Abstract
This interview details the lives of two sisters, Barbara Hermes and Erika Wagner, from their time spent in Niedersachsen, Germany, at the end of World War II to their immigration to the United States in 1954. Their story continues with a transatlantic journey and travels across the American Midwest to Cleveland, where they both live today.
Loading...
Interviewee
Hermes, Barbara (interviewee); Wagner, Erika (interviewee)
Interviewer
Franklin, Bill (interviewer)
Project
Cleveland German-American Oral History Project
Date
12-2-2020
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
110 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Barbara Hermes and Erika Wagner interview, 02 December 2020" (2020). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 195003.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1261
Transcript
William Franklin [00:00:00] So what's your last name again is how do you spell your last name?
Barbara Hermes [00:00:10] Which one are you asking?
William Franklin [00:00:11] I'm asking you, Barbara.
Barbara Hermes [00:00:12] Hermes, H-E-R-M-E-S, and my maiden name is Jordan, J-O-R-D-A-N. And I use it as a middle name.
Astrid Julian [00:00:31] OK, wait a minute. I have to chime in, my family from Pulman. I have a grandmother. Jordan. that's really wild about Jordan. And she there's a Bauhaus which is a family. I mean they were, they were the father was a minister, something supposedly that. So I'll have to find get some more connection to their family history and enough of that.
Barbara Hermes [00:01:01] That's really interesting. But the Jordan, of course, comes from our father and he is from Frankfurt Am Main. Far away from Porman.
Astrid Julian [00:01:13] So my Jordan is in Croatia and Pomerania, but he was the French Huguenot.
Barbara Hermes [00:01:22] Oh. Oh, and connection there.
William Franklin [00:01:26] Yeah. OK, Cousins Bill, we're taking up your time.
William Franklin [00:01:33] No, that's good. It's all very interesting to hear. The interconnections of all the families.
Astrid Julian [00:01:41] I'm hearing, bells voice a little bit fuzzy. Is that a concern? Is this going to. This is going to be transcribed, right?
William Franklin [00:01:49] It will be, yeah.
Astrid Julian [00:01:51] OK, I hear you. I hear everybody else really nice. And clearly, your voice is a little bit fuzzy. How about you guys? Can you hear Bill clearly? Fine.
Erika Wagner [00:02:03] I think he's quite soft.
William Franklin [00:02:05] Yeah, can you hear me now, I just turned the volume up, I don't know if that helps anybody that helps.
Erika Wagner [00:02:11] Yes, it does.
William Franklin [00:02:12] OK, very good.
William Franklin [00:02:16] OK, good. So I think we we had a discussion earlier and I think we got as far as your trip after the war and you were en route, I guess, through Germany and through Europe before you came to America.
Barbara Hermes [00:02:43] Yes, well, what we mostly talked about the last time was our fleeing our childhood home in Pomerania of the oncoming Russian front and the fighting front between Russia and Germany. And and possibly we would pick it up that our mother then took us and we ended up in north Germany. in Niedersachsen.
Erika Wagner [00:03:11] We lived up about eight years or nine years.
Barbara Hermes [00:03:22] We lived there from 1945 until 1954, which is when we immigrated to the United States, so nine years.
William Franklin [00:03:33] How do you spell Niedersachsen?
Barbara Hermes [00:03:38] Yeah, that's like that's like a German state. and it's N I E D E R S A C H S E N.
Erika Wagner [00:03:43] Lower Saxony is the English word. Yes.
William Franklin [00:03:56] Thank you, that will help in the transcribing.
Barbara Hermes [00:04:02] And the town, we went to what's calIed Aendorf (A S E N D O R F) and it had approximately 3000 residents. It was a small town.
William Franklin [00:04:25] And how long did you stay there?
Barbara Hermes [00:04:28] Nine years.
William Franklin [00:04:29] You were there for nine years. And was your father there with you, too?
Barbara Hermes [00:04:34] Well, our father. Our father. What's not with us when we fled. He was in the army and at some point when we arrived, when the war was over in May of nineteen forty five, sometime after that, maybe a month or so, Erica. Is that about right? Our mother decided to go look for our father because he would have no idea where we were if he were still alive. We didn't know that either. But but she knew his company's name and she knew. So she would question any military person that she would that we would come across about if they knew where that company ended up. And she was told that that company ended up in Bavaria.
