Grandmother: Shield and BattleAxe

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WW2. A woman building her own path during times when a woman was too often defined by her man. A single mom when such a thing was unheard of. Surviving Nazi times and thriving after the war. This was my Grandmother. This is her story. This is her example for us all.

My maternal Grandmother was physically absent from most of my childhood and later life but we were always together on many summer vacations. She made her presence felt through Christmas and Birthday cards. She never missed one.

To this day, even at my older age, the example she set, gives me strength and resolve.

She was a feminist without being a feminist. She shielded her family in tough times. But she wouldn’t hesitate to use her force of will and determination like a battleaxe to cut through the bullshit life throws at people.

She did all this during times and in circumstances designed to keep people down, to humiliate them, and to keep them in control. This oppression was often directly focused on women. She dealt with it, fought it, and somehow never lost her motherly spirit.

Hopefully this story illustrates my Grandmother’s incredible spirit, persistence, and independence. Perhaps it will inspire you to seek out the stories hidden within your own family or circle of friends.

This is a story that comes to life in Frankfurt, Germany and comes full circle after many trials back to where it started.

As with most things involving the older generation in Germany, time was split into three parts: Before, During, and After WW2. It’s no surprise that the War with all its trauma, sacrifice, loss, humiliation, and eventual reconstruction, marks time in the lives of the survivors no less than a natural cataclysm impacts history for a civilization.

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The Pre-War Years

My Grandmother was German. She was born in Neunkirchen, a small town nestled in the forests of North Rhine Westphalia along the border with Hessen. She was born just before the outbreak of WW1. Her father was a foreman in a local mine.

My Grandmother’s father served with the German Army during WW1. Toward the end of the War, her mother and siblings moved to the Bodensee to live on a farm with my Great Grandmother’s parents. They survived the post-WW1 starvation and chaos in Germany.

Sometime after the Great War, my Great Grandfather returned to the family on the Bodensee. From there they moved to Frankfurt. This was about 1920/21. What my great Grandfather did there to support and raise his family of four girls and a son, plus my Great Grandmother, is lost to time. A story never recorded. Lost.

It was there in Frankfurt that my Grandmother completed her schooling. In those days most kids attended school until they were about 14. Additional schooling past age 14 was available, but its cost was too dear for most families to afford. One option that was available was vocational school.

Around 1926/27, My Grandmother was able to attend a business skills vocational school, called a “Handelsschule.” There she learned the basics of business and sales. She took to a “sales person” role while at school and thrived.

Sadly no stories regarding her Weimar times survived. The one thing that has remained is her legendary enthusiasm for what the Germans call “Fastnacht”, or “Carnival”. Other than that, no vocational school stories, no adventure stories, have survived that time. All that living during such a changing period is lost to time.

Starting around 1929/1930 my Grandmother wound up working for a local retail business. This business was a very successful business that would in a matter of a few short years become the target of the Nazis. In deference to my mother’s wishes and the cherished memories of the goodness of that family and the tragedy that ensued, I’ll not provide details here. They are painful, powerful, and personal.

Around 1934 or 1935 my Grandmother and Grandfather met. The details are lost to time. Since they were both “Fastnacht” enthusiasts, we imagine that they met at one of the many “Fastnacht” celebrations. My Grandmother apparently never missed the major ball/celebration at the Palmengarten or the carnival Parade in Frankfurt. Their meeting is likely the stuff of a period romance movie happening in those uncertain pre-war years.

They married shortly thereafter and moved to Italy.

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Why Italy?

My Grandfather was an early trans-national food importer. He leased farms, worked them, and imported vegetables into markets like Frankfurt’s GrossMarktHalle. Based on what I have been told, he leased two operating farms in the immediate Frankfurt area. He also leased some properties in Italy. He grew vegetables on the farms and transported them to sell in major metropolitan markets.

After he married my Grandmother, they made plans to move to Italy. They did this most likely to enjoy a completely different quality of life. In 1936, They moved to a beachfront villa somewhere south of Livorno, Italy on the Ligurian coast. Sometime in early 1939 they moved again to another working farm further south and inland.

