After Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in September 1938, my parents had to apply for German passports. They were now German citizens living in France. With the start of World War II, my father, now an enemy alien, was arrested by the French and interned in Libourne; my mother took refuge with us children in Switzerland. When Germany invaded France in May 1940, German troops freed my father; several months later, he was conscripted into military service. According to my mother, he would have preferred to serve in the Navy or Air Force, but as an expatriate German he had no choice but to join the Waffen-SS.

Stationed in Zhitomir, Ukraine, he was killed in September 1943, while on a train back to France. He had been released from duty at the front in order to resume his previous work at the Strasbourg paper mill, now essential for the Nazi war machinery. It was not meant to be. Partisans had mined the train tracks near the town of Winniza. My father was killed in the explosion; my 28-year-old mother was now a war widow with four small children, the youngest nine months old.

She stayed in Strasbourg until November 1944, shortly before the Allied forces reached the city. With a few bundles of clothing and a baby carriage we escaped across the Rhine Bridge to Kehl in Germany. From there we continued by train to Czechoslovakia to live with my maternal grandparents in Gablonz, a city famous for Bohemian glass production. But after Dresden was firebombed in February 1945, and the deep-red sky could be seen in far-away Gablonz, and as the Russian army was approaching ever closer from the East, my mother followed her father’s advice: She fled with her three oldest children for Southern Germany, reluctantly leaving her youngest son, 2-year-old Michael, in the care of her parents-in-law. It would have been arduous to travel through war-torn territory with four children, especially a small child like him.

Unknown to my mother or any of her relatives was the Allied plan to expropriate and expel millions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia at the end of the war. Thus, forty of our family members fled Czechoslovakia in the mass exodus toward the end of 1945. My paternal grandparents and my little brother Michael made it to Eisleben in East Germany, where the grandparents died of typhoid fever. A Roman Catholic priest and his sister took in the orphan Michael. It wasn’t until 1948, after desperate searches, that my mother found him through the Red Cross.

In March 1945, after several days on different trains, we arrived in Southern Germany at the Monastery Reute refugee camp. After a short stay there, a farmer in the village of Gaishaus reluctantly rented a room to us. Now at least we were able to get small quantities of milk, eggs, and vegetables in addition to the scarce food from rationed food stamps.

Our stay with the farmer was short-lived. Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, the Allied forces divided Germany into four occupation zones. The area we had taken refuge in became part of the French Zone. My mother was asked to report to the French military authorities and was informed that, because my brother Roland and I were born in France, we were French citizens and, therefore, we all were to return to Strasbourg. My mother had no choice. Once in Strasbourg, she was summoned to the Deuxième Bureau, the French counterintelligence service where, I assume, my father’s membership in the Waffen-SS was brought up. The officials suggested my mother, who was fluent in German, Czech, and French, act as a French spy in Prague. They offered to return the apartment we had previously lived in at Quai de la Tuìlerie, and to hire a governess for us children. My mother, who had sacrificed her husband, was unwilling to sacrifice her children too.

Her refusal resulted in our internment, June 22, 1945, at Natzweiler-Struthof, a Nazi concentration camp in the Vosges Mountains, about 30 miles south west from Strasbourg. Guards with pointed guns shoved us into a barracks. The ordeal ended mid-November 1945, when freezing temperatures in the Vosgues Mountains became too risky for the prisoners, especially women and children. We were released and deported to Rastatt, Germany. Once there, my mother did not know where to go. Returning to Czechoslovakia was out of the question. There was no mail service; communication with relatives had long been broken off. My mother decided to return to the same community in Southern Germany where we had briefly found refuge early in 1945.

Desperately trying to find a place to stay, we were turned down again and again by the villagers. At long last, we found shelter at Spital Neutann, a lice- and flea-infested senior home in the countryside. It had its own farm so that, as far as food was concerned, we were relatively well off. My mother’s younger sister, Gerda, joined us there in April 1946 after fleeing from Czechoslovakia.

After nearly two years at the senior home, in one small room for the five of us, my mother felt it was time to move. A brisk fifteen-minute walk from the home, through a forest and past hilly meadows, lay the secluded hamlet of Bainders and the weekend house of a city surgeon. The only immediate neighbors were three subsistence farmers. To shop for food, to go to school, to church, or to the railroad station required at least half an hour’s walk. My mother rented the weekend house, in which we lived for the next ten years. She earned a little money by knitting hats, mufflers, sweaters, and skirts for the families of the French occupying troops. Though marked by privation for quite some time, these years were the best in my childhood. To this very day, the bucolic hamlet Bainders and its unpretentious, down-to-earth people are Heimat to me.

However, ten years of living in isolation was more than my mother could bear. She found a secretarial job at a lawyer’s office in Ravensburg, the district town with a population of 30,000. In May 1957, when I was 18 years old, we moved to Ravensburg. I did not feel at home there. Less than two years later, I moved to Munich, the capital of Bavaria. And in November 1960, a few months after I had come of age, and to my mother’s deep regret, I left for America to follow my dream of a new, challenging, and inspiring life.

Carin Drechsler-Marx