Two days ago I was contacted by another passenger who crossed the angry North Atlantic with me and my family on the USS General Ballou in April 1952. He was 15 and I was almost nine. He is the fifth (or thereabouts) fellow passenger who has contacted me so far. It will be fun to compare notes. Shown here are my the front and back of my Alien Registration Card.
PS. He bought a book!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Gerhard continues to receive messages from people who were on the very same ship that brought his family over from Germany to the United States:
Gerhard, Thank you for emailing me. My father and his family were on this ship. I found the name of this ship on their naturalization paperwork from Germany. I don’t know much about the trip over on the boat other than all my family became very afraid of water and never got on a boat again. There are still two members of the family alive. I feel overwhelmingly compelled to contact them and get their experience before their passing.
-Stephanie
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!
It’s not every day you get a review written by a Lt. Col, USAF! Here’s what Herr Joseph (Joseph P. Contino, of Lithopolis’s Das Kaffeehaus von Frau Burkhart) had to say about the book:
Why Can’t Somebody Just Die Around Here? is a must read for anyone who is engaged in professional military education (PME) at the Squadron Officer School level and above or just the casual reader who is merely curious to educate themselves on what true hardship AND success looks like for real people.
From a military history angle, it puts into relevant context WWII Germany from a war torn victim’s perspective. The reader experiences everything from the enemy’s movement and tactics and their political motivations at the end of the war, to US policy and how both had a direct and lasting impact on a family. Gerhard Maroscher touches on everything from the enemy’s military structure and modus operandi during their time of desperation and how that intertwined with the American advance and eventual victory in the region. Most importantly, those two factors are again told from a civilian perspective which presents a very unique and real learning experience, for not only military professionals engaged in PME , but for frankly any breathing human being that has never had the “pleasure” of suffering such atrocities and LEARNING form them!
This memoir is a masterpiece in how it also bridges the gap of personal and family wartime strife to the American story. This leaves readers with an authentic appreciation for our great country that they may otherwise never have an opportunity to experience considering today’s soft environment. It is a treasure to read a book that a rare life lesson and learning experience can be garnered from – the kind that most people (thank God) will never have to endure.
Maroscher also allows other family members to give their “take” on stories told by him in the first person – a welcoming multi perspective that pulls you into the book.
Maroscher’s story should be required reading for any service officer PME let alone any high school history class and beyond – a true eye-opening experience that is relevant on so many social and political levels today. On the most trivial of levels, this book at the very least should stand as a reminder to all of us what really is important in life and what is truly nonsensical fluff….
Joseph P. Contino, Lt. Col, USAF
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.
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!
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.
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
70 years ago today, August 28, 1945, Dad was released from a Russian POW camp. He kept his Certificate of Release with his important documents.