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Excerpts from “There Comes a Time…”, by Rosemarie Emma Marie Smith 1935-2013.

….

My mother was instrumental in my early formation. She was born on 1 November 1903,

entered school in Berlin in the years preceding World War I and graduated from high

school during the time of the Weimarer Republic. At that time few children continued

past the eighth grade, especially girls rarely completed high school. My mother

cherished her education that had introduced her to several languages, English, French,

Latin, and Greek, and to the literature and mythology of Western civilization. An

intensive classical curriculum was then and still is part of a high school education in

Germany.

My mother transmitted her love for higher education to me through conversations and

teaching. Her fluency in English allowed her to listen regularly to the radio broadcasts

from the BBC London during World War II. As a small child, I wondered why my

mother listened to a strange language coming from the radio in our bathroom. My

mother explained that she wanted to hear the news. It occurred to me later that our

bathroom was the only room with no outside walls where our listening to the BBC would

escape detection by the neighbors. During the Hitler era, one could be arrested and

imprisoned as a traitor to the fatherland for listening to foreign broadcasts. But it was

precisely the foreign view of the events that my mother wanted to hear. This early

exposure to the English language was later a determining factor for me when I was given

a choice for language instruction in either French or English on entering the fifth grade.

Naturally, I chose English because my mother was fluent in English and some words

were already familiar to me from her teaching and my listening.

The people in our apartment house displayed several types of political orientation. There

were the brazen supporters of the German National Socialist Workers Party (Nazional

Sozialistische Arbeiter Partei, NSDAP) from which the word Nazi is derived who greeted

everyone with “Heil Hitler” and looked askance when the answer was “Good Morning”.

They hung out the red flag with the central white circle and the black swastika at every

opportunity to show that they were on the winning side. There were also communists in

our house who avoided contact because they had only recently hung out the red flag that

was currently out of favor. There were still some of the old royalists, and some of the

recent republicans, and then there was the majority, whose political leanings and true

allegiance was uncertain. I felt a tension walking down the flights of stairs in our

apartment building because trips down the stairs were usually accompanied by

admonitions to be quiet and to avoid contact with the neighbors. Of course, I knew

nothing of the reasons for my mother’s strange suspicions, for her sudden hurrying me on

so as not to provide an opportunity for conversation. Only a few people were recognized

as friends with whom warm smiles were exchanged and it was alright to stop for a few

words. Even with them, the eyes spoke more than the words that cautiously dealt with

safe subjects such as children and the weather. Inwardly I was critical of my parents’

caution and would have thought them paranoid had such a word been part of my early

vocabulary but these were troubled times and danger surrounded us, neighbors could

become informers and threaten our existence in an instant. And then there were my

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mother’s fears for my safety. I recently learned from my cousin Kate that on the floor

above us a physician had his practice who was a lung specialist and that my mother

always walked the back steps with me because she was afraid I might catch tuberculosis

from one of the doctor’s patients if I became exposed to their cough or inhaled the dust

where they had been. Now, that she mentioned this fact, I remember longing for the

elegant stairway at the front of the building with the impressive balustrade that was

denied to me most of the time. Instead, I had to take the back stairs that were normally

used only by servants and people dressed in house clothes to fetch coals and potatoes

from the individual cellars that each family had in the basement for their personal

storage, or to remove the days rubbish from their homes to the containers in the ugly

courtyard.

My mother did not have a happy childhood. She had been an only child. My

Grandfather Karl Oettrich, a businessman, was distant and harsh and her mother was

feeble and irrational, their marriage had been arranged to join modest wealth rather than

loving hearts. The situation in my mother’s childhood home caused her to have a closer

relationship with her nanny than with her parents. There is a picture in our family album

with my mother as a baby, her nanny, Emma, smiling in the background holding my

mother and her pet dog, and my grandmother Marie, standing in the foreground looking

rather detached. My mother told me later that she chose the middle name Emma for me

not to honor my father’s mother, as it was understood by everyone else, but mainly in

memory of her deceased nanny who had brought some joy, love, and hope to her when

she was a very lonely child. My second middle name Marie was the name of my

mother’s mother. It was then common in Germany to use the first names of the two

grand mothers for a girl, or of the two first names of the grand fathers for a boy, or of

other significant relatives, or historical persons as middle names for the child. As a rule,

children in Europe in the nineteenth century were given multiple middle names.

Both my parents were employed at the Deutsche Bank in Berlin before I was born and

this is where they met. After her graduation from high school, my mother obtained a

position as secretary in the America division of the Deutsche Bank where she was

responsible for translating the correspondence to and from America.

My father was born on the 21st of June 1903. He was only four months older than my

mother. He was the third child of Alfred and Emma Weber. The financial situation of

the Weber family allowed only their eldest son, Gerhard, to receive a formal education.

This was the uncle Gerhard who later became a jurist. My father’s older sister, Gabriele,

took fashion-design courses and became somewhat successful in that work. My father

studied economics and accounting which enabled him to get a job at the Deutsche Bank

in the book keeping department.

The late twenties and early thirties were years of great financial difficulties for most

people. Unemployment was widespread. Enormous sums had to be paid in reparations

to the allies for the lost war of 1914-1918, also known as World War I. Payment of

reparations led to staggering inflation of prices for goods in Germany. Eventually, a

postage stamp or a loaf of bread cost hundreds, thousands, even millions of marks. My

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step mother recalled her memories of men carrying their salary home in back packs or

suitcases because of the large number of worthless bills that had to be paid out every two

weeks. The years of inflation were followed by the Great Depression that started in the

United States in October 1929. My parents and grandparents along with a large part of

the urban population lived near starvation for several years, surviving, as they said,

mostly on turnip soup. Historians state that the civilian population suffered more

deprivations and deaths from starvation after World War I than they had during the war.

This experience was also true for the period following World War II as I can testify from

my own experience.

The modest wealth of my grand parents had been lost in the depression. Although both

my parents were glad to be employed, their salaries were insufficient for them to live

independently from their parents. They felt a deep love for each other but their

engagement that was to last six years before they felt financially able to exchange their

marriage vows on the 21st of April 1934 in the Dom, the Lutheran Cathedral of Berlin.

Even after their marriage, my parents were unable to afford their own apartment. My

maternal grandparents allowed my parents to move into my mother’s small bedroom in

their own apartment on the third floor of the five-story apartment house Am Planufer 36

in Berlin Kreutzberg. It was a sacrifice for the aged couple to accept the young people

into their crowded living space. What had been the coming and going of polite

cooperating adults would soon become more complicated by the arrival of a baby girl.

Financially this was an additional burden on the family because my mother gave up her

position to be a full time wife and mother.

I was born at the Martin Luther Krankenhaus in Berlin-Schmargendorf on the 27th

of July

1935 and was baptized there into the Lutheran Faith eight days later, on the 4th

of August

1935. I spent my first three years in my grandparents’ apartment while my father

struggled to advance and earn more money. Meanwhile, my mother had to deal with the

conflicts that arose from the cramped conditions in the small apartment between the

demands of her new family and her elderly parents. I can remember their arguing even

though I was only three or four years old when we were finally able to move into our own

apartment on the ground floor of the same building. The other battles that I remember

from this time took place between my mother and me and were food related. My mother

thought that it was essential for my growth and well-being to eat all my food. For

example, each morning I had to eat semolina cooked with milk over which fruit juice was

poured. I could eat a reasonable amount of the semolina as long as the juice did not mix

with the cereal but if it mixed, which was inevitable, the lovely red juice would turn

purple and thereby making the mush inedible as far as I was concerned. Each morning a

contest of wills ensued between my mother and me. The outcome was invariable

frustration for my mother and an even more impossible situation for me when my tears

mixed with the purple mess.

For our annual vacations, we often went to the Baltic Sea. I have fond memories of the

beaches, the combination of the sun and the invigorating cold breezes from the sea. One

could wrap up and cuddle into a rented basket chair on the beach for some shelter from

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the cold wind. Each year there were the familiar rituals associated with the beach, the

application of the Nivea crème, the walks along the chalk shores, the boardwalk concerts,

and the souvenir shops filled with treasures made of amber and sea shells.

My mother was a strongly spiritual person. My most vivid memories of her are her

prayerful trust in God and her love for my father. Her prayers with me and for me carried

us through the horrors of World War II. My young mind was cool and rational compared

to her anguish and fervor but I saw her love in the many prayers at my bedside and for

that I was grateful. When my mother died of typhus in February 1946, I was bereft of

that love. My rationality was all I had left and my prayers such as they were always

contained the element of doubt. Only seldom, when pain overwhelmed me, would I

tentatively repeat the words of the hymn my mother had so often prayed with me:

“Befiehl du deine Wege und was das Herze krankt der allertreusten Pflege, des der den

Himmel lenkt, der Wolken, Luft, und Winden gibt Wege Lauf und Bahn, der wird auch

Wege finden da dein Fuss gehen kann” (Command your ways and the troubles of your

heart to Him who reigns in heaven. He who guides clouds, air and winds will also find

paths where your foot can tread).

