divided city of Berlin. Because anyone who tried to depart to the West without official permission faced arrest and imprisonment by the East German secret police, my mother and sisters kept their intentions secret from our neighbors and continued to behave normally until the day they departed.
Leaving everything behind except small suitcases, they began to sneak out of Puggen on Friday, April 3, 1953, just two days before Easter. Agreeing to meet in West Berlin, they split up to avoid drawing the attention of one of the many government informers.
While my mother crossed a field out of our village and caught the train in Beetzendorf, Margarete left from the stop nearest our farm in Siedenlangenbeck, where she joined my mother on board the same train. Meanwhile, Christa remained in Salzwedel after work on Friday and Marlene stayed on the farm to feed the animals.
Telling the Treuhandler that she was leaving Puggen to attend a church confirmation of a relative, and would not be back until the beginning of the week, Marlene said goodbye to Aunt Hedwig. On the morning of Easter Sunday, she walked out the entrance of our farm for the last time with our dog barking behind her. After boarding the train at Siedenlangenbeck, Marlene met up with Christa in Salzwedel.
Upon reaching East Berlin, my mother and Margarete and my older sisters separately caught the subway train that still ran between the Communist-controlled eastern zone and the Allied-controlled western zone. Their joyful reunion at Spandau in West Berlin meant that they were safe and free, though they lacked the money to buy a ticket to West Germany.
Finally, about a month later, they purchased plane tickets to Hannover with funds that I sent them from Canada. When they arrived by train in Luneburg from Hannover that May, my father was waiting on the platform to embrace them all for the first time in four and a half years.
Learning they had fled, the East German government immediately assumed total control of the property in Puggen. Soon afterward, it demolished all the buildings, except for the Altenteil where my grandparents had lived.
The fate of our home and farm was tragic, but this loss was far outweighed by the sense of euphoria that my mother and sisters felt as a result of their successful escape from Communist control. Though my family never expected to recover our farm following its seizure by the East German authorities, my three sisters eventually won a court battle to regain title to our property following German reunification in 1990.
My family was thrilled when the border dividing Germany suddenly disappeared during the wave of East European revolutions in 1989, but Otto was the happiest one of all. He and his family finally had a chance to live in a free society and travel for the first time in decades. Tragically for him, some members of our family had already passed away before the wall came down. As for most Germans, my family found that the nation’s defeat and division had lasting consequences that proved much greater than the direct impact of the war itself.
THE UNITED STATES: July 1956–December 1982
By the mid-1950s, Anneliese and I had decided not to return to Germany after growing increasingly comfortable with our new lives in North America, but we still wanted to try to emigrate to the United States as we had always planned to do.
At the American consulate on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, I applied for a visa that would permit me to bring my family to live in the United States as legal aliens. Because of my background and work experience, they issued us a visa to emigrate in less than three months.
Shortly after receiving permission in the summer of 1956, I resigned my job at The Steel Company of Canada and drove down alone to Cleveland, Ohio. Given my experience, I had five different job offers from construction companies and a steel manufacturer within a week. Many of the positions interested me, but I ultimately accepted a position as an electrical engineer with a large industrial construction firm that offered to double my salary.
After spending three months back in Germany, Anneliese, Harold, and Marion arrived in the United States and moved into the new home I had found for us in Cleveland. We quickly settled into a quiet family life, driving around northern Ohio for sightseeing on weekends. About a year later, on October 22, 1957, our son Norman Ralph was born. Afterward, Anneliese and I joked that our children could form their own United Nations, representing Germany, Canada, and the United States.
In late 1958, I left the job with my first American employer and went to work for another Cleveland firm. At the age of 38, I became the chief electrical engineer at Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Working with two 200- ton capacity electric arc furnaces, I now began to develop an international reputation for my innovative expertise in maximizing the efficiency of these furnaces in terms of the amount of time and energy used relative to the quantity of steel produced.
Today, the industry uses this type of furnace to produce roughly 50 percent of the steel made in the United States, but it was a cutting edge technology during the late 1950s.
During the ensuing decade, we took the children to visit our family in Germany about once a year. My parents doted on their grandchildren, though my conservatively dressed mother sometimes thought that Marion wore outfits that were “too colorful.” While sometimes missing our families and Germany, we never regretted our decision to build new lives in America.
As immigrants, Anneliese and I constantly sought to blend our German heritage with the American lifestyle. While we spoke German together, we usually tried to speak English with our children. Instilling German values like hard work and punctuality were particularly important to us and probably led Anneliese and I to be more strict than most American parents. To teach responsibility, we assigned all the children regular chores in the house and in the yard. The children knew that when I told them to be home by five o’clock, it meant five o’clock. They also learned to value our time together as a family.
Growing up in Puggen, Sundays had always been a day for family. Anneliese and I tried to make this a family time in Cleveland too. Following church in the morning, she and I took turns preparing something special, typically a traditional German meal. After a nap, we would pack the kids into the car for a Sunday drive into the country or to a local park for a hike and rock-climbing. Some Sundays, we would drive up to Lake Erie for picnics.
Returning home, we would have Abendbrot, a light meal consisting of an open-face sandwich. Like most American families, our Sundays often finished with the family sitting around the television watching shows like Gunsmoke or The FBI. Perhaps our separation from our extended family back in Germany made the bonds among our immediate family tighter.
Twice a year, Cleveland held a festival celebrating German heritage that offered traditional food, music, and dancing. Anneliese and I always loved dancing together, frequently reminiscing about our first meeting in the dance hall in Luneburg.
About this time, I entered a local hospital after experiencing severe back problems resulting from the war. As I lay in traction to prevent movement, a man with a broken hip was placed on the room’s other bed. Later that night, the other patient asked me for a smoke. When I told him I was unable to move, he tried to get out of bed to retrieve his cigarettes from the drawer in the table next to him. With his broken hip, he collapsed immediately on the floor, unable to move. I pushed the button for a nurse and they lifted him back into bed.
That drama would be repeated three times that night. As a daily smoker of cigarettes, cigars, or a pipe since the invasion of Russia in 1941, this pathetic exhibition seemed like a warning to me. If smoking was so addictive that it could cause that kind of insane behavior, I wanted nothing to do with it. Deciding never to smoke again, I quit for good.
In 1961, at the end of the five-year required waiting period, our family proudly attended a ceremony at which we became citizens of the United States, breaking the last legal connection with our Fatherland. Making up my mind that my family and I would be Americans, I dropped the German part of my identity almost completely. Even the legal spelling of our family’s name was changed from Lubbecke to Lubbeck, though this was partly because I was tired of hearing my name mispronounced as “Lubbeckee,” instead of the proper “Luebbeckeh.”
On January 1, 1964, I went to work for the Union Carbide Corporation after leaving the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Rather quickly, I worked my way up to the position of Manager of Arc Furnace Technology in the division which made graphite electrodes for steel-making arc furnaces.
At Union Carbide, I also started to travel all over the country and the world, consulting with large and small steel companies and foundries about setting up new electric arc furnaces and optimizing their manufacturing
