von Aulock

Recorded on May 31st 2000 in Stellenbosch, South Africa

Part 1

00:01

Angela Hüssen had it sich gewünscht.

00:03

Today is the 31st of May 2000 and Rosi von Aulock will tell her children and grandchildren. Yes, and I will put the gun on my chest and say, now tell me. And now I have a little bit of a shiver in front of me because just tell me, you know me, you have to be very careful. But I think it’s wonderful from Orsel Hüssen that she comes here to record this life story. So appreciate that, please. Now I want to tell you first of all

00:33

where we come from. Our family comes from Silesia, from the Middle Mountains, that is, near the Giant Mountains. The small village was called Konradzwaldau and we grew up in an ancient wall with a enchanted park, a wonderful area, a wonderful security, wonderful parents. We had a wonderful paradise childhood. I can’t tell you everything because it would take too long just to tell you

01:03

It was located south of the Riesengebirge, 23 km from Hirschberg. Our old district was Schönau, at Katzbach, where Blücher had chased the French. And our new district was called Goldberg, which was already located in the lowlands of Liegenitz and Breslau. So we were just in the outskirts of the Riesengebirge and had a wonderful childhood.

01:33

We went down from home, that was very close, had an office, did wonderful

02:05

I have to tell you a little bit about my parents, about your grandparents. My father was born on April 26, 1899 in Gleiwitz in Upper Bavaria. He went to the Ritterakademie in Liegnitz and got his school there and also his education there. In 1916 he went to Lübben as a war volunteer to the 3rd Jäger and in spring to the storm battalion to France, Kaumenbre.

02:35

ungemein harte und furchtbare Kämpfe als Fahnenjuncker und Leutnant. 1918, also bei Kriegsende, brachte er trotz des Soldatenrates, und das kann ich euch jetzt nicht alles erklären, seine Truppe zurück nach Lübben und war am Schluss in Spa zum Schutz des Kaisers eingesetzt. Ein halbes Jahr ging er dann zu Kurt von Prittwitz, um die Landwirtschaft ein bisschen näher

03:05

His sister Janett came to the Altenburg Foundation, where my mother was, and where we went to school, my sister and I, later. Then he went to Göttingen and studied in Göttingen, Forst and agriculture.

03:22

1921, in the summer, to Ober-Schlesien for the Freikorps, where the grandpa Aulok was also the leader of the Freikorps. And Ober-Schlesien, after the First World War, was given its own hand for Germany. 1922, he was an assistant at Ortmann’s, and his sister Kete, the Red Cross sister in Balkanbau in the First World War, had typhus and collapsed.

03:49

In 1923, father took over the property. In 1924, his second youngest sister Kekel died at Typhus.

04:02

In 1925 he married Marie-Louise von Harnier, whom he met through his youngest sister Jeannette from Altenburg. Jeannette took my mother to Konrad Zwaalau as her friend, and so the parents met.

04:21

In 1926 he married Marie-Louise von Harnier. And then we had children. 1926, 1927 and the twin brothers in 1929. You all know them. In 1934 he had a six-month work service. And in 1934, also after that, he was allowed to reactivate himself as a leader to the Hirschberger Jäger.

04:51

The following reasons. It was because of the heavy depression after the First World War. The agriculture was so terribly bad that he saw no way out how he should get the good through. Konrad Zwallau was a medium-sized good of 1600 ma. Had two prefectures. We farmed with grain, potatoes, grapes, dairy, sheep. Of course, also had the corresponding amount of horses to process the farm.

05:21

In the years of depression, the need was so great that father was forced to sell and farmers from the Rhineland were settled with us on a part of the good. But after the takeover in 1933 by Hitler, the rest of the good was declared a legacy and was therefore unsold and indiscriminate. We children have actually only experienced the good, consciously lived as a legacy.

05:51

very clear memories of what it was like, how big it was.

05:58

I want to tell you a little bit about how it was in our home. It was a pure paradise for us children.