Erika Wagner [00:05:39] It's in the south of Germany,. It's quite a distance away from northern Germany.
Barbara Hermes [00:05:46] And ended up after the war as the American occupation sector, whereas Niedersachsen where we were once the British sections, the British occupied section of Germany. But anyway, she she was a rather courageous woman. She left Erika and me with our grandmother. And and hitchhiked to the area mostly on military vehicles, because that's the only traffic there was, to find our father. And she did find him in an American prisoner of war camp. And so she was able to let him know where we ended up and a few months later, then he was released and he came and joined us in November of nineteen forty five.
William Franklin [00:06:51] And your mom was there all of that time in Bavaria with your dad, those few months while he was in a POW camp?
Barbara Hermes [00:06:59] No, She she came back. She just let him know where we lived.
Erika Wagner [00:07:05] I did want to interject something. You you had asked Bill. I had asked about if our father was along when we were fleeing from Pomerania. And I thought we should emphasize there were only women. There was my grandmother, my mother, the sister-in-law, my sister and I. There were no men.
William Franklin [00:07:38] And was your father, the only man that you found after the war that was alive, or were there other male relatives that you found?
Barbara Hermes [00:07:50] The only other male relatives that we knew of was my mother's brother, Otto. And and we did not find him until much later, but he was alive, but he somehow ended up in East Germany. He was in Greifswald in East Germany, he did not make it to the West.
William Franklin [00:08:24] So he was there until the 50s. Did he stay there the rest of his life, or did he ever get out?
Barbara Hermes [00:08:35] I couldn't hear you, Bill.
William Franklin [00:08:37] Oh, I was going to say that I don't ever get out of East Germany or was he there for the rest of his life? Did you ever hear from Otto.
Erika Wagner [00:08:48] Yeah, Otto stayed in the East Germany until the wall came down.
William Franklin [00:08:55] Oh.
Mark Cole [00:08:58] Hey Bill? I think we're getting a little feedback from your microphone or I don't I don't know where the microphone is on your computer. I don't know if you're scraping it with your sleeve or something like that. Good thing about this is we can edit it all out.
William Franklin [00:09:15] OK, good. I don't move anything out. There's nothing in the way. You know, about.
Mark Cole [00:09:21] Or I don't know if it might be feedback from your headphones, too, I.
Astrid Julian [00:09:24] Hear a lot of noise in the background, like static and crackle.
William Franklin [00:09:28] OK, maybe I can take these off, and see if that helps. help.
William Franklin [00:09:33] Does that help now?
Astrid Julian [00:09:37] Oh, yeah, it's wonderful. OK. Thank you.
William Franklin [00:09:41] It must have been interference or something from the from the headphones.
Mark Cole [00:09:48] Much, much clearer now.
William Franklin [00:09:50] OK. I thought maybe I could hear better with them, but I could hear fine, this will be recorded anyway,.
Barbara Hermes [00:09:56] You might be interested for us to tell us a little bit about school, the school we attended in Niedersachsen, in Asendorf. Or is that not something you'd be interested in?
William Franklin [00:10:11] Yes, absolutely. We'd love to hear that. So you were what age now?
Erika Wagner [00:10:15] These were the after war conditions?
Barbara Hermes [00:10:21] Yeah, I, I was seven years old.
William Franklin [00:10:26] You were seven, OK?
William Franklin [00:10:30] So you were just coming into grade school?
Barbara Hermes [00:10:34] Yes. I was started in the first grade,.
Erika Wagner [00:10:41] But you had attended school in Pomerania already,.
Barbara Hermes [00:10:45] Actually only for a couple days. And what happened there was I started in school and as all of you know, who had studied the war, Hitler took anyone and everyone at the end of the war. And so even though he had been a retired teacher and was quite elderly, he was also drafted into the war. And so my school days, I maybe had a week of school before he was then drafted. And then shortly after that, of course, we had to flee the front with the reifort. So, no, not much school before we got to Asendorf. And in Asendorf, there were also, not hardly any teachers. The schools that we attended, both of us, eventually error cut to head for classrooms first and second grade in one room, third and fourth, fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth grade. So that was our school house and that was the school. And we had a teacher who had a war injury. He was one of the teachers. He had a prosthetic leg. And we had another teacher who was quite old. He had been retired for quite a while. So the teaching staff was also. Rather sketchy, we had no books. And and all of you know, like I said about the Second World War, probably do that all school books were burned by it, by the allies, because because all the books contained Nazi pictures and material.
