Tara LaChance
June 1, 2015
Memory Essay final draft
My father’s parents both died before I was born. My grandfather shot himself when my dad was 11 and my grandmother died of a stroke when my dad was 26. My mother’s parents didn’t have much interest in spending time with or developing a relationship with their grandchildren. They died a few years apart when I was in my 20’s. They said they had raised their children and were done. I have always had a very intense longing to have grandparents who would tell me stories about where they came from and my heritage, to take me places and spend time with me like I saw so many of my friends’ grandparents doing with them. For this reason, I decided that I would seek out a person who I could ask the questions that I would have asked my own grandparents. I really wanted to find someone who emigrated from Italy, since that was where my father’s grandmother came from, and I feel more connected to that side of my family (even though I never met them) than to my mother’s side. But, as fate would have it, I came across a woman who emigrated from Germany, which, by coincidence, is where my mother’s grandmother came from. This is her story.
I didn’t seek her out. Instead, she just happened to be sitting at the front desk of a recreation center for senior citizens that a friend took me to one day. I went in with the intention of just asking if they had anyone there who had emigrated from Europe and would be willing to speak to me about it. As I was asking the receptionist at the front desk if she knew anyone who may fit these criteria, there was a woman sitting with her back to me, maybe a foot away and had been talking to the receptionist when I walked in. The receptionist said, “Well, she is from Germany and has a lot of great stories” and pointed to the woman sitting in front of me. The woman slowly turned around and I said, “Great! Would you be willing to speak to me?”. “You’ve come right at lunch time”, she answered, “but I can talk to you for a few minutes. Let’s go in the back room where it’s quiet.” We walked down a short hallway, in to a room that has five round dining tables with four plastic and metal chairs around each table and sat down near a window.
I introduced myself and she did the same. Her name is Hermine, and she was born in Berchthegargen, Germany in 1929. She is about 5’2” with a round figure and an accent but very adept at the English language. She has short, white hair that comes above her shoulders with loose, sporadic curls, pinned up on both sides with gold barrettes. She wears a gold necklace with a cross, gold hoop earrings and small, frameless glasses, (also with gold accents), and a gold eyeglass chain attached to each side and falling around the back of her neck. Her eyes are blue. You can tell that, in her youth, she was a beautiful woman.
She comes to this center every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, early in the morning and sets up the exercise room for the group exercise that she participates in. She likes for things to be clean and for everything to be in its right place, she tells me. “I am very particular about things,” she says. We already had something in common, it seems.
Her parents were Austrian, she makes sure to tell me, but she was raised in Germany. She is kind and open, willing to tell me whatever I want to know. It seems as though she is happy that I am interested in hearing about her life. Although her demeanor is not overly friendly I still feel an instant connection with her. Maybe partly because the great-grandmother on my father’s side that I mentioned I had wanted to interview…her name was Erminia. What a great coincidence! (I don’t believe in coincidences)
Her mother died when she was 10 years old of ovarian cancer, and Hermine was put in to a foster home. Her two brothers and one sister were put in foster homes a well. She goes on to explain that her father died a couple of years later but she is unsure of how. In the middle of this, she interjects, “And then the war happened.” “Do you remember much about the war?” I ask her. “I remember everything” she replies. “Would you mind telling me about it?”
She begins right away “We of course had the bombings. I slept in my clothes for three years straight because you never knew when the bombs would start and you would have to go to the bomb shelters. We had the black-out windows, all the windows blacked out. And then it got to the point where we got bombed every hour, on the hour, at the end of the war, you know. Sometimes we run for the bunker and if it was too late and they closed the bunkers up, then here we are out and the bombs are coming down. Then we hit the ground and as soon as we got, we made a circle and we dashed to the next building which was a school house, down in the basement there during the bombing. Bombing was hell.” Her eyes become red and well up with tears, but she doesn’t allow them to flow out.
She lived in Munich, on the opposite side of the mountain where Adolf Hitler lived, she tells me matter-of-factly. “Were you afraid of Hitler?” I asked and very quickly she says no. In the same breath she goes on to say, “You have to belong to his party or you didn’t have a job. People wanted to work. My father and mother, they had four kids, they needed work you know. But uh, I don’t know of anyone that got by not belonging to his group. He held a Christmas party for all of the families with four or more children every year and we all sat at long tables and we each got a gift.” She looked forward to attending that every year, being young and not knowing any better, she explained.
