Living in the Soviet Zone and How We Escaped From It
  Memories of a Childhood After the War had Destroyed Germany



I was born at the end of 1942 C.E. in Berlin, Germany. It was war time and shortly after civilians were evacuated from Berlin to places all over the Northern countryside. We ended up in Neu-Globsow, where my brother Peter was born at the beginning of 1944. Obviously I don't remember any of that. I have pictures of myself showing me walking, so I must be over a year old and as it was summer I suppose it must be 1944, before the war ended. I do not know where that picture was taken. It shows a chubby little girl with a mess of very light, very curly hair.

My first remembrance is of a Christmas, probably in 1946, when my brother received a teddy bear and a little yellow armchair and I immediately wanted to claim it for myself. I had received some kind of a doll but had no use for it. I think I also had  received a doll carriage with curtains on the hood but apparently had no use for that either. When I was made to give the chair back to my brother there were tears and probably a hissy-fit. I wanted trucks and trains. I guess I was a tomboy even then.
We lived in a manor house but only in the uppermost part of it which was a pigeon loft that had somehow been converted into living quarters. This manor house was called "Rosenhof" which I have actually tracked down on the Internet, located in Klosterheide, a small village outside of Lindow in the Mark Brandenburg, some 80 miles North of Berlin.

Quite a few families lived at the Rosenhof, the owners long gone, and I understand that at one time Russian soldiers were quartered there too who had taken a liking to the little blond toddler and fed her goodies she otherwise would not have received. I do not remember them. Did that set the stage with my later battle with being overweight, a battle I am still waging?

My father had a manual typewriter and the Russians were quite ignorant. One of them kept hearing my father's typing and wanted to see what he was doing. Upon being shown it and watching my father type with the keys going up and down and the carriage moving across, the Russian ran out of the room in a panic screaming that it was a "Hoellenmaschine" (machine from hell). He must have thought it was some kind of explosive device.
The Russians also had some of their women there who were just as ignorant and backwards as the soldiers. The manor house had working flush toilets with the tank near the ceiling with a chain you pulled to make it flush. One of the women found the bowl of water and put her potatoes in there to wash, pulled the chain and the potatoes were gone. She must have been quite disappointed when she found that there was no way to retrieve those potatoes.

There was a pig sty on the bottom floor, did it have pigs? I don't remember, but probably not, most likely they had already been eaten..
There was also a stable for horses and there probably were some of them although I don't remember them either.
There was a greenhouse which to my 5-year old eyes seemed to be immense, where my father grew tobacco. Yes, Germans, just like most of the world, were addicted to smoking. I'm sure the tobacco must have been awful. Germans have tried to grow tobacco for a long time with less then good success. Tobacco needs HEAT. Once he stood in the greenhouse, smoking that awful weed in his pipe until the whole greenhouse was full of smoke. There had been a nest of hornets and he wasn't about to attack that nest as hornets can actually sting you to death. He just poisoned them with tobacco smoke. Once the greenhouse was full of smoke he left and waited for the tobacco smoke to kill the hornets. So much for how poisonous tobacco smoke is.
There was also a big vegetable garden but I don't think I was allowed in there as it had a gate that was always supposed to be locked. We had chickens and two big white roosters were kept in the garden. I guess to eat the snails and other pests. Their wings were either clipped or had some kind of device on them so that they could not spread their wings and fly. More later about how successful that was to keep them in the garden.
The other chickens which were brown, my mother called them "Rodehlenders" which I later figured out were Rhode Islanders, (the name had been scrambled by German speakers), were kept in a henhouse at night but went about the yard during the day. One of them was an old brooding hen which was called Lottchen, which could not let her little chickens go to be big chickens. She would go about the yard saying "kloock-kloock-kloock", calling her chickens and running after them with her wings spread out for the little ones to go under, but they were as big as she was and did not go there anymore. It did not keep her for calling them anyway.
I know my mother would kill a chicken every once in a while with an ax as I vividly remember seeing that chicken with its head cut off still running around in a circle before it finally fell over. I don't remember being grossed out about that or feeling sorry for the chicken.
My father kept two rabbit traps in the garden and he must have been successful as I remember my sister Marga having a grey rabbit coat, a scarf, a hat and a muff made from these rabbits. Later on those items were handed down. Eventually, as parts of these items were wearing out only enough was left to make an adult's winter hat from them which Marga wore when she was an adult (1957?). We really got some wear from those rabbits. I'm sure we ate them too but I don't remember that either.

Although my father had come from a very wealthy family and had gone to University he was quite handy and would tackle just about anything. He had built the rabbit traps, had built hotboxes to prolong the growing season in the garden and had probably done much in the garden, manor house and yard to make things more livable.

During that time my oldest sister Hertha was learning to be a nurse and was living in the nurses' home at the hospital in Neu-Ruppin. She didn't come home very often. But when she did she and my parents would be gone all day and would come home covered with soot: they had been cutting trees that were damaged from forest fires. I guess it was to lay up firewood for the coming winter. Who was watching me, my brother Peter and Marga who would have been only about 10? Probably nobody. It was common to just lock children in with strict orders what not to touch and we didn't.