Barbara Hermes [00:13:03] And so but they were burned and they were taken away. And you were not allowed to have any such books in your house. And so there were no books. We also had no paper and we did not have pens or pencils and us probably. When did you go to school there? Did you could your younger. So you probably.....
Astrid Julian [00:13:30] I Didn't go to school at all in Germany? We came over in '56 to Canada and I started started first grade because I was afraid. Because I know.
Barbara Hermes [00:13:38] So you did not have this experience? No. I realized the moment I said that you were quite a bit younger. So so what most of the children had was a slate that we could write on it, you know, I don't know.
Erika Wagner [00:13:58] So you wrote on it with a slate pencil slate piece and then you would write it down and then you would write a new you could do it.
Erika Wagner [00:14:10] And you had two things attached to your slate with a string, one wet sponge and a dry cloth. So when you were done writing something, you wiped it with the wet sponge and dried it with the wet. With the dry cloth.
Barbara Hermes [00:14:25] Yeah. And and since we had no books or the teachers were incredibly ingenious, many of them would remember a poem by heart because you learned poetry by heart in Germany and the teacher would write it on the blackboard. And then we had to copy it down and then we had to learn it. And and so school was difficult. A little later, a few months into it, a few books arrived. But they were few we had generally a reading book and math book. I can't remember anything else, I think those were the two I can remember having, but we would be given assignments. But you had a book for five students maybe. And so for homework, we would be given an assignment. The parents devised a schedule that was pasted in front of the book that said from we went to school until noon for the first two hours. This child gets the book. And then it was your responsibility to carry it to the next child and then the next child would have it for two hours and the next child would have it for two hours. And that's how you got to do your homework and you had to carry these books to the next person who needed them. It was an extremely difficult time and I marvel at the fact that I actually learned quite well the circumstances.
William Franklin [00:16:29] That's quite a story. So what was what was your home life like back then? Was your mother working or your grandmother or.
Barbara Hermes [00:16:41] Asendorf, as I told you, was a very small town. It was a farming community and the way the refugees and of course, when we arrived, many, many refugees arrived from the east and the way the Burgermeister, the mayor of that small town, and I imagine. Most places in Germany dealt with the refugees was I don't know if you know that, Astrid, Erika, did they do that all over Germany.
Erika Wagner [00:17:21] Yes, they did.
Barbara Hermes [00:17:21] That you took a census. Every household that had to report how many rooms they had in the house and how many people lived there. And then it was decided how many refugees they could take in. So each household was assigned a number of refugees.
Astrid Julian [00:17:45] And when my sister was born, there was a neighbor of my grandmother and we lived with my grandmother and and they the police, they had bricked up their attic to not take any anyone. This was already I was born in fifty two and the police came and broke open the attic and they forced the person to open their house to other people because there were there were no homes, no no rooms even so. So, yeah, that continued a long time. From the time you guys were little I was born.
Barbara Hermes [00:18:18] Yeah. It was not optional. Whether or not you were going to take refugees, it was not optional. You had and I often have thought how we could deal with a homeless situation if we were to do it that way, ou see. It wouldn't be popular though, and it wasn't popular in Germany if you were a refugee. You were imposed on the local population and and that's how you were treated. I also feel often have said. I know what it feels to be discriminated against. I know what it feels like because as a refugee, you had a stigma attached to you. Now mind you, most of the people were extremely nice to us.
Erika Wagner [00:19:23] So I did want to interject that it was very easy to know who the refugees were because the local people spoke with a different dialect than the people who came in.
Barbara Hermes [00:19:39] Right.
William Franklin [00:19:41] These refugees were they are German speakers.
Barbara Hermes [00:19:44] Yes, more than dialect.
