Nema’s Story: A Comprehensive Summary

An oral history of a German woman’s childhood, wartime years, and immigration to America. Recorded across 36 transcript files from www.bearsfeat.com/Nemas_Story_transcripts/. The narrator is Barbara — known as “Nema” — born in 1925 in Erfurt, Germany.

Family Background and Parents

The Father

Nema’s father was born into modest circumstances. His own father managed a farm and held a government bookkeeping position. He studied at a monastery school where he learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, and studied music — piano, organ, drum, and bugle — before pursuing architecture. After World War One, in which he served as a lieutenant and traveled to France in the famous “forty-and-eights” (freight cars carrying 40 men and 8 horses), he found work with the German railroad. He eventually rose to become a railroad inspector and later a high-ranking administrator.

He was a man of deep culture and broad knowledge: he quoted Latin proverbs and Homer in Greek at the dinner table, led hiking expeditions with encyclopedic knowledge of birds, plants, and history, played the grand piano daily, and was passionately patriotic. He had seen the Kaiser as a boy and fought in WWI. After the war, he joined a foot soldiers’ union that attempted to bring order to the chaos of Weimar politics. He was witness to both communist and Nazi street parades from his front windows and grew increasingly troubled as the political situation darkened. He admired Hitler in the early years, believing in his promises of European unity, but was utterly shattered when a trusted White Russian intelligence contact confirmed the reality of the concentration camps around 1943. After that revelation, Nema describes her father as “a broken man.”

Throughout the war he worked to manage railroad logistics as Germany’s trains were consumed by troop movements and the flight of refugees. When Frankfurt an der Oder was declared a fortress, he made one final trip back to their apartment, convinced the mother to flee by train, and then returned afterward to find their grand piano dragged out to the boulevard and smashed, their library burned on the floors, everything ruined. He reported the Russian soldiers had been “like animals — completely backward peasants.” He later escaped on his work train to the British zone on the North Sea, obtained a bicycle from a railroad colleague, and pedaled home to the family in Thüringen — an arrival Nema describes as the greatest moment of the postwar period, with her mother’s eyes “sparkling and shining.”

In the Soviet zone he was rehired by the railroad and transferred through several towns, continuing to revamp the railroad system until it ran as punctually as it always had. He never formally joined the Nazi Party despite significant pressure, a fact that proved crucial to Nema’s immigration papers. He faced reduced pension (one-third of his due) after the war. On the day Nema left for America, he told her: “Whatever you do, never forget that you’re a Prussian, and a Prussian never gives up.”

The Mother

Nema’s mother came from a small village in Thüringen where her own father served as forest master to the Duke. She had suffered extraordinary losses before meeting Nema’s father: her youngest brother drowned at sea, her oldest brother went missing in Russia, her fiancé (a WWI pilot and brother of her best friend) was killed, and her own mother died. Despite these losses she possessed, in Nema’s description, “a sweet, quiet manner and a warm heart.”

She met Nema’s father through a newspaper poem he placed after spotting her dressed entirely in black on a train. She initially dismissed him as resembling “a cattle salesman” in his knickers and Tyrolean hat, but her girlfriend talked her into meeting him and she eventually agreed to marry. He overcame the 11-year age difference by impressing her father on hiking trips through the forest.

There was a family legend about her heritage. One of Nema’s godmothers — the woman who had originally introduced her parents to each other — visited after hearing about Nema’s wild behavior as a small child, and told the mother: “What do you expect? She is only the typical gypsy blood in our family. Don’t you know you have gypsy blood?” The mother laughed — she had dark skin and deep brown eyes, and the look that people in the Thüringen woods often have: black-haired, dark-eyed, some with Mongolian features. Nema speculates this traces to Genghis Khan’s armies and to a Hungarian princess who married into the family at Wartburg Castle, bringing her court and followers with her. Nema concludes the story with a smile: “And so I was a wildcat andif the gypsy.”

She was a formidable homemaker who transformed neglected apartments and gardens into places of beauty. She preserved food, organized community welfare work during wartime, and hosted soldiers for Sunday dinners with genuine warmth. She had strong moral instincts: when Nema and her sister staged a Heil Hitler mockery at the garden gate, the mother delivered one of the few truly fierce punishments of their childhood, apparently fearing what visible mockery could cost the father at work. She foresaw the worst from the moment England declared war, saying: “This is the end of it. Now they have gone too far.” During the war’s collapse she ate almost nothing herself, claiming she had eaten while cooking — “we all knew she was lying, but we were hungry.” She managed the family’s evacuation, eventually arriving in Thüringen with little more than a suitcase. On the day Nema came to the door after returning from Vienna, she fainted.

The Maternal Grandfather

The mother’s father was forest master to the Duke of Thüringen, a position of significant quasi-aristocratic standing in his small village. The family occasionally attended ducal hunts and received thank-you notes from the Duke’s family. He was described as a collector and craftsman who made intricate handmade gifts — one Christmas he gave each grandchild a walnut shell dyed gold, inside of which was a tiny handmade bed and doll. He died before the war, but the village where he lived — with its half-timbered houses, communal bread ovens, linden tree gathering place, Sunday church processions in traditional costume, and surrounding castle ruins — remained one of the warmest places in Nema’s memory.