This is also when we came up with all kinds of games that required no equipment of any kind. Peter would climb into the pigeon hutches which ran around the room and were used as a bench and claim to be "brooding pigeon eggs", hollering "brood-brood", and then say " crash-crash", indicating that his weight had broken all the eggs, so there were neither eggs nor little pigeons (which we ate too if we could find and catch one).
We had another game where one child would whirl another by the arm and then let go and the object was to freeze in a bizarre position, and the one who was the most bizarre won that contest.
Another game was to put all hands on the table and one would start with a fist with the thumb sticking up going around tapping each hand in a row while singing this little ditty: "We're going to Jerusalem and who's coming with us? The cat with the long tail she is coming with us". Wherever the fist landed that person would have to grab the thumb and now two people were going around doing the same thing as before. By the time 4 or 5 thumbs had been grabbed there would be quite some contortions, the tower of fists had grown and people would start giggling and cracking up. Don't ask me why anyone was going to Jerusalem or why they would want to take a cat. Nobody we knew had a cat. Perhaps someone Jewish had come up with that game ("next year in Jerusalem") and someone in our family had picked it up. In any case, I didn't know where "Jerusalem" was but that it was obviously far away.

We had a game similar to blind man's bluff, where you had to figure out the identity of a person while blindfolded but this involved feeling up the person, however not with their hands but with ladles in their hands which made it much more difficult. Also the person being touched with the ladle would try hard  not to make a sound so that the "blind" person would not know who was there. To make it even more difficult others would stick their heads or arms between the ladles and the person to be identified, causing much confusion.
Another game involved a person pretending to be a tomcat, going on their knees and stopping in front of everybody who were sitting in a circle, and only making cat noises (purring and meowing) and generally acting like a cat while trying to make somebody laugh (smiling is ok, but not showing of teeth). That person is only allowed to stroke the "cat" while saying "armer schwarzer Kater" (poor black tomcat) and nothing else. If the cat succeeds to make his "victim " laugh then that person becomes the cat.
Also try this: everybody's hands on the table. One person starts to count off fingers while singing this ditty "my mother is cutting up bacon and is cutting off her little finger" (talk about gruesome!), in German this rhymes, the finger that is the last one counted gets turned under. The person with the last finger still standing is the winner.
The last one I remember gave this premise: A Jew has butchered a hog, what part do you want?  (Hey, don't look at me, I was pretty small, didn't know what a Jew was and it could have been anyone, I think it needs to be "the butcher has butchered a hog, what part do you want?")
Anyway, each person is asked this and each person picks a part, no matter how weird (a favorite was "lower third molar", don't ask me why). Then the moderator, the person who asked the question, now picks one and starts asking that person questions and the only answer that can be given is the animal part that person had picked. The object again is to make that person laugh. Once the person laughs he/she is the questioner. Not as easy as you think. Say one is asked what the name of their best friend is and the person had picked "liver". So the name of your friend is Liver? "Liver". Does he get teased a lot? "Liver". What is his favorite dish? "Liver". With what do you sleep at night? "Liver".  What do you wear when it gets cold? "Liver". And so on. It's hard to keep from cracking up and everybody else is allowed to giggle and laugh. On the other hand, it's not easy to find questions to make that person laugh. Is it a low-brow and in a way disgusting game? Of course, but what do you expect from children? They all like gross stuff.

None of these games involved any kind of equipment, not even cards which were guarded by adults for adult card games and were almost irreplacable at the time, just imagination and they can take up a whole day. So kids could be busy with this sort of nonsense without getting into mischief when left alone. Some families had special cards for games like "Old Maid" and others made for children's games which we did, but most families did not. Too much had been left behind during the evacuations. We also had dominoes and some board games, including checkers and chess.

My father had tied two ropes on a wooden board, making a swing, on a branch of a big tree for me and also a thick rope with a big knot on the bottom next to it for my brother Peter. Once while I was coming up to towards the swing right along the garden fence I saw one of the white roosters (one had a black feather on his tail so he was called "Litttle Tail", the other was "Little Dot" as he had a black feather on one of his wings) walking parallel to me on the other side of the fence. The faster I walked the faster he walked. The gate was supposed to be closed. It wasn't. Out he came in a flash, chasing me, flapping his wings. He was catching up with me. I ran to the swing, figuring that once I was up there I was out of his reach. That rooster flapped his wings so hard he managed to get up there where I was and started to peck at me and only my screams brought my mother who grabbed that rooster and threw him on the ground. I don't remember anything else about that. I do know he was still in the garden after that so I guess he was needed for pest control.