What that hymn meant for my mother is revealed in one of the last preserved letters that

she sent to my father, dated 30 March 1944. This letter contains her loving greetings to

my father at the front on the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary on 21 April

1944. In it she recounted how she had sought comfort by attending worship services in

Berlin’s Lutheran Cathedral, the “Dom”, during the difficult years before their marriage.

One day on her way to work the words of the above hymn entered her troubled mind with

such power that it gave her a deep sense of peace that never left her for the rest of her

short life.

All my recollections tell me that my basic outlook on life and character were already

formed when I first became aware of my desires and thoughts and never changed through

all my life. I delighted in plants and animals and was eager to observe and to protect life.

I was an only child, isolated from other children in our small nuclear family surrounded

only by my parents and a few elderly relatives. I spent all my time with my mother and

often played in the kitchen while she prepared food. We had a potato-bin in our kitchen

and for some reason spiders liked to live among the potatoes. While moving the potatoes

around me noticed that I had squashed a spider. I was saddened that my action had

caused the death of the spider. When my mother later asked me to select a stated number

of potatoes (to teach me counting), I would pick each one up ever so carefully so as not to

kill another spider through my carelessness but to my horror I soon discovered that I had

squashed another spider. This disturbed me greatly, I felt responsible for the death of a

creature at such an early age. I also knew then already how to lift my spirits. I would dig

up small weeds such as wild Chamomile from between the trolley tracks in Berlin and

take them home, plant them in flower pots and place them on the window sill of our

living room.

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Nature played an important role for us city dwellers. My parents regularly took me out

into the fresh air on weekends for walks in parks or nearby forests. At first I would run

and explore full of enthusiasm but soon I would tire of walking and asked to be carried.

Not that I enjoyed being carried so much but rather walking really exhausted me and I

remember begging my parents to stop walking because my legs hurt and my head began

to swim from the heat and perhaps also from boredom. There was one road we often

walked in the spring that was flanked by huge bushes of fragrant large-blossomed wild

roses. Sometimes we returned in the fall to harvest the rose pips to dry them and make

rose-hip tea. These pips were large and round and almost the size of small apples. It

must have been after these roses that I received the name Rosemarie because my mother

told me that she had received a huge bouquet of wild roses from my father when they

were engaged and that she then decided to name her daughter Rosemarie.

Our weekend excursions often took us to the lakes around Berlin. My parents owned a

paddle boat that was stored for a small fee in a boat house in Caputh. It was a beautiful

boat made of lacquered wood. When the weather was fair, we would take the city train to

Caputh, walk to the boat house, and my father would lift down the paddle boat that was

hanging from the ceiling in the boat house. My mother would put a cork belt around my

waist and then we loaded up the boat with drink and sandwiches. My father paddled

while my mother steered the boat around the shores of the placid waters of the local

lakes. Boating was pleasant for me because the only walk involved was the one to the

boat house and then came the reward of just being able to sit there and observe the many

water creatures below and the scenery around us. My brother Helmut now owns a little

house probably not far from where the boat house must have been. The swans, ducks,

and coots are still plentiful on the canal right outside his house.

We spent summer vacations either at the beach on the island Rugen in the Baltic Sea, as I

already related, or later when I was a little older and able to keep up with walking and

climbing in the mountains. In the mountains, I enjoyed picking wild strawberries and

wild raspberries. When we had collected an ample supply, we took the berries home,

washed them, sprinkled them with sugar, and added cream for a delicious desert. The

wild strawberries of the German forests are tiny compared to the cultivated varieties but

their flavor is far superior.

As a child, I suffered from frequent bouts of asthma and bronchitis. My mother would

take me to the forest and have me perform breathing exercises to expand my lungs.

When I was ill, my mother boiled water and poured it in a large bowl over Chamomile

flowers, as soon as the water had cooled just a little, she would have me put my head over

the steaming bowl and I had to inhale the vapors ever mindful not to tip over the bowl.

My mother also applied all kinds of poultices to my chest. There were linseed poultices,

a black salve poultice which had strong vapors and irritated the skin, and the one I liked

the best was a healing-earth poultice. I preferred this therapy because after about a half

hour or so, when the initial benefit of the heat began to subside, I started to dig under the

moist towels for the brown clay that I could then form into marbles and roll them all over

the bed sheets. When I had fever, my mother gave me pure unsweetened and undiluted

cherry juice; this was supposed to drive down the fever. I don’t know if it had any effect

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but it tasted good. Then, of course, the bane of all children at that time, especially in Italy

as I later learned, was Castor oil. Also daily I had to swallow a tablespoon of cod liver

oil for strong bones. These were the small tortures imposed by loving mothers.

In the autumn of the year 1940, my father was called up to serve in the German Air

Force. From then on, my mother and I were alone except for my mother’s aged parents

who lived two flights up in the same Berlin apartment house in which we had a two-room

apartment on the ground floor. My grandmother spent a lot of time with us and she did

the best she could to keep my mother company. She taught my little fingers to crochet

and to knit. This was a welcome activity for me because I missed my father who had

always devised activities to train my coordination in contrast to my mother who always

tried to feed me knowledge. For example, when I was still too little to handle sharps, he

would skillfully fashion needles from matches so that I could embroider squares of fabric.

At other times, he would draw pictures with me. I remember my pride over the little

artistic productions. My grandmother, on the other hand, after my first attempt at

crocheting a potholder, asked me to undo what I had done and start over when I had

dropped too many stitches. I was indignant at her request; it had never happened before

that I had produced something that was not “wonderful”. I had worked so hard and was

proud of the fabric I had created even if it was not perfect. Undoing my work was

impossible for me, so I converted the proposed potholder into a cap for my teddy bear

and stuck the ears through the holes. I can still feel the pride of this autonomous

decision. This episode taught me two valuable lessons, not everything we do turns out

well and that is alright too as the cliché states, when life gives you a lemon make

lemonade, and sometimes it is best to undo what one has done and start over. I

continued to practice crocheting and later also learned to knit and eventually even

produced an acceptable potholder; however, the boring potholder never quite gave me the

satisfaction that I got from the teddy cap.

In the fall of 1941, I entered school in Berlin. It was an exciting day for me that I had

hoped for and anticipated for so long. I had wanted to go to school for at least a year but

there was no preschool and no kindergarten in those days. When I was five, I looked

with envy at the children I saw walking to school or met in the subway with their book

satchels on their back My mother gave me an old purse that I converted into a book

satchel by adding straps so I could wear it on my back like the other children carried their

book bags. I played school, as usual by myself because we had no family nearby and my

mother would not let me out of her sight to associate with neighbor children. There also

were not many children in our neighborhood that I can remember.

Finally, the great day came. It was customary for children to receive a large brightly

decorated cone filled with sweets for the first day of school. This too is a custom that

goes way back. In ancient Rome, children were lured to their first lessons with cookies

and sweets but then gradually the very painful and strict classical education of the time

took over. What a chock it must have been for the children. St. Augustine describes this

so well in his Confessions. I started out with a well-organized book bag containing a

pencil box, erasers, and note books. I was so proud of this real school bag and had the

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best intentions to always be neat and organized but it did not take long and this perfect

order disintegrated until the beginning of the next school year.

In 1942, the nightly bombing raids over Berlin grew increasingly more severe. We lived

near a gas storage facility located at the bank of a canal across the street from us. The gas

works were an obvious target for the bombing raids that began with the British napalm

incendiary bombs. We would go to bed fully dressed so that when we heard the sirens at

night we could run down into the communal cellars of the apartment house. Normally

these cellars were parceled out one room to each family but during the war several of

them were combined to form a shelter. There we would sit together, listen to the

explosions and pray. There were men, apartment wardens, who would go up

immediately after the explosions and see if there was any impact in the vicinity. There

was also some fire-fighting equipment kept ready and of course each of us had our gas

mask. The only time that I ever put one on was during the fitting and that time I nearly

suffocated. This gas mask was an early model fashioned with a narrow rubber sleeve that

had to be pulled over the head until the face fit into the breathing mask. The sleeve was

very difficult to pull down so that there was a time of complete air obstruction until an

adult had finally pulled the tight sleeve down far enough to access the air. One can

imagine how difficult that was to do for a child struggling to stay alive. One effect of the

war was that we were no longer able to obtain wheat bread because Germany had

imported wheat from Canada or the US who no longer traded with Germany so all our

bread was baked from German-grown rye. For breakfast, Germans prefer to eat wheat

rolls and in the afternoon sweet rolls and cake. All recipes now had to be improvised and

were baked with rye flour rather than wheat. Sugar derived from sugar cane was scarce

as the imports from America ceased. Sugar was now made from German-grown sugar

beets. Many other food stuffs were no longer available and were manufactured from

artificial substitutes such as “kunsthonig”, kunst means artificial and honig is honey. The

rolls thus prepared tasted sweet but unpleasant, as a reminder of war and deprivation even

though we were not going hungry yet.