06:09

It was obvious that we children of our little old gardener, who was taking care of the parkways and the flower beds, that we would help her, even as a child. The parents never forced us to work, but it was obvious that it was their upbringing without us noticing it. That we were doing everything, even later as older children. That we were all working in the holidays, which were demanded by the workers. So we got an idea of what it means

06:39

from morning to evening to plough, or to tie up gardens, or to drive hay, or whatever it was. And it was a lot of fun for us. So I have to say, everything I needed later in life, I learned at home as a child. Our apples, our fruits, our vegetables, were in the three stores, how do you say that? Our fruits, our vegetables, the animal feed,

07:09

was necessary for the winter, up to three floors were deep in our basement so that it could not freeze. Because frozen food was unbearable. Also the rye for the cattle, the potatoes, the seed potatoes for next year. We had very, very hard winter in the east that went down to 30-35 degrees. And that was a completely different economy than, for example, here in South Africa, where we know no frost.

07:39

I was a terrible fruit-lover and I was always in the fruit cellar where huge stilages, apples and irons were stolen and I was constantly being robbed. Which was strictly forbidden, but I couldn’t resist that. Get out.

07:53

The seasons at home were wonderful. I can only remember one thing. The pre-Christmas time, for example. The baking, the secrecy. We children made up. Nobody knew what the other was doing. On the long evenings and nights, even though we had to go to bed early, father and mother often played music. The piano was next to our children’s room. We often played music. Mother played the violin. Father played the piano. We also played music together as a family.

08:23

I can’t imagine that we children would have ever been bored. In the places the horses had a little longer rest. It was hit by wood in winter, it was threshing grain, which was very icy. All the barns were full of hay and food. In the cattle barn, that was an old, old farm, like the Osthöfe, all built in a square.

08:53

to be able to defend themselves. And it had huge barns where the cattle were standing in Romanesque arches. Why? Because this place was warmer through the arches. It wasn’t flat, but it was like a little palace, a kind of a stable. I only noticed that much later, how beautiful it was. And where the cattle were standing, it was naturally warm. The doors were closed in the night and only opened in the morning when cleaning.

09:22

Now it was spring. Then you started to drive out with fertilizer, with flies, with lakes, with… The animal came as soon as it went to the pasture and stayed outside. You drove out to milk and came back with the oldest horse you had in the stable, because you could only do easy work. And we children were always there. We all got it right. To milk cows in the pouring rain outside on the pasture was honestly not a pleasure.

09:52

summer. He’s been here. Look at that. They keep. We’re not some kind of this comes from fear. I’m just feeling like this. How you get? I’m going to be. I’m the type of. I’m going to be.

10:22

the whole wheat harvest was out there and grew out of the doll. And we had nothing. And of course I don’t need my pony.

10:32

That was sad, but usually even the spirituals of the village came to help the farmer who was the worst, who had too little help. And it went in a gallop with the harvest truck and the roof. I can show you that very well. It was a constant struggle. And I often think back to the time when the farmer was really next to the God. He was next to the sky, because he was incredibly realistic dependent on him.

11:00

Well, the autumn was not very funny with the rye harvest and the potato harvest. It was already freezing cold early in the morning. And the rye and potato carriages were stuck in the country and it had to be pre-tied. So I don’t have that much in my memory, but it all happened. And then Christmas, the horse-drawn sleigh and bells on the shoulders of the horses went

11:30

evangelical church on the spot. The Catholic church was there, but was not used anymore. And we sang wonderfully. It was a small cross, that means not a cross church, but a choir around it, so that all the children of the village were on the choir. Each one had a candle in their hand. And they sang an ancient four-part or rather too singing choir, which still sounds in my ears today.

12:00

Everyone had a candle in front of them on the little desk in front of them. And these services of God remained in my memory. That was our home. We were happy. We had a paradise on earth. And we children got from the emergency situations that otherwise we could hardly get. And the parents never spoke against us about anything negative. Turn it off.

12:28

In 1934, because the situation of the goods was very bad, our father decided to let himself be reactivated.

12:40

He got back in and became a hunter in Hirschberg. He was appointed as the leader there. We lived in a very cozy place with a woman from Cologne. We also went to school here in Hirschberg. Here we graduated from the Volksschule. My brothers came to the school. We had a very good education as children. I can remember our mother. The picture was beautiful at the time.

