Marbach

Marbach in the state of Baden Wuerttemberg was going to be our new home. We were under American occupation. The beginnings could not have been bleaker. My aunt and her family lived in an attic. The city authorities gave us a permit  to live in a root cellar of a large house. Housing was at a premium. Cities like Stuttgart, Heilbronn and Pforzheim had been totally destroyed. The people had been evacuated to the country side, refugees from the east started to pour into the same places. Naturally, the Americans took the best housing for themselves. My mother got ill and started to suffer from depressions. I got ill because we lived in a dark and dank place. We all looked bedraggled. The Americans did not care a lot about single mothers and children - we had no food. Gunther became adept in shooting and killing cats. I was told they were rabbits. They stopped the ruse when one day I looked up and asked my mother: "Are these the rabbits that climb trees?" My brother developed huge boils on his neck because of serious vitamin deficiencies. Nevertheless, Christmas was celebrated with a board over my children's crib and a small tree on top of the board. The house next door was occupied by Americans. Gunther taught me how to say: "Good Day, Mister!" I stood there at the fence and said this little phrase to every American who approached the house.

Gunther and I in front of the first house where we lived in the root cellar. This is the only picture from that time and I don't know who took it. We certainly did not have a camera. Although our lives were safe, we still needed Gunther's help to keep us from starving. My mother always hated my children's pictures from that time. She claimed my chubby appearance was misleading. I had bloated from the poor diet.

Occasionally I got  gum which I initially swallowed not knowing it had to be chewed. I quickly realized that when the GIs came with their girlfriends it was worthless to say anything. The were occupied and I was ignored. My mother was so disgusted with our living conditions and my deteriorating health that she  hauled my damp children's mattress on her back to the Buergermeister downtown. Eventually we were assigned a sunny three room apartment where I grew up.

Mother still had to share this apartment with other families. It was not until my father returned in 1951 that the whole apartment belonged to us. I grew up and always heard that there had been a war and that we had lost everything.  Because of our impoverished state,  mother could not buy me the toys every kid asks for. However, since I had no comparison of a "before" and "after", I did not suffer so much from this as my two brothers. There were many other refugee children in Marbach. We all looked enviously towards the American kids who were dressed well and had bikes and candy but they did not share and we did not know how to ask in English for anything. On a visit to Stuttgart to visit uncle Hans' widow and her two children who now lived there, the first trip outside Marbach that I remember, we went window shopping one evening. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and saw two knees in khaki and a hand that held out two Hershey bars. I never looked up. It was my first chocolate and whoever the GI was, bless you. I have never forgotten the moment.