My father’s parents owned a summer home in Alt-Buchhorst outside Berlin. It took

about forty-five minutes to take the subway to the end-station Erkner, from there we had

to take a regional train in the direction Furstenwalde, Frankfurth an der Oder for one

more stop to Fangschleuse. From the train station we walked about a half an hour

through the forest until we arrived at the village of Alt-Buchhorst. The trip to Alt-

Buchhorst used to be a pleasant weekend outing for at least three generations of our

family. As the bombing raids on Berlin continued to intensify in the winter of 1942, my

mother packed the absolute necessities and moved with me to Alt-Buchhorst. I am

amazed today how much of normal civilian life continued in spite of the war. While we

were faced with almost nightly bombing raids, I had started second grade in Berlin until

we transferred to Alt-Buchhorst. We took many trips back and forth between Alt-

Buchhorst and Berlin on weekends because we maintained our apartment in Berlin and

my Grandparents stayed in Berlin. The cityscape we passed each time changed as the

level of destruction increased.

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Even in the idyllic forest village of Alt-Buchhorst life did not remain peaceful. There

was a factory nearby. I do not know what was produced there but it became a target for

British carpet bombing. One morning the meadows were blanketed with small yellow

burning heaps of a phosphorous material. Sometimes we found intact sticks more than a

foot long and about two inches thick that contained incendiary devices. The ground was

littered with propaganda leaflets. This was all quite exciting for us children. One

morning after a bombing raid on the factory, one of our sub-letters whose husband had

worked there that night was crying because her husband was not among the workers who

were straggling out of the factory. My mother tried to console her and I too felt

sympathy for her. Finally, he came home safe and sound but his clothes were full of burn

holes. Instead of celebrating his safe return, his wife began to complain that his new

corduroy trousers were burnt. In amazement and childish innocence for the first time in

my life, I began to wonder about the psychology of human behavior.

We stayed in Alt-Buchhorst for about a year. My mother contracted hepatitis while we

were in Alt-Buchhorst and became very ill. She became so jaundiced that her skin

looked dark orange. She felt extremely fatigued and for a short time I had to play the

nurse at the tender age of eight. There was no-one else to care for her.

In November 1943, there was an appeal from the government to move women and

children away from potential targets to small villages. We had no relatives in the country

but my father’s comrade in the military, Kurt Seifert, was from Silesia. He arranged with

his wife that we could come to his house in Nieder-Thiemendorf near Lauban, then part

of Germany, later ceded to Poland after the war. My mother moved her parents and me

to Nieder-Thiemendorf during December or January of 1944. We took a train from the

Gorlitzer Bahnhof in Berlin. I will never forget the frightening experience of this train

trip. Railroads had become the vehicles for troop transports and weapons, refugees, and

as I later learned for the mass transports to the concentration camps. Order and civility

had given way to the commands of armed soldiers. I could sense grave danger

surrounding us. When my mother had to leave the train to make some inquiries while I

stayed behind with my grand parents I became terrified. Even my otherwise gentle and

reasoning mother could only bark commands to keep us all in line and alive. We finally

arrived at our destination in the deep snow and cold of winter. Where we had hoped to

find refuge, instead of help and compassion, my mother discovered that we were not

welcome. But after a day or two of searching for other accommodations, she found a

kindly woman who was willing to take us into her house.

For me, our time in Silesia was a time of discovery of my own personality, my loneliness,

and the inner strength to shape a rich and satisfying life nevertheless. That spring when

the snow thawed and I was able to go out to play, I discovered that the local village

children shunned me for my diction and past experience that was so different from theirs.

As a remedy for my loneliness I invented playmates. When alone in the garden, I played

and talked with my imaginary best friend Inge. I marveled at this coincidence later when

my father remarried after the death of my mother and I received a step-sister named Inge.

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I planted a garden in a wooded area near the house and tended it with the people I had

invented. My garden was on a slope that led down to the small rushing creek. Normally

it was easy to cross the creek by jumping from boulder to boulder, but that spring, when

the deep snows of the previous harsh winter had melted, the creek became a raging river

overnight, filling the entire valley and sweeping barns, cows, and other debris in its

torrent. I witnessed a flash flood.

I had always loved animals and therefore tried to befriend the geese that walked the

village road. I knew geese as friendly creatures from my early picture books and for that

reason totally underestimated the ferocious temper of a gander. When he hissed at me, I

thought he was just warning me off and I thought he would go away if I left him and his

geese alone but he came after me biting my legs with his powerful beak and not letting

up. I was unable to free myself from that predicament until weighing my options I saw

his Achilles heel, so to say, in his long neck. I grabbed it and swung the gander in a

circle around me once or twice and when I let him go, he decided he had enough and left

me in peace. The village children had watched this episode with glee, seeing the city girl

in so much trouble. But after my successful operation I suddenly earned their respect,

especially that of the boys. So our relations were getting better and when school ended in

the summer and we had a school picnic on the day of my birthday, I asked my mother to

bake a cake for the class. She ordered large sheets of cake for the children from a bakery.

After that, I became the most popular girl in class.

The summer was warm and beautiful. We lived in a bucolic and oddly peaceful part of

the country. There were no soldiers, no guns, and no bombs. Even my father was able to

visit us for a few days. This time he had to carry his rifle with him at all times. What he

would have done with it had he needed to use it is another question. I could not imagine

my father shooting at anybody and I don’t believe he could either. The war kept

marching on and soon we learned that the Russians were not far away. That fall, there

was no school. People were planning their escape but no-one knew where to turn. The

war was raging in Germany and the Russians were closing in from the east.

We walked around not knowing how to live while we were still alive. My mother tried to

indulge in the normal life that she had left behind once more one beautiful fall day. We

went to the nearby town of Lauban. There we did some shopping and stopped for

refreshments. We passed a jewelry store and my mother looked at some of the articles

that were displayed there. I really liked a necklace of pink Austrian crystal beads. My

mother’s birthday was coming up on the first day of November and I wanted to buy the

necklace for her. It struck both of us as absurd under the circumstances to buy a necklace

but my mother gave me the money to buy her the necklace. That day we managed to

wrest some happiness from an otherwise dark time.

As the winter and the Russians advanced, we did not know what to do. There were no

civilian transport possibilities back to Germany other than walking. An endless stream of

refugees was coming down the main thoroughfare on horse or donkey carts piled with a

few possessions topped by children and the elderly unable to walk. Should we join them

or was there any hope of survival if we stayed? Was there a chance for a place on a

train? My mother explored all possibilities. The reports from the Russian front were

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grim. We heard of the atrocities real or exaggerated committed by the advancing Russian

army. How could my mother walk with two aged parents and a child? My grand father

was eighty-six and my grand mother was seventy-five years old.

Around Christmas, my grand father became ill with the flu. Medications were not

available and he was already debilitated by age and poor nutrition. He could not shake

his cough. After two weeks his breathing became more and more labored. He died in

early January 1945. We hastily buried him there in Nieder-Thiemendorf and a few days

later we had to flee from the Russians.

Soon Silesia fell to the onslaught of the Red Army. A few days before the arrival of the

Russians, my mother was able to stuff us on an incredibly crowded train that had been

procured for that emergency by the government. People were sitting on top of the trains

and everywhere, it was a miracle that we got on. The train took us only a short distance

out of Silesia and away from the front. Then we had to get off. We spent the night at

that train station, where it was, I don’t remember. In the morning, my mother was able to

buy a small wagon to transport our two suitcases containing all that we possessed and my

grand mother whenever she was unable to continue walking. Now we lived the life of

vagrants and beggars, my mother tried to find food for us but there was none.

My mother stood in line at a local bakery to get a loaf of bread before the supply was

exhausted. The baker was handing out the loaves as soon as they came out of the oven.

Often I remember these scenes when I see reports on television about refugees and food

distribution in other countries. I understand the fear, the running, and the grasping to find

food to stay alive or to get on to the last transport out of a dangerous place. The roads

were full of destitute refugees there was never enough food to go around often the small

wagons people were pulling broke down, panic was a constant companion for us. Once

my mother was able to buy two kilos of sugar, a treasure indeed, we ate bread sprinkled

with sugar for days on end and that kept us alive.

We usually walked ten or twelve kilometers a day. At night fall we had to find shelter.

My mother had to endure endless humiliation. Some people had polite excuses of

already filled shelters, others were unable or unwilling to admit refugees, doors were

often slammed rudely in my mother’s face, but once after an especially harrowing and

unsuccessful search she met with unexpected kindness. After having been refused at all

prospective shelters in the village, my mother made one last desperate attempt to find a

place for us to stay that night. She had been directed to the local butcher’s house. She

was almost afraid to knock on the door because she thought that the butcher’s brutal

profession would certainly have hardened him to others in need. To her great surprise,

my despondent mother was received with the utmost kindness. We were invited in by the

butcher and his wife who immediately set to work cooking us a hot meal. It was the first

hot meal we had had in days. There was even some fat and meat in the soup, such

nourishing food we had not eaten in months. My mother expressed her deep gratitude to

the family and told me that in the butcher and his wife she had met godly people.