13:10

and many many guests visited our smaller apartment. One day she had no girl who could help her, then she hop hop, sewed us cook hats and white skirts and said to us, you serve the dinner tonight, and what fun did that make us? She cooked with her picturesque eyes, everything always looked terrible, full of imagination and always came up with something new. And we were dressed as chefs

13:40

with the greatest pleasure the guests. And woe, if there was one who did not give us a drink, then he was done. That is still very good in my memory. Here it also happens that my brother Hans got deadly ill in the same night after we were all cooks, double lung inflammation, immediately into the hospital and he would have almost died. Mother called the children’s specialist in her fear of Breslau,

14:10

100 km to Hirschberg, took all the medicines, fed him an egg conjac, and a small cup of coffee. And the next day, the delirium, I can’t call it otherwise, went down, the slide went down from 42 to 36, then we were still worried about him, but he recovered. I will never forget this event. The Hirschberg era was wonderful for us,

14:40

We were in winter and on weekends we were in Oberschreiberhau. We did all the hiking, the Cam hiking, the Rijfträgerbaude, the Neuschlesische Baude. The Hirschberg hunters had their hunting hut up there. There we built snowmobiles, went skiing, enjoyed it very much. And I especially remember the ski water, which I never and nowhere else got. It was just a mix of raspberry and lemon juice.

15:10

a relationship that I never got back. That played a big role for us children.

15:23

We then went from Hirschberg, we were there for three and a half years, then we went home every big holiday and Christmas holidays. Because father had handed over the good to his little mother. She came, she was a small, delicate lady, came from a big good from the Carpathians, so she had Hungarian blood. Her name was from Rudolf Rudzinski. We also get this name in the southwest, by the way. And she managed this good bravely for my father.

15:53

Until next time.

15:56

After we had graduated from the National School, my sister Heidchen and I took the entrance exam in the upper secondary school. And so our time in Hirschberg was over. Father was, against his will, briefly moved to Schweidenitz to join the infantry. He didn’t like that anyway. And we lived with our grandmother Harnje, born Freyja von Schlichting, who also came from the East. We lived in Kunao, that is on the Zoppenberg, and had an infinitely long school road.

16:26

We had to go to the upper school in Schweidenitz by bike at 5 am, 8 km to the train station, by train 20 minutes, and then by 15 minutes by walk, then we were back at school. We finally arrived home at 4 am. And that was not the most beautiful memory for us sisters. But our grandmother, who we loved so much, did everything well again.

16:56

Then came the annexation of Austria in August 1938. And we were in Graz for one month, in the Steiermark, where my father was deported to Graz to the high mountain hunters of General Dietl. And now a whole new era began for us. We didn’t know Austria. This era was wonderful. The people sang a lot, they were cheerful, they were so much more relaxed. And we had a wonderful time.

17:26

with tram and walking and the schools were very good and I had my need to with all our activities that we had through the HJ and the DJ to keep up with the school but it was a wonderful, wonderful time. Dietl had a regiment in Graz and of course he was set up on the high mountains war and had bought small horses for four

17:56

that served as a carrier during a possible war. And that was of course my purest victory. And the most beautiful thing was when dad took us into the barracks and we could climb our two little skis, Heidchen the Christmas man and me the Ocelot, and then we died. It was a… It was very, very wonderful. And we made wonderful trips through Austria. Dad had his first car shortly, and we had all the bikes,

18:26

We went to Slavia, that’s all very close. And there we lived wonderfully. And father, as I said, very busy. There were also weapons SS in Graz and an artillery department. And also parachute, strangely enough, there was in Graz. Turn it off.