What did we eat?  I don't remember ever going hungry but a good cook can do magic with very little. Maybe that's why I am a good cook.
We did eat strange things according to American tastes. Creamed spinach, boiled potatoes and for everyone half of a hard-boiled egg, yum, I still like that but now I have the whole boiled egg. Beets, warm or in a vinagrette as a salad. Cabbage rolls filled with rice, tomatoes or bell peppers stuffed with rice. Boiled potatoes and Quark. Quark is half-ways between cottage cheese and cream cheese, no curds. Potato pancakes with apple sauce. Buchteln or Rohrnudeln or Dampfnudeln with vanilla sauce. They are all very similar to each other and are a kind of biscuit baked in the oven or on top of the stove in a closed pot with milk. Fried potatoes with bacon pieces and onions. Potato salad, nothing like American potato salad, no mayo ever but a vinagrette with onions and chives, and maybe hard boiled eggs and tomato wedges for everyone. We must have eaten a lot of potatoes and we did go out on the fields after the farmers had brought in their harvest to pick up those they had missed. The teenagers would later burn the dried potato tops and put some of the potatoes in the glowing embers and make it a potato party.

When I was about 5 years of age I was taken to the village proper as the manor house was outside the village, to a doctor for X-rays. Well, actually, it was a fluoroscope which fascinated me. Apparently at one time I had had pneumonia with a raging fever and from somewhere my mother had gotten penicillin (or at least that is what I have heard) and they were checking to make sure I did not have anything else. All children were vaccinated not only against smallpox but also against tuberculosis. Vaccinations against what was called "childhood diseases" like mumps, chicken pox and measles did not exist and children were exposed to them on purpose at a young, but not too young an age to "get it over with" and because contracting these diseases as an adult was much more serious.They also took blood and the doctor had a terrible time finding my vein and had to keep sticking me. I do remember that and also that I screamed bloody murder because of it. They also found that I had a "lazy eye" but they could do nothing about it and that's why I had to get glasses when I was 11 and I'm wearing those to this day, I look weird to myself without them.
We had to walk a long way on a path through the fields, at least it was a long way for 5-year old feet, and the land is quite sandy there and I kept getting sand in my shoes and had to keep taking them off and pour the sand out. On the way back my mother carried me on her back.

Another time my mother, my sister Hertha who was about 15 then, and I were coming home from somewhere and it got dark. We came through a swampy area, the ground kept sucking on my shoes and eventually it sucked one of them right off my foot and neither my mother nor my sister could find my shoe. So they took turns carrying me on their backs. Maybe it was too cold to let me walk barefoot.

This swampy area was caused by the river Rhin which connected the big lake to some smaller ones. Once my sister Marga took me at night to the lake to catch crayfish. We had a bucket and a stick with a cut at the end that was held open with a small piece of wood. Once we spotted a crayfish the stick was used to clamp it over the back of the crayfish which was then released into the bucket which had water in it. You had to be careful not to let the crayfish get you with his claws. When we had enough crayfish we went home where my mother had a big pot of boiling water ready and the crayfish were dumped into the boiling water. They must have made good eating, like lobster in miniature.

When I was 6 we moved out of the manor house pigeon loft and went to live in the town of Lindow, I don't know why. I don't remember much about that place, just that it was a house and we lived in the back, and my sister Marga learned how to split firewood. Now isn't that a weird memory, that's all I remember about that place? Later we moved to a different place in Lindow where we lived upstairs.

Since I had turned 6 in December I had to wait until the following September to go to school. I already knew how to read and I could read my mother's cursive handwriting which was the new kind, not the old German script my father used. When I finally did go to school and learned cursive it was the new kind, but we were also taught the old German script so that we would be able to read it, I still can. Printed books were still in the fancy Gothic script so to this day I can read that as fast as the Roman script in which all books are printed now.
My sister Hertha still lived and worked at the hospital so we did not see her much. I have no idea what my father did for a living, women in general were housewives like my mother who had 3 children at home, only Marga went to school as she was old enough. She was also learning Russian in school. At some time all kids were supposed to join the Young Pioneers, but somehow my sister did not join that, maybe she was too young and Hertha was working.
There were some Greek kids without parents in town, I don't know where they came from, but they put on native dances and sang, and to this day I remember the tune of one of them and some garbled words to them which I am sure no Greek would ever be able to untangle unless he or she recognized the tune. I remember lots of bits and pieces of rather insignificant things, with no context, although I have heard since then that some Greek children were taken from their homes and brought to various places outside of Greece, I don't know for what purpose or by whom.

Lindow lies at the Gudelack Lake, which is rather shallow and its bottom is covered with some kind of moss which makes the lake appear to be much darker and deeper than it is. We would go swimming and bathing there, it wasn't really a beach as the moss came right up to the edge of the water and there the grass would start.There was a dock with some diving towers attached. A fancy motor boat was moored there which had been commandeered by the Russians who would take it out every once in a while. They probably didn't have a lot of gas to spare. We had heard that its inside walls were covered with yellow silk which the Russians had torn up. True? Who knows.
My sister Hertha would dive from the top of the diving tower. My sister Marga did not know how to swim and she never did learn, so she would jump from the lower board, wearing a life preserver made from two big airtight cans strapped to her. I don't know if I ever wore that thing, somehow I think maybe.
At the place where we went bathing there was a latrine which was a sort of an outhouse but it did not have seats, just a board to sit on with your fanny hanging over the edge. I was sent to this outhouse with my brother because he had to go. He fell in. I had to get someone to get him out. The Bathing Master, something like a lifeguard with other duties, got him out, scraped him off with a stick, then took him far away from the bathing beach and got him clean in the lake water. I hope he does not remember that, it's just too embarrassing.