The Paternal Side and Cousins

The father’s cousin Karl Otto was a wealthy wood, coal, and grain merchant who kept a town house, a hillside villa called “Villa Eden” with vineyards and fruit trees, and a hunting lodge. Family visits there were major events: horse-drawn coaches, elaborate dinners with many guests, and children required to sit quietly and properly. Karl Otto’s household included daughters Sabina, Anna Marie, Eva, and little Carlotta. The grandmother (Karl Otto’s mother) was the grandfather’s second wife, previously married to a spa owner, and was described as “a jolly, jolly lady” but thoroughly formal, requiring afternoon naps and hair curling before changing dresses for each social occasion.

Nema describes herself taking a serious fall on a scooter at the bottom of long stone steps at Villa Eden, injuring both knees and elbows so badly she had to be carried to the train. She notes her cousin had done the same thing, and reflects that all the girls of that generation “were so worried we had to replace the boys for our parents.”

The Sisters

Rosemarie (born 1922) was the eldest sister — quiet, well-behaved, just beginning first grade when she died at age seven of pneumonia that progressed to pleurisy affecting the brain membranes. Nema felt guilty for decades, remembering a moment when she bit Rosie’s leg to take her turn on a chair during a nighttime parade. The mother wore black mourning clothes for a long time after.

Uta was the youngest sister, named after a famous medieval stone sculpture — “Uta of Naumburg,” a Duchess of Thüringen — in Naumburg Cathedral, at the insistence of a friend who had seen the statue. (Uta’s husband in the statue is named Eckehart; Uta’s own son was eventually named Eckehart.) Uta suffered severely from childhood rheumatism, wrapped in cotton in her little white crib and crying, which left her with a weak heart that limited mountain activities. She was drafted from school at age sixteen to dig trenches in East Prussia with classmates, returned after three weeks, and then began working Red Cross station duty with the mother as refugees poured in from the east — children arriving without parents, knowing only that they had “one suitcase and no name.” Uta later fell in love with Dieter, who became her boyfriend in the postwar period.

Early Childhood in Silesia

Nema was born on a Sunday in 1925 in Erfurt — her father delivered her himself because no doctor was available. He named her Barbara, after the patron saint of artillery: Saint Barbara, the story goes, was imprisoned in a tower by an African ruler; a thunderstorm split the tower during her prayers and she escaped. Because of the thunder and lightning connection, artillery adopted her as patron saint, and miners did so as well. Nema’s father, a former artillery lieutenant, chose the name. She notes it gave her “a noisy name.”

Shortly after her birth, the family followed the father’s railroad promotion to East Silesia — a coal-mining region near Poland, which locals mournfully called “the cold pot of Germany.” Community members predicted the family would freeze and starve as if being sent to Siberia. The relocation happened in mid-winter under terrible conditions, but the family’s beloved nanny, Elisabeth (always called “baby”), chose to leave her Tyrolean homeland and go with them.

Their apartment was a palace-like space in a huge railroad building with 8.5-foot ceilings, inlaid wooden floors throughout, and a garden the family shared with a neighboring apartment. The father installed his grand piano — his joy and pride, played every day. The mother transformed the neglected garden into a small paradise: a central rose bed, four grass plots each with a fruit tree (cherry, pear, green plum, blue plum), raspberry and gooseberry bushes, borders of pale-blue irises, tulips, zinnias, and a grape vine trellis. To Nema as a small child, the irises reached nearly to her chin.

The family lived on the main street facing the town square. As Nema grew she witnessed communist parades with red flags, then Nazi parades with brown shirts and swastikas. Fights broke out at night; police came in green trucks. The father would leave work early and sit on the back balcony with the mother, speaking in low, troubled voices. He was bitter about his parents’ starvation during the inflation years — “people received wages and ran immediately to the stores before the money devalued.” He recalled toys costing 100,000 marks and diapers costing a million.

The mother never turned away the vagrants who sometimes came to the kitchen door. She gave soup, food, and wrapped sandwiches to anyone hungry.

School Years and Everyday Life

Nema was a famously stubborn child given to spectacular temper tantrums. Her mother said she would be “a nail to my coffin.” From early on she was known in the family as “the Wildcat” — the nickname was earned when, during a nighttime street parade, she bit her elder sister Rosie on the leg to get her off a chair so Nema could see out the window. Her mother called her a wildcat from that moment on, and it stuck. The godmother’s gypsy-blood theory was invoked as the explanation: “She is only the typical gypsy blood in our family.” Her only stint at kindergarten ended with a fight with boys over the rocking horse; when her mother asked if she wanted to continue, Nema said no, and that was that — “the most wonderful thing in my life.” She was replaced by town errands with her mother, which she loved.

School began around 1931. The first day tradition involved a large cardboard cone as tall as the child herself, filled with candy and sweets, to “sweeten” the experience. The mathematics teacher carried a cane and beat students for incomplete lessons — during one public caning for failing the sevens multiplication table, Nema wet herself, a humiliation that damaged her confidence in mathematics for years.

The sisters suffered the usual childhood illnesses of the era: diphtheria, chicken pox, measles, scarlet fever, and rheumatism. Uta’s rheumatism was particularly severe.