Erika Wagner [00:19:49] Most of them, yes, I think all of the, yea.
Astrid Julian [00:19:51] In my town, there were Polish speakers and there were some older I'm more of an urban area, so so that's that's different from time to time. But in the farming, I think I don't know why did you go to a farming village where you would if you come from a farm?
Erika Wagner [00:20:13] When we were on the train, fleeing from the from Pomerania, we were told that we should not go to a large city because the cities were so badly and the people were basically starving in the cities because they had no food.
Erika Wagner [00:20:31] They said the only way you can survive if you go to the countryside into a small village where there is farmland and you'll be able to get food. And we basically did get the food by often walking from house to house and begging for food.
Astrid Julian [00:20:49] That was my mother. She had the tagebuth, a diary from that time. And when there was there were long processions of refugees going through there. And she mentioned that a neighbor gave coffee to a little baby, but that was warm and it was all they had. So it was it was quite bad in the cities. That's more urban where she was.
Barbara Hermes [00:21:16] Yes. during the time that we lived in the in this Asendorf but on the farm there, people would come from the cities who would try to sell to the farmers any little valuable thing that they would have anything; jewelry, anything that they still had left after the war to trade it in for food. You remember that too, probably Astrid. That was that was in addition. And in comparison to what happened in the cities, we were pretty well off. And on the farm, the farmer gave us a pitcher of milk every day and they allowed us a small plot so we could grow our own vegetables.
Erika Wagner [00:22:30] We gave us a few chickens.
Barbara Hermes [00:22:36] We had some checks that we were able to raise,.
Erika Wagner [00:22:39] We raised chickens, we had rabbits that we raised and ate, we had every so often, one year we got they gave us the runt of the pigs,.
Barbara Hermes [00:22:52] A piglet. But only once we had that only once. I was going to say about this, about the school. I had some classmates where only one of the siblings could come to school in the winter because they had to switch off shoes, they only had one pair of shoes and only one of the kids could come to school and then the other child would come the next day to school. The poverty in those first years after the war was extreme. The other thing I wanted to say is that in my class we just told you the story about my father being an American prisoner of war camp and then coming home in November. But I was one of. Just like my class was about 20 students and I think there were three who had a father, the rest the rest of their father had died in the war. That's how dire it was.
William Franklin [00:24:15] So when you when your father came to that that village, you probably didn't recognize him, it must have been years from the last time you saw him, right?
Barbara Hermes [00:24:26] Well, no. Remember, he came back in November of 1945. We still see him maybe in 1944 before.
Erika Wagner [00:24:37] I did not recognize him because I remember asking my mother, who is that man that came into our house and.
Barbara Hermes [00:24:49] Erika was younger, so....
Erika Wagner [00:24:50] I was four years old when we left. So I had last seen him when I was three.
Erika Wagner [00:25:03] I was going to say the clothing I remember that clothing we had my mother would make because you could not buy fabric in this store, you really couldn't buy hardly anything in the store. So she had made us some skirts from some parachutes that had fallen down and that were that the soldiers had left behind. And she also there were some of the soldiers had discarded some old sweaters that she unraveled and then she knit sweaters for us from the unraveled soldier's sweaters. I had an Army green sweater, and Barbara too.
Barbara Hermes [00:25:49] Yeah, and the worst
Erika Wagner [00:25:55] We had my father made us bicycles by going to the dump and looking through the junk in the dump city in the town dump and then finding various bicycle parts and eventually found enough parts to make bicycles for Barbara and for me.
Barbara Hermes [00:26:14] He was he was actually very, very good. However, you were saying about him coming back, you said about recognizing him. I was going to say he did not have any work. He was an aircraft mechanic. And of course, that whole industry had died with the end of the war in in Germany.
Erika Wagner [00:26:45] Germany was not permitted airplanes.
Barbara Hermes [00:26:48] Right. And so he could not find any work. He worked briefly as an electrician. He worked briefly as a car mechanic. Our mother helped as a field hand and and that was very needed because none of the farmers had men to do the work. It was all women who had to do the farm because, like I said, the huge percentage of the men had died in the war. Young men.
William Franklin [00:27:27] So after the war, Germany wasn't even a lot of commercial airline anymore?
