Do you know your Neighbor

[wpeters]

One of my friends is a physical therapist. The last couple of weeks he has been working on helping a old lady with her mobility.
  Sunday I was at my friends place visiting in the afternoon when he said he had a interesting and extremely sad story to tell me about one of his patience. I will try to type this story as he told me.  It has given me a new respect for the personal hell people sometimes go through.
     My friend tells me that with in a few session they normally tells him there life story. So during the first session he sits down with his patience and talks about how things will work.   As my friend is sitting there on the couch he see two old photographs.  The first one is of middle aged woman and the other of man in a German Wehrmacht wearing the rank insignia of Oberleutnant.

  My friend who loves history has his interest perked and asks the lady who those photos are of.  She tells him that it is her Father and Mother. During the next three sessions she tell him here lifes story.   I will try to relay the story as best I can.

   She was young girl when the war started.  Something like 4-5 years old.  She had three brothers who were all older than her.  Soon after the war started her Father was called up for duty. He was to serve in Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.

 Sometime during 41-42, one of her older brother, who was eighteen at the time,  was making extremely good marks in school.  Shortly after the end of school, there was a knock on the door by the Kriegsmarine asking them to come serve with them.  He left and went on to serve on the submarines.

Her next older brother fought under Rommel in Africa Korp.  He was captured and became a POW.

Her oldest brother was a tank commander of a Panzer unit on the Eastern Front.

[wpeters]

  The family home was located in a small village close to the border of Poland.

  As the war progress things became harder to get and the allusion of Hitler winning the war was disappearing. Her Father who was still fighting on the Easter Front, became disgruntled with retreating and with the Nazi Party.  During this time he said some politically incorrect things about the Nazi party. For the words he uttered he was shot.  They still are not sure what happened if he was shot and survived or if tried to escape and was shot. However her father who was wounded tried to escape to Russian line.

    A while later( several months) with the German Army in retreat,  her oldest brother show up at home in his tank. He told his mother and his sister who was nine at the time, to get a few things and head west for a major town that was some miles away.  He told them that the Soviets were coming and that he would not allow the house of his father to fall into Communist hands.  After they had picked a few simple belongs, he fired on their home with his tank , reducing it to rubble.

   After he had accomplished this he took off his uniform and told his mother that now was the time for him to try to find father.   They would not hear from him again till the 1950's.

She and her Mother set off for the large town.  They arrived in town and found that there was no place for them to stay.   Upon looking around they finally found a small place to hole up in.  Not long after they arrive in the town and had settled down( all in the same day)  A german Panzer unit appears on the road heading for town. The town people over joyed to see a German unit came in to the streets cheering. 

The tanks pulled into town.  As soon as they were in the center of town the hatches opened and the tanks open fire on Men Women and children a like.  The Soviet Soldier had taken the tanks and brought in to town so the people woulld lower their guard.  The lady talks about how so many people died.

[wpeters]

She escaped with her life and made to west Germany.  In the years falling the war her Brother from the navy and her brother that was a Pow made it home.  It was not until the 50's that her older brother came home from Russian were he had been captured and became a POW.   All her older brother found out was that her Father died on the way to work camp in Siberia by succumbing to his wounds.

As she grew up in a refugee camp she earned her meager money by making uniforms for the allied personnel stationed in the country.  During this time she was sexually assaulted  by an American solider. Do this she became with child.   She took her case to the military officials.  The officer in charge refused to court Martial the soldier. He told the soldier it was his honorable duty to marry the girl.

At this point my friend said she totally broke down and he had to wait till the next session to get the rest of the story.

Her husband on who when drunk would come home and beat her.  Within 6 months of her 1st baby she was expecting her second child. At about this time she got a letter from her cousin that she was living in the US.  She had married a American Officer.  She offered that my friends patient could move to America and live with them.  Once the paper work was finished she left and moved her to America..

My friend asked me after he had finished telling me this story,  can there be a worse hell to live with then all the memory of that lady.. He said that it is very evident that she relives those memory every day of her life.

Makes me fill sad for all my neighbors out there that I think are grumpy.  Maybe they have a good reason to be.

I hope and pray that I can be a person that judges people less by there appearance but can look in and see the true person under those layers.

[bagrat]

As terrible and unfortunate as those events in that ladies life were, older people usually have interesting stories to tell. Worked as a door to door salesman and more times than not I would find myself listening and talking with older folks about their interesting past rather than trying to close a sale...I wasn't a very good salesman. Anyways thanks for sharing.

[Thruster]

They're both gone now but when I moved in to the area I had two war vets living on either side of my house. One was ex Wehrmacht, wounded once and captured twice, finally interred in Texas. After the war he brought his wife over and they raised 4 kids. Salt of the Earth he was. The nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. And he had some stories....

