Tara LaChance<\/p>\n
May 1, 2015<\/p>\n
Memory Essay #1<\/p>\n
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My father\u2019s parents both died before I was born.\u00a0 My mother\u2019s parents didn\u2019t have much interest in spending time with or developing a relationship with their grandchildren.\u00a0 They said they had raised their children and were done.\u00a0 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\u2019 grandparents doing with them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I really wanted to find someone who emigrated from Italy, since that was where my father\u2019s grandmother came from, and I feel more connected to that side of my family (even though I never met them) than to my mother\u2019s side.\u00a0 But, as fate would have it, I came across a woman who emigrated from Germany, which, by coincidence, is where my mother\u2019s grandmother came from.\u00a0 So, this is her story.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The receptionist said, \u201cWell, she is from Germany and has a lot of great stories\u201d and points to the woman sitting in front of me.\u00a0 The woman slowly turned around and I said, \u201cGreat!\u00a0 Would you be willing to speak to me?\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cYou\u2019ve come right at lunch time\u201d, she answered, \u201cbut I can talk to you for a few minutes.\u00a0 Let\u2019s go in the back room where it\u2019s quiet.\u201d<\/p>\n
I introduced myself and she did the same.\u00a0 Her name is Hermina, and she was born in Berchthegargen, Germany in 1929.\u00a0 She is about 5\u20192\u201d with a round figure with an accent but very adept at the English language.\u00a0 She has short, white hair that comes above her shoulders with loose, sporadic curls and is pinned up on both sides with gold barrettes.\u00a0 She wears a gold necklace with a cross, gold hoop earrings and small, frameless glasses also with gold accents.\u00a0 Her eyes are blue and you can tell that, in her youth, she was a beautiful woman.<\/p>\n
Her parents were Austrian, she makes sure to tell me, but she was raised in Germany.\u00a0 She is kind and open, willing to tell me whatever I want to know.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Maybe partly because the great-grandmother on my father\u2019s side that I mentioned I had wanted to interview\u2026her name was Erminia.\u00a0 What a great coincidence!<\/p>\n
Her mother died when she was 10 years old of ovarian cancer, and Hermina was put in to a foster home.\u00a0 Her two brothers and one sister were put in foster homes a well.\u00a0 She goes on to explain that her father died a couple of years later but she is unsure of how.\u00a0 In the middle of this, she interjects, \u201cAnd then the war happened\u201d.\u00a0 \u201cDo you remember much about the war?\u201d I ask her.\u00a0 \u201cI remember everything\u201d she replied.\u00a0 \u201cWould you mind telling me about it?\u201d\u00a0 She begins right away: \u201cWe of course had the bombings. \u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0 We had the black-out windows, all the windows blacked out.\u00a0 And then it got to the point where we got bombed every hour, on the hour, at the end of the war, you know.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Bombing was hell.\u201d<\/p>\n
She lived in Munich, on the opposite side of the mountain where Adolf Hitler lived, she tells me matter-of-factly.\u00a0 \u201cWere you afraid of Hitler?\u201d I asked, very quickly she says no. \u00a0In the same breath, she goes on to say, \u201cYou have to belong to his party or you didn\u2019t have a job.\u00a0 People wanted to work.\u00a0 My father and mother, they had four kids, they needed work you know.\u00a0 But uh, I don\u2019t know of anyone that got by Not belonging to his group.\u00a0 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.\u201d\u00a0 She looked forward to attending that every year, being young and not knowing any better, she explained.<\/p>\n
She saw Hitler in person once as he went through the town in a parade.\u00a0 \u201cWe were all on rations, and the rations were very small.\u201d She doesn\u2019t show any emotional effect when I ask about Hitler which I find interesting. \u00a0Also during my questions about Hitler she told me that her blood brothers who were also sent to foster families, both had to go in to the German army during the war. \u00a0I asked if they were forced to go in and her response was, \u201cWell, they were 16 and no parents, what are they gonna do?\u00a0 You join the army.\u201d \u00a0She continues by saying, \u201cOne 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.\u00a0 He lost a lot out of his back and he lost a leg. The other brother joined in the fighting because that\u2019s all he wanted to do.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She is the only one left out of her family now.<\/p>\n
Outside of Munich was a concentration camp, she tells me, called Dachau.\u00a0 \u201cDid you know what was happening to people there?\u201d I asked her.\u00a0 \u201cNo, no, no, we didn\u2019t know what happened inside of that until after the war. What the American\u2019s said\u201d she tells me.\u00a0 \u201cBut 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…\u201d 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 \u201cburners\u201d inside of the Dachau where they burned the people. Also a tree that supposedly was used to hang 800 people a day.\u00a0 She says it just didn\u2019t make sense to her because there was not a scratch on that tree.\u00a0 I had never heard of this camp so I Googled it when I returned home that day and found this information.[i]<\/a>\u00a0 \u201cDachau 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 goes to each family. \u00a0She spoke about how sugar was \u201calmost impossible\u201d during those times.\u00a0 She wanted to bake a cake, so she saved up the sugar rations for three months in order to have enough.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Her foster parents owned a restaurant so she said that she didn\u2019t feel hungry during the war.\u00a0 They had access to a garden and they were also able to go to other towns to get meat from butchers.\u00a0 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 \u201creally a nice guy.\u201d\u00a0 She gets the first smile on her face so far and remembers, \u201cWe used to get in to trouble together.\u201d\u00a0 She describes her childhood as \u201cbeautiful\u201d.<\/p>\n One time, a plane was shot down in Munich where Hermina lived, she was only maybe 11 years old, her and several other children wanted to \u201csee what he looked like\u201d.\u00a0 She thought that the pilot was an American.\u00a0 They began to run towards the plane and they began getting bombed.\u00a0 One of the other kids, a boy, yelled at her to run for her life, in a zig-zag pattern.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t end up seeing the pilot\u2019s face but when I asked if the plane was, in fact, American, she told me it was actually British.<\/p>\n I find it so fascinating that she was a part of that time in our history and wonder how it must feel to be able to look back and say that you lived through all of these things that so many people want to know about now.\u00a0 Over the course of three interviews with her, she says several times, \u201cYou know, I\u2019ve had good times and bad times\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [i]<\/a> www.viator.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tara LaChance May 1, 2015 Memory Essay #1 My father’s parents both died before I was born. My mother’s parents didn’t have much interest in spending time with or developing a relationship with their grandchildren. 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