11

We were trying to reach Dresden, but as we got closer, we saw the night skies red from

the burning of Dresden. It was the second week in February 1945 when repeated massive

bombing raids utterly destroyed this once beautiful city. What anguish this firework

display must been for my mother who understood only too well how many souls were

perishing in this fire. My childish concerns were yet unable to grasp the full horror of

this war. Again we were in a situation where each move could mean death. My mother

was unsure which way to turn, ahead of us were the bombing raids and behind us was the

Russian Army. Only prayer for the guiding hand of god could offer her some comfort.

We diverted our track toward the Elbsandstein Mountains hoping to escape the enemy

tanks higher up in the mountains.

Eventually, we arrived in the town of Koenigstein. Koenigstein lies in a valley of the

Elbsandstein Mountains on the Elbe River. The industrial region of the town stretched

along the river, higher up on the side of the mountain were small homes and guest

houses, and presiding over all was the Castle Koenigstein. In peace time, Koenigstein

was a resort and spa. A genteel and friendly attitude towards strangers still persisted even

in these hellish times. We found refuge in a house on the slopes of the mountain

overlooking the river below us. It was a beautiful location well-suited to spend a

vacation. We had not chosen this site but war had brought us here and war surrounded

us. There amidst beauty and kindness, we spent the remainder of the war.

We missed my father very much. He was last stationed in Poland working in an Air

Force office. He had this job because it was most suitable for a man who in civilian life

worked as an accountant in a bank. Until the last few months of the war my parents were

able to arrange short vacations outside Berlin each summer whenever my father received

a furlough. These brief glimpses of normalcy finally ended after my father’s short visit in

Nieder-Thiemendorf in the summer of 1944. My mother was able to correspond with my

father for a few more months until we no longer heard from him because the advance of

the Russian Army from the east changed the German land into a battle zone.

While we were in Koenigstein, the news reached us that my father’s mother, Emma

Weber, along with my Uncle Werner’s wife Margot and their young son Joerg perished

in the cellar of their apartment house during a bombing raid on February 23, 1945. My

uncle Werner also had to serve in the military toward the end of the war, but I believe

that he stayed in or near Berlin. I do not remember how we heard about the death of his

mother, wife, and four-year-old son, but we received news somehow and perhaps even

my father was contacted but eventually all communication ceased and none of us knew if

the other was dead or alive. In reflecting on these events, I cannot help but be amazed

that civil administration still functioned and how long communication continued to flow

effectively during that brutal war.

For me, Koenigstein was a surreal experience of peace and beauty. There I found

friendly children; some boys showed me tadpoles in a creek that I, as a city dweller, had

never seen before. They genuinely wanted to show me their hidden treasures and did not

make fun of my ignorance as would have been the case in Silesia. I no longer felt lonely

and oppressed, I felt free again. The adults also shared any scrap of news that came their

12

way from passing soldiers and the stream of refugees. Some of this news was too

dreadful to share with children and we only occasionally caught snatches of the adult

conversation or saw the results of warfare with our own eyes when we came across a

dead body by the side of the road. There was now talk of the approaching, inevitable end

of this horrible war and I could see joy again in the eyes of my mother and those with

whom she spoke.

We were all starving but residents shared all they had and all they knew. While we were

in Silesia we had often been treated with resentment but now we were treated as equals

and I know that my mother also felt that comfort. Great was the jubilation in response to

news of the advancing allies in March of 1945 but then came the Russians and with them

war and rumors of atrocities. The locals tried to hide us in their cellars and barns while

war raged around us. Many times, my mother would cover me with her body and pray

over me all night. When the shooting ceased, we would tap around in the dark to find

something to drink or eat. Once, I discovered that I was sitting on a barrel of pickles, so I

reached in and handed out pickles to anyone who wanted one. There was joy even in this

communion.

The horrors of war washed over us during those days and nights. We heard the battle

raging around us the tanks rolling down the street. We often did not dare to look out to

see if these were German or Russian tanks, it mattered little, their business was war and

we all hoped and prayed that they would move on. When the battle had finally passed,

we emerged from our hideout to see a landscape full of the reminders of war. I tried to

befriend a confused little donkey who was walking down the street. We saw the

remnants of a refugee trek that had hastily rushed from the enemy, clothing and

belongings strewn along the street. Fallen soldiers were lying by the side of the road

among all the broken-down vehicles, clothing, and dead animals. No family was there to

mourn these men. A little home-made rag doll was lying in the road among the debris; I

picked it up and kept it for many years even though I no longer played with dolls. I much

loved this doll in memory of the poor child who had lost it; and I wondered if this child

was safe.

Local people came together to tend to the most pressing chores. They buried the dead,

caught the surviving animals, and tried to make their town livable again. My mother

went out searching for food and for news about the progress of the allies. One day early

in May 1945, the people on the street seemed to be electrified; news spread that the

German Army had surrendered and that the war was over. My mother cried and laughed

at the same time, strangers hugged each other; none could contain their joy.

Now our thoughts turned to our families and former home. We were wondering and

fearing to what new pain this journey would lead us. As soon as it was safe enough to

travel we set out once more on foot on the slow mile by mile trek towards home, to

Berlin. We saw armored vehicles along the way and tanks but at least now we no longer

had to fear the guns. We tried to travel the small country roads to stay away from the

Russians. My mother warned me of the brutality of some soldiers especially toward

13

women and we tried all we could to stay away from them. Most vulnerable to violence

were the young women and we heard stories of teenage girls and young women who had

committed suicide rather than to fall into the hands of the soldiers. So my mother would

often have my grand mother and me stay in a hidden spot while she searched for a safe

shelter for the night.

It is strange to tell but life is full of the strangest contradictions, we were refugees

running for our lives and yet we carried with us our pet birds. When we lived in Berlin,

we had a Canary named Matzl. My father had bought Matzl for my mother before I was

even born, so I had never known life without Matzl. Matzl sang beautifully, he was tame

and would come and sit on my finger and he loved to eat fried potatoes from my father’s

plate. In 1942, during the time of the nightly bombing raids in Berlin, my mother and I

walked around the corner of our house to buy some groceries. Suddenly I saw a large

swarm of noisy sparrows swooping into the bushes near our home. I then noticed the

reason for their excitement; they were pursuing a little yellow canary. My mother asked

me to stay there and watch the Canary while she quickly ran to our apartment to get

Matzl’s cage. She returned a few minutes later and put the cage on the ground near

where the little bird was hiding. In a flash, this little bird knew a refuge when it saw one

and hopped into the cage. We were overjoyed and took him home where we introduced

him to Matzl. The new bird was not completely yellow like Matzel but he had a little

olive splash on his head. At first, the little bird was so scared that he did not make a

sound. It took him a day or so to settle into his new environment. We were anxiously

waiting to see if he could chirp or sing like Matzel but one day he said what sounded to

us like shewitt, and since we had not giving him a name yet, we named him Shewittchen.

Matzl and Shewittchen got along well. Soon they would both lighten our wartime days

with song and the special delight that our pets can give us with their antics. Of course

when we became refugees to save ourselves it would have been unthinkable for us to

leave Matzl and Shewittchen behind, so in all our sad travels we carried also with us the

bird cage covered with a blanket. Matzl was advanced in years, therefore, it was not

surprising that soon after my grandfather died in that cold and bitter January 1945 in

Silesia, Matzl also got the flu and died, but Shewittchen we continued to carry with us.

After the war when we had started our trek toward Berlin, we still had Shewittchen. We

had found refuge in a large farm for a few days where there were former French prisoners

of war sent to that farm by the Nazies as farm hands. In the chaos at the end of the war,

they were still there waiting for transport to France. My mother spoke French with them

and they in turn played with me talking of their own wives and children and wondering if

they would find them alive when they got back. My mother taught me little French songs

to sing to them and we enjoyed ourselves sharing good will and kindness. It was a large

farm, the owners were kind and we had a comfortable room to sleep in. Unfortunately

the newfound freedom made us a little careless and we did not close the door to our room

carefully enough so that one day the farm cat must have slipped into the room because

when we returned we found the cage on the floor, Shewittchen was gone, and only a few

feathers were left behind. We felt especially guilty because this tragedy could have been

prevented.

14

We were delayed on this farm for some time because I came down with the whooping

cough (Pertussis). As I was improving, my mother who had not had the disease in

childhood also came down with it. The symptoms affected my mother much worse than

they had me and there were times when we were afraid that she would suffocate from the

constant severe coughing fits. I was anxious to relieve her suffering but did not know

what to do. We collaborated in her care, she would tell me what she thought might help

and I would eagerly listen and try to provide it. My mother recovered, having summoned

all her strength in order to prevent me from becoming an orphan stranded on the way to

Berlin with my feeble grandmother.