Summers brought extended visits to the maternal grandfather’s village in Thüringen, which Nema describes with particular affection: communal bread ovens (three per village, shared by households in rotation), haymaking in mountain meadows where larks sang overhead, the grandmother’s dairy work with a hand-cranked cream separator and wooden paddle butter churns, massive festival cakes baked in the communal ovens for confirmations and weddings, half-timbered houses with slate-shingled roofs, and the village linden tree where people gathered and danced on Sundays.

The father belonged to a hiking club (the “Wandering Birds”) and led weekly family hikes to castles, lakes, and natural areas. He was an accomplished skier and figure skater, demonstrating figure-eights at the town pond while a noted Olympic female skater also practiced there. He later took the family on winter skiing vacations in Czechoslovakia.

Nema attended her first film around age four with her nanny — “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which left a deep impression.

Among the historical figures Nema witnessed as a child: Field Marshal von Mackensen, who appeared at a parade wearing a red coat with silver tresses, a high black-visored hat, and legs bowed from decades of riding — she compared him to “the Nutcracker out of the fairy tale.” She also saw President Hindenburg both in her town and later in Berlin, riding in an open car, showing his “big head and white mustache.” She notes Hindenburg had fought the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia and was eventually pressured by Hitler into conceding the chancellorship. Nema witnessed the famous Zeppelin airships passing over the family garden — “like a big silver cigar with little cabins underneath, the little windows glowing.”

The Move to Berlin

The father’s next promotion took the family to Berlin, which the mother feared but the father welcomed. They arrived to find the floors of their new apartment wet with rust-brown paint and the kitchen linoleum freshly waxed. Movers had left; the father carried in beds and slept on furniture in the kitchen the first night. The new apartment was a villa divided into three units, with tall double-paned windows, iron bars on a porch arch that the children loved swinging from, and a garden below street level that was dark and overgrown but contained a magnificent lilac bush.

Berlin was a city of “two faces” — a downtown of cabarets and modern shows alongside old-fashioned suburbs with organ grinders and garden colonies. The family explored it systematically: on trains, elevated railways, streetcars, and on foot. They visited the zoo, the Sanssouci palace at Potsdam (sliding across polished floors in felt slippers), lakes, châteaux, and swimming beaches. The father was enthusiastic about the new Autobahns but worried about the proliferation of automobiles.

Nema was placed in a lower grade because a Berlin teacher assessed her mathematics as deficient. At around age eleven she joined the Hitler Youth for girls — black skirt, white blouse, prescribed shoes — mainly because of parental pressure on the father regarding Nazi Party membership.

A transformative friendship began when a Swiss girl named Mary von Lesser joined Nema’s class. Her father worked in film and theater and introduced Nema to a world of performance.

The 1930s: Hitler, the Olympics, and Gathering Clouds

In the summer of 1936 Nema attended the Berlin Olympics festivities, marveling at small flipbooks that animated the events when riffled through. She saw Japanese swimmers practicing their techniques. She watched hundreds of girls performing synchronized exercises with clubs and hoops in the great stadium.

On a family vacation to Hitler’s mountain residence near Salzburg, the father was interested in the modern architecture — particularly the enormous picture window through which Hitler received diplomatic guests. The complex had displaced 450 local farmers. When Nema’s group arrived, a crowd had gathered because a flag was flying, and children were eventually allowed through to shake Hitler’s hand. Nema, about twelve at the time, describes it as “a very moving moment at the time.”

The family’s maid Erika had come to them years earlier without references, having fled an abusive household. The mother took her in on trust, and she became something of a family member. Erika’s disapproving parents objected to her older boyfriend who owned a mechanic shop; she eventually married him and moved to Frankfurt an der Oder — which happened to be the family’s next posting. Her husband ran a prosperous auto repair business that also served Russian military customers after the war — until a Russian officer apparently coveted the property, had the husband arrested, and he never came back.

The Austrian Anschluss occurred during this period. Though some cheered, Nema notes an underground resistance existed. Her family toured Austria afterward — the Tyrol, Innsbruck — and she began piano lessons, made slow progress, and discovered ballet after seeing a performance of Eine kleine Nachtmusik performed in a Viennese castle courtyard. The experience gave her a lifelong love of dance.

The father’s next transfer — to Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border — was described as a step down professionally, possibly because of his ethical disagreements with Nazi Party officials. Nema suspected it was a form of punishment for his refusal to join the party.

Frankfurt an der Oder: A New Home

The Frankfurt apartment was the finest the family had lived in: an entrance hall with oak furniture, the father’s piano overlooking rose beds, a combined living-dining room with a red-tiled porch, and more space than Berlin. The father could walk to work through a boulevard of trees and past old buildings from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Nema joined the church choir because the music teacher led it. She was chosen as “the first angel” for the Christmas Eve service — descending from the choir loft in a white gown, carrying a candle, long braids qualifying her for the role. She made close friends, formed a theater club in the cellar and entrance hall, and performed plays for audiences of neighbors and family.

Movies were a central pleasure: Saturday matinees in Berlin had meant Shirley Temple, cowboys, Laurel and Hardy, newsreels, and cartoons. In Frankfurt, the theater club began producing their own works. A wealthy friend named Ingrid had access to film stock (her father owned a drugstore), and her father agreed to film the group’s theatrical production. With theatrical makeup and a dozen participants, they made a roughly twenty-minute amateur film featuring Nema as “the chic” and Ingrid as a belly dancer. The film opened on a huge brass Islamic candlestick with smoke dissolving into Ingrid’s dance. Nema calls it “the most wonderful thing in our lives.”