18:46

Ursula said that she had to say something about the Austrian annexation. Why did Father go to Austria? The annexation of Austria was a very important matter for us and for the Austrians. It is said that it happened against the will of Austria. I was 14 years old, right? 14 years old and I was very capable of taking over. And because we were already in Austria four or three weeks after the annexation,

19:16

Have I experienced this euphoria? We were celebrated as Reichsdeutsche. Because we came from the Reich, we got extra bonbons. We got the giant basket of vegetables for free at the gardener’s. We got flowers sent, just because we came from the Reich. That was inexplicable to me at the time, but the joy was so great. The German army marched in at the time, marched across the borders, of course, completely without violence,

19:46

Austria. I sat on the radio and listened to this cheer and I can promise you that I don’t imagine that, that I don’t imagine that afterwards, that we enjoyed so many privileges because we came from the Reich. And father was moved to Graz as a German officer to adjust the Austrian army to the German army. And later he was in the

20:16

with all the little shepherds and with these different horse companies. In any case, I can tell you what the newspaper or anyone else reports. It was a celebration at the end of Austria. Austria had 7 million at that time and has not much more today. It is a poor country and has certainly celebrated that Germany came to Germany and that they received a certain security. In the Austrian monarchy it was no different.

20:46

Balkan states, Hungary and whatever they are called. So I can understand that they felt attracted to a state relationship with the Andersdeutsch speakers. And I have not experienced a little enmity in Austria, not even in the Sudetenland. Also how the German army marched into the Sudetenland and the Sudeten were directly on the edge of the huge mountain was the same. They were taken by the three million Germans

21:15

and welcomed them with a lot of cheer. Because these Germans had a difficult time among the Czechs.

21:26

Now I want to take a little look back to 1936-1937, in the time of Hirschberg, when we got to know Hanna Reich, the great German sailor, who later also entered the V1 and V2 in the war. A colossal, sharp, powerful, wonderful woman. We often went to the airport, to the sailing port at Hirschberg in Grunau,

21:56

have how she practiced, so that she, for example, picked up handkerchiefs from the floor with a wing. We all have all the riches very honored. The parents were very much friends with the parents. He had the eye clinic in Hirschberg, played the viola and cello like a fairy, and somehow looked like Beethoven colossal. And when we visited, we children, we had to take off our shoes and walk on socks, because he was never allowed to be disturbed.

22:26

Frau Reitsch came from Vienna and raised her children wonderfully. She was very modest. She was very modest and didn’t pull over the strings. I had great respect for her. But she was gentle and very, very nice. Hannah had to do medical studies from her parents to have a really solid job. She was nice and kind, but after that her enthusiasm for flying only grew.

22:56

and get up so that the father could no longer resist and allowed her to do an education.

23:03

When the Olympics took place in 1936 in Berlin, I sat on the radio as often as possible as a child and followed everything with glowing enthusiasm. It was so wonderful and the Olympics were so successful. There, Hanna Reitzch flew for the first time a helicopter in the Olympic hall. The parents had warned that she was not allowed to do anything to play or to be something.

23:33

only if she was really forced to do it. And that’s her. They asked her to do it because she was the only one who could do it. So that’s the small complaint. But now we continue. We have now arrived on the 1st of September 1939, early in the morning at 5.45 am, when the great Second World War begins.

23:57

I still remember driving to school and hearing huge loudspeakers on all the stations in the electric train. The war is over, the war is over. I was so shocked and my first reaction was, my goodness, we lost the first world war, then we have to win the second one. That was my childish reaction. But we were all shocked. We were already surprised that father had disappeared. He had disappeared from the picture frame and all questions

24:27

We didn’t have any children, we were so busy that we didn’t even notice that dad was somewhere again. He was at the Polish border and participated in the Polish campaign. Now we experienced it through the radio. After the Polish campaign, at that time…

24:48

After the Polish platoon, he was moved shortly to the West Front, to the Marginot Line, where he stayed for a short time. He was then called off very quickly and joined the war in Norway with General Dietl and his High Mountain Division. With horses and everything else, they were loaded on German cruises and transported from the German coast to Trondheim, where they were supposed to make the depot of the German troops deployed in Norway.

25:18

He arrived with his troops in Narvik one day after the departure by the Navy from the sea. That remained in my memory. Papa also brought us Norwegian dirhns, which I later wore in South Africa as a pregnant woman, because it was my only dress that was wide enough. After Norway, father landed in the direction of the east, to Russia.

25:45

There he got a women’s department that should connect to the oil sources of Iraq. It was 200 km from the German line and had everything at its disposal. And here I want to throw in something again, which I know from the story of my father. They drove through Ukraine to get to the Caucasus. And the population in Ukraine celebrated it like freemen.