As soon as we felt strong enough to go on, we continued our walk towards Berlin as far

as our daily strength permitted. At one stop on the road, we were directed to a large

estate where a Russian Army detachment was quartered. The main house was once a

mansion, not all of the rooms were occupied by the soldiers, so that there was a room also

for us. The young Russian officer in charge was an exceptionally kind and cultured man.

In the evening, I met him meditating near a goldfish pond in a once beautiful garden

behind the house. He smiled at me kindly and although we were unable to communicate,

I was not afraid of him; both my mother and I trusted him. He took my head in his hands

and lifted me up and laughed, only later did I learn that this was dangerous to do with

children. I must have reminded him of his child or family. The war was over and we

were glad to be civilized once more.

Some of the Russian soldiers preparing food for the company in the house amused us.

They were simple Russian peasants who had grown up in Russian villages in utter

poverty, and so they were unfamiliar with the simplest modern appliances. They pressed

every button and lever in the house and marveled at running water and flushing toilets.

Their fertile minds sometimes put these unfamiliar conveniences to strange use. The

soldiers had confiscated a store of potatoes that they intended to cook. Some soldiers

were already busy washing potatoes in the sink but there was still a heap of muddy

potatoes to be washed and things were not progressing fast enough for the cook, a large

and ebullient man with a thundering voice and a big heart. He had a brilliant idea to

expedite the task of washing the mud off the potatoes. He put a large stone in the bottom

of the toilet, then piled the bowl with potatoes and flushed, and presto, the potatoes were

washed without much effort. The cook beamed, the officer shook his head, all laughed,

no more enemies; how good it felt just to be human again. The potatoes were duly

cooked, and yes, we shared their meal.

My mother’s father, Karl Oettrich, was from Doberlug-Kirchhain in the Niederlausitz

which lay on the way to Berlin. We headed in the direction of that town where my

mother hoped that we could stay a while with her relatives before attempting the final leg

of our return journey to Berlin. My mother had not visited these relatives in a long time

and I had never seen them before, so consequently, I no longer recall the names of the

people with whom we stayed. More than fifty years later, my sister Inge became friends

with a man who had lived ten years in Doberlug-Kirchhain. He recalled the unusual

name Oettrich and said that he thought the family owned a tannery business, one of the

15

main industries in that area. We looked in the phone book, and sure enough there were

several entries under the name Oettrich.

The relationship with our relatives was somewhat distant although the elderly aunt or

cousin of my mother who took us in tried to be kind. I remember though that she was

upset when I used more than one piece of the book she had cut up as toilet paper. Later, I

understood that she was only trying to provide the necessities. She tried to keep an

immaculate house and had crocheted doilies over all the tables, backs of chairs, and even

the toilet seat. I suppose that this may have contributed to my dislike of doilies.

The children of our relatives and their friends liked to roll down a grassy slope. This

made me dizzy, and I broke out in hives all over afterwards. I envied the other children

who simply enjoyed this game and did not seem to suffer any allergies. Leaving me in

the care of the relatives with whom we stayed, my mother went to the train station

frequently trying to find transportation back to Berlin.

Finally, in August of 1945, railroad officials told my mother that we could ride in a lorry

on top of the coals that were being transported to Berlin. This offer was a great relief for

my mother because it would have been virtually impossible for us starved and exhausted

people with my old grandmother to walk the rest of the way. We took our few

belongings and went to the train station at the appointed time. The train arrived and we

and several other people climbed up on the coals. Getting my grandmother up there was a

bit of a challenge but eventually with some help, we succeeded. There was a little space

between the coals and the side of the wagon so that we felt fairly secure. We were not

the only ones hitching this ride; there were people on the other wagons as well. The train

was moving slowly but the distance was not that far so that we arrived in Berlin safely

and much easier than we had thought.

We found Berlin in total ruin. How we made it from the train station to our old house or

at least to where it used to be, I do not remember but I believe that some of the city trains

must have been running again because I remember arriving at our usual subway station

Prinzenstrasse. We saw only mountains of rubble on our street where once five-story

apartment houses had stood. The street Am Planufer #36, where we had lived was no

more. There was only one house left on our street; it was Am Planufer #34, where my

grandmother’s younger brother, Uncle Julius Noack and his wife Aunt Clara,

“Claerchen”, lived. All other houses were rubble.

We climbed the rickety stairs to their apartment trying to see if we would still find any of

our relatives there, while my grandmother waited below. It was a great joy for us when

my Aunt Clara opened the door. She was old and frail, but otherwise as I remembered

her. Aunt Clara immediately invited us in, and I ran down the stairs to help my

grandmother up that winding stair to the fourth floor. Uncle Julius, who had been an

intelligent business man, unaffected by the mental feebleness of my grandmother, had

died during the war. When Aunt Clara invited us in, I went down the stairs to get my

grandmother and assisted her up to the fourth floor. Aunt Clara said we could stay with

her but most of the apartment was not usable. The house was so badly damaged that the

16

roof leaked, there were fallen ceilings, and the wind blew through holes in the walls.

Aunt Clara had moved into the bathroom and prepared her bed in the bathtub. It was the

only room that was relatively safe from the elements, except for a leak in the ceiling, for

that she had spanned an umbrella over the bathtub. She was able to heat the bathroom in

cold weather by making a fire in the small stove that doubled as a hot water heater.

Annedore and I went to this house in February 2005. We noted that the part of Am

Planufer where we used to live was now called Karl Hertz Strasse, so that the old

numbers and street names no longer agree. All houses had been rebuilt with similar

apartment houses. We found the house where my Aunt Clara and Uncle Julius lived. It

is the only one of the old houses still in existence. Although it has been restored and

renovated, I recognized it by the old stairwell and got a glimpse of the old dreary

courtyards that were behind these apartment houses.

My Aunt Clara had two children, my mother’s first cousins, Heinz and Hilde. Heinz was

an engineer. Aunt Clara did not know where he was, he had been taken to Russia by the

Russians after the war and she had no idea where they took him. This distressed her

greatly but she hoped that he was alive and well and that she would hear from him again

when international relations became more normalized. I do not remember what kind of

work he did but his knowledge must have been of value to the Russians. Many German

scientists and experts were taken to Russia to help rebuild that country just as some

scientists who ended up under American occupation were taken to America. It was our

misfortune that we were in a part of Germany that was occupied by the Russians. Aunt

Clara told us that Hilde and her small child were well but she did not know if her husband

was still alive. They were not living in the same house, so we did not see them.

I have good memories of both my Uncle Julius and my Aunt Clara. My Aunt Clara had

been especially kind to me when I was small, she would always make a fuss over me and

have cookies for me. Among older adults whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to

correct children, she was an exception. She actually seemed to enjoy children. Naturally,

I liked Aunt Clara and felt comfortable with her because she was not as distant as many

older adults of that time were to children. I especially liked her daughter, my mother’s

cousin, Hilde. Before we left Berlin, she got married and had her first baby. Both my

mother and I were so excited about the baby. She lived nearby and would come by often

with her baby girl. My mother and I as only children missed the company of young

people in our lives; this made Hilde and her baby even more special.

Both my mother’s parents were from the Niederlausitz. The Noacks, on my mother’s

mother’s father’s side were an old Wendic family. The Wends were a Slavic tribe that

had settled in the Niederlausitz (Lusatia) in the eight or ninth century. The Wends, also

called Sorbs, are of Serbian origin and speak their own language. Persecuted and pushed

into undesirable marshland by the Germans, they nevertheless learned to adapt to the land

and thrive. They created a unique landscape crisscrossed by canals where they planted

herbs and other water-loving crops. Lusatia was later incorporated into Germany.

During the Nazi era they were considered undesirable due to their non-Germanic Slavic

race and their language and culture were suppressed. After the war, the German

17

Democratic Republic promoted a revival of their culture and their language. Today, they

still live in the area around Cottbus growing mainly cucumbers. Their towns, often only

accessible by boat have become popular tourist destinations. The Sorbs guide tourist

boats through the many canals past docks with vegetable stands. The locals wear

traditional picturesque costumes. Tourists can buy vegetables, cucumbers, and souvenirs

directly from the tourist boats thereby cotributing to the local economy. The name Noack

is a Wendic name. Aunt Clare told us that there was an old Noack estate that had been

occupied by the Noack family since the fifteenth century that was still occupied by

distant relatives after the war. The owners were old and the estate had to be sold but

there was no one from the Noack family able to buy it.

With my grandmother safely staying with my Aunt Clara, my mother and I were free to

seek out any other surviving relatives. We found that the house where my Uncle

Gerhard, Aunt Trude, and their four children were living was miraculously still standing

as the only house on Crusemark Strasse 2 in Berlin-Pankow. What fear must of what we

might find must have occupied my mother’s heart when we approached the former home

of our relatives. Miraculously, we found the whole family alive.