She saw Hitler in person once as he went through the town in a parade. “We were all on rations, and the rations were very small.” She doesn’t show any emotional effect when I ask about Hitler, which I find interesting. Also during my questions about Hitler she told me that her blood brothers, who were also sent to foster families when her mother died, both had to go in to the German army during the war. I asked if they were forced to go in and her response was, “Well, they were 16 and no parents, what are they gonna do? You join the army.” She continues by saying, “One joined the SS because it paid more but not the kind of SS that was in a concentration camp he was in with a fighting troop. He lost a lot out of his back and he lost a leg. The other brother joined in the fighting because that’s all he wanted to do.” I asked if she ever spoke to her brothers about their experiences in the war, but she ignored the question and moved on to talk about her brothers and their families, so I left it alone. She is the only one left out of her family now.
Outside of Munich was a concentration camp, she tells me, called Dachau. “Did you know what was happening to people there?” I asked her. “No, no, no, we didn’t know what happened inside of that until after the war. What the Americans said. But uh, I was supposed to have had an uncle in there but I never did find out who he was or what his name was, I never saw him after the war, so evidently he was one of them that…” She stopped there, right in the middle of that thought. After the war, she goes on to tell me, they went in and saw the “burners” inside of the Dachau where they burned the people. Also a tree that supposedly was used to hang 800 people a day. She says that she saw it and it just “didn’t make sense” to her because there was not a scratch on that tree. I had never heard of this camp so I Googled it when I returned home that day and found this information[i] “Dachau Concentration Camp was the first of its kind opened in Germany by the Nazi government in 1933, and it served as a model for later concentration camps. Designed to hold Jews, political prisoners, and other ‘undesirables,’ the camp is now a memorial to the more than 40,000 people who died and over 200,000 who were imprisoned here during the Nazi regime. The memorial was established in 1965, 20 years after Dachau was liberated by American forces.”
She recalls how the school children in her town were given the rations to deliver to families in the area every week. They gave them the addresses and a package of what went to each family. She spoke about how sugar was “almost impossible” during those times. She wanted to bake a cake, so she saved up the sugar rations for three months in order to have enough. While she was waiting for the cake to bake, bombs were falling, everything was rattling, but she wanted that cake so badly, she just stood at the oven and waited for it. Her foster parents owned a restaurant so she said that she didn’t feel hungry during the war. They had access to a garden and they were also able to go to other towns to get meat from butchers. Her foster mother was very strict she and the three other children had to sit down right away when coming home from school to do their homework before they could play or do anything else. She describes her foster father as “really a nice guy.” She gets the first smile on her face so far and remembers, “We used to get into trouble together.” She describes her childhood as “beautiful”.
One time a plane was shot down in Munich where Hermine lived she was only maybe 11 years old. She and several other children wanted to “see what he looked like”. She thought that the pilot was an American. They began to run towards the plane and they began getting bombed. One of the other kids, a boy, yelled at her to run for her life, in a zig-zag pattern. She didn’t end up seeing the pilot’s face but when I asked if the plane was, in fact, American, she told me it was actually British.
Hermine recalls one time that she saw a dead body in the street. She was about 13 years old and was on her way to the train to go to the next town to get lamb for her foster parents’ restaurant. There was a woman lying dead in the street. She walked right past her, stopping briefly and looking down at her. “But what could I do? I was just a kid.” She had to keep walking and continue on with what she was doing. “Some nights up to 400 people died in Munich from the bombs,” she says plainly. I can’t help but think that this must have affected her on a deep level, but she is very even in her emotions while telling me her stories, almost unfeeling sometimes.
I enjoyed getting the opportunity to meet with Hermine and her openness to speak so candidly with me. After all, I was a complete stranger to her and here she was sharing her life story with me. So didn’t hesitate to tell me very intimate details about her life. There were times when I actually felt uncomfortable with the details but she didn’t seem to mind. Maybe that kind of willingness to share her story comes from the fact that she had a lot of struggle in her youth and she learned to just be open and free with her life. Or possibly it comes from the fact that she grew up really without a tight family unit and like me, she longed to have someone who cared enough to ask. Whatever the reason, I am glad that she is willing to share and I looked forward to our next meeting.