In 1939 the family vacationed at the North Sea, walking across tidal flats between islands on horse-drawn high-wheeled carts. They tried to visit an island with famous cliffs but were told it was “a restricted area — very strange.” Returning home, they heard German radio coverage of “unrest in Poland.” On September 1st, 1939, Germany invaded.

The War Begins

The mother’s response to England’s declaration of war was immediate and certain: “This is the end of it. Now they have gone too far.” She predicted rationing and hunger, comparing it to WWI. She was right on every count.

Ration tickets arrived. Only the younger sister Uta received milk, until age fourteen. The mother stockpiled what she could in the cellar. Uta apparently reported this as illegal hoarding. Jazz music was banned as “decadent.” Air raid shelter locations were marked with white arrows. School classrooms were converted to hospital wards for wounded soldiers from the eastern front.

Soldiers were quartered in the family’s spare room — generally married men with children who used the space only for sleeping. Nema and her sister often accompanied soldiers to the railway station to say goodbye before deployment. The mother organized sisters’ work at a large soup kitchen at the station, serving pea soup, beef stew, and turnip soup to arriving troops. When the father questioned why young girls should do this, the mother replied: “They would rather look at them than look at me.”

The blitzkrieg conquest of Poland took only days. Radio coverage of eastern campaigns used what Nema called “fancy words,” but the reality became clearer as the war expanded. German troops had attacked without providing adequate winter clothing for Russia; nationwide drives collected knitted goods, skis, and winter equipment. The catastrophic losses in the east began filtering home.

Air raids on Frankfurt were dramatic and personal. One night a bomb struck across the street and the blast blew Nema against a chimney door, leaving her “black like a chimney sweep.” On another occasion a dud bomb was discovered between their house and a retaining wall, approximately six feet from their home. The whole area was evacuated for hours while it was defused. Nema writes: “How close we came that night.”

One of the worst raids used “air mines and chain bombs” — weapons linked together to hit one target. The apartment building across the street was devastated. The following morning Nema and her friend Walt helped clean up the ruins. She watched bodies being pulled from the rubble by their legs off iron bedsteads, saw a toilet still hanging from its pipes with the toilet paper roll “waving in the wind,” and observed all the layers of wallpaper from different floors now exposed to the sky.

Hamburg, she notes, was bombed so completely that authorities “put up brick walls across the streets in a ring around the ruined area and declared it a forbidden zone.” So many people were dead that it was officially forbidden to wear black mourning clothes, because too many people were wearing them.

Life Under Total War

The turning point Nema identifies most sharply is a moment on her father’s 60th birthday in 1943, when she was riding a streetcar and heard that Stalingrad had fallen. She and a friend decided not to tell anyone until after the birthday party. She writes: “We were old enough to understand what it meant. It was the beginning of the end.”

The father had by then already learned the truth about the concentration camps from a White Russian intelligence contact — a man who had been in Russia since the revolution. Nema found the father “with tears in his eyes, looking like a broken man.” There was no escaping what the man told him. After that, the house changed: a quiet busyness of daily survival replaced whatever hope remained.

Food became a constant preoccupation. Soups grew progressively thinner — beans and turnips, cream of wheat, beet slices and fried potatoes, no fruit, no chocolate, no bananas. The mother ate almost nothing. Bread was rationed; meat tickets were hoarded. “People’s whole attention,” Nema writes, “was taken up by what we trade. What do we eat. What can we get.” American bombing intensified once Germany lost air supremacy.

Refugees from East Prussia began appearing at the Frankfurt railroad station in overwhelming numbers — Nema’s mother and sister, on Red Cross duty, reported children arriving with a single suitcase, unable to name their parents, parents crying for lost children.

The German school curriculum during these years included mandatory daily political lessons tracking army movements. At fifteen or sixteen, students divided into academic tracks; Nema’s mother chose home economics rather than the science track for her. Nema was furious — she desperately wanted to study Latin. The home economics track covered cooking, baby care, child psychology, kindergarten instruction, and handicrafts alongside the usual academic subjects.

Required practical placements included stints at kindergartens, wealthy estates, and village childcare. One practicum placed Nema on a large Prussian estate, where she worked as an upstairs maid for a “robust, energetic countess” whose husband was “a wimp and a drinker” who occasionally returned for parties with local Junker nobility — families named Stein, Finkenstein, Bredow, and Bülow. A French prisoner of war lived in a stone tower on the estate and “decreed for himself that he would have no contact” beyond receiving food — he maintained complete dignity and pride even while working the fields.

For her theater ambitions, Nema and a friend traveled to Berlin under the pretense of art school auditions. She actually attended a theater audition, performing a monologue about Cleopatra and a prayer from Faust. The director told her to “stick with it.” Her friend Piller was accepted to art school. Nema briefly considered leaving school early to pursue theater — her father discouraged this.

