The Post-War period was not the first time Pop missed out on months of schooling. In the Summer of 1936, when he was about 6 years old, he was very ill with a measles infection that attacked his middle ear and required surgery. He was hospitalized and required months of respite care. As a result he missed the first 6 months of school. He remembers the hospital specifically because he was able to look out the window and see the Hindenburg Zeppelin fly over the Berlin Summer Olympics. This fly-over was August 1, 1936.
(Pop has no photos from before the war, due to the fire bombing. This photo is from https://www.airships.net/blog/ hindenburg-1936-berlin-olympics/)
“All combined, I must have lost about two years of school, if you count those first six months when I was six years old and then the years after the war. When I was six, I had measles or something infectious like that, and the disease attacked my middle ear. I was placed in quarantine in the hospital and no-one could visit me. My mother could only come to a window and look in, but she was not allowed into the room. All I had to do was look out the window. The Summer Olympics were happening then, and I clearly remember looking out the window and seeing the Hindenburg airship. That was very exciting. It had only just been built and was flying over for the opening ceremonies.
In those days, there were no antibiotics. The only thing doctors could do was surgery to clean out the ear infection, but I was not in the correct hospital for that kind of surgery. In order to save my life they did the surgery anyway, but the doctor cut my left face nerve so my left face was permanently paralyzed. When I was released from the hospital, I was on strict rest and could not go to school for six months. The only treatment I had was I had to eat liver and a raw egg every day. My mother would mix the raw egg with sugar or honey. It was delicious.”
I said to Pop: “The liver, not so much, I imagine. What other memories do you have from that age? Were you troublesome to your mother?”
“I remember getting lost a couple of times. In May of that year, on my 6th birthday in fact, my parents went on a holiday, and my sister and I were placed in a Lendsheim in Schreiberhau. A Lendsheim is like a nursing home or care home for old or young people. My brother Dietz had not yet been born so it was just Irmel and me. I know it was my birthday because I was allowed to sit at a table with Irmel.
At one point the kindergarten lady took us younger kids out into the field to pick flowers. I walked around and picked the flowers for my mother. But when I looked up there were no more kids. I was told later that the kindergarten lady had asked if everyone was there, but she didn’t count heads. Anyway, I went with my handful of flowers, looked for more flowers, and walked in the forest on a path for a while. Along came a lady with a little German leiter wagon (a wood wagon with big wheels). She had two kids and some wood on the wagon. The lady figured out that I was lost and put me in the wagon with the two kids. I remember she had an enamel can of coffee, filled a cup, and gave us kids a drink from cup of coffee. She then took us to her house, and I slept there. The next day, a man with a motorcycle came and picked me up and took me back to the landsheim.
The other time I got lost was on the boat to a family farm in Ost Prozen, probably that summer as well. It was common at that time for the women and children to go to a summer holiday and then the fathers would come at the end of the work week. To get to the farm we had to take a boat from Stettin to Ost Prozen. The Polish would not let Germans go over land through the Polish Corridor so we had to go by boat. I remember the farm was very close to water and dunes, close to Tilsit, where you could find lots of Amber. Anytime my mother got fed up with us kids she sent us out to the dunes to gather amber. We had three cloth bags full of amber when we left that summer, but it all got burned up in the attic of the Berlin house that was fired bombed.
So anyway, my mother was on the boat with just Irmel and me. We didn’t have a cabin, we just slept on a pad. There were hammocks, but mother slept on the ground. When I had to go to the bathroom, I did not wake tmy mother, but went off by myself to the men’s room. Apparently, the men’s room had two doors, maybe one for the crew and one for the others, but when I left the men’s room, I went out the wrong way, probably in to the crew quarters. Someone found me wandering around and took me up to the Captain on the Bridge. The captain announced that a little boy was found, and a woman near my mother woke her up and told her about the announcement. So I was found again.“