During our second interview together, Hermine carries a women’s magazine in her hand on our way back to the empty lunch room that me meet in. I don’t think anything of it until we sit down and she opens it up saying, “I have these papers to show you. I had to hide them in this magazine because the people around here are nosey.” She grins at me like a young girl with a secret. This is the first time that I have seen this side of her. She pulls out several old documents among them are her temporary travel document in lieu of passport form German nationals, a magazine from the Alexander M. Patch ship that she came from Germany to the US on, and her citizenship paper. “I am surprised I still have all of this stuff,” she says to me. My eyes light up and I grab the stack with excitement and begin to inspect each one. “Wow, you were really pretty”, I say to her as she smiles and goes on with another story about the war.
“When I was 15, we were in town in a big group and two German officers just came up to me, one on each side, and told me to come with them,” she explains. “They took me to a nearby building to a second floor apartment and set me on the bed. I didn’t know if they were planning on raping me, or killing me, or both. But what could I do? There was one on each side of me, holding my arm. I looked around the room and thought about jumping out of the window as an escape when another officer came in with an interpreter. He wanted to cut a piece of my hair. He said it reminded him of his wife. Of course I agreed. After he cut a lock of my hair, he gave me a 5 pound bag of sugar and some money and told me to go home. I still don’t understand what that was all about but I was happy to not have been harmed.” I sit across from her, riveted by the story that I was sure would have a very bad ending, but thankful that it didn’t. She goes on, “My foster mother told me that I was seen being taken by two officers and asked me if I had been raped. No, I said, he just wanted a piece of my hair. My mother was so angry. She said that she was going to take me to the doctor and have me examined. I told her to go ahead, because I was still a virgin.” She chuckles, “She was so angry.” Her 86 year old hands, wrinkled and thin, are fiddling with the magazine that she brought in, smoothing down the middle of the open pages, making a nice crease, throughout her story. Has all this questioning touched a nerve? She seems nervous for a few moments, but continues on anyway.
I ask about her first husband, an American GI that she met in Germany. They dated for two years before they got married, when she was 20. She recalls the day that they went to the courthouse. She clearly recalls, “They weren’t going to let us get married, because I was 20, not 21, and they needed permission from a parent for that. I had a guardian assigned to me, which I didn’t even know about, who was ill and living in another town about 100 miles away so he couldn’t come and sign papers to allow me to marry. I was so frustrated and angry, sitting there waiting to get permission to marry this man that I was crazy in love with. I’m not sure why, but they finally decided that since I was only 6 months away from being 21, they would let me choose on my own. They asked me if I wanted to denounce my German citizenship or keep in once I was married to the American. I didn’t think that I would ever get divorced, and figured that I would have my US citizenship in two years anyway, so I said that I would give up my citizenship. I left shortly after that to come to America. We took the ship called the Alexander M. Patch, and landed in New York. From the moment I got there, I felt like I had been here all my life. I had never felt out of place, any place that I lived here in America.”
The journey on the ship took them 7 days from Germany to New York. She doesn’t have much to say about it but she does offer me a copy of the ships newspaper that she has kept all of these years. The paper is several pages, stapled together, in good shape for being from December of 1949. With only some numbers, presumably written by Hermine, in pencil at the bottom. The newspaper is called The Newspatch, (Souvenir Edition) with a rough drawing of a globe with a dotted line from the vicinity of Germany to New York, a drawing of Santa Claus and a ship on the front. It gives information such as the date that they left Bremerhaven and arrived in New York, what was happening on the ship and a log book of the journey which gives the days of travel, how many miles traveled per day, the weather and the position report, to name a few things. It looks like it was typed with a typewriter and has spelling and other errors throughout. The illustrations look like that were done by hand with a pen. Such a great piece of physical history that she has. She allowed me to make copies at the front desk of all of her documents which I greatly appreciated.
Her first marriage only lasted less than 3 years. She became pregnant only one time, when she was 23 and that only lasted three months. She went in to the doctor and they told her that the fetus was growing in her fallopian tube and could kill her if they didn’t do emergency surgery that day. She doesn’t seem upset by the fact that she was never a mother, she doesn’t dwell on that subject for more than a few seconds, so we move on.