My grandfather worked to vertically integrate his business. He grew the crop, transported the crop, and delivered it to market for sale. He eliminated as much of the middle man as he could. The farm in Tuscany was leased from a land owner. This particular farm was worked by the Italian version of share-croppers. Mussolini and the Fascists were busy implementing land-reforms and reclamations of property to boost agricultural production during this time. My Grandparents had a few good years there before the war and the reforms caught up with them.

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The War Years

Once the War started, life changed dramatically for everyone in Europe. My Grandmother and Grandfather were no exceptions.

To understand their wartime experience, it’s important to note that while my Grandmother was German, my Grandfather was Danish. My mother, born in Italy, was also Danish through her father’s citizenship.

During the War, as citizens of a vanquished country, their experience during and after the war was different from that of my Grandmother.

As the war went on, Nazi currency controls made it increasingly difficult

for my Grandfather to move currency and profits from his business in Germany into Italy. He needed the money in Italy to pay his employees, fund his business, and provide for his family.

Eventually, he gave up trying to game the currency controls and Italy’s reform initiatives. They left Italy for Frankfurt sometime in 1941. The Nazi’s had him continue to work the farms he had in Germany.

We aren’t sure, but it seems that my Grandfather was probably an early adopter of nitrogen fertilizers made through the Huber-Bosch process (look it up).

He had consistently solid yields and sometimes more than one crop from a field. One time, someone, likely a jealous neighbor, denounced him to the Nazis for depleting the soil. Fortunately the Nazi’s tested the soil and found it healthy — he was given a pass.

During this time as well, my Grandfather was able to arrange another lease on a new farm in Germany. He leased it from a local municipality and started farming it. It was a large space of land on an island in the Rhine. The island was formed by a bend in the old-Rhine’s meander and the new Rhine’s canalized channel.

During this time they all lived in Frankfurt. Eventually the Allied bombing started.

My Grandfather was thinking ahead and had previously built and stocked a bomb shelter on the farm on the Rhine. He built it away from the buildings, in the fields. He was surely thinking that Frankfurt with its concentration of factories and transport would inevitably become a target for bombers. It did.

My Grandmother and her family were bombed out of their Frankfurt house in Dec 1943. My Grandmother, her mother and two of her sisters evacuated Frankfurt and moved out to the farm on the Rhine. They took up residence on the farm. My Grandmother’s brother was wounded during Operation Barbarossa on the Eastern Front and spent much of the rest of the war recovering from his serious wounds. One sister, the one who didn’t evacuate, was assigned to a flak battery around Frankfurt.

They ended up spending the rest of the war on the farm.

My mother can recall some of the bombings. When the BASF plants in Ludwigshafen and Mannheim were bombed, my mother says she can still see in her memory how the sky was lit up orange and changing colors. She remembers the distant feel of the air pressure and compression waves that made their way even to their far away farm.

My Grandfather was a gentleman’s gentleman in many ways: Cigars, pubs, and frequent travels away from home. In those days, before even regular phone service, communication from the road was difficult, if not impossible. Letters and postcards were all one had.

Eventually the relationship between my Grandparents got to the point where my Grandmother filed for divorce.

You may or may not be aware, but for a woman to file for divorce in those days was a risky proposition. Women had very limited rights in Nazi Germany. To do so during a War and with a government that clearly was not a supporter of “liberated” women was a daring and courageous thing to do. There was also some kind of custody battle.

Eventually the divorce was granted in 1944.

After filing for divorce, my Grandmother moved the family off the farm to a nearby village. They were there at the end of the war. That nightmare was over and the struggle to rebuild and reconstruct the country was about to begin. Yet another life transition was coming. One in which my Grandmother showed her true grit.

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The Post War Period

Once Frankfurt was occupied by the Americans, my Grandmother, a single-mother at this time, moved my mother and herself back to Frankfurt. There they lived in a small apartment.

Food was in short supply. Post War, in the cities everyday Germans made obtaining food a number one priority. My Grandmother responded to this challenge.