The Rhin is a very small river, really just a brook, emptying into the Gudelack Lake. I was out playing with two boys and fell in the river. Oh boy, my mom was going to be mad if I came home all wet. It was summer. So I took off all my clothes, hung them on the bushes to dry, crept under a bush so nobody would see me and set the two boys up as guards. I was going to wait until my clothes got dry. Children even at that age would be out playing unsupervised for hours and nobody would know where they were. But it must have been suppertime  and my mother went looking for me. She found the two boys with whom she knew I would be and after questioning them severely about my whereabouts she discovered me under the bush. End of story. I probably got spanked, maybe not. I'm sure my mother was happy that I was ok.

September 1949 I started school in Lindow. Kids talk and there was this tale that the teacher in 2nd grade, a man, was really mean and beat kids. So all the first-graders were already afraid to eventually be in 2nd grade. True? Who knows. It surely scared a lot of kids. I don't recall much about that time in school. I think I did ok, after all, it was just first grade and I already knew how to read.

Money: I know we had grey looking coins, I don't think I ever saw paper money and the money I did see went to the store to buy bread when my mother sent me there. Yes, even very small children were sent to the store to buy one or two items and they had better remember what it was they were to get, or they were given a list to give to the merchant who then would put the items in a bag or net the child had brought. No paper bags. Merchants always gave correct change unless mom had calculated exact change beforehand and children would not have dared to get anything they were not told to purchase.
My father was gone a lot, I did not know where but I did know it was nothing one talked about. I heard words like "leaflets" and "putting them out at night", that he might "get caught" whatever that was and would be sent to Siberia which we only knew was far away and very cold and that people hardly ever came back from there.

And then everything changed.

One very early morning  in I think November 1949, (I turned 7 shortly thereafter) my mother woke us, Marga, Peter and me, and said to get dressed in the dark, no lights and to be very, very quiet, that the woman who lived downstairs should not know we were up and that we were going somewhere. I did know that there were some people who would report stuff to some other people which I assumed were the police or other authorities and that then people would be "picked up" in the middle of the night, so this was pretty serious. The woman downstairs was one of those "reporters", they were called "Spitzels".
We went down the stairs, all bundled up, my mother and maybe Marga were carrying suitcases. Almost at the bottom of the stairs I banged my shoe on the stairs, my mother hurried us out the front door and this woman from downstairs came screeching out of her door from under the stairs: "what's going on? Where are you going in the middle of the night?..........." and so on. Outside a car was waiting and we were bundled into it fast and the driver took off. I did not know this man and I had never been in a car. It was dark, I was still tired and I went to sleep.

So far so good.
What came next I only know from hear-say: my mother had told this man she needed to go to some town about 3/4 of the way to Berlin, that she was meeting my father there. Whatever story she told him why she had to drag her children out in the middle of the night I don't know. In any case, he agreed. Once we got there she told him she really wanted to go all the way to Berlin, and after giving him a considerable amount of money he agreed to that and drove us to Berlin, the Eastern, Russian-controlled side. At that time you could still go across the border from East to West Berlin by train and subway but you ran the chance of running into passport control by the East German police who might not let you continue or might even arrest you.

The next thing I do remember is that we were on a train platform, we were waiting for my father to show up, hoping he had "made" it. We were in West Berlin, I guess we had taken a train and had not had any trouble getting from East to West, who knows what my mother told the conductor or any patrol that had come along. After waiting there in the cold for what seemed forever, my mother and my father finally found each other, there on the train platform of the railroad station. We had all "made it".
My sistser Hertha had long before, once she had become a full-fledged nurse, gotten a job in West-Berlin and my parents had sent her surreptitiously (did I spell that correctly?) household goods in small packages so that we would not arrive in the West with nothing at all. Obviously she had no intention of returning to the East although she was supposed to. She just kept all our stuff where she lived.

There is one thing that stands out. My mother, brother and I were walking down the street and she stopped, gave me a shiny coin that looked like gold to me (actually it was brass, the new West-German 10-Pfennig piece) and told me to go into the store in front of which we were standing and ask for caramels. I had no idea what that was but I did what I was told. I came out with 10 pieces of caramels. My mother handed me one, and one to my brother, and I'm sure she had one too. I had never had a piece of candy before so I must have thought this was the best thing I had ever eaten.

This was not the end of our escape from the communist East. It seems that my father had fallen under suspicion of being the one who had instigated the anti-East-German government leaf-letting which was true, and would have been "picked up" within days of our escape. We, my mother, sister and brother, would probably have been picked up also. They could not do anything to my older sister sister as she lived in the West.
So here we were in West Berlin but that was like an island surrounded by East Germany which was under Soviet (Communist) rule. The Berliners called themselves "Insulaner", Island People.  The rest of Germany was divided by American, British and French rule. The only way out of West Berlin to the rest of West Germany was by plane or sealed train. In the meantime we had to have a place to stay. The only living relative we had was my mother's mother in Augsburg, deep in the South, an old lady with a very small income and an even smaller room of her own that she called home. We could NOT stay with her.