She joined “Faith and Beauty,” an artistic division of the Hitler Youth for those interested in dance, theater, and physical culture, where she performed in pastoral plays and a major civic theatrical production. Through this she met Helmut, a boy from the Humanist Gymnasium who played a shepherd in a blue velvet suit and lace jabot. They shared wine at a Berlin wine festival and maintained a “strictly honorable relationship” — one kiss, in total. Helmut formally approached Nema’s father to declare his intention to become an officer and marry her. Her father replied: “I can’t for the life of me see you as the wife of an officer.” Helmut later wrote that he was “not planning to come back” and that “there is no hope for Germany and no hope for an officer in Germany.” He apparently died in the war.

Another friend’s brother Eric had voluntarily joined the SS before finishing high school and was eventually wounded and died in a field hospital with his mother present. Their father was imprisoned after the war and died of typhoid.

Graduation and the End of School Life

Graduation itself was brief and understated — no caps and gowns, a speech from the principal, and a short address from the class teacher. Nema nearly failed mathematics, which lowered her overall grade from excellent to satisfactory. “It didn’t break my heart. I was done anyway. Hallelujah.”

The class threw a costume party since there were no boys and dancing was not possible; each girl created a costume and poured her heart into it. The food was minimal — sandwiches and cookies donated by the home economics class. They gathered in the schoolyard for photographs as the evening darkened. Growing increasingly emotional, realizing they might never see each other again, the group grew wild and a little reckless as the evening progressed.

Then the air raid alarm sounded, and they all ran home.

Labor Service: Austria

Rather than wait for a random assignment, Nema volunteered for the mandatory Reichsarbeitsdienst (labor service) and strategically chose Austria as her posting — “the dream place.” After a month’s delay, she traveled to the Linz district near the Czech border.

The camp was purpose-built with barracks, a dining area, large washroom, vegetable garden, and animals including a pig, a goose, and Angora rabbits (whose wool was harvested for bomber pilot jackets). Inspections were rigorous — lockers, clothing stacks, beds with a coin bounced off them. The camp leader, a woman from the Rhineland named Coca, is described as “a beast.”

Work rotated between camp duties and assignments to local farms. One early assignment involved clearing a “foul potato cellar by hand — so disgusting she couldn’t eat that evening.” Later she was sent to a remote mountain farm requiring over two hours of hiking each way — hard work, but it gave her freedom and escape from the camp’s surveillance.

Politically, the camp was a tense space. Austrian girls, accustomed to black-market luxuries, struggled most with discipline. Nema befriended Slovenian and Czech girls and learned their songs — behavior that drew criticism from leaders. After three weeks she and other high school graduates were identified as “rebellious” and nearly exchanged with another camp. When offered a leadership position due to her influence over other girls, she declined.

A Slovenian girl who smuggled an Air Force soldier into the barracks had her hair forcibly cut while she screamed in protest. Village youth threw rocks at camp girls. A camp assembly selected most girls for anti-aircraft training. Nema was among the small group of “black sheep” left behind — she was stunned and momentarily downcast by this exclusion.

The rejected group was eventually assigned kitchen duty and transported toward Vienna. En route they stayed overnight in Linz, where officials mistook them for another group and gave them beautiful beds and breakfast. They ended up at a Philips radio tube factory built into a bunker thirteen stories underground, performing spot welding on tubes for submarines and tanks for approximately ten hours daily.

A vivid memory from this period: she was assigned to deliver two female rabbits to the SS camp at Mauthausen for breeding. She observed barracks and stone buildings from the entrance area. She acknowledges she never saw the real interior of the camp.

Another striking moment: finding a Ukrainian woman “who appeared forty or forty-five” crying while digging potatoes in the rain. Nema removed her apron and put it around the woman’s shoulders even though they couldn’t speak to each other.

Her final weeks of field service were spent in a village carpenter’s shop making wooden crosses for soldiers’ graves — staining each one black with Gothic lettering naming the dead man, his unit, and his date of death. “A very melancholy job,” performed as war news grew worse.

Vienna: The Final Months of the War

The factory barracks in Vienna’s suburbs were former French POW quarters, unheated (girls had burned the bunk boards for warmth and now the stove doors were padlocked). Water was scarce because bombing had damaged city mains. Hot acorn coffee in the morning and yeast dumplings with vanilla sauce in the evening were the only reliable comforts.

Every day the Americans bombed by daylight. The British came at night. Girls were roused by sirens and marched to air raid shelters in old medieval storehouses with arched cellars. An Austrian yodeling chorus organized by girls in the barracks provided a small source of community and warmth.

Nema developed scabies (an epidemic swept the camp), was sent to a clinic, scrubbed with sulfur foam from neck to toes, had her clothing sterilized, and received white bread, honey, hot milk, and tea afterward — she suspected this was to encourage other girls to report for treatment and contain the epidemic. She also developed lupus (a skin disorder from mucous membrane infection), had to wear black sulfur salve like axle grease on her skin and clothes for two weeks, and suffered migraine headaches from the factory lighting.

During one air raid she was at the soup kitchen across from a bunker. A bomb hit the kitchen immediately after she crossed the street. “If I had stayed for another three spoonfuls of soup,” she reflects, “I would have died.”

One evening she got lost in the old city of Vienna during a snowstorm — wandering through alleys she didn’t know — and ended up, with grim humor, walking into a psychiatrist’s office. The doctor was kind, made phone calls, located a former camp acquaintance, and convinced the friend to let Nema stay the night. The friend’s mother warned Nema not to open the door to the next room because the adjacent building had been bombed — “that door goes nowhere but out into the air.”