Barbara Hermes [00:27:34] No, not for years and years.
William Franklin [00:27:37] Wow, I didn't realize that.
Barbara Hermes [00:27:42] And as for food, because our mother worked on various farms here and there, and she always negotiated that for that, they would feed her dinner and her children would be allowed to come for dinner. So Erica and I would at dinner time walk to wherever our mother was working on the farm and we would get to eat with the farmer. And and, of course, they had simple meals, but they had food, because it was a farm.
Erika Wagner [00:28:25] I think that's interesting, too, is that, you know, we to have bread, you have to have flour and you couldn't buy flour. So what we would do our whole family on weekends or evenings after the farmer was done harvesting the grain, the wheat, we would walk the fields and pick up the grains that had fallen to the ground. And we collected over years of everybody gathered together. And eventually we'd have enough and we would take the whole back to the miller and the miller would grind it for us. And then we would use that flour to have bread baked. And we in the summer, we didn't have shoes on. So you'd have to go barefoot on the stubble of the fields. So you really get your ankles scraped up.
Barbara Hermes [00:29:17] Yeah. And similarly, later in the fall when the potatoes are harvested, our mother took us to the potato fields and you just, you know, any leftover, a potato here and a potato there,. You just walked the field up and down and up and down and picked up singular potatoes until we had a sack of potatoes. And that would you know, that's how we would have our sack of potatoes. And because there was no wood for the winter when once our father came in November, my mother got permission to dig up, you know when you cut down a tree, you have the stump left. They would dig out stumps. They were allowed to do that. And but it's very, very hard work and and to have some wood so that we could have some heat. And because we had wood stove.
Erika Wagner [00:30:23] Another thing we did too, was we had that along the streets. There were some streets, had apple trees growing along the street so you could rent a tree. And then when the apples were ripe, then you could go to your tree and pick those trees from your rented tree.
William Franklin [00:30:45] Was this like in the mid '40's or late 40s or. Yes. What year would this have been?
Barbara Hermes [00:30:52] It would have been from 45 to '48. It was very, very difficult. In 1948, things started to get better.
William Franklin [00:31:08] And were the winters pretty harsh in that area?
Barbara Hermes [00:31:13] Yes, yes, this was North Germany.
William Franklin [00:31:19] Right, So what kind of winter clothes did you have? Did you were you able to find coats and boots or any outer clothing that kept you warm?
Barbara Hermes [00:31:33] Actually, Erica and I were pretty lucky many children did not have any, but we we were pretty lucky. The father of several of them and some of them we're still friends with one farmer had sons that were just a little older than we. And when they outgrew the clothes, they would give us some. You you only had what someone would give you. And like I said, the people actually were quite kind and helped each other out that way.
Erika Wagner [00:32:17] But you couldn't buy any if you outgrew something, you never throw anything away, you would always give it to somebody who could use it. And as a matter of fact, I was thinking you also collected things because they were that you you picked up things like silver foil off the ground because that was collected, that was reused, you know.
Barbara Hermes [00:32:41] Like the foil soldiers threw away that the chocolate was wrapped in because otherwise there wasn't any around.
Erika Wagner [00:32:49] And cigaret packs too. You llso collected like little pieces of cigaret stubs and you would take them home. And then the father you out there and the men did we didn't. Yo also you had no containers, no paper bags. So when you went to the grocery store, you had to bring a can or bag or you're in order to put your flour in their jar to put your flour in or something, a container. You had to bring your own container when you went to get milk. They poured the milk into your container. After we left for a while, after a while, then we were able to because we had the chickens we put my mother would send me to the store sometimes to go and buy, for example, like sugar or something. So she would give me a dozen eggs. I would take the dozen eggs to the to the store. And then they would give me maybe a pound of sugar for that.
Barbara Hermes [00:33:47] Sugar we didn't even get the first.
Erika Wagner [00:33:50] You didn't get sugar, but whatever you needed,maybe flour, you so you bartered for your food also.
William Franklin [00:33:58] And in 48, did you is that when they made plans to come to America?
Barbara Hermes [00:34:06] Well well, we, my father and sister in America and one of our most wonderful experience were when a package would arrive from America because our Tante Annie had sent a package, and you cannot imagine the joy of opening up this package and finding. such good stuff that she would send.