Oh yes, refugee camps in Berlin. They are all scrambled up in my head, I have no idea in which order we lived in which.
There was Askania Lager, we didn't stay there very long, it seems to have been long barracks with no partitions. I remember a man who had a Schuko car, a small model car with a wire attached that he could make go in any direction he chose by manipulating a small box attached to the other end of the wire. Adults and children stood around watching him do this.
I had a pink knitted suspender skirt and a white blouse with white knee socks  with black lace-up boots, and a ball I carried in a net that was all mine. I have a picture of that.
We also lived in a former bunker in the Hasenheide, I think just for a week, which had a communal kitchen in the very center. There were long halls that went all around the circumference of the bunker which was built in the round in several concentric circles with halls that connected the circles. There were  small rooms in which people slept in triple bunks. My brother and I slept in the middle bunk, my parents at the bottom and my sister on top. My father got a flea from somewhere and my mother went all over him to find it. Apparently she found it too. This place must have been awful with so many people crammed together, but it was still better than being outside in the snow or cold and rain. And children are resilient. What bothers adults may be a game to children. Only in retrospect do I find those conditions to be horrible. I got lost once and kept going around and around without finding our own little cubby hole and someone had to find it for me. I don't know if I knew the number of the cubby or if somebody had to look it up to find where I belonged.
The best camp we lived in was run by Caritas. My father didn't much like that since it was a Catholic outfit and he didn't care for them at all for personal reasons. He really hated those "black ones".

Nevertheless, this was a nice place to stay in a three storey big house on a corner with a nice wrought iron fence with flowering bushes. The place was called "Roseneck" which means "Rose Corner". We must have stayed there quite a while as I went to school there and American soldiers were at the school handing out thick stew every day to the school children. Parents sent their children to school with small buckets with covers so that the soldiers would put the stew into the buckets and there would be enough for everybody at home to eat also.
I also found that I was sadly behind in what I had learned in school. All the other children were already doing cursive writing and I could only print. Being able to read my mother's handwriting did not help me being able to make the letters myself although it certainly helped in other ways, at least I could read what was written on the blackboard.

During the summer while living at the Roseneck my sister, my brother and I caught whooping cough which is highly contageous. We could not associate with other children  so my mother would sent us out just to take walks but we were admonished to cross the street if we saw anyone coming towards us or overtaking us as we did not want to give the whooping cough to anyone else. Whenever one of us started one of those coughing attacks we would pound each other on the back until the attack was over.  At least we were not cooped up inside.

While living at the Roseneck I was selected to be part of a ceremony for some high offical's birthday. We were to sing a song "Viel Glueck und viel Segen, auf all Deinen Wegen, Gesundheit und Frohsinn sei auch mit dabei" which means "Lots of luck and many blessings on all your paths, health and happiness should also be with you". This is sung "in the round" like "row, row, row your boat". I had always been able to sing (still do) and I had never been afraid of talking to anyone, no shyness here, so this was just fine with me.
I wish I knew who this official was, possibly the Lord Mayor of West Berlin at the time or even Theodor Heuss, the president of West Germany then. I know it was NOT Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. I have a picture of me and the other children all standing there with one girl making an address. My eyes are turned her way, admiring the pretty shoes she had when all I had were lace-up boots. Oh, how I wished I had shoes like that. But my shoes were handed down to my brother when my feet got too big and he could not very well wear Baby Janes, so boots it was.
Later on, winter coats always had buttons and button holes on both sides so he could wear my coat the next winter. Thus the coats were always black or navy or brown, no red or lighter blue for me. I hated green even then so that was no loss.

We could not stay at Roseneck forever. We had to get out of Berlin, we had already lived in every refugee camp and they did not want you to return to one where you had already been. There was little housing, the city was in ruins, no work for a man over 50 years old and my father was 53.
But I did see the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedaechtnis-Kirche one cold and rainy December 1950, it is a treasured memory and I hope that I will one day be able to see it again, don't ask me why, I don't know. My sister had taken me and my brother for a walk, and we stood inside this bombed-out church, the roof was gone, the rain came in and we looked up and saw the dark sky. But there were other people there and they were singing Christmas songs. Germans seem to sing no matter what. The husk of the church was the only thing that was still standing, everything else was pretty much levelled in that area. It is the only ruin in all of Berlin that has been left that way, on purpose, with new modern buildings all around on a busy boulevard.

During the day, wherever you went you saw women working by carrying and putting into piles bricks that had been part of the bombed-out buildings. They called these women "Truemmerfrauen" (the women of the ruins) and the bricks were used to rebuild houses. I don't know if my mother and sister Hertha had to do this also, it's possible.