26:15

They read every wish of the eyes. They made it clear that Father Jäger was there, and he had a lot of joy in extra beautiful crying. Woops, he had a huge cry on his motorcycle. And the population was beyond joy that the German army had been pushed in. Something that was

26:45

World War II, with weapons, against the Bolshevism. Of course, that was never heard by any media. Nobody knew about it. My father told me a lot of interesting things, but it was too long ago to talk about it.

27:05

That was the moment when mother had to leave the tents in Graz. We two girls were pushed to Altenburg, where she had already gone to school, where she had met Jeanette Ponset, through which she then met her husband. And my two brothers were brought to the monastery school to Rosleben an der Unstrud. And here we have now pushed school banks for all four of us for two years.

27:35

in the sense that we had art history. A lot was used to teach us music. We were at the big and the small choir. We also played ancient Krippen, for the city and for ourselves. And it will always remain in my memory. Especially Maria, who I was at a Krippen game, who had to start in a dead silence, in a very high tone, Joseph, my dear Joseph. And I was shaking like a

28:05

In Altenburg, my sister and I were confirmed. That was in 1944.

28:15

And shortly after my grandmother died, who managed the goods in Konradzwallau, and I was shortly after the confirmation ordered home, I had to take over the goods with my mother. There was no choice. Our workers were all pulled in, the horses were all pulled in, the army needed every leg that could get it, and we started again to fly like at the time of the oxen. I will not forget,

28:45

Wind. Eisig eisig mit Ochsen zu flügen. Das war wirklich ein Landbau-Einsatz.

28:52

It didn’t take long. My brothers were brought in to the people’s storm at the age of 15 and finally landed in East Prussia. And my sister Heidchen came home a little later, because it became very, very uncertain. And we two girls couldn’t do our graduation. It was over anyway, and after the end of the war there were no schools anyway. They were all closed for a long time. Now for me, of course,

29:22

You are young, you are not so afraid, you don’t see what could possibly come of it. Nothing was told by the parents. Officially you were not allowed to speak of escape or anything. You would be immediately cornered. Because the propaganda was very strong. Turn off the camera for a moment.

29:44

My mother, who went back home in 1942, 1943, packed everything in the Steiermark and went back to Schlesien. She went to a grape farm that had a sample and learned the practical agriculture there. Because she thought she would have to understand something if it was necessary. So mother and I packed the theoretical and I the practical. And it was a lot of fun.

30:14

two French prisoners, who could speak French fluently with their mother, and a Russian and a Polish woman as workers. The Polish woman had the cow stable and was pious. She personally took care of every piece of cattle. And she was so happy. These people were so happy with us. You could see that they were not very good at getting used to it.

30:44

I don’t know why. She doesn’t understand much. It didn’t take long. My mother told me during my training, Öschi, you go home now, take your truck, put it in the barns that are closed, and make it ready for the flight. Because…

31:04

Officially we were not allowed to do that, then we would have fired people to flee or something. And so Mother did it very kindly and obediently. She saw it and came home, had a car made for all the working families and our own car, so that if the order came, that we were ready. We had on the property seven citizens of Saxony, who were still afraid of the resettlement of seven

31:34

were not settled. They were the first to be pulled out of our territory. Then later in 1944 the first trucks arrived from East East East, Upper Silesia and behind. Also from Poland the first trucks arrived and that was already autumn and winter. I can remember that we were drawn against with our comrades to help them get over the

32:04

They lived with us for a while and were then finally also withdrawn in December 1944.

32:13

The organization was very typical German. Nothing came to chaos. It was done very reasonably by the municipalities, by the city administration, by the districts, at the command of the higher authorities, so that there was really no chaos. If you think about how many endless trashes were on the road that fled from the Russians.

32:41

And then one day it was time. We had a… I can’t remember exactly whether it was a regiment staff or a division staff. I think it was almost a regiment staff. And a veterinary department. With many, many horses on our farm. And my heart beat faster. I thought it was wonderful. I drove 20 military-tired shits four days before the flight. I can still remember that very well. With the…

33:11

We had a very good relationship. He had a full-blood. My greatest wish was to ride and ride. He gave in and I swung and was very curious. You could hear gunfire. I wanted to see how it looked like towards the low level. I rode towards Goldberg on the big mountain back.