When Hermine and her new husband arrived in America, things changed and he became “a drunk” and she couldn’t deal with that. Along with her husband’s behavior, they had been sending money back to the states to be put in an account for when they arrived. She remembers asking her new mother-in-law about going to the bank to get some money out and her response was that “there was no money”. They had spent the money on home repairs before they arrived. Hermine went from being madly in love and a citizen of Germany to the young wife of a GI in America with no family.
When she left him, she was faced with the grim reality that she had renounced her German citizenship, and had not applied for her American citizenship and was, therefore, a citizen of no country. I asked her how she was treated by American’s when she got here due to the relationship with Germany and the war. She said she was called a Nazi only once but she didn’t have any problems really. According to her, “I was an attractive young girl. No one really bothered me.”
Hermine had spent her childhood in her foster parents restaurant, so when she needed to go to work here in the states, she naturally went and became a waitress. Her husband wasn’t pulling his weight financially when they were married, so she took it upon herself to get a job and she left him. After her divorce, until 1957, Hermine lived in fear of not belonging to any country and what that might mean for her if anything ever happened.
I left the second interview slightly amazed at how much I have in common with this 86 year old woman. She had two marriages, and two divorces, the same as me. She is very particular and anal retentive, like me. She is a strong independent woman and a hard worker, like me. I kept finding myself saying, “That’s how I am too.” Have I just met the grandmother I have always longed for? Did I fill in any gap in her life as well? I hope so. This meeting has really been a true testament that age really doesn’t matter. That you can be kindred spirits with someone no matter their age, gender or nationality.
She called me and asked me to come visit her at her house, just days after our second meeting, saying that she wants to tell me the story about why it took her so long to get her citizenship. Of course, I went over as soon as I could. I arrived at the trailer park where she lives, not sure of what kind of conditions it would be in. She was standing on her small front porch when I arrived, leaning on the railing and looking over at a nearby tree. She invited me in and as I stepped through the door I saw a bright, open floor plan, and a spotlessly clean home with photos of family on the wall, nice furniture, bright with sunlight. She took me on a short tour of the trailer which was spacious and open, unlike any of the few dark and cramped trailers I had seen in my life until then. Everything had a place, and there was nothing extraneous lying around. I notice a Seattle Seahawks poster on the wall just as she says, “I like to watch football.” Then I walk over to a photo collage of a young, handsome guy. I ask her who he was, “Oh, that’s my great-nephew in Germany. He won the gold medal for Germany for the luge during the last Olympics. I wasn’t sure who to root for, the US or Germany, but I was happy for him when he won.”
She takes a seat in her single chair and I sat on the modern, firm, heather grey couch and she begins to tell me the reason why it took her so long to get her citizenship. After her divorce, she didn’t have the money that she would have needed to do all of the things that were required of her to apply. She also told me a story about when she went on a weekend trip with one of the other waitresses from her restaurant, her boyfriend and his brother. The brother was playing pinball, which she said she had never played in her life. He won two games in a row, winning $40 each time. Something wasn’t right. It looked as if he was holding something in his hand on the table while he played, so noticed. The owner came out and wanted to watch. The brother said to Hermine, “Here, you play” she played and won! Beginner’s luck she speculated. The owner shrugged and muttered something under his breath and then walked off. “I must have had an angel watching out for me that day. I was so afraid of getting arrested because I saw that he must have been cheating. So, I ran out and walked for a long time, until finally I came to a truck stop. I sat and had a cup of coffee and was crying. They knew I wasn’t a citizen, I was so upset that they put me in danger like that. A truck driver came up to me and asked me why I was crying so I told him my story and that I needed to get back to Philadelphia. He said he was going that way and would take me.” That situation made her feel an urgency to become a citizen.
After that incident she began dating a millionaire. He was a nice guy that she met at her job. After dating him for a while, he gave her the money that she needed to travel to the town she needed to go to take her classes, stay there for 10 days and travel back. It was thanks to him that she became a US citizen on June 20, 1957. She recalls studying the amendments on the way to take the oral exam and again says, “I must have had an angel watching out for me or something because they asked me about the amendment I had just studied.”
