annika's story

I grew up in a village near Bremen. You've heard of Bremen? It's a port city. I was about eleven and we would hear the bombs falling. If we were in school we would have to leave and go into bunkers.

My sister and I were sent to the south of Germany with a lot of children, because the Allied forces weren't bombing there, that is, not until later. We stayed with strangers -- foster parents, as I called them. There was primary school but no secondary school there. It was not an easy time, being a child -- but things were not easy for a lot of people. After a while the bombs started falling in the south too, so I thought I might as well go back home and be with my mother. Our home was bombed. We had a piece of land in the country and later we built another house there, a small one.

The end of the war, that was the worst time. The Allied soldiers came into the city. They were everywhere. I was with my mother and sister in the bunker. There were animals outside, horses and goats, and they were screaming because the shrapnel was hitting them. I heard the sound of gunfire. Then an Allied soldier came into our bunker and told us, "You go back to your home and stay there."

After the war, my father came home. He had not been at the front. He had worked for the war industry. Sometimes, though, he would visit the front to see what the soldiers needed. Only two uncles didn't come back. They died in Russia.

I had wanted to be a doctor, a diagnostician, but after the war I got a job with the Americans. I worked for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Many of the displaced people, Poles and Hungarians who had been brought to Germany to work, now wanted to go to America. Sometimes there would be hearings to decide if they could go or not. I worked as a translator for the hearings. Someone would translate the Hungarian into German, and then it would be my turn to translate the German into English. I was eighteen only but I had a knack for languages, English in particular.

The reason the people didn't want to go back to Poland and the eastern countries was very simple: the Russians had come. The Russians were terrible, brutal. They raped the women. No one wanted to go where the Russian soldiers were. So people chose America.

Later, when I was married, I went with my husband and visited a concentration camp. I could not believe what I saw there. During the war, we had no idea.


(Annika is a patient of mine. She says she's too old to write her memoirs. So I'm setting down the little she told me -- in the interest of preserving history, and because I love a good story, and because she deserves the tribute.)