Love, Loss & Deja Vu
Living Through the Nazi Regime — and Experiencing It All Over Again
Story by Ella Gage
Photos courtesy of Helga
My grandmother as a joyful 3-year-old in Gdansk, in one of many black and white scrapbook film photos hand-developed by her father.
“History is repeating itself, mein schatzi [honey],” said my grandmother, with a melancholy smile. “The same thing is happening now, and it’s just terrible.”
My grandmother Helga — Oma, as I’d never dare refer to her as ‘Grandma’ in English — was born in 1938, five years into Hitler’s rule and one year before World War Il. The long-awaited youngest daughter of her family, her father was a brilliant chemist at Dynamit Nobel, developing rocket fuel as part of the wartime effort despite his deep-seated pacifist nature.
“It was wartime chaos, but I didn’t understand it at the time,” said Oma, pointing to an old black and white photo of herself at 3 or 4, grinning and pigtailed. “I was carefree and happy as a little girl,” she said.
She grew up in the outskirts of Gdansk, a Free City protected by the League of Nations post-WWI. Back then, it was sleepy and rural, inhabited by farmers, scientists, company men and their families. Then 1945 struck: the company was bombed, Nazi Germany crumbled, Poland reclaimed the city and my Oma turned 7.
“With [Germany] on wartime footing, the entire economy was turned over to supporting the war effort, so the chemistry at the company became part of the rocket program, developing two different types of rockets and, at the end of the war, the first intercontinental ballistic missiles,” said my uncle Eric, Oma’s son.
Dynamit Nobel was founded in 1865 by none other than Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Prize. Like my great-grandfather, he’d dedicated his life to the advancement of science — a noble endeavour that turns morally murky and weaponized when geared towards war.
“When the Americans liberated us from Hitler, we knew the purge was about to happen,” Oma said wistfully. “And sure enough, I woke up one night to soldiers in our house, to my mother screaming and crying, and my father getting dragged out of bed in his pajamas, and that’s the last we saw of him for nearly two years,” she said.
I sat across the scrabble-and-coffee-strewn table from her, speechless. It had taken me 21 years to sit down with her and listen to her story, her family’s story, in its entirety — perhaps because I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to carry the guilt of ancestors I’ve never met and a culture I barely know.
“My father’s company was contracted to the government,” Oma continued. “He hated it, hated the regime, but if he didn’t work for them, terrible things would’ve happened, so his hand was forced,” she looked at me knowingly.
My great-grandfather was taken as a prisoner of war and thrown into Dachau, the notorious concentration camp, during the American liberation. He was there for 22 months. My grandmother and her family had no idea where he was or whether he was alive until they received a message from him, scrawled onto toilet paper and delivered by a freed prisoner.
“All that was left in our neighborhood was women and children since no one knew where their husbands were,” Oma continued. “My mother and the other wives became ‘Rubble Women,’ sorting through the [bombing] rubble, and when I was eight my brother and I picked potatoes after school since the farmers had no farmhands left,” she said.
“School?” I asked, confused. “You were still going to school every day?”
“Well yes, schatzi,” said Oma, as though this should’ve been obvious. “The schools shaped us as children — they prepared us for the war, and after the war, they were the first institutions to be rebuilt,” she said.
Our sprawling three-hour conversation covered a lifetime of joy and pain, love and loss, her country’s destruction and reconstruction. Interestingly, a theme resurfaced: the importance of education, which is deeply embedded in my grandmother’s values, and perhaps the values of Germany as a whole.
“My father befriended the guards in Dachau and begged them to bring the prisoners any books they could find,” said Oma. “The guards did, and my father started teaching [the other prisoners] English and French to occupy their mind…they needed that, psychologically, to survive,” she said.
So my great-grandfather became a teacher as he awaited the infamous Nuremberg Trials.
“He was no war criminal, so we [Americans] couldn’t charge him with war crimes,” said my uncle, an avid historian. “The U.S. was desperate to get ahold of any of the scientists in the rocket program because their technology was far ahead of ours, so that’s why they held onto him for so long in prison,” he said.
Though the U.S. and Russia were technically allies during WWII, it was a tense allyship amidst the burgeoning arms race. In the aftermath of the war, they were racing to pay German scientists to go work in their respective programs, my uncle explained.
My great-grandfather was freed after every one of the 250 employees from his company sent in character references in his support. Refusing to move to America to contribute to the Cold War effort, he stayed in Germany and went on to invent a method for chemical combustion in rockets, documented by Oma’s photocopied patents for nearly every country in the EU.
“Reconstruction went as fast as you could possibly imagine, like within 10 years,” said Oma. Rubble was cleared, buildings were resurrected, peace treaties were signed and Oma graduated high school.
Following her love of language, she spent a year and a half in an English immersion school and secured a job working as a bilingual secretary and translator for the Australian embassy at 19.
“And then my girlfriend and I met American soldiers,” said Oma with a mischievous grin. “They were nothing like the dreadfully boring, privileged guys my parents would introduce me to at my father’s company parties … I’d never met anybody like them,” she said.
When she was 26, her enthrallment with Americans led her to secure a job at the American embassy in Bonn, translating and typing bottomless piles of new agreements and treaties between Germany and America.
“Ella schatzi, it was incredible, the things I learned at the embassy,” said Oma, beaming. “Typing the original agreements, I felt important, part of something bigger,” she said.
She typed and typed, agreement after agreement, until her wrists gave out from carpal tunnel.
“My wrists were hurt and bandaged, but I could still take calls!” Oma laughed wryly.
She ended up falling in love with an American Command Sergeant Major she’d met in the embassy, teaching English to American ally troops all across Europe for over two decades and eventually getting her poetry published on the side.
“Despite the war, despite my family’s status, I married one of the American soldiers who bombed us,” she exclaimed with a grin.
We both cracked up, and I nearly choked up my coffee onto her white carpet.
Hopping back and forth between army bases in Germany and America every two years, she and my grandfather would load up their Volkswagen Beetle and take off from the bases — described as miniature inner cities by my uncle — embarking on dreamlike weekend trips to the Niagara Falls, the Dolomites, Austria, San Francisco's Bay Area and the Italian Riviera.
That’s how the entire three-hour-long conversation went: the story of my grandmother’s life, underscored by violence, war and loss, contradicted by dazzling worldliness and dream-like romanticism, punctuated by her delightfully sporadic sense of humor.
But I could sense the recollection took a unique toll on her. She was experiencing profound deja-vu.
“They wanted to cleanse Germany of science,” said my grandmother wistfully. “It’s like what’s happening now, in America.”
I was dumbfounded to hear that — not from media or political pundits, but from a woman who grew up during the worst of the Nazi regime.
“Because of [Trump], people don’t believe in science anymore, or education,” she said, near tears. My grandmother has been a lifelong advocate of both, a product of her life experience. She believes science is the future and education is freedom.
My grandmother has lived a rich and beautiful life. She survived a war and witnessed the reconstruction of a country. She typed up peace agreements, fell in love, traveled the world, raised children, got her writing published, and watched her children and grandchildren grow up. But at the end of the day, she’s carrying a unique type of grief few people experience: living long enough to watch history repeat itself, a continent away and a lifetime later.
Then and now: Oma in her mid-20s (left) and mid-80s (right) - still as sassy, vivacious, and beautiful as ever, 60 years later.