About three weeks after I started work, my prospects greatly improved when Sorel shifted me to much more interesting work as a draftsman. They needed a German-speaking engineer to assist them in exploiting captured schematics of a German design that would be used to build a four-barreled weapons system for the U.S. Navy. Now earning enough money to support myself adequately and rent a one-room apartment in the center of Montreal, I was ready to welcome Anneliese and Harald.
Following three long months of separation, they finally arrived in Canada on the ocean liner Homeline in October 1951, bringing an end to my isolation. With our finances rapidly improving, we quickly moved from our cramped residence in the center of the city into a larger apartment across the St. Lawrence River in Longueuil, closer to my job. On October 9, 1952, our daughter Marion was born. Our family and happiness grew together.
Of course, there were also challenges that we experienced as we made our new lives. As a young German boy who spoke with an accent, Harald probably faced the hardest adjustment. Early on, he got into a couple of fistfights with another kid at school because of his limited English, but it was nothing too serious.
There were also advantages to life in Canada as Anneliese and I discovered when we found that a pound of the animal lard that we liked to use as a spread for bread and for cooking oil was priced at only 15 cents. While we had considered lard to be a luxury item back in Germany, we now enjoyed slathering it on everything we ate, at least until we learned how unhealthy it was.
In May 1953, Anneliese and I decided to leave Montreal in pursuit of better career opportunities in the city of Hamilton, Ontario, located 375 miles to the southwest. Almost immediately after our arrival, I accepted an offer from The Steel Company of Canada, which operated the largest steel plant in the country. After working there as a draftsman for a couple of months, the company transferred me to the engineering department and placed me in charge of maintaining an electric arc furnace.
An arc furnace is a brick-lined container with a moveable roof. After loading scrap iron into the container and closing the roof, the operator extends three moving electrodes down through the roof of the container to create an electric arc that melts the scrap iron. Electric furnaces had previously been used to melt scrap steel into iron, but we utilized a recently developed technology that gave an arc furnace the capacity to produce high-quality steel from scrap steel.
While never explicitly requesting a raise, I regularly asked my employers for more responsibilities. As I proved myself, I continued to earn more responsibilities and a higher income. Meanwhile, the experience that I received working with the first arc electric furnace of its type in North America would prove invaluable to my career.
Anneliese and I were ambitious and our life continued to improve in Hamilton. We moved to progressively larger apartments three times and bought our first car. During this time, my English language ability also improved through daily practice.
In November 1954, Anneliese opened her own shop, “Kenilworth Florist,” in the center of the city. She had my support to pursue this long-time dream of hers, though it meant further changes in our lives. Harold (formerly Harald) had already begun grade school, but we had to place Marion at a daycare center run by nuns while Anneliese was at work. On my lunch hour and in my spare time, meanwhile, I played delivery boy for the florist shop. Unfortunately, her business made little profit despite her hard work.
On Christmas Eve 1954, Anneliese was stuck in the shop preparing flower arrangements while I delivered them around town, preventing us from being with our children as usual. Listening to Christmas carols on my car’s radio with the snow falling outside, tears ran down my cheeks as I despaired at the thought of Harold and Marion alone when I had enjoyed such wonderful Christmases as a child. It made me cherish that Christmas Eve even more when we finally were able to celebrate later that night.
In the end, Anneliese decided to close her shop before the following Christmas after giving the business venture her best effort.
ESCAPING EAST GERMANY
In the early 1950s my brother Hans was still living on the farm in Puggen with my mother, my sisters, and Aunt Hedwig, while Otto had married and was living and working on the farm belonging to his wife’s family in nearby Hohengrieben.
The East German government had not yet attempted to seize our family’s farm in Puggen outright, but continued to require ever-higher production quotas from my remaining family members after my father’s decision to remain in the west. Although other farms were also unable to meet their quotas, the Communist authorities continually persecuted my family because of its known hostility to the regime.
Shortly before Christmas in 1951, Otto received an order to go down to the office of Puggen’s mayor. Growing concerned when he failed to return after an hour and a half, my sister Marlene went down to check on him and learned that they were waiting for the arrival of Communist authorities from the city of Salzwedel, about 10 miles away. When the officials appeared shortly afterward, they took Otto away in handcuffs.
In Salzwedel, a judge sentenced my brother to 15 months in prison because our family’s farm had failed to meet its production quota, apparently unaware that my mother now held the title to the farm and that Otto himself was now living in Hohengrieben. The court also informed Otto that the farm would be confiscated as a result of both the failure to meet the quota as well as my father’s illegal departure to the West in 1948.
When people in Puggen learned about Otto’s prison sentence, they were so upset that they cornered the local police detachment in a basement in the village until his release was granted. The East German police soon rearrested Otto, but allowed him out of prison again in the middle of February 1952. He returned to Hohengrieben and had little further involvement with affairs on the farm in Puggen.
At this same time, the government went forward with its confiscation of my family’s bank account and farm, placing it under the supervision of a government Treuhandler (trustee). In addition to claiming furniture from our home, the government also began confiscating horses from the farm to use elsewhere, and starting killing the farm’s cattle for meat, even if a cow was pregnant.
Because my sister Christa was working at a photography shop in Salzwedel, my oldest sister Marlene had the primary responsibility of looking out for my mother and my sister Margarete. Now an employee of the state, Marlene earned hourly wages to work on our farm. Because it was now state property, my family was no longer able to take eggs, milk, or anything else from its production. Though she fed and took care of the remaining animals, all other operations on the farm ceased.
In March of 1953, Herr Schmerschneider, the same local Lutheran pastor who had warned that my father would be arrested if he returned to Puggen in 1948, passed along new information. This time, he alerted my mother and sisters that the Communists intended to take Marlene and Christa to a camp on the island of Rugen in the Baltic Sea to perform manual labor as punishment for my father’s illegal departure six years earlier.
Under mounting pressure, my mother and sisters finally made the heartrending decision to leave our old family farm forever and escape to West Germany. It was more than leaving a house and property; it meant accepting the surrender of the family’s legacy, land on which our ancestors had lived for centuries.
In preparation for their departure, my mother and sisters began collecting our personal items, clothing, bedcovers, and other belongings for shipment to my father in West Germany by mail, posting the parcels from different locations to avoid detection. While they were able to mail some of our valuables, they could not risk sending everything by that route.
Among the items not sent were some very valuable old coins that my parents had dug up from our farm’s ornamental garden in the 1920s. Dating from the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648, these coins had likely been buried by the earlier residents before they fled into the surrounding woods to escape marauding soldiers.
When I was a student in Wolfenbuttel and my parents had no money, they gave me part of the collection to help me out. Though pawning part of the collection, I returned the remainder to my mother before I left for Canada. As she readied to leave for West Germany, my mother entrusted the entire collection for safekeeping with one of the few neighbors on whom she felt she could rely. Sadly, this neighbor betrayed that trust and sold our family’s treasure.
The increasing use of barbed wire fencing, guard dogs, and minefields along the border had made an unauthorized crossing to the West almost impossible, but at this time there was still an escape route through the