What bothered me more was the absence of my father. We did not know if he was alive or dead until 1949. I desperately wanted to have a father above all else. I urged my mother to marry any man that I saw on the street and liked.  Suddenly  in 1949 I had a father but he was not around. I had never seen him except in pictures. I entered first grade and we were encouraged to draw a family picture. I promptly drew something that included my father. I remember the strange look of pity I received from my first grade teacher. Then my father came home in 1951. My mother was overjoyed. It was the biggest disappointment in my life. It was not politically correct to display pictures of men in Wehrmacht uniforms. Therefore mother displayed a picture of father on a white horse that was taken in Palestine during W.W.I. I expected my father to come home like that. Good looking  - on a white horse. What I got was an old man. He was 58. He came home without any teeth in a prison uniform and his belongings in a bundle. Twenty minutes after my initial shock, I took my piggy bank and handed it to him. I figured he needed it more than I. That was my only reaction. My father was seriously ill (he had been tortured and came home with beriberi, a serious vitamin B deficiency) and we were told initially that he would only live for 3 months. He lived until 1970. My father and I became extremely close. I went through the German school system and in 1955 entered the Gymnasium in Marbach. A timid, little kid started to become more self-confident. I had three close friends in the Gymnasium with whom I am still in touch today. Gerhild (Geggi) Kramer's family were not refugees and the four Kramer children were encouraged to bring their friends home. I learned to appreciate "high tea" at 5 p.m. which was better than our evening meal at home and I took advantage of their hospitality. Geggi lives today near Muenster, married to a vetnarian and has three children. Ursula Gauss's father, "Papa Gauss", as we called him was our social science and English teacher for a while. This was another local family and they had an extensive library. Ursula and I explored her father's library together, desperately looking for sexual information at age 13. What do you look for when you don't know what IT is to begin with? She is married and lives in Berlin and the island of Sylt today and has a daughter. Elke Lausmann, another refugee, and I volunteered for a collection drive for war veterans and then,  with collection box in hand, only approached much startled American GIs. They gave generously and we returned our collection box filled with American money. Elke is married with two children and  lives in Abstatt which is not very far from Marbach. When our schooling in Marbach ended most of us girls had been enrolled by our parents in Ludwigsburg at a business school. We commuted by train every day. Ludwigsburg lay between Marbach and Stuttgart, a beautiful city started by a Duke of Wuerttemberg. It had not only beautiful castles, not damaged by the war, but it was also a "Kasernenstadt," a city with many barracks all occupied now by the Americans. We had wall to wall Americans. Gunther had married in 1953 and also lived in Ludwigsburg. Elke and I found the city much more fascinating than our school. In fact I hated the business school. Elke became an expert at fainting and I always had to take her home. Thus we spent many happy hours exploring the city and practicing our English. Elke was and is a brilliant linguist and besides English, speaks fluent French and Italian today and is a court interpreter. We both enjoyed our English and French classes but put in little effort into our typing and shorthand skills and barely graduated at the end of the year. Finding a job was not a problem in Germany then. The economic miracle had started and jobs were plenty. I had made up my mind that I wanted to work for the Americans. I applied for and got a job at the American Officers' Club at the Flak Kaserne. I knew the place well from the outside because it was about a 10 minute walk from where Gunther lived. There were many times I now wished I had applied myself at business school. My typing was terrible and I learned on the job. The one who made my life tolerable was my immediate boss Don Rogers who became a life long friend. Don was like an older brother who protected and consoled me. After a while I improved but it was not until many years later that I appreciated the discipline demanded by Bruce Stedge who ran the place. Bruce and I correspond today but I hated him then. However, it was the discipline that Bruce had demanded that made me successful when I started to work for my husband Kevin many years later.

Working for the Officers' Club had certain advantages. Food was one of them. My family had slowly graduated from rabbit to horse meat by 1949.  When my father returned in 1951 and started to work as a school teacher again we could pass up the horse meat as well. However, at the Officer's Club I learned that a sandwich could be two slices of bread and a pound of sliced cold cuts in between.

My father's health improved sufficiently and for a few years he was again employed as an elementary school teacher. By the time I was 13, he had retired. I remember fondly coming home from school and occupying a chair next to him and both of us reading the newspaper or a book.

Sadly, as I grew up, the relationship with my mother deteriorated. Certainly some of it had to do that she disliked Elvis, coke, gum, lipstick, fingernail polish and jeans. "Ein deutsches Maedchen tut das nicht!" "A German girl does not do that!" was her constant refrain. However, I had inherited my father's family stubborness. My father could reason; my mother governed by decree. The relationship with my mother became an unending battle. In late 1963 I was married to an American GI and in March of 1964 I arrived in the US. Predictably, the marriage did not last. My second husband and I met late in 1966. We worked together until he retired a few years ago. We now live happily in retirement in Davidsonville, Maryland.

Gunther in  his twenties. He married, had two children and now has 4 grandchildren. Unfortunately,  one of his granddaughters died of cancer at age 4 in 1993. Two years later, the mother of the child and Gunther's only daugher died in 1995, also of cancer. I talk to him almost every week on the phone. We are very close. Gunther loved animals.Even when he was already married, he would take a day off from work and he and I would go into the woods and catch salamanders and other critters. I always inherited Gunther's snakes once they had died. I brought one home from Ludwigsburg, wrapped in newspaper and the dead snake fell out of the newspaper in Marbach at the train station. I had to kneel down and rewrap the dead snake while everyone looked out the train windows and watched. I always gave the snakes to my biology teacher who put them in formalin.

My parents and I in front of Schiller's Monument. This was at a time when I worked for the Americans. Shortly after this picture was taken I emigrated to the US.

My mother outlived my father by 11 years and died in 1981.

To top of Page