Category Archives: Daily Life

Letters from 1946

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Mom saved every letter Dad wrote her during their long separation during and after WWII. The letters give a powerful and intimate view of the deepest feelings of a young married couple whose life has been torn apart by war.

Here are a few short excerpts from two letters and a postcard written by Dad to Mom.

Excerpts from a Letter—May 14, 1946
My sweetie!
Wow! What a joy! I received three letters at once from you today. I got weak in the knees… 

Excerpts from a Letter—May 22, 1946
I can endure everything, but worrying about you gives me many sad and bitter hours. Not to be able to help you . . . But God willing, this separation will also end. Just so you and our boys stay healthy… everything else we will be able to manage… my soul is screaming—why must this happiness bypass us? Is our cup still too full? Have we not drunk from it enough already, and always to the last bitter drop! As there is a God on this earth, this suffering must end and we be together again.

Excerpts from a Postcard—May 31, 1946
“Everything seems so gray, always alone! Well, you can imagine my diet, considering my culinary skills… 

Excerpts from a Letter—June 23, 1946
…Tomorrow it will be seven years since we were married! And we live off the beautiful hours of being together; we live off the memory how much longer?…Oh, how many loving words I want to write to you, but on paper they are cold words. May God grant the time of our reunion, and then in my arms you can forget all this misery. And then I can take care of you and our boys. 

Read more in the book – get your copy on this website or on Amazon: https://amzn.to/32CJfQs

USS General Ballou Reunion

Posted on by under Daily Life, News, War

Sixty-seven years ago John Diebus and I crossed the stormy Atlantic on the USS General Ballou to the promised land: America. John was 14 and I was 8 at the time.

Recently John and I met for the first time since we set foot on Ellis Island. It was exciting and emotional. We both realize how blessed we were to be allowed to come to this country. Mom, my brother, and I fled our Transylvanian homeland (part of Romania) on a Red Cross train. John, his family, and the citizens of his town, fled the advancing Soviet army by wagon train.

Both his family and my family were Romanian citizens. We were ethnic Germans who had lived in Romania for hundreds of years. Ethnic Germans who did not flee were sent off to slave labor camps in Russia, where 15% of them died.

In communist countries (and under the Nazis) a person does not have inherent rights. What matters first is a person’s group or collective identity. There is a hierarchy of groups. Woe to you if you find yourself with the out-of-favor collective identity.

The Ballou: yet another connection, and a different view

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This photo was kindly submitted by Leo Wagner, who was on the voyage with his wife Ann and daughter Heidi.

Two days ago I was contacted by Heidi Wagner, a fellow passenger who crossed the Atlantic on the same ship with me and my family!

It was a joy to talk to her. We shared our respective histories, immigrant experiences, and love for our adopted country. She is doing research for her 92 year old father in hopes of locating the family of a dear friend of his with whom he had lost contact after arriving in the USA in 1952.

All immigrant refugee families on the ship received a post card with the picture of the USS General Ballou (also referred to as MS General Ballou) on it. I remember our postcard, unfortunately in the ensuing 65 years it was lost. Heidi just sent me a picture of the postcard her dad still had.

Heidi and her father are both looking forward to reading Why Can’t Somebody Just Die Around Here? Writing the book is a gift that keeps on giving!

POW Connections

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Gustav, Gerhard’s father in his early 20s.

I met an 81-year-old Saxon lady (possibly a relative) at a recent breakfast, and she has a story similar to mine.

She obviously remembers her homeland quite well. Her father, being Saxon, was forced into the Waffen-SS. He fought in the war and became a POW, as did my father.

Gustav, a few years later and about two years after being released from POW camp.

After her father was released and returned home our stories diverge. Having perpetrated the crime of being Saxon, he was arrested by the communists and schlepped off to Siberia as a slave-laborer. He died there at the age of 37. The lack of food, clothing, adequate shelter, and extreme cold was difficult for the healthy to survive. For those in poor health, such as former POWs, it meant certain death.

Gerhard’s father’s certificate of release from the Prisoner of War camp.

When my father was released from Russian captivity (Focșani, Romania POW camp) he returned home in extremely poor health. In the early years of WWII, before Dad went to the front to fight the Russians, he surreptitiously went against the regime to help his Jewish friend Mr. Massler. His friend, now the communist police commissioner of Bistrita, Romania (Bistritz in German) protected him from arrest. He returned kindness with kindness. My dad survived.

To add to the poignancy of the Saxon lady’s story about her father was that she once met a former Transylvanian Saxon slave laborer who had survived. In hopes of gaining some knowledge about her father’s death she asked him what they did with the bodies of those who died. He responded, “We stripped them of their clothes and dug a shallow grave wherever they had collapsed and died.” As she told me this she began to cry.

The USNS General CC Ballou, Part 3: Fellow Passengers

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Sixty-five years ago my family crossed the stormy North Atlantic on the USNS General C. C. Ballou as displaced persons. In the early morning on April 10, 1952, while anchored in New York harbor, I saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time.