Not everything was dark and dreary though. My parents would take us to parks, and to see the Havel River with its strange looking boats that were moved forward with poles stuck into the bottom of the river, took us to the Wannsee where everybody went in the summer to go swimming, we went up in the Funkturm, mainly a radio tower, which looks like the Eiffel Tower in miniature and has a restaurant 1/3 up its height. I'm sure that one could really see the destruction of the city from up there, but a 7-year-old is not concerned with that. We went to the famous zoo. All these kinds of entertainments were either free or they did not cost much as my parents just like all the other refugees surely did not have a lot of money.

How to get out of Berlin? Apparently my parents had scraped up enough money for plane tickets for themselves and my sister Hertha. They were the most vulnerable to be arrested by the East German police for unauthorized travel and did not dare to take a train from West Berlin through the Soviet Zone to West Germany. But what to do about the younger children?
At that time trains travelling from West Berlin to West Germany were "sealed", meaning one could not enter or leave the train while in the Soviet Zone. However, the East German police and pass control could and did on occasion. Anyone caught without proper travel papers could be taken off the train and be arrested.
A bold plan was developed by my mother and somebody must have helped her with that. She brought us to the train station where a bunch of "city kids" were being escorted to West Germany to spend some time in the country with farmers where they could breathe fresh air, get good food and relax. This was called "Erholung". There were only a limited number of adults escorting these children and so we were just mixed in with them. The car was crowded, I would say 50 or more children that would have to be kept together, so when the pass control came there were so many children milling around in the car that it was difficult to make a head count and the officials finally gave up trying to ascertain the exact number of children that were going to the country and they did not notice that there were three more than there were on the official documents. The train started up again, the pass control had left. My sister, my brother and I had made it to the West.
When we arrived in Hanover, where the train was headed, I remember seeing a huge Christmas tree in the hall of the train station, all lit up with lights, it seemed to reach to the ceiling of this huge hall, we were reunited with my parents and my sister Hertha. It was still December of 1950 and I was now 8 years old.and in 2nd grade.

But it was not the end of the journey.
Another refugee camp, another school, another train ride to another camp, another school, here and there,  2 weeks, a month, however long the camps had room for us. Uelzen, Giessen, Hanover, Celle, Hamelburg - those are just the names of places where we landed for a time, not neccessarily in that order. By the time we finally settled down in one place I had been in 7 different schools, in some I was ahead and in others I was behind. Being only 8 years old I took all this in my stride, it just did not enter my head to question it, this was just the way it was. (My brother did not fare as well as it was the first grade's beginning that was shattered for him and he was never as bright as I was; eventually he had to repeat 2nd grade so that he could catch up. When he grew up it became evident that his talent was in his hands, not in his academic learning.)
Eventually we arrived in Augsburg and were quartered in another camp, this one was more permanent, close to a rail yard at Wolfgangstrasse 55, which was unpaved and full of pot holes but had a seperate, paved sidewalk lined with trees. There was no grass, just stones and dirt. The camp had no special name. This one consisted of long wooden barracks with a very few wooden partitions. Inside we shared the space with an old man, at least he seemed old to me, and a couple with a grown daughter. We put up blankets to divide the space with each family unit behind their own partition. The roof leaked when it rained, it was just tar paper. We put every kind of container under the leaks to keep the floor dry. Once every summer the American soldiers would come and put new tar on the roofs which would melt and drip off the eaves, we children would play with it like with play-doh, get it on our clothes and make our mothers mad as it was hard to get out.

There was a wood and coal burning cooking stove with the exhaust pipe going through the roof, otherwise no heat. No running water, we had to get that from a pump (a job for any child big enough to carry a bucket of water) located a short distance from the rear of the barrack in which we lived. Used washing water was thrown out the front door where it made puddles until it soaked into the ground.. There was no bathroom, it was located two barracks away and we could take a bath once a week there when hot water was available. They seperated the girls from the boys and the men from the women as there were no partitions between the showers and bathtubs. People used chamber pots and slop buckets at night, these were carried every morning to the bathroom to be emptied and carefully cleaned. This was usually the job of the older children, the vessels were inspected by a parent and if not satisfactorily clean the child was sent back to do some more scrubbing and disinfecting. Dirt and filth was not tolerated and thus diseases were kept at bay.

Pretty soon the men in the barrack which we occupied put up wooden partitions between the various family units as we were going to be there for some time, many months at least, if not years. There simply was no housing available for this influx of people from other places. We stayed there for 4 years.
Augsburg, a city now over 2,000 years old, also had received a lot of damage. The Diesel Factory was located there and the allies had tried mightily to destroy them but never managed to hit them. They were covered in camouflage paint and netting and plants were planted all over them, the allies had no exact location for them and could not see them, so the Diesel Works were still standing when we arrived in early 1951. The paint was still there years later although the netting and plants had been removed.
I was now 8 years old and started school again in 2nd grade. In February Germany celebrates Fasching or Mardi Gras and children were to show up in school in costume. My mother made white, pleated paper cuffs for my wrists and ankles and painted up my face but I did not know what that was all about, so when we paraded in school and were to say what we represented I was at a loss. A kind teacher, Fraeulein Linda Ruf, took pity on me and declared that I was Puss in Boots, at least I knew what that was, although it escaped me why we did this dress-up.
Paper was scarce and we wrote on slates which you could wipe so that you had a clean writing surface. Frl. Ruf took pains to teach me how to write cursive as I still had trouble with that and what I did do was very poor. She gave me extra homework in penmanship, starting from scratch, making lines of loops so I could make e's and f's and other letters that required the stylus to go backwards. Then u's and m's, then letter combinations until my handwriting had improved to a satisfactory level. Eventually it was better than some of the other children's.

