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Christmas
was magical to Jutta Hildebrand as a child growing up in
Berlin, Germany.
Now living in Hollow Rock-Bruceton, she and husband
Horst met in Canada in the late 1950's, to which both
had immigrated. She was 23 and he four and a half years
older when they laid their plans as a couple to return
to their home country. Once there, they found the
economy unkind to Horst's work as a custom tailor, a
vocation he held in common with his father, while
families fleeing from East Germany were given
preferential housing over childless young couples.
Remembering the sights of America on a two-and-a-half
month excursion across the country, they decided to
return to the United States. In 1969, work brought the
couple to Hollow Rock-Bruceton, where Horst worked with
the Henry I. Siegel Company. There they raised their
children, Bettina and Herbert. Jutta had received
training in accounting in Germany and found employment
with Midway Materials before being offered a fulltime
position at Hollow Rock-Bruceton School. She retired
earlier this year after 21 years as the school's
business manager.
In Germany, the holiday season began the first weekend
in October with the Ernte Dank Fest - Harvest Thanks Day
- a season that was celebrated with food, music and
dance.
"Everybody brought food to celebrate the harvest," says
Jutta (pronounced "you-ta"). Folk dancing and the
accordion were popular at early festivals, with the
waltz and foxtrot danced to the sound of big band music
in later years.
December 6 was St. Nicholas Day. The evening before,
children polished their shoes to their highest gloss and
placed them outside the door with their wish lists
tucked inside. Santa would come by and pick up the lists
while leaving the shoes filled with goodies in happy
anticipation of Christmas.
"Then we had to wait until Christmas to see if Santa
thought we were good enough to get what we asked for!"
Jutta says with a wry smile.
The rest of the season was filled with cheerful
Christmas markets, where merchants displayed their
holiday wares including toys and special Christmas
cookies like the marzipan treats made of almond paste
fashioned into figurines and Christmas shapes.
In rural areas, carolers went from house to house
singing carols that brought neighbors to the door with
offers of hot tea, hot chocolate and cookies.
Christmas was celebrated on December 24, though
preparations began several days in advance when the
living room would be "off limits" to Jutta and her
sisters Ingrid and Margot.
When the children were younger they memorized Christmas
poems, but as they grew older they and their cousins
would produce Christmas plays to the delight of their
parents, uncles and aunts who watched from the kitchen
as the children performed with a sheet hung across the
room for a curtain.
"We came up with all kinds of stories; they were all
very simple but our parents always applauded," Jutta
tells in happy reverie.
A bell was rung when the time was right to enter the
living room, where presents were not wrapped but were
laid under the tree in careful sections. Rather than
rushing in to their gifts, however, the family gathered
to sing carols while Jutta's mother Luzie played the
piano and the children strained to see which section was
their own.
"The Christmas tree was lit always with real candles,"
Jutta says, describing the fresh evergreen covered with
silver tinsel, white candles and silver balls.
"It was always very beautiful," she recalls. The tree
would remain until January 6, "Three King's Day".
On the evening of the 24th, Jutta shares, her mother
always attended midnight mass: "Many times we would
accompany her through the fresh fallen snow, it was so
peaceful at night."
Jutta
could hardly wait to start school. She remembered with
little girl excitement the Zuckertüten or "sugar cones"
her sisters had received on their first days of school.
Covered in shining paper, the paperboard cones filled
with candies, chocolates and "neat little things" seemed
nearly as big as they were.
When Luzie went to the school to register her
six-year-old, however, she was told the school would be
closed as many of the children had left the city because
of the dangers of World War II.
"I wanted to go to school so bad," Jutta says sadly. Her
mother made a zuckertüte for her, but Jutta was too
young to understand when she found the cone stuffed with
paper and just six little chocolates on top. The war had
taken its toll in many ways.
Soon, Luzie and husband Verner decided the children
would be safer in the countryside rather than Berlin,
the capital city.
Two teachers fled with 35 children to Prussia, on the
Russian border, only to discover they must flee once
more to the south of Germany. Jutta, at six-years-old,
was the youngest of the children whose ages reached to
14, many of whom were away from their parents for the
first time. When one teacher decided she couldn't go on
the next day, the sole teacher continued the journey.
"We had to leave there early in the morning - hurry,
hurry, hurry!" Jutta describes in anxious tones.
Unable to travel by trains which were prime targets for
Allied bombs, the slow journey was abbreviated by nights
spent mostly in school buildings where the children
slept on hard floors with no blankets. Their only
comfort was their teacher who would tell them stories at
night.
Once in the southern reaches of the country, social
workers took over, dividing families as children were
doled out to volunteers who would care for them.
"Any child would be cranky by then," Jutta says
apologetically. Her wailing had betrayed the despair of
a child separated from her parents, who after a hard
journey was taken from her sisters as well. The couple
who was to take her turned away with the young wife
declaring, "I can't take a crying child, I wouldn't know
what to do!"
She was returned alone to City Hall where Mr. Voigt, the
mayor of the town, without recourse, said, "Oh, you're
just going to come home with me."
"I was so glad, they had a girl a year older than me and
that made all the difference," breathes Jutta
gratefully.
It suited the American military, she says, to locate a
patrol at the mayor's home, which was connected to a
grocery store. Her first experiences with the foreigners
the children had been taught were their enemies were
mixed.
"We had some of the nicest Americans there," she muses,
recalling soldiers who tried to give them "gum".