Hermine told me that she was married a second time, again for only a years, but she did not give any more information about that marriage. She simply said, “I am a very organized person, I like things to be my way. I guess I am just not easy to live with. Maybe I am too fussy. I figured that if I was going to be with someone who didn’t pull their weight, I may as well be on my own.” She laughed and that was it for that subject. Another thing she and I have in common.
Over the years she was not only a waitress but she was also a hostess in a nightclub and lived in many different states, such as New York, South Carolina and spent 27 years in Oakland, California. When she turned 50 she got a job at a printing company, engraving stationary, where she worked until she was 65. They didn’t offer retirement at that job and only gave three days of sick leave per year. But she remembers that time fondly, working for her friends and enjoying what she did.
She moved up to Washington to be close to her only family here in the states, her niece and her two kids. Although when she speaks about them, so seems disgusted. Telling me that they really only come around to see her when they need money. “My niece drives past my house every single day to go to work, but she never stops to see me. Even when I ask for her help, she usually says she is too busy. And those kids of hers, they are spoiled and ungrateful.” I feel empathy for her. She is such a sweet lady and has so many great stories to tell. “It’s interesting,” I tell her, “some people have grandparents and family right here for them to be able to spend time with and they don’t take advantage of that. And then people like me would do anything to have that and I don’t.” There is an ease between us while we sit their together and talk openly about her past, her small family now and mine. I feel as though we may be able to fill a void for each other somehow. I make sure to tell her, “If you ever need anything, please just call me,” maybe too many times during our three meetings, but it’s what I feel like saying to her.
I ask how she likes living where she is now. She says it’s fine and then tells me, “About a year ago, I was sleeping on my couch, here in the living room. About 4 in the morning, a huge bang wakes me up and there is a man standing in my living room. He had kicked my door in and had the molding in his hand with nails sticking out. I just laid there, still. He came over to me and put his face about 3 inches away from my face, put his finger up to his mouth and said, “Shhh.” I thought, oh God, he is going to hit me with those nails. But he just walked back in to my bedroom. I got up, grabbed my phone and went outside and called 911. I said, there is a man in my house, send the police. They got my address and said, the police are already there. No, I said, I am standing outside and they are not here. Yes, she said again, they are already there. No! The police are not here, send someone now!” I guess the police actually were about five trailers down from me, she said. The man had robbed them and ran and they called the police. The police were out looking for him. “Just then, my neighbor yelled at me and said, ‘he’s on your roof!’” Did they catch him, I ask, rubbing my hands together out of the anxiety that I had hearing her story. “They found him later, he was on drugs I guess,” she said, rolling her eyes. “It has been a year of going to court and dealing with this and it cost me $600 to get my door fixed and he never had to pay a penny. He doesn’t work, he lives off of the state, and they haven’t made him pay me back. They should make him do community service to earn the money, or go to jail, until he pays for the damage.” I can see that she is angry. Understandably so.
“Aren’t you afraid of that happening again? Do you feel safe here?” I asked, very concerned. She shrugs, “I learned from my childhood not to be afraid of everything. You don’t know what’s in other people’s minds. Why worry about it?” I guess after all of the things that she has seen and been through over the past 86 years, she has become desensitized to things like the threat of violence or death. Over the course of three interviews with her, she says several times, “You know, I’ve had good times and bad times. Whatever is gonna happen, is gonna happen.” Great, yet simple wisdom from a fascinating, lovely lady.
I find it so interesting that she was a part of that time in our history and I wonder how it must feel to be able to look back and say that you lived through all of those things that so many people want to know about now. I also wonder how she feels being from Germany and being associated with Hitler and the atrocities of the Holocaust. I wonder a lot of things still and I hope that over time and the development of a relationship with her, I will be able to ask her more of the questions that I didn’t feel were appropriate so early on. I also hope that this will be a relationship that goes beyond just a few interviews.
I only spent a few hours with her and was gifted with so much rich history, I can only imagine what else I will learn in the span of several more hours, days, weeks, months and years. How many hidden memories will come up through the act of telling me her stories? How many things will come up for her that she may have blocked or pushed out of her consciousness in order to protect her heart? Once the memory has been aroused, what will it offer to the owner of them? And what will that offer to the person on the receiving end of the sharing? I find that I am left with more questions than answers at this point. But without questions there would be no conversation in the first place.