Since I had older sisters I wore a lot of hand-me-downs. If a dress was not good enough anymore my mother would take it apart and with the addition of parts from another dress would make a new one. This was done so commonly that a whole new fashion was created that put fabric of different prints together to make outfits, and not just for children.

Hertha soon found a job at the local hospital and moved out to live in the nurses' home. My youngest brother Walter arrived in November of 1951 so we were just as crowded as before. I had no idea where this baby had come from, just that my mother had gone to the hospital, was gone for a while and then returned with this baby. We had been asked some weeks before if we wanted a brother or a sister. I went for a sister but thought this to be a null question. However, when presented with a brother I was deeply disappointed. Didn't I say I wanted a sister?

There were other children in the camp and we all played together. While at school the other children would talk to me and play with me during recess and some of them would walk home with me as they were living in the same direction as I did, I was not invited to come to their homes. This did not in general bother me but it did eventually become obvious that I was different from them and thus I was not as welcome as other children who were not refugees.
First of course there was the fact that I was living in the refugee camp and not in a real house. My clothes were not bought in a store but were homemade, hand-me-downs or made up from other clothes, the lunches I brought to school were bread with margarine and homemade jam, not thick salami or leberwurst or ham sandwiches most of the other children brought. At least the government provided milk at the schools for all children, sometimes even chocolate milk.
Then there was the way I talked. These children spoke a Suebian dialect and my speech was that of the North. We were not allowed at home to speak any kind of dialect, only proper German although it is impossible to not take on at least a bit of the regional way of talking, so the way I spoke set me apart also. Eventually I took on more of the regional dialect but at home I still had to speak proper German, so I never sounded just like the other children. If one of them wanted to call me names a favorite was to declare me to be a "Prussian", the people from the North. I never heard anyone call me a refugee as being something derogatory, only to explain why I lived where I did and why I spoke the way I did and that I had come from someplace else.
Last if not least, my parents insisted on exposing us to the better things in life which meant listening to classical music programs and plays on the radio, visiting museums that did not charge anything, excellent table manners at all times, proper way of greeting people and general decorum, the list goes on. This gave me and my brother and sister the appearance of feeling superior, especially to those where this way of being was not the rule. I read whatever was printed and thus my vocabulary was larger than that of the other children, giving me the appearance of a know-it-all and being arrogant. It does not make you a favorite among your peers.
My mother also saw to it that I would not always be the last to have something new. I was the first in my class to have a new type of stylus similar to a mechanical pencil which used a softer material to write on the slate, making it easier for me to write and to learn to write better. She crocheted several wipers for my slate so that I could always have a clean one and they were in bright colors from left-over yarn where most children's were just little dirty rags sewn together from scraps. When it became fashionable in the winter to have a scarf that doubled as a cap my mother was the first one to knit one for me, with stripes and tassels. My mittens had stripes too and my regular knitted cap had the biggest pompom, a real status symbol. And I always had bows in my short hair.

Yes, and then there was that hair.
It had always been light and curly. Now it was getting a little darker and even more curly. Marga had the same problem, maybe even worse. The curls just could not be tamed and stood out from our heads. Big bows at least kept the top down. The other girls with straight or wavy hair wore braids or page boys, but my parents had a hard time even getting a comb through my short curls (this is before conditioners and cremme rinse that detangles hair) so they kept it short. How I wished I could have braids with bows in the ends.
When I was old enough to attend a different school at age eleven I rode the streetcar, many times by myself as my friends at school had to attend religious instruction from which I was excused and thus either came to school an hour later or left school an hour earlier when this instruction was given. Women on the tram just could not resist touching my curls and I really got tired of that. Once there were two women on the streetcar touching my hair and commenting that it was a shame that my mother had gotten me a permanent at such a young age. I told that woman to get her hand off my hair and she said I was rude. Then I said that I did not have a permanent and the other woman said "oh, and she lies too". That of course really made me mad and I said I did not lie and that I did not like people touching my hair and that I had natural curls. They didn't say anything else after that.
But I heard other comments too: Krause Haare, krauser Sinn, steckt der Teufel mitten drin, loosely translated that since I had curly hair and an inextricable intellect that the devil was smack in the middle of me. I only knew the devil from fairy tales, not the religious one and thus was at a loss to understand how I could have the devil in me.

My sister Marga got it even worse. On the way to the streetcar she had to pass a factory where she made sure she was walking on the opposite side of the street, and the male factory workers would holler and whistle at her but she would not even look at them. She had a way of walking that made her hips sway and so the factory workers would call her a whore (she was all of 16, quite shy and rather insecure and only knew how to defend herself from this kind of behavior by trying to ignore it) and when that still did not get a reaction from her they would call her a "white nigger" because of the super-curly hair which was still quite light though it too, like mine, would darken later on. Both of us later found that a hairdresser could wet the hair until it was straight with water, set it on rollers and dry it completely and the hair would be smooth and in waves (until it got wet or even just damp with humidity which would revert the hair to its frizzy-curly state). Both of us would also lighten our hair to the blonde shade it had been when we were so much younger.