33:41

huge fire signs and even our small district was on fire. The Russian was standing in the lower level and left the mountains aside for now, to move forward faster. Suddenly I heard behind me, a field guard called and said, friend of Tronset, I should watch out for her. And that was called, return home. But now I knew what it was about.

34:10

Now I thought, now Matte is last. We sat in the regiment staff, which consisted of five officers. We sat in my mother’s salon on February 12, 1945. And the situation was discussed. And now I’m going to tell you a little experience, what someone can or cannot believe.

34:35

Our ancestors from Burgundia, France, since we were Houguenottes, both families, the Harnies and the Ponsets, learned the watchmaking after fleeing to Switzerland. And this ancestor made beautiful stand-gates. One of them stood in the Green Gorge in Dresden, one we had and the others were distributed somewhere in the family. This Ponset watch stood on a small table as long as I could think and as long as I had eyes in my head.

35:05

And while we were sitting there, Major von Wolf suddenly shouted and said, hold on, hold on, hold on. This watch fell down along with the table and broke into a thousand pieces. And my mother became pale and said, now it’s time. By the way, my mother had the fork to sometimes see something. That was in the evening.

35:31

and at 3 a.m. the official order came. We had to gather at 7 a.m. at the village exit for the escape. What a blessing that mother had prepared that the work of the families was prepared.

35:47

The horses were fed in a hurry. The electric light was gone. In our big kitchen you had to walk with a candle because there were wounded everywhere and troops we had not heard of coming in. It was adventurous. And outside it was 20 degrees below zero. February was the coldest month for us too. Now we were tense. At 7 o’clock we gathered and now we went on the trek.

36:16

On the way we met many wounded, military, back and forth. It was shot later, the sub-officer school Jauer shot us out. The Russian was already very close, so to speak. They made sure that we, the tracks, all came away. When we went through our neighboring village, which was only three kilometers away from us, the people stood in the doors and said, where do you want to go?

36:42

This of course did not cause any chaos. They received the order to start the operation a few hours later, so that no blockade took place.

36:51

Now we set off. Our Polish woman drove the animal with her. They wanted to transport the animal in trains to the west, but there was no train anymore. So we waited for Bronia to go back with the animal and stay at home, which she did. Our French women took the train with them, because they felt just as insecure and scared of the Russians. Because they had heard enough about what would happen if the Russians came.

37:19

Also, so we went to Mertzdorf and there our family said, we want to go home, we don’t want to go on. We told him honestly, look, if you don’t want to go on, that’s your decision, then go home.

37:36

But we have to go on. We, with the word from between our names, we would have been put down right away. So we moved on. Also, father was wounded and shortly before our trek to home appeared. And he still put us on the way and had agreed with my mother that we had exactly the route set where we should go and said we should report to every larger police station

38:06

he had the opportunity to know where we were going and where we weren’t. And that was a very good decision. Because father, as I found out later, didn’t come back to Russia to his troops, because that was already chaos. He couldn’t go anymore and was ordered in Eger to wait for his new order of action. And he actually looked where we were. Which was a relief for me personally.

38:36

I was 18 years old and I had the responsibility for the horse, for the carriage, for the train, that everything went smoothly and that was really with this huge snow that the horses had their horseshoes, you couldn’t get anything anymore. We took my mother, my sister and me and then we took a little girl with us that no longer had parents. She was with us, Grete Pufel. I still know her name.

38:59

And there, we were met by the veteran who was in our arms. And I hugged him and said, what a blessing that you are here. And he felt so relieved. He said, you know what? You are now joining our military tross. You are under arrest and you do not have to decide for yourself how and where. Oh, I was so blessed. We were in a small village. And who comes to my father at night? What are you doing here?

39:28

You must go on, you are not allowed to hang yourself in the military. You have no idea where the military is going. You must go on. That was such a black day for me. Now again alone and I can remember that we left in the morning. The streets were so wretched that you could only see the trees looking out on the upper half. And then I should have gone along the street. I can still remember what state I was in. But mother, she was so courageous. She said, of course we do that. Of course. So we continued bravely.

