but I wanted to do my.

I had an attitude with my hat or something.

And I got all the hairpins out, and I combed my hair, and all of a sudden my teeth started chattering and my hands started shaking.

And I got so excited and I couldn’t get my hair back up and and they said, we’re going to be landing in fifteen minutes.

And I realized I wasn’t going to have enough time.

I had plenty of time, but I was just too excited. I stuck all the pins in my pocket and I said the heck with it.

And I took my silk scarf.

I had tied it around my head like a babushka. I looked like a real immigrant and let my hair hang down. I said, what difference does it make? I’m here. I’m home. Who cares?

And there’s nobody down there anyway. From the way it looked. Ah. And so. I landed in the new world. And the first thing that happened when we stepped off the plane.

It was amazing.

It was like I was a big actress after all, because photographers came running forth from all directions and take pictures of us. Snapping Flash bulbs right and left, pulling me out of line for interview. And.

But I was just looking, looking, looking to see if Dick was standing there in the line of people waiting. And there he was, and I saw him and I just started, dropped my suitcase. I ran, ran, ran over the whole. Landing strip over to him and gave him the biggest hug and the biggest kiss. And fifteen guys came after me and ripped me away from him and said, no, no, no, you can’t touch him.

You can’t touch him. You haven’t been through customs. And they dragged me away from him, and half of them were laughing and snapping pictures again. And then they dragged Dick out too. And they interviewed us in the customs building. And that’s how those newspaper pictures were taken. And there was that kerchief around me looking like a real immigrant.

Ah, it was funny. And the first time I saw Dick in civilian clothes. And he looked so cute. He had a brief flannel suit on with pinstripes, real soft pinstripes and a tie. A red tie with little white. Daisy. Little white flowers that I just fell in love with.

I had it for years and years and years because I loved that time. He looked so handsome and I was so glad. And the customs officer gave me a hard time because I kept running and they said, what did you give him? Did you give him nothing? I gave him a kiss. And they all laughed again. And they opened my suitcase. And they said, open up everything, everything out on the table. One of them was all business. And there they unpacked.

My mother says, don’t waste any space, because wrapping things up in paper or anything, she had given me her three nice underwear outfits. She had, so to speak, the shirt off her back. And my all my my China, my good China cups were wrapped in that.

And I said, careful, careful. And they pull in all these long lingerie out and enjoying every bit of it. I felt like an exposed criminal.

It was a fine welcome.