By early 1945, Nema saw a newsreel at the movies showing Russian troops crossing the Oder River through the main square of her hometown Frankfurt an der Oder, running past her own house. She realized she could not go home. She resolved to go instead to her aunt Erna’s house in Thüringen.

When release papers were distributed, many girls were denied because their homes were in occupied zones. Scenes of girls threatening suicide broke out. Nema claimed a friend (Agnes) had her parents’ permission to travel with her, and brought Agnes along. An elderly anti-aircraft officer who had befriended Nema insisted she leave immediately, warning that artillery was already “shooting in the suburbs.” He personally escorted her and Agnes to the station and refused to leave until the train departed.

The journey was grueling — standing in a corridor by the toilet with sick soldiers, detours around military areas, a single cup of thin coffee passed among all passengers. She slept crouched in the position she had learned in air raid shelters.

Collapse and Reunion

Nema and Agnes arrived at Aunt Erna’s apartment in Thüringen at dawn, climbed five flights of stairs, and knocked. When the mother opened the door and saw Nema, she fainted.

The family had lost almost everything. The mother had fled Frankfurt with Uta and a small suitcase. The father had been managing the railroad on a moving train behind the retreating front.

Germany surrendered May 7-8, 1945. President Roosevelt had died on April 12th. Americans arrived in the town, distributing bubble gum and candy to children. Nema was “thrilled it was the Americans.”

In the chaotic weeks that followed, ration tickets were suddenly declared unnecessary, stores emptied immediately, and the black market took over. The mother stole flour at night and mixed it with water and sugar as a dessert soup. Everything was divided, counted, and weighed. Agnes received a letter smuggled through traveling soldiers all the way from her own family — a miracle in the collapse of all mail service. She had to wait for passenger trains to resume before she could safely go home; a train she earlier boarded was strafed by aircraft despite the war being technically over. Groups called “werewolves” continued guerrilla resistance.

The father arrived on a bicycle. He had hidden the family’s photograph album, jewelry box, and one silver set in his briefcase. The mother had saved two or three of her teacups, marked with “R and O,” from her china collection. She had also saved the baby doll from Nema’s childhood — “the Crown Prince of Egypt,” as Nema called it during childhood games about pharaohs. The family’s laughter at this reunion over the doll was, as Nema writes, the moment “the war experience of the last two years was just a blur and a bad memory.”

Nema’s aunt Erna told her that people who lived near Buchenwald concentration camp “were just numb to the realities of war” — a measure of how thoroughly the regime had normalized horror.

The family later visited their former maid Erika in Frankfurt. Her house was intact but shared with another family; her husband’s auto repair business was prospering. A few years later a Russian officer apparently had him arrested on pretextual grounds and he never returned.

The father’s godfather — a writer and journalist whose work “did not agree with the party line” — simply disappeared after being picked up by authorities. “People just said, well, you couldn’t ask questions, because if you asked too many questions you would get in trouble yourself.”

Postwar: The Soviet Zone

The American zone quickly became the Soviet zone as the postwar boundaries settled. Americans handed territory over to the Russians as part of the agreements already made at the wartime conferences. Nema and her family watched from the windows as Russian troops arrived — in ponies and wagons, with rags on their feet, in what felt to her “like a medieval conquest.” The Russians established order after a devastating wave of looting and rape.

In Berlin and Frankfurt, the devastation was biblical. Returning to her hometown Nema found the marketplace “a heap of rubble.” Two girls from her school class had committed suicide after being raped by Soviet troops. A third girl had been abducted and never returned. Of the corresponding boys’ class from the humanist gymnasium, only two had come back. The medieval church where Nema had sung as a Christmas angel had no roof; grass and small trees grew from the walls.

She visited Berlin with her father: “Coming back to Pompeii” was how she described it. The old city center was an open field of cleared rubble. Vibrant shopping streets stood empty, weeds growing in the streetcar tracks. The parliament building area had been reduced to a vast open square.

Under Soviet occupation, all factories became “people’s owned” — and immediately produced inferior goods. Paper was poor, string was poor, yarn was poor, glass was poor, lacquer peeled from toys. The one exception, Nema notes, was food: “The sausage, the butter, the vegetables” were still good. The father’s railroad, however, was revamped to its prewar punctuality. Nema’s godfather disappeared when his writing disagreed with the party line. Young men disappeared routinely. “You couldn’t ask questions.” Families with any Nazi Party connections faced de-nazification proceedings, imprisonment, and dispossession.

Political indoctrination was constant and mandatory. Communist Party recruitment circulated through every institution. Nema’s friend joined the party to secure a newspaper job and return to university. Nema declined to join, observing the fate of former teachers and neighbors who had joined the Nazi Party and were now unemployed and miserable. Joining another party held no appeal.

Theater School in Weimar

Nema auditioned for a new theater school in Weimar using Stanislavski’s method, run by Professor Maxim Valentine — described as looking “like Doctor Zhivago,” well-known, charismatic, and politically connected (he had been in Russia since Hitler came to power). The audition required her to embody a Russian serf watching a sick baby through the night. She was accepted — and the acceptance prompted one of her most striking reflections on her own life. She describes it as “another miracle,” and then: “I couldn’t believe the way 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. If anything, I think I was rather laid back and lazy in a lot of ways. And shy, almost, to try to do these kind of things. But it always happened anyway.” She adds that this trust in life’s unfolding gave her a deep 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.”