Shame to say my other neighbor was ex Navy. Never got much else since he was among the biggest punks I'd ever run into and never really cared to ask. Real dirt bag. Thought his wife was gonna do a dance when they hauled him away. She was actually smiling. Turns out he was a late war inductee and never left Illinois. Never paid the price as it were and never developed one ounce of character.

Guess it just goes to show...

[Rich46yo]

My old man used to run an Amvets chapter and I used to also hang out in a German Bar, in a German neighborhood, where a bunch of German vets used to get together once a week. It used to surprise me how similar they were in so many ways. On occasion they used to talk about the war but I never asked out of respect. Some had been in some huge battles. The eastern front, the western front, the air, the Pacific. Mostly they talked about their families and lost comrades. They never lost their loyalty to each other.

[colmbo]

A former neighbor and I were talking the yard one evening.  He was an older German man known at Pete, worked for an airline at the airport I worked at.  As we chatted he asked if I had been in the military and I replied that I had been a Sgt and paratrooper in the Army.  He replied that he too had been a Sgt in the Army.  Evidently my expression changed when I thought about his accent and age because he replied "Ja, that army!!"  with a huge smile and a twinkle in his eye.

He was a sapper captured by the US, I think in Italy, then managed to escape easily.  Sometime later he was again captured.  He said that time he stayed captured, he was one of only a very few men left in his unit.  He ended up in a POW camp in Florida.  His name was Ewald Petrasch, he passed away a couple years ago. 

[mthrockmor]

Humbling story. And I'm sure she bore her cross with dignity and hard work her entire life.

And we complain about our meager troubles by comparison....gratitude!

Thanks for all of these posts.  

[Zoney]

I sold a motorcycle to a young man several years ago.  He needed to finance it and could not qualify for the loan by himself.  He brought his grandfather in and gramps co-signed for him to get the loan.  We were in my off ice doing paperwork when gramps said something about a small P38 model I had sitting on my desk.  Gramps ended up being a WW2 P38 pilot that was shot down over Romania and was hidden away by the locals until he could be rescued.  His name was Ervin T. Cloyd.  I showed him a couple of films from Aces High and he really seemed to enjoy the entire idea of guys like us playing the game and remembering those who had flown in real life.  He passed away a couple years ago.  His grandson came into the shop and told me gramps had passed away.  He then reached into his pocket and pulled out the "Wings" Ervin had worn on his uniform.  He held them out and I held my hand out and he dropped them into it and said, "My grandfather wanted you to have these.  That time in your office where you guys talked about what happened to him was the only time I had ever heard anything about what he did in WW2".

Now I wear those wings on my leather motorcycle jacket and think of him every time I put it on.  Thank you Ervin, I will never forget you.

[Slate]

   Good stories all.   

     There is a gentleman that comes into work that was ground crew for the Tuskegee Airmen. He proudly wears his hat describing his service. I hesitate to inquire for a story but may chat with him to see if he wishes to share.   

[MarineUS]

Thank you all for sharing. 

[helbent]

Thats awesome Zoney

[smoe]

This girl did go through some tuff times, but in WWII Europe a lot of lives were changed quit horribly.

When I was younger an ex-sailor of an Iowa-class battleship who served in the WWII Pacific theater told of some good stories. He was related to high ranking officer and was assigned to the radar room. He used to monitor the radar scope. I remember him talking about watching the main gun battery rounds on the scope when they were hitting Japanese held islands. His ship was also bombed by a Japanese fighter-bomber and he couldn't hear anything for a few days.

[morfiend]

 When I was a little boy we had an crotchety old man down the street!

  We all knew him as "Mr. Thompson" and we had heard stories that he was the way he was because of the war.   Later when I grew up I came to find out Mr. Thompson was a POW and that a movie called The Great Escape was made about the POW camp he was in!

  He never made the escape and I guess thats the reason he survived.   A real shame I never knew that when I was a youngster,we all would have likely been much nicer to him.



   

[cpxxx]

Sometimes you really don't know who your neighbours are. When I was a kid my friends Granddad was ex British army Sergeant Major, the Ox and Bucks regiment and served in both world wars. Shot down a plane once according to my friend. Across the road lived another friend's granddad who fought against the British army as part of the IRA in 1921. One of my Father's friends was an ex British paratrooper.

One day I was in the school playground playing with my model Spitfire. A middle aged man passed by outside the fence. He stopped and looked. 'That's a Spitfire' he said. 'Yes' I said backing off conscious that I shouldn't be talking to strangers. 'I used to fly those.' he said with a wistful look in his eyes as he walked away. Young as I was I realised the authenticity in his comments and wished I could think of something else to say to him. But the moment passed. A similar thing happened to my brother when he brought his Airfix model Mosquito to church. He told me later that a man saw it and told him he was a Mosquito navigator once.

They are mostly dead now. That is so sad. I wish I knew them better.