39:58

As it turned out, it was a blessing that father appeared. Because while we were with the Tross, they were later imprisoned in the area much later and were all exiled. So the guardian angels were on duty again. Now we have moved on. The route is approximately indicated.

40:20

Jungbunslau, Yechin, over the Czech border, then back in the Egerland. Father had forbidden us to flee through the Czech Republic, because it would have been much easier and faster over Prague, but we were afraid of the Czechs. And that’s why he said, you stay at the border with Germany, so that you can cross the border at any time, if it is absolutely necessary. So how is it all? We have regularly bypassed Bohemia and the Mediterranean.

40:50

It is the thousands of American planes that flew over us to Germany. As we will explain later, we heard thunders, rumbles and shudders of the attack on Dresden. Back then we didn’t know, but afterwards we could roughly register it. Because, I mean, the airline was not far away. So we are over Eger and then we are down to Weiden.

41:19

and then landed in Germany. One more thing I want to say. This trek, this journey, we only went in the first days at night to escape the daily trek, to get faster. We have traveled 60 kilometers in the night.

41:41

And I have to take off my extra hat in front of our horses, which have done an incredible job. I didn’t need a single pre-tension to get to Upper Bavaria. There I took a cow pre-tension. We came to the Czech border. I just want to tell you this to give you an example.

42:00

And it went up a mountain of serpentines. I still see it in front of me. I woke up my mother, my sister, I said, get out, now it’s going to be difficult. It was incredibly steep. The horses had already run their iron. The stables were no longer in order. And I always gave the horses a piece of sugar or a piece of bread when it became particularly difficult. And then I stood in between them, gave them the bread and said, come on.

42:29

And then they knew exactly, normally, pulling horses, if they realized it was getting hard, then one of them pulls and goes back, the other one goes back. But they slowly went together into the

42:59

Böhm and Meeren were replaced by German workers who were supposed to show the Böhmers and the Czechs how to farm properly. He came down by chance in the bike, looked at it and said to me, Girl, what do your horses cost?

43:18

Unsellable. Now I’m getting the tears. What else I wanted to say? What we’ve been through.

43:28

We had to be extremely careful not to overload the car, as so many garbage trucks from the East have done. They couldn’t pack enough on the car. It was time to take food with us, namely for people and horses. Because it was a deep winter, you couldn’t let the horses graze as you could here. So we took it with us. It was five of us, each allowed a small suitcase of private things. That was all. So clothes and what was most necessary.

43:58

A small suitcase, not a big one. We took with us a centner of wheat flour, a centner of barley flour, a centner of salt, a centner of sugar, a slaughtered pig and a giant iron pot of goose mackerel, which I still use today as a frying pan. And then hay and oats for the horses.

44:21

My father wrote a letter to my mother at all the military positions. Because my mother turned to help us when we had to go somewhere to spend the night, when it was going wrong, to a regiment or company or whatever, to help. And they helped us wonderfully. I can remember that we arrived in Jungbunslau early in the morning. I didn’t walk one step, I walked all the dirt. I had a beard up to my stomach hanging from ice, through the breath.

44:51

And I was so cold.

44:54

And there a military unit received us. So, mother turned to them and they immediately came out, took the horses, fed them. And we lay down in a hotel and slept. I thought, how I was woken up, I would have slept a few hours. I had slept one and a half days. And we were allowed to sleep. Because now we were away from the camp. Now we were a little bit outside the Russians. And from there we marched on the day and no longer in the next.

45:24

But we were sure that we were only going to be down in Bavaria when we crossed the Danube.

Part 2

00:03

And when it was evening, we looked around for a place to stay. It was too nice. When we stopped in a village and said it was time to look for a place to stay, the horses stopped. They were red. Their ears and heads were down. They were tired to death. Mother went ahead, right and left, and asked where we could stay overnight.

00:30

And when mother came out of a house and crossed the street, then the ears and heads of the horses went up, and when she went to the next house, they went down again. And as soon as mother stood on the street and waved, then I had to do that she followed me. Then they swung behind mother, right, left, in a row. So it was great.