The school occupied a cold, crumbling building — “like a morgue, with plaster falling from the walls.” Students rehearsed in coats and ski pants with blue knuckles. Curriculum included acting, speech lessons, Russian language, Spanish and Portuguese dancing, folk dancing, lace-making, Shakespeare scenes, improvisations, and eventually a full production of a Cervantes play which the students interpreted as a commentary on how Hitler had controlled the population like a puppeteer.

Nema performed in the chorus of Fidelio, played an Egyptian handmaiden in Elektra (“always whispering evil things”), and worked toward a production of the Cervantes play. The school also attracted a vivid assortment of people — former Air Force pilots, former camp members, POWs, people who had lost everything and discussed “theater, religion, Hitler and politics and the future and the Russians” at every meal.

One night, on her way back from the city after the audition, she was stopped by a drunk Russian soldier on patrol who accused her of lying about her name (her papers had two names on them). She knew that any German male who tried to intervene would be shot. She kept talking as fast as she could, holding up fingers to demonstrate she had two names, until he lost interest and left.

A schoolgirl working at the radio station was raped, leaving her unable to speak properly — trauma that showed up in her voice. A classmate had had his own leg deliberately broken by his veterinarian father with a waxed mop handle to prevent Russian conscription.

Nema became briefly engaged to Ulrich, a former Air Force pilot and theater student. She later learned from her friend Brigitte that Communist authorities had “instructed Uli to get involved with her, to keep her in the collective.” When this became clear, she ended the engagement. She describes it as having been “a whim” anyway.

Weimar itself was historically rich — Goethe and Schiller had lived there. But under the Nazis it had “become one of Hitler’s main babies.” The Gauleiter, whose name rearranged into “Saou” (meaning pig) was still mocked by Weimar residents years later. The Hotel Elephant, renovated by Hitler as his preferred local stopover, was now the best restaurant in town — accessible to students with ration tickets for humble meals.

Nema also observed the Russian propaganda effort closely and found it more effective than the American one: “Americans have always been great salesmen all over the world. And the thing they could sell the least was democracy.”

The Americans

Through her friend Brigitte, Nema met American soldiers stationed at a repeater station — a telephone relay facility — on the edge of Weimar. The Americans occupied a beautiful pre-war villa overlooking fields, woods, and (in the distance) Buchenwald. A nearby villa had belonged to the Nazi Gauleiter. The soldiers had a phonograph, radios, a film projector for American movies, and a skilled chef who had worked at the Hotel Elephant.

Among the Americans was Dick — a tech sergeant whose last name was abbreviated to “Farty” by colleagues, though Nema’s mother renamed him “Freddy.” The connection was immediate. She describes it: “I looked at him and saw him only for a second, and then it was just like our eyes met, like they say in the novels.”

Dick had been at the station for about two years, spoke fluent German, and could discuss Hitler, religion, and politics for hours. He re-enlisted specifically because of meeting Nema. He took her on rides in a jeep on the Autobahn, where she saw Russian road signs in Cyrillic spelling “Ben Map” (the Cyrillic rendering of “Weimar”) — she and Dick laughed easily at things that filled other Germans with dread.

The American soldiers existed in sharp contrast to the defeated German men around them: “always laughing, always joking,” well-fed, healthy, casual. A new crew eventually replaced the original group — many from the American South, some functionally illiterate in English, unable to learn German. The contrast with the earlier soldiers was stark.

Cold War tensions were already present. Russian soldiers had moved into the adjacent house and watched the American villa. Russian soldiers would ask German girls: “Why are you smile for Americans? You don’t smile for Russians.” An American captain’s girlfriend was raped by Russian soldiers who locked her in a hotel room. An undercurrent of rivalry ran beneath all daily activity.

Nema also learned from American photographs and films shown at the villa about the full reality of the concentration camps — and discovered that the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, long blamed on Germany, had actually been carried out by the Soviets during the Nazi-Soviet pact period.

Professor Valentine eventually wrote a letter to the American villa calling it “a bordello” and issued an ultimatum: students must choose between continuing their education or maintaining contact with the Americans. Brigitte was subsequently arrested for passing a note to an American soldier — placed in a cell with seventeen other women, one bucket, water once a day, no food. The Americans smuggled her out to West Germany in a crate on a truck.

Dick and Nema faced an agonizing decision about whether to flee to West Germany, which would mean abandoning her family.

Decision and Departure

The first devastating blow came when Dick told Nema about “the Eisenhower directive” — that no one with any connection to the Nazi Party could emigrate for twenty-five years. They were both twenty-one and twenty-two years old. Dick was found crying on his bunk with the pockets of his uniform wet from tears. “If we wait for each other,” he said, “we’ll be forty-five before we see each other again.”

Almost immediately, however, the “sweetheart law” was announced: any American soldier could bring his promised bride to America on a visitor’s visa, marry her within three months, and she could then stay, becoming eligible for citizenship after two years instead of five. This completely reversed their despair.