What joy it was to meet them again. My Uncle Gerhard and Aunt Gertrud, “Trude,”

immediately told us that, although it would be difficult to find space for us all in the

apartment, we could come and live with them until we found another place to stay. For

me, this was ideal. I had always loved my cousins. Wolfgang was the oldest; he was five

years older than I. Gerhard, the second son, I liked the best because of his quiet and

gentle temperament and the fact that he was only four months older than I made us ideal

playmates. Rudolf was two years younger, and Annedore, the only girl was six years

younger than us.

The apartment in Crusemark Strasse 2, a corner house, was undamaged. The area had

been spared some of the worst attacks of the bombing. All the other houses on the right

side of Crusemark Strasse were gutted and burned out. Uncle Gerhard and Aunt Trude

told us that this had been an act of revenge by the Russians in response to one person who

had shot at some Russians from that street. All boys and men over fifteen years of age

had been rounded up and taken to hill in a nearby park and shot, the women and young

children were ordered out and then all the houses were burnt down. Wolfgang’s best

friend who was fifteen years old was among the executed. This tragedy affected

Wolfgang deeply for the rest of his life. The ghosts of that terrible war were palpably

present on that street.

In earlier years, it had always been a great pleasure for me to visit the Webers on the

occasion of a birthday or holiday. My other cousin, Kate Zwirblat, my father’s sister

Gabriele’s daughter, was eleven years older than I and seemed more like a young aunt

than a playmate to me. We did not visit the Zwirblats often. My visits with the Weber

children were more frequent and always exciting. I loved my Uncle Gerhard; he was

always kind and fatherly to us all. My Aunt Trude was a good friend to my mother and I

thought, she cooked the most delicious foods and deserts. Theirs was a lively household

where there were always things to see and do. The boys had such interesting toys and

18

they were skilled in all kinds of games. My Uncle Gerhard had several aquariums. To

watch the beauty of this underwater world deeply satisfied me. As the boys grew older

they kept terrariums in which they showed me all kinds of interesting creatures. Gerhard

once had an axolotl and then one of the boys said that he wanted to become an

entomologist and had walking-stick insects. When visiting this family, I not only had

great fun but also never failed to learn new ideas and new words.

The family pursued many interests and was musically talented. There was a piano that

several members in the family were able to play. My Uncle Gerhard often played the

violin. My father had in his younger years played cello but the war put an end to such

cultured pursuits. In his younger years, my father carved marionette figures, designed

stage scenes, and wrote plays. During the summer holidays the brothers and their friends

would meet in Alt-Buchhorst and offer nightly marionette performances. My Uncle

Gerhard was a circuit judge, for this reason and the fact that he was seven years older

than my father, he was allowed to stay home until the last days of the war when he had to

join some sort of local defense militia but luckily, at that time it was too late for the

defense of the German capital, the resistance quickly crumbled before the Russian

onslaught, and the men just disappeared back into their homes.

So it was that I learned to be a child again with my cousins. We children were enacting

the reconstruction of our devastated land right there on the living room floor without the

enormous difficulties of the real world. My cousins built houses, factories, and roads and

railroads to enable transportation. We then searched the house for materials of

commercial value to trade and transport. Beads became gold, silver, and platinum and

served as currency. We found a few grains of puffed rice that I had never seen before.

We did not eat those grains but kept them in a tiny bottle that we along with other items

bartered and shuttled from place to place with our toy cars and railroads. Some items that

once were commonplace now took on almost mythical qualities and attributes far beyond

their actual value. We children managed to put aside the past and create a world of hope

for the future. The magic never left that family, even then there was so much for me to

see and learn.

The summer passed, it was now the autumn of 1945 and no one knew where my father

was or if he was alive. My mother must have walked all over the devastated city to

implore the occupational government for information on former German soldiers but to

no avail.

In the fall, I started going back to school in Pankow. I was now enrolled in the fifth

grade. The children in my class that had stayed in Berlin and continued with their

curriculum were ahead of those of us who recently returned from abroad. I had difficulty

understanding my lessons because I had missed almost an entire year. Moreover, the

year before in Nieder-Thiemendorf, I had been in a village school where third grade and

fourth grade were combined in one room. This class was the only time in my entire

school history that I was in the same class with boys. Our teacher was a good Nazi but a

rude and poor educator. She was harsh with her students. One farmer’s boy suffered

especially. She would pull him out of his seat by his ears and his hair for minor

19

infractions. I believe that the poor boy either had learning difficulties or had to work too

hard on the farm. These scenes in the classroom upset me a great deal. I tried to keep a

low profile in that class but that was not always possible because even at age eight, I

suffered from frequent colds and had to request a restroom break to obtain tissue to wipe

my nose. She then would make humiliating remarks, consequently, I did not learn much

in third grade either. My mother had a few talks with her which seemed to soften her

attitude a little, at least towards me. I never caught up with my classmates in Pankow and

when the grades came in the following summer, I barely passed. To my surprise, my

father only said: ‘It does not matter, as long as you are healthy’.

There was good camaraderie in my fifth grade class in Pankow. We all had been through

hell and were glad to be alive. One girl joined our class a month or more after the school

year had started. Our teacher spoke to us before she entered and explained that she had

just returned from an internment camp. She told us that her appearance was due to the

indignities she had suffered in that camp. We understood from our teacher’s serious

words that the camp where she had been was a bad place but we really could not

comprehend the nature of that camp. When she entered we saw a beautiful girl shaved

completely bald, with a golden stubble just beginning to sprout on her head. We tried to

include her in our activities. Although we were all half starved and had been through a

lot, she was the hero who we all imagined to have been through much more. She had a

congenial personality so that we soon lost all awkwardness around her. When we asked

her about the camp, she did not say much. It seemed that she preferred to leave that

experience behind her. Not long after, were astonished to see her become a beautiful girl

with a full head of curly golden hair.

To ease the overcrowding in my aunt and uncle’s apartment, my mother, grandmother,

and I moved into a room on the ground floor of the same apartment building, but since it

was a corner building, our new address was on Wolfshagener Strasse 87. We were able

to sublet a room from a lady who had either lost loved ones or was unable to locate them

and therefore lived alone in the street level apartment. That room had a huge hole shot

out of the wall under the window facing the street. Our landlady said that the damage

was done in the last days of the war by the Russians with a so-called “Molotov Cocktail”.

The landlady had loosely plugged the hole with bricks that were readily available, all one

had to do was pull them from the nearby rubble of destroyed buildings, mortar on the

other hand was not available, so that the air freely circulated between the bricks. We

hung a blanket over the bricks from the inside but this was insufficient protection when

the weather turned cold. In Berlin, the temperatures may drop below freezing in October

and November and since there was no fuel, the room became unbearably cold. In the

middle of November 1945, my grandmother caught a cold that turned into bronchitis and

within a short number of days led to her death at the age of 75. After being with my

grandfather when he died, I now stayed in the same room with my grandmother and

watched her die also. Later when I was a nurse, I worked with many young nurses who

had never seen someone die and did not recognize the signs of impending death that I had

learned so early.

20

There simply was not enough room in the apartment of my aunt and uncle, who lived in

their apartment with their four children and my aunt’s mother, Gertrud Vogler, whom my

cousins called Omi. After the funeral of my grandmother my mother and I had to sleep in

the ground floor apartment again even though we spent our days with my uncle’s family

upstairs.

There was also not enough food for the family. My aunt and my mother scoured the

destroyed city in search of anything edible. Some bread could at times be obtained from

the Russian occupation forces. Begging became an art and an honorable occupation to

keep us alive. Both women became inventive in their efforts to prepare a meal. My aunt

wiped the bottom of a frying pan with Nivea cream to fry some potato peels they had

obtained from the refuse of the Russian soldiers. It nauseated us and tasted terrible. My

mother found some bird seed; it was millet with the hard hulls on the grains. Our

mothers were especially proud of this find because they thought it would provide

nourishing cereal for the children. They cooked the bird seed with water and divided the

portions for us children. We tried to chew the grains but the gruel was impossible to

swallow because the hulls were sticking in our throats. My mother and my aunt had to

force us to eat this meal. Every food was portioned out to each child and adult by our

mothers according to what was needed to keep the family alive. This counting of slices

of bread and numbering of small fruit such as cherries was to continue for many years

after the war and became a distasteful cause for jealousy and greed. My oldest cousin

Wolfgang was highly intelligent but also quite selfish. My aunt had said that each child

was to receive two slices of bread. Wolfgang held in his hand a sandwich of two slices of

dark bread with a slice of white bread in the middle. When my aunt told him that

everyone could only have two slices of bread, he said that he had only two slices; the one

in the middle was the spread.