In the past several months I have been contacted by two fellow passengers and the granddaughter of a third. One of them, while reading my book, realized we were on the same voyage and bunked near each other. Although she was only four at the time, she remembered the burial at sea described in the book.

Another refugee who crossed the Atlantic on the USNS General C. C. Ballou several months earlier learned about my book while doing internet research on the ship. He was struck with how uncannily similar our stories are. He contacted me and we’ve become friends. Writing the book is a gift that just keeps on giving!

By the way, the book is now available for Kindle readers!

Death by Starvation

Posted on by under Daily Life, War

Today I saw the movie Bitter Harvest, the story of two young people caught up in “Holodomor” (Ukrainian for death by starvation).

Holodomor was the purposeful starving to death of 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 Ukrainian peasants by the Soviet Union in 1932/1933. The movie hit home. It brought back memories of my childhood. I broke down at the end of the movie.

We all know the history of the Holocaust – as we should. It was pure evil. But if that is all we know, we know only half of history. We know Nazism was evil. We should also know that communism is evil. Most Americans have never heard of the Ukrainian genocide. The communist government controlled all information and kept the genocide a secret.

A New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer-prize winner, Walter Duranty, who was stationed in Russia, was complicit in keeping it a secret. He knew, in real time, of the genocide but never reported on it. Instead he praised Stalin, the Soviet Union, and communism. 

Being an admirer of Josef Stalin and communism he famously wrote, “But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” He was justifying the purposeful starvation peasant farmers who did not want to give up their freedoms and their land in order to attain the ideal communist society.

Books make great Christmas gifts! Hint hint!

Posted on by under Daily Life, Excerpts, Family, War

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Give your friends and family a really cool Christmas gift – a copy of my book! Below is an excerpt describing our Christmas in 1945. Christmas for your friends and family will be much better than ours was, especially if you give them my book!

Christmas 1945

My brother remembers that Christmas:

“The Christmas gift that year was part of an apple. Grandfather Josef Maurer peeled the apple with a knife. The peel was an unbroken spiral. My brother and I got to eat the peel. We also ate a little bit of the apple and ate the core. We ate the entire core, including seeds, but we did not eat the stem.”

You can make someone happy and purchase a gift copy here.

For those who have not read the book and wonder about the unusual title, the story behind the title is explained here.

Two Men, Four armies, Four Countries

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The picture is of me in my advanced ROTC uniform with Dad just before I was to get an ROTC award. Dad, who had fought in three Axis armies, was very proud of me.

And now a retired US Army Colonel has read the story that spans the experiences of those men, from WWII to Vietnam, and loves the book!

Thank you, thank you, thank you. The book…it is a shame that we have so abused great adjectives i.e. awesome, outstanding, and terrific so (so is “so”)…in the United States Army lingo I will say “a job well done”.

Gerhard, your ability to tell your family’s story was and is a true gift; I understand “labors of love.” You made me laugh and cry and thank God for his mercy to you and your family especially where their lives were at great risk. It is a wonderful story of survival, heartbreak, determination, and love. Your research and capture of such historically valuable documentation was stunning.

Your family’s life story would make a great movie!!!!

-Dick Smith, US Army Colonel (Ret), former faculty member of both the Command & General Staff College and the US Army War College

Not in the book: the lifesaving lamb

Posted on by under Daily Life, Excerpts, Family

Many stories we never made it into the book. Some didn’t make it because I took them out, others because somewhere along the way one has to stop changing the book. Yet occasionally something triggers my memory and a story that I hadn’t thought about for decades suddenly pops into my head.

For example, several minutes ago a 64-year-old story came to mind:

I was very sick and near death from a severe allergic drug reaction. I had been in bed for maybe four weeks. My parents were not sure I would survive. In hopes of sparking a will to live in me, my parents brought me a newborn lamb. I remember the joy I felt at the beautiful fluffy little lamb beside me in bed. Their plan worked.

First visit to an American grocery store

Posted on by under Daily Life, Excerpts, Family

We arrived in Columbus, Ohio, from West Germany, via the Port of New York, on Easter Sunday, 1952. Prior to that the only time within my memory that I had had enough to eat was on the ship sailing to America. There were many new and amazing things to experience in our new country. The abundance of food was a pleasant culture shock.

Excerpt from the book:

Our first visit to an American grocery store

I remember our first trip to an American grocery store, the A&P on Main Street, near the Capital University campus. It was a family affair with my Mom, Dad, my brother, and me. A nice American lady helped us with the shopping, a big help since everything was strange to us. We had just moved into our home on Mound Street, and we had no food in the house; the cupboards were bare.

The amount of food in the A&P was astounding. I had never seen such a so much food or such a wide selection. We filled a cart (smaller than today’s carts) full of groceries, which cost about $10. (That is about $88 in 2014 dollars.) I did not know someone could actually have enough food to fill such a huge basket. While amazed and pleased at the amount of food, it almost seemed wrong to buy that much. We had a refrigerator in the house for perishable food. Now that was amazing!