They printed engagement notices and sent them to family and friends. When Nema notified the family of her former wartime suitor Helmut/Herman — who had survived Stalingrad but lost an arm and married a widow to help run her farm — she received back a postcard reading only: “The rats are leaving the sinking ship. Helmut.” She was devastated by the cruelty of it, but proceeded.

Dick eventually transferred his station to Eisenach, where the family was now living. He came to church with them at an ancient church built around 900 AD — earning her father’s approval that his daughter would not “become a heathen.” He gave the family a Blaupunkt shortwave radio (illegal in East Germany, kept hidden). He gave Nema an onyx ring with two small diamonds for the engagement.

At one point during this period, an incident with a drunk American officer who made unwanted advances toward Nema was shut down by a soldier named Ryder, who told the officer: “If you say any more I’m going to hit you square in the kisser, whether you’re a big shot or not.” Dick returned to find the house in chaos.

At the immigration processing stage, Allied intelligence interrogated Nema about her father’s Nazi Party membership. The father had in fact never formally joined — despite intense pressure and holding his railroad position throughout — and the officials accepted this. The immigration application went through.

Her last Christmas in Germany featured a red and silver tree, Nema lying on the sofa with a cold, listening late at night to the American Forces Network playing the Star-Spangled Banner. “I felt torn between two homes.”

Off to America

On February 3rd — the father’s birthday — the family gathered for a final celebration. Nema received her departure notice: February 16th. The mother worried obsessively about the airplane journey rather than the larger reality of her daughter leaving.

At Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, the father’s final words were: “Whatever you do, never forget that you’re a Prussian, and a Prussian never gives up.” The mother’s advice: “Be understanding toward your future mother-in-law.”

The transatlantic flight made stops at Frankfurt (where the wing of their plane struck another plane’s cockpit — no serious damage), London (only tea and crumpets), Prestwick, Shannon, Iceland (“desolate”), and Greenland. Most passengers were violently ill from turbulence. Nema, driven by excitement, stayed awake and helped others, living on apples and sandwiches her mother had packed.

Landing at Logan Airport in Boston, she abandoned her careful grooming and tied a scarf around her head “like a babushka.” Photographers swarmed the arrival group. She spotted Dick in the crowd and began running toward him — and was stopped by customs officials. She describes his appearance precisely: “a brief flannel suit with pinstripes, a red tie with little white flowers.”

She later reflects on the German immigrant’s experience: that homesickness was fundamental to every woman who had made this crossing, and that practical people suffered less of it, but that most settlers — especially those coming from Europe — carried the weight of what they had left behind for the rest of their lives.

Key Historical Observations

On Inflation. Nema’s parents lived through the Weimar hyperinflation firsthand. Her father’s parents starved during the economic collapse — they had retired from farm life to town and had nothing when the currency collapsed. Toys cost 100,000 marks; diapers cost a million. Workers received wages and “ran immediately to stores before the currency devalued.”

On Hindenburg and Hitler. Nema saw both historical figures in person. She observed Hindenburg — who she compared to General Eisenhower in stature and popular affection — in an open car in Berlin, his “big head and white mustache” clearly visible. She recounts how he was eventually pressured by Hitler into conceding the chancellorship, and reflects on the failure of the Weimar Republic — “the only democratic system they had.”

On the Reichstag Fire. The family’s explanation at the time was that a Dutchman had done it — “not a communist, and not a Nazi.” This memory, offered as a contemporary understanding, captures how confusing the political moment was even for engaged citizens.

On the Holocaust. The father learned the truth about the concentration camps in approximately 1943, through a White Russian intelligence contact. The revelation destroyed something in him. Nema’s aunt Erna, who lived near Buchenwald, said later that people nearby “were just numb to the realities of war.” Nema visited Mauthausen herself while delivering rabbits for the SS breeding program, but saw only the entrance area. She writes with care about what she saw — and what she did not see.

On the Bombing of Dresden. Nema mentions the devastating February 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden — estimating “three hundred thousand people” killed over two nights — as one of the war’s most shattering events for the German civilian population.

On Russian Occupation. Nema’s observations of the Soviet occupation are extensive and precise: the dismantling of German railroad tracks and equipment to ship to Russia; the enforced collectivization that caused cattle to die by the dozens on open meadows in winter; the constant disappearance of people who disagreed with the party; the night-time raping and looting that preceded the establishment of order; the Russian soldiers “coming with ponies and wagons and rags on their feet” like a medieval army. She also notes the Russians were more effective propagandists than the Americans.

On the Katyn Massacre. Nema learned through American photographs and testimony that the mass graves of Polish officers in the Katyn forest — which Germany had been blamed for — were actually the work of Soviet forces during the Nazi-Soviet pact period. This revelation “complicated Communist sympathies among Germans.”

On the End of the Weimar Democracy. The street fighting Nema watched as a small child from her family’s front window — communist parades with red flags, Nazi parades with brown shirts, police in green trucks making arrests, occasional gunshots — was her direct experience of the Weimar Republic’s collapse. Her father, a WWI veteran with strong patriotic feelings, is a window into how many ordinary Germans were pulled between political forces they neither fully trusted nor fully resisted.

Summary compiled from all 36 transcript files of Nema’s Story, www.bearsfeat.com/Nemas_Story_transcripts/. Barbara (“Nema”) was born in Erfurt in 1925 and emigrated to America in February, approximately 1948-1950.