Each morning, my mother woke me in time to get ready for school. Getting up early was

always difficult for me in my childhood so that my mother had to insist several times

before I finally got up. Then she had to untangle, comb, and braid my long hair which

was painful and always led to a fight with my mother. She was impatient because the

time was short and the procedure hurt me more the quicker she had to accomplish the

task. She finally gave up and said: ‘Do it yourself’. So I started combing and braiding

my own hair. The result was not nearly as neat as when she combed and braided my hair,

but I had mastered another step to self-sufficiency. Little did I know how soon I would

have to rely even more on myself.

December came and Christmas passed bleakly with our recent loss and without any

knowledge of my father. We children received small presents, little handicrafts or some

colorful stickers that the adults found in some drawer. My relatives did everything

possible to have a warm and loving Christmas for all of us. Omi had prepared a small

doll bed for my little rag doll that I had found on the road in Konigstein after that terrible

night when the Russians came through the town.

We celebrated New Year 1946 in peace but lacking so much. On January 4, 1946 there

was a knock on the door at my uncle’s house. When my aunt opened the door she saw a

21

dirty, bearded old man out of breath and in tattered clothing who was leaning on crutches.

He introduced himself saying: “Hallo Trudchen, I am Hans”. My aunt hesitated a

moment before calling my mother. He looked like a beggar and there had been reports of

men who impersonated missing husbands to find food and shelter among this devastation.

My mother wanted to believe but even she hesitated before daring to embrace the man

she hoped she would see again and the man who now stood before her. I was called and

also felt that initial shock over his appearance but then I saw his smile, his lips, and his

beloved face that no beard could conceal. I knew that this was indeed my father and fell

into his arms. That moment of recognition was as though a spark passed between us, as

if our genes made contact on a deeper, more primitive animal level than mere reasoned

knowledge. We invited him in, we embraced and cried and he took me on his very bony

knee. We had not known if he was alive and he had not known whom he would find

when he climbed the stairs to his brother’s apartment. The joy was overwhelming for

him to find his loved ones there. When I recall the scene of my father’s return, I am

always reminded of the Odyssey where Penelope expressed the same caution and doubt

on the return of Odysseus and did not dare to embrace him. In that story, it was the

faithful old Eurecleia who recognized the man she had nursed as a child.

My father was only forty-two years old but he looked like a man in his seventies. He told

us that in April 1945, when his unit was overrun by Russian soldiers during the retreat of

the German forces, he threw away his weapons and surrendered. He became a prisoner

of war and was forced to work in coal mines first under Polish supervision and then under

Russian command. Not only was this unaccustomed work for an office worker but my

father was also extremely malnourished but Polish and Russian brutality knew no mercy

for any of the prisoners and many died and never made it back home. We were surprised

how weak and short of breath my father was. We undressed him and had him lie down.

We saw that his face and body were emaciated but his legs were swollen. My aunt called

a doctor to come and examine him. He diagnosed heart failure due to starvation. He

gave my mother a prescription for digitalis to strengthen his heart but he expressed doubt

whether the medication could be found in the bombed-out city.

My father opened the pack he had brought with him containing his only possessions.

Among the few rags there was a tattered manuscript of marionette plays he had written in

prison and two marionette puppets that he had carved with a pocket knife out of pieces of

wood, to keep his mind sane and to turn his misery into positive creativity as he said.

Then he tore open the lining of the bag and pulled from it two sticks and a crook. These

pieces when assembled and glued together would make a beautiful little walking stick.

The hand grip of the stick ended in a lovely little mouse. A band encircled the stick just

below the curved crook on which was carved the name “Rosemarie”. My father had

carved this stick in prison while thinking of his beloved daughter whom he once had

denied a walking stick when she wanted one very much. My father now joyfully

presented this unique walking stick to me that was fashioned from his love. I was

overwhelmed and happy.

This is the story connected with the walking stick. During our last vacation together in

1942 in Polaun, Silesia, we went hiking in the mountains traversed by lovely bubbling

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brooks. It is customary in Germany to use walking sticks when wandering in the

mountains. These sticks come in various shapes and sizes and can be purchased in the

many gift shops lining the ascent. Also available in the shops are medals portraying

points of interest and natural monuments for the area. Hikers decorate their sticks by

attaching these medals adding interest and ornamentation to their sticks. My parents each

had such a walking stick but I did not. So I begged my parents to buy a stick for me but

they had their concerns that I would soon tire of the stick because I liked to jump from

stone to stone across the babbling brooks where a stick would only be a hindrance and

they did not want to end up carrying my stick. I did not accept no for an answer because

I had set all my desire on one of those sticks, so I persuaded and begged them until they

bought me a child-sized walking stick. I was happy for about half an hour until I laid the

stick down when it was in my way, as they had predicted, but then I forgot to pick it up

again and did not realize I had lost it until much later. We retraced our steps without

success, we could not find it. There was much cause for tears for me but in no way

would my parents buy me another stick.

Besides my father’s physical debilitation, he brought with him a reservoir of the dreaded

germs that thrived in prison camps. All of us came down with typhoid fever within days

of his return. The men in the family seemed to be affected worse than the women and

were unable to leave their bed. My mother continued to walk all over Berlin in search of

food and digitalis returning each evening with little or no food and no medicine. In the

middle of January, my mother returned from one of her searches exhausted with a flushed

face but happy; she had found a few digitalis tablets. She nursed my father and then lay

down with a high fever.

My father now had to get up and nurse her. When her fever persisted and she developed

a rash as well as diarrhea, the doctor was called again. He diagnosed typhus and

instructed us to try to keep her hydrated as best we could. While the whole family was ill

with typhus, my mother demonstrated the most virulent form of the disease. After one

week of raging fever and diarrhea, she became irrational.

My aunt who was caring for her bedridden family upstairs came down one day and

brought a jar of preserved blueberries. She asked my father to feed them to my mother

because blueberries were said to work against diarrhea. Her loving concern however did

nothing to change the outcome. My mother’s condition steadily worsened. On the first

of February she still had a high fever but seemed to rally somewhat for a few moments

and smiled at me without regaining her mental faculties before she lapsed once more into

unconsciousness. The next day, my mother’s temperature dropped but she remained

unconscious and her breathing became irregular and shallow. My father and I were

sitting near her bedside in the only room we all shared. My father calmed his emotions

through creative activity; he had carved a small heart from a piece of wood and was

coloring it with some blue paint. He wanted it to be a pendant for my necklace. It was

quiet in our room. I listened to my mother’s breathing as it became increasingly slower

until she stopped breathing. I quietly went to my mother’s side and checked her pulse,

when I did not feel a pulse; I calmly told my father that my mother had died. My father

did not want to believe what I had said. He sent for the doctor who must have been living

23

in the neighborhood because it did not take long until he arrived to examine my mother

and confirmed that she had died. It was the second of February 1946.

Once more, we had to stay upstairs with my uncle’s family for a few days. My mother’s

body lay in the apartment downstairs for the time required to make the arrangements for

the funeral. During these two or three days we burned incense in her room just as we had

done when my grandmother died. Upstairs with my relatives, my cousin’s grandmother

gave me a lot of attention, trying to be a loving grandmother now also to me. I could tell

that she felt sorry for me and was looking for ways to raise my spirit and engage me in

activity. She brought out one of her lace handkerchiefs and showed me how fine it was.

I assumed that she was giving it to me in consolation but she asked me if I would like to

learn to crochet such a beautiful handkerchief. I was doubtful that I could do it but she

encouraged me and said that we could start with a simpler pattern. I appreciated what she

was trying to do for me and felt obligated to succeed at this task even though my mind

was not on crocheting handkerchiefs. To please her, I followed her instructions to stitch

the basic hem that was the foundation for the lace. The resulting tidy edge satisfied both

of us and then Omi showed me a pattern for a simple lace. I completed the lace edges for

two handkerchiefs at that time. Omi was a wise woman, she allowed me to gain

confidence and pride from creative activity to overcome adversity.

Shortly after my mother’s death, my father was able to rent a room from a lady on the

third floor of the apartment house on Wolfshagener Strasse, so that we were able to move

out of the cold and drafty room on the ground floor. I went back to school and was

received with sympathy by students and teachers alike. So many of us had lost fathers,

mothers, and loved ones. We survivors clung to each other and gave each other support.

It was good to be in the company of understanding people. I especially remember our

teacher as the kind and motherly person that we all needed at that time.

In the one-room apartment that my father and I shared, we had a small Bunsen burner or

similar cooker in a corner that was operated with some kind of fuel. My father would

sometimes attempt to cook something hot for us over this flame. Not having any food to

put into the soup, he added whatever he could find to the water, perhaps some potato

peels or some other scraps that he had been able to obtain from the Russians. One did

whatever was necessary to survive. One day my father cooked a soup consisting of water

seasoned with lots of pepper and some salt that he found in the cupboard. It was hot and

exceedingly spicy but not at all nourishing. If the ingredients of that soup were listed as

they are today on the labels of commercially prepared foods in order of highest percent of

contents first, then it would have stated: water, pepper, salt, etc., in other words, although

I appreciated my father’s effort, I could not eat that soup because it burned my mouth.