Erika Wagner [00:34:43] Jello.
Barbara Hermes [00:34:43] She also had, she had friends at church who would give give her clothing that were discarded and she would send it to us so we would get clothes that way,.
Erika Wagner [00:35:01] Sometimes some coffee, because you couldn't really buy coffee in Germany at that time.
Barbara Hermes [00:35:08] But like, anyway, my father had a sister in America. She had with her husband, emigrated to America in the 30s,.
Erika Wagner [00:35:21] 20's something.
Barbara Hermes [00:35:23] I'm sorry.
Erika Wagner [00:35:24] I thought it was like around nineteen twenty three, I thought, I don't know.
Barbara Hermes [00:35:28] Possibly, possibly, I forget the date if it may have been in '23. But she would write eventually and say, we'd like you to come to America, we'll be here, I'll be your sponsor and come to America. So, our father decided that perhaps he would like to do that and applied for a visa to come to America. And it took two years for that visa to come through.
William Franklin [00:36:07] So that was in 1950, 1951 or so?
Barbara Hermes [00:36:11] Well, he's– We came in 1954, and his, the visa, he would have started in 1951, the process of getting the visa to come to America.
Erika Wagner [00:36:30] If it's important, but we had when my father first applied, my grandmother, our whole family applied, my mother, father, my sister and I and also our grandmother, my mother's mother lived with us and she and her visa came through very quickly because she was an older person and had no bad, nothing,
Barbara Hermes [00:36:54] My father, because he had served in the army, the process took very long.
Erika Wagner [00:37:00] So, so the grandmother's visa came through almost immediately. But she couldn't didn't want to go alone because she was in her late 70s already or was 17 year old. And so she she didn't want to go alone. She wanted to wait for our visa. And then when the visa for the rest of the family came through, her visa had expired and then she could not go with us anymore and we had to leave her behind.
Barbara Hermes [00:37:26] Which was very sad for our mother. But that's how we came to America.
William Franklin [00:37:38] And when your father came to America, was he a mechanic? Did he find employment here?
Barbara Hermes [00:37:45] Well, our his sister lived in Evansville, Indiana. And the jobs they were able to find him was hired help in a peach orchard, fruit orchard.
Erika Wagner [00:37:59] He was supposed to work with Uncle Frank in the in that refrigerator company, but they were on strike by the time we got there. And then so they got my father a job working in a peach orchard as a hired hand.
Barbara Hermes [00:38:14] Also, what happened, because it took a long time to get our visa, the we could not get passage on. A ship, immigrant ship, immigrant ship and and in time before the expiration of the visa and so our aunt and uncle here in America said they would purchase, they would purchase us tickets on a regular ocean liner so that we could come and then they would pay for the tickets and we would then owe them the money and pay them back once we got to America. And so Erika and I and our parents got to come over on the SS United States,.
Erika Wagner [00:39:11] Which was the fastest ship at the time.
Barbara Hermes [00:39:13] Yeah, it had the blue ribbon for the ocean crossing, but, and of course, our Aunt bought the least expensive cabin she could find, she could get for us. And we did the bathroom, it had no bathroom, had like two bunk beds for four people and, and the bathroom was up the hall. But for us it was the most luxury we had ever seen in our life. We had never seen an experienced luxury like we did on this ocean crossing.
William Franklin [00:39:54] Must have been amazing, yeah.
Barbara Hermes [00:39:55] Can I tell you a cute story?
William Franklin [00:39:57] Yes, please do!
Barbara Hermes [00:39:58] We would– And of course we were assigned a table in the dining room and it was a table for four. And we had a waiter and we and it would be there would be menus on the table. And of course, we didn't know any English, but our reader was so cute he would always help us and point us in the right direction. And it was always a basket of rolls on the table. And we would love those rolls. But as soon as the basket was empty, the waiter would refill the basket. You know how people do in this country. And by the time we were done eating, my mother said, Oh, this little basket of rolls which we can't let go to waste. So she would gather up the rolls and she had a little bag. She put them in your bag and take them along. And every day we've got more rolls, a bag full of rolls. When we got to New York a
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