"We didn't know gum; in Germany there was no gum," she
declares. In time they accepted the treat as well as the
admonition not to swallow it.
Other American soldiers, immersed in anger, would
purposely mix the scarce supplies of sugar, flour and
meal.
Tragically, Mayor Voigt was arrested by occupying forces
at the end of the war and marched through the street
before being jailed. "The family couldn't even say
goodbye," Jutta says sadly, their helplessness echoed in
her voice. When Germany was later divided, Russian
forces assumed control of the city after which they
removed the mayor from his cell, placed him against a
wall and shot him.
"My
mother was courageous," relates Jutta as she describes
the children's journey home in the summer of 1945. When
Luzie decided to search for her children, she was
approached by a woman who beseeched her to find
Marianne, her daughter and last hope, as she had lost
her husband in the war.
Luzie made good her promise to find Marianne, who was
one of many children besides her own that she escorted
home from the countryside.
Though the war had ended, tight controls remained in
place and danger was especially prevalent in the Russian
sector through which the group had to travel.
"That was very scary," Jutta says, an understatement to
a young girl, now eight or nine years old, who witnessed
Russian soldiers beating an old woman who did not want
to leave her belongings behind on a train from which
passengers were ordered to evacuate.
Luzie and the children endured two and half days in
freight trains, riding in box cars with lice-ridden
German soldiers making their ways home. The troupe
finally arrived in Berlin at 11:00 on the second
evening.
"We were so tired," recalls Jutta. The 8:00 p.m. curfew
long past, Luzie nonetheless could not face another long
night in a train station, so she herded the children
together for the walk home.
Hearts racing, from house to house the group slipped
along the closely built rows of houses, huddling in
doorways to escape the attention of military patrols,
dropping children off along the way.
"Every time we saw a jeep coming we'd lie down in the
hallways," she says.
Near the end of their mission, just 300 yards from
Marianne's home, they were sighted by a patrol of
American MPs.
"My mother had to use all her charm to say, 'Look we are
just 300 yards away, let us go,'" Jutta says. They were
allowed to proceed, and awakened Marianne's mother to a
joyous reunion. There they tarried for about an hour
before Luzie summoned the courage to go on.
Hiding once more from door to door the foursome went,
then across several yards along side streets outside of
town and they were home.
Jutta (left) and sisters
Margot and Ingrid
Life
as usual was impossible in the new Germany with supply
routes obstructed through the communist eastern sector.
One ray of hope was found in the sports clubs that were
Germany's usual source of organized recreational sports
rather than the school sponsored events that take place
in the United States.
"It was all done with volunteers," says Jutta. "They
pushed us into that right away when we came back because
they knew we were taken care of and it kept our minds
off how hungry we were."
While boys played soccer, girls played handball on the
soccer field, a similar game but in which "the feet are
used only for running."
By "pure chance" Jutta's family lived in the American
sector, and between the train station and home was the
Army barracks surrounding by a tall fence.
"We were scared to death of any American," explains
Jutta, who with other children had to walk past the
barracks on her way home.
When Christmas neared, the children were enthralled with
the Nativity scene the soldiers had erected. "That was
something we had never seen before," she explains in
awed voice, "In Germany there were no outside
decorations. It was lit up and we kids just loved it."
Pressing their noses through the fence for a better
look, the children were startled when an American
soldier appeared behind them and invited them to come
inside.
"Our parents would have been horrified!" Jutta says,
drawing her hand to her face at the unheard of
suggestion. Understanding, the soldier asked them to
return that evening for a special children's
celebration.
The girls' parents relented to accompany them to the
post that evening where they were stopped at the gate.
The soldier was waiting as promised, and explained to
the parents that only the children could attend.
"By then our fear had subsided a little bit," says Jutta,
who joined her sisters inside the compound. "They fed us
and gave us chocolate which we hadn't seen for years.
More and more, the fear went away."
 Years later, as Jutta reached her teenage years, the
German public and American soldiers routinely mixed in
dances and other get-togethers, but the magic of her
first Christmas home was just beginning.
"The
best Christmas I remember was 1945, that year we came
back to Berlin," Jutta shares with sparkling eyes. "We
had nothing, no tree - if there were trees they were
burned for heat - but that Christmas the sports club
decided to do something for the children."
On December 24th, the girls were not told of their
destination as they boarded the train with their parents
on the cold, snowy evening when their shivering was due
as much to anticipation as the chill of the air. Other
neighborhood children and their parents were also making
the mysterious trip.
Embarking from the train, families walked together
through the snow-whitened forest.
As they came into a clearing, standing by itself under
the clear, starlit sky was a Christmas tree in all its
splendor, lit with flickering white candles and
decorated with the love of a community whose children
had been restored to them.
"It was all so beautiful," marvels Jutta, her
hands clasped before her in reverential memory. A
gentleman whose golden voice typically heralded the news
on the radio read aloud the Christmas story, after
which, accompanied by the accordion, the community
raised their voices together in singing Christmas
carols.
"We didn't get presents that year but it was the most
beautiful Christmas. For many years we talked about that
particular Christmas when the kids were back home back
with our parents."
This year, Jutta and Horst's Christmas tree will bear
some resemblance to those of old Germany. Though the
candles are now powered with electricity and colorful
ornaments have replaced the silver balls of her
childhood, the tree will be covered with silver tinsel
and decorated with love that transcends the years in
beautiful memory of one special Christmas. |
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