Oh yes, there was another problem that made me "different". I had been raised with no religion whatsoever and thus was quite ignorant about these kinds of beliefs. When my friends found out that I had not been baptized in either the Catholic or the Lutheran church (I didn't even know what this "baptism" was they said I was a Heathen Child but of course I did not know what that was either so it did not bother me. However, again it was something that set me apart.

But you deal with things the way they are and not the way you wish they would be, it's a whole lot less stressful.

When I was 12, it was 1954, we finally moved out of the barracks onto the 2nd floor of a brand new 4-storey building with 36 apartments. We had 3 bedrooms, 2 of which were really tiny, another room which my father used as an office, and a combination living room/dining room/kitchen which was called a "Wohnkueche". This opened out onto a very small balcony, just big enough for a small table and 2 chairs. Soon there were window boxes with geraniums attached to the balcony and lacy curtains at the windows. Enough new housing had been built so that even a family as large as ours could find a place to live. Many of the refugees had found housing earlier and had moved away, but that was easier for families with just one or two children.
Sure, we lived far away from the city's center, out even past the suburbs, the only road to the streetcar was still dirt about half of the way and in the winter no snowplow came to clear the road and people would just follow in each other's footsteps until they had made a path one could navigate without having to watch where to put one's foot next. By the time I was ready to leave for school that usually had already happened. Eventually this was all built up with lots of apartments and even some high-rises and the bus came to us too.

At first only refugees lived in the new housing, but it did not take long before others moved there too. We had running water and a flush toilet without a tank hanging near the ceiling, just working on water pressure which was high, but no hot water. Our heat came from a coal-fired stove which later was converted to oil, my mother cooked on a seperate gas stove and oven.
To take a bath, once a week a big zinc tub with a drain spout was brought up from the basement and set up next to the heating stove in the living room, water was heated to the boiling point in a huge pot my mother used for canning and poured into the tub, followed by cold water to bring it down to bathing temperature. First my brother and I would get bathed, if the water was not too dirty my sister would get clean next. Then the water was emptied into buckets and poured down the toilet, and then my parents would take a bath with water that had been heating while the others had had their baths. My father had built a 3-part screen frame which my mother then filled with a flowered curtain, this was used as a screen to give the bathers some privacy and to cut down on any drafts.
Later my father with the help of Hertha's new husband who was an electrician, put a bathtub into the bathroom, installed a sink, hung a tankless water heater on the wall in the kitchen area with an extra pipe to the bathroom and we could take a bath in the bathroom with unlimited hot water. He also installed an electric heater on the wall in the bathroom so it would be comfortable there to take a bath. (I told you my father was handy).
After I had left home in 1961 he even removed the kitchen area completely from the living room and put it into one of the bedrooms complete with the water heater now in that room, also the sink, stove and a small refrigerator plus a deep freeze, and a table that served as a counter to prepare food. The dining area stayed in one corner of the living room which now was much larger with the kitchen no longer there, with a corner bench that had storage under it.

Laundry was done once a month in the basement with a huge copper kettle that was heated with coal to boil the white clothes with soap, which then were scrubbed on a big wooden table while the colored clothes were soaking in the now just warm soapy water. They were then scrubbed also, everything was rinsed 3 times in cold water, wrung out by hand although my mother later had a gadget that worked on water pressure that squeezed all the water out. Then the laundry was carried up the stairs to the outside and hung on clothes lines. In the winter or when it rained, the laundry had to be taken up into the attic, 4 flights of stairs! where clotheslines also were strung. Since heat rises it was always warm and dry up there and laundry did not take long to dry, but then it had to be carried down again as soon as possible as somebody else might want to hang clothes also.
By the time I was 14 and tall enough I had to help doing the laundry also, two or three people washing all those clothes for 6 people could do it faster than just my mother doing it, although my father did help with the really heavy work, like carrying baskets with wet laundry or filling the kettle with water.
It was not until many years later before my mother finally got a washing machine, but laundry still got hung up to dry.

I cannot say that I had a hard or deprived childhood although it might seem that way to an American. I cannot remember ever being hungry or being raggedly clothed or having no shoes. Children under the age of 12 all went barefoot in the summer once they had come home from school and during summer vacation, even the ones whose parents had money. Later we would wear sandals, with socks, which would come off once we were home from school, didn't want to make the socks dirty, you had to wear them all week.We would have one school dress that was taken off once we got home, one Sunday dress, and various inexpensive, usually home-made blouses and skirts and sweaters to wear outside of school which we wore all week before they got put in the dirty laundry.

Children are resilient and can make a game out of anything. I loved to read and once I discovered a library there was no stopping me. I could have lived in a library and would have been happy without ever coming out. But that's not how life is.