Through sheer persistence and luck, my Grandmother was able to get a job at an American Army post in Frankfurt. She worked there for more than a year. Not so much for the money, but for the fact that the Americans provided food. The Americans, in their generosity, allowed my mother to come to the post and eat a free-meal after school. It was a quality meal — so much better than what they could scrap together on the “outside”. It was the critical benefit my Grandmother earned cleaning the Officer’s Club.

You should know that I knew my Grandmother as this obstinately honest and charming person. She could turn on the charm when needed and sweetly talk her way out of many sticky situations. She could also hit the stubborn button and softly get her way with almost anyone. My mother too got or learned this same skill that is just lost on me.

Germany was a country destroyed. What you see in some post-WW2 movies was real. Almost nothing was available in Germany at the time.

My Grandmother had a keen eye for a deal and was always ready to trade and bargain. She’d gather “city items” that she could in the course of her travels to and from work. Trading here and there, turning a pencil into a pen so to speak.

Periodically she would go out to the countryside. Even the small items she could scrounge in the city were impossible to find out in the country. She’d take those few items and go visit farmers she knew. These were contacts she made over time with my Grandfather and his business dealings. She leveraged the network. She’d barter and negotiate with the farmers to exchange the goods she had for food. She related stories to me of traveling by train for some distance to a butcher she knew because she knew and could trust the source of the meat used in the sausages. My mother related a story how soon after the war her Mother traded a Persian carpet for two pounds of butter. That’s how hard things were in those days.

My mother remembers her coming back with baskets of apples, cabbages, sausages — all gathered through barter and carefully transported on trains and streetcars. She remembers meeting her at the train even as a little girl and helping carry goods home.

Sometime around 1946 things started getting better in Germany. It was around this time that my Grandmother got another job working as a front desk clerk for a printing and custom stamp house in Frankfurt. She did this for a few years before getting a job at a department store in downtown Frankfurt. She worked there for the rest of her career inching her way up the retail food-chain.

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The New Germany

My Grandmother watched the German miracle and got to enjoy the process. She fought real estate developers who wanted to clear her out to make way for luxury apartments that they likely sold to the very high income earners that her generation’s sacrifice and stoic persistence had helped educate and enable.

She enjoyed the German miracle of annual vacations. She visited us many times. I spent many summers with her at various simple vacation spots. I heard her stories. I watched her exercise her unique mix of charm and persistence.

She was trusting but wise. Like the one time she took the oriental express through what was then Yugoslavia. Passengers in her car were all gassed and made unconscious. Thieves came through and took all valuables from all the passengers. She didn’t miss a beat. And naturally, she had hidden her real valuables so well that they were never found.

Her story. Her ability to survive. Her willingness to give and yet be firm. Her sense of respect for others was always freely given until proven otherwise. I heard the stories and saw many of the behaviors that defined her. They have stuck with me through my entire life.

Most importantly was the fact that she courageously became a single mom, never remarried, and carved out a life during a time when a woman’s value too often was measured by the man in their life. She filed for divorce with the Nazi’s who mandated certain roles for women and looked down on “independent women”.

Conclusion

If you read this far, thank you. I’d like to leave you with a few final thoughts.

Our ancestors define us. Or do we allow them to define us based on how we remember them? Are we molded by them, or does our memory of them mold us?

My maternal Grandmother was one such influence. I wield her memory, and my memory of all the things she did, survived, and the sacrifices she made almost everyday. She gives me strength like a shield to suffer the blows and defeats of a world I can’t control nor predict. Her story of persistence and courage is like a battleaxe, arming me to work through obstacles in my own struggles.

Perhaps you too, dear reader, can find reinforcement and inspiration through her story. Maybe you too may wish to explore and document your own family past. The stories of our ancestors is a spirit that transcends the years between us. These stories are in many ways more important than the history of our genes and family tree.

Within legends, legacies are built.

I’m just sorry that my daughter never knew her Great Grandmother, never got the chance to learn the lessons I learned from her. Perhaps some of my Grandmother’s strength will find its way to her.

Please remember the past, its lessons can help us deal with tomorrow.