Germany had been utterly destroyed. There was no German state and no German

government. The only functioning governmental agencies at that time were those set up

by the respective occupational forces. Since ours was the Soviet sector of Berlin, my

father turned to the Russians to find a job as soon as he had gained enough strength. In

the fall of 1946, he found employment with the Russian occupation army to help conduct

a census of surviving inhabitants. For this work, he was reimbursed not with money but

24

with mostly black rye and some white Russian bread. It was a sheer delight to see the

first whole loaf of bread after months without food. My father left every morning and

returned every evening, on certain days he brought home his wages, the loaf of bread, and

still, it was just bread, nothing else and never enough. During the day, I was either in

school or played with my cousins. When the weather was not suitable for playing outside

after school or when it got dark, I was alone at home. My father brought me books, first

Jules Verne and similar adventure stories that were appropriate for my age and

encouraged me to read these books while I was alone. I was below reading level at

school because of my inadequate school attendance during the war years. When my

father returned from work we would eat whatever bread he had been able to obtain and

then he would read to me by the light of a candle. He started reading Karl May to me.

We both enjoyed entering the world of fantasy together. I soon became too impatient to

wait for my father to come home and read to me so that I picked up the story where he

had left off as soon as I returned from school. It did not take me long to gain complete

fluency in reading and grammar which in turn helped me a great deal in school. I

acquired a good vocabulary and additional knowledge about geography, history, and

other ethnicities. By the spring of 1947, I had read all sixty-five volumes by and one or

two about Karl May.

As the weather got warmer, my cousins and I played in the street on the corner of

Crusemark and Wolfshagener strasse. There was almost no traffic and many enjoyable

games took place at that corner. The boys would play football and we girls would jump

rope and do hop scotch. We played games that do not require special equipment and that

children have played for thousands of years with the materials at hand. My cousins had

old roll shoes. Most were the type that consisted of wheels on a metal platform that

tightened to the sole of the shoe. My cousins lent me a pair that fitted my shoes fairly

well so that I could practice roller skating. I enjoyed running and skating straight down

the street but never learned to turn circles like some of the older neighbor children. As

we had ill-fitting shoes and some of the metal screw mechanisms did not work well any

more we often had to secure the rollers with string. One day I held the string in my

mouth while applying the rollers, when I pulled the string out, I cut the corners of my

mouth. This innocent action later had serious consequences. The small cuts in the

corners of my mouth just would not heal. It turned out that I had contracted a

staphylococcal infection called impetigo that soon spread over my entire face.

That spring, my father took me for a few days to visit my mother’s relatives in the

Niederlausitz. They had written him to invite us to a May feast for which the village had

been able to bake sheets of cake because they thought that would be a welcome diversion

for us. What a wonderful sight that food was for a hungry child but as I opened my

mouth to bite into the first slice of cake without thinking about the sores, I was quickly

reminded by the ensuing pain because I could not open my mouth wide enough. I had to

laugh at the irony of the situation that when there was finally some food, I was not able to

eat it. The facial disfiguration continued to embarrass me for several years during my

early teens because even after the sores healed, the skin continued to show red blotches.

25

That fall, my father took me to Potsdam to visit Herta Ladwig, a lady he had known in his

youth. None of us had telephones, so he must have obtained her address somehow and

written to her. A visit was arranged and we went to see Herta. She was living with her

mother, her Aunt Liesel, and her seven-year old daughter Inge.

The school I attended in Potsdam was the former Lyceum in the Weisenstrasse that had

been renamed Albert Einstein Schule. There was not enough money for me to take the

trolley to school, so I walked the forty five minutes each day in all weather. Much of my

mental homework was done during this walk. The walk was pleasant for the most part. It

led first down the street, we lived on Drevesstrasse 14, then past the cemetery, across a

busy intersection near the Potsdam train station, across the canal and then past o corner of

the ruined royal palace and across the former parade grounds. I hated to pass the large

parade grounds in the summer and imagined that I was crossing the desert because there

was no shade. Sometimes I skirted the parade grounds and walked close to the palace

ruins to get some shade but I did not feel safe there.

We did not go to church and my father was not religious in the traditional sense. He

found his God in nature. My stepmother did not believe in God. She followed the

precepts of her father and the previous era where religion was considered a thing of the

past and the modern belief was a sort of Darwinism and belief in the sun as the giver of

life. My stepsister Inge was finally baptized after she began school when a Lutheran

catechism teacher entreated my stepmother to have her baptized. Baptism was a pre-

requisite for catechism classes at age thirteen and confirmation at age fifteen. The non-

religious communist youth were not baptized but received a sort of initiation rite into

adulthood called “Jugendweihe” (Youth Initiation). The two tracks are still current in

Germany, either a religious, or a civil initiation into adulthood.

I had been baptized into the Lutheran Faith when I was eight days old. At age thirteen, a

decision had to be made whether or not I should enter the two-year course of catechism

classes at the Lutheran Church to become confirmed. When my father and I discussed

this subject, although I did not share my stepmother’s beliefs, I felt that I no longer

believed in God and did not see the necessity to be confirmed, nor did I look forward to a

Jugendweihe, such state sponsored festivities were never the real thing for me, there had

to be a deeper dimension, a commitment to a higher purpose.

My mother taught me that a promise must be kept; therefore, spiritual honesty was

important to me. I felt that I could not, like so many other young people, go through the

motions of study and confirmation as a rite of passage without taking the faith seriously.

My father was adamant and insisted that I take catechism classes even though he himself

did not practice his religion. He often said that he found God alone in the woods better

than in a church. So in obedience to my father, I began catechism classes in 1948.

Catechism classes lasted for two years. During that time I was initially a bored and

unwilling participant. There was this inner conflict between what I was supposed to do

and what I was actually feeling. I had heard all those biblical stories before but they had

no meaning for me. The majority of the other young people participated for exactly the

26

same reason as I, their parents wanted them to become confirmed but they themselves

could care less or looked forward to a celebration at the end of the lessons without any

further commitment. There were a few children who seemed to have a deeper

commitment not from any false religiosity but from true love for the word of Christ and

for each other. In discussion groups these young people would show earnestness and a

depth of perception that I had never before encountered among my classmates.

Naturally, my ears pricked up and I contemplated what it was that made these youngsters

different. Not long after that, I began to see deep love and true value in Christ’s teaching.

So when the first year of instruction came to an end, several of those young committed

people to whom I looked up asked me to continue in the fellowship through the summer

and attend the bible study meetings of the Junge Gemeinde or Young Congregation.

They were the young people who took their pledge to follow Christ seriously after their

confirmation and were committed to live the faith. I admired these young people for their

convictions and agreed to join them thinking that this also gave me a chance to find out

more about this mysterious power of faith.

We were then living in East Germany under a communist government. While Sunday

worship and religious instruction in the churches were still grudgingly permitted, the

formation of any kind of organization other than state organizations was prohibited,

especially where that organization might influence the youth in offering an alternative

world view to communism. It was, therefore, an act of defiance to belong to the Young

Congregation. Our meetings were held clandestinely in a different private home each

Saturday. There was always risk involved in the possibility of alerting the authorities to

our activities. For this reason we went to and from the meetings in groups of one and two

to avoid the appearance of an assembly. On the other hand, we were proud to receive a

silver lapel pin in the form of a cross on a circle, the symbol of the cross over the world.

We daringly and proudly wore these emblems on the lapels of our coats, publicly

proclaiming our commitment to Christ rather than the imposed atheist, communist

regime. I still have this little pin. It now graces the spine of my first Bible. What a joy it

was to buy this first Bible. I still remember drinking in the smell of this small book. It

was my constant companion in my late teens. I read it cover to cover starting with the

New Testament, then the Old Testament, then the New Testament again, and then the

Psalms again, several of which I learned to recite from memory.

The Bible study of the Young Congregation was based on exegesis. We studied the

scriptures with references to the original texts including background knowledge of

political and social issues of the time in which they were written. Our pastor had studied

during the Nazi era when the only allowed theology was a state-sanctioned version of

anti-Semitism. While some pastors acquiesced to the regime for their safety, others

became Confessing Christians boldly proclaiming the faith and suffering the

consequences or quietly asserting the old values. Our pastor counted himself among the

Confessing Christians, his education had been broad and included the study of Hebrew,

Greek and Latin. He often quoted from ancient sources of the early Christian and pre-

Christian literature. I found his teaching and our discussions intellectually and spiritually

immensely stimulating. I learned the value of finding out the truth through inquiry and

study of all available resources. Belief should neither be a social attribute nor based on

27

the opinion of authority. All absolute authority was suspect for us. Conscientious young

people of the post-war period in Germany hungered for truth and redemption. They

wanted to be washed clean of the guilt of the Nazi era. In this spirit we sang “Wasche

meine Seele hell, Jesus, reiner Lebensquell” (Wash my soul clean, Jesus, pure spring of

life) pouring our distress and shame into the words of this canon.

….