00:58

Mother organized it very well and she was not afraid. But I want to mention something here. And that is the experience we had on this quarter search. Up in the Sudeten, relatively poor, where the man mostly worked in a factory or somewhere and the woman liked the small farm, when you knocked on it and said, you are a garbage truck, I’m looking for a little hay

01:28

This is the food for the horses. These farmers had dirt every night. They had endless dirt. They never gave up. And when they went back and brought a bundle of wheat straw, wheat straw has no value at all. But it is at least something for the teeth, for the horses. You always got something. Down there in Franken, we experienced the same with a large farm.

01:58

He had at least 36 animals in the stable and a few horses. Everything was well fed and people were doing well. It was a big farm. When I asked him to put my horses in the stable, he said, no problem at all. The horses could have diseases and can infect their stuff. And he gave us a check, only with one roof. I hung our beds and ceilings over the horses.

02:28

And then I asked if they had some hay, because his dog was eating very nice hay. And he said, no, he’s sorry, he has nothing to eat for the horses. And here I have to admit, this is the first time, and I hope the last time in my life, that I stole.

02:50

I waited until Mr. Baron went to bed. Then I looked closely at the hayloft and went into the stable and got a lot of hay for my horse. I admitted. But as young people we have already seen what it means to be dependent on the grace and the ungrace, on the poor and the rich. That was very instructive for us, I must say. It only happened afterwards.

03:17

So we went on. We came to Bavaria through good areas. Bavaria didn’t know any dirt. We were the only one who knew any dirt. We were amazed by the front and back. We went to Regensburg because we had a aunt there. We visited her. We slept there and took two days off so the horses could recover. We were helped incredibly in general. The mayor, it was organized, the mayor had made a room where refugees could get food soup or something.

03:47

was taken care of. It was really all very well organized. Another little story to describe it.

03:57

And then, as it started to become spring in March, end of March or whatever, we came back from a very exhausting day, uphill and downhill, to a charming little village, which lay down and went up very steeply in the back. And I was taken by surprise. I started the brake because it went downhill and I was always happy when it went downhill, then the horses could relax. There comes, there in front, a farmer,

04:27

a basket full of apples. And I was fascinated by these apples. And it must have been so intense, I didn’t even notice. But I looked at them so fascinatingly that as I passed by, I had two apples out of my head.

04:49

I will never forget this little guest, this woman. I remember that very well and she absolutely reacted to it.

04:58

Now we finally came closer to our goal. I have to say that the parents have made it clear that our trek destination is a great-aunt Ponset in Bergen near Traunstein. And that was very good that we had a goal. She had a farm and the parents had discussed it with her. She would have gotten refugees into the house, then rather relatives, which was also a blessing for her, as it turned out later. So we went and I will never forget.

05:28

Sunday morning, when we walked for 800 kilometers and six weeks through Traunstein. Then the terrain was still quite mountainous in front of the mountains and I saw two cows strained and I kept quiet and said, oh please, strain me, because I didn’t want to torture my horses unnecessarily. And there I prayed the first pre-strain of the 800 kilometers.

05:57

Then we went down, my aunt lived on a mountain, and now we were actually there. And I will never forget how we arrived at the highway, with the view into this disheveled mountain valley and moss, with the big alpine peaks behind it, high ferns, high gherkins, the campground and the fruit trees bloomed. Easter, Sunday morning and the sunshine.

06:27

We were supposed to celebrate it. We are here. We are here. And I know that I was silent at the top. And I was grateful for that, because my greatest fear was to have to come to a terrible place. Without mountains, without flowers, without anything. That was very important to me at that time. And it was so beautiful that I was overwhelmed. And then we arrived. And now another chapter begins. My brothers…

06:56

My father was gone. We didn’t hear anything from him anymore. My mother became very, very restless. First we feared, we hoped and prayed that the Americans would roll in first, which they really did. The Americans came and not the Russians, because it was not clear at all who would be there first.

07:18

And now, after a while, my mother became very restless. We were outside in the garden. My sister and I took over my aunt’s small farm. Because by the end of the war, the Poles who were working for her disappeared. Her three sons were gone. She didn’t know where. So, Heidchen and I took over the farm and continued.

07:42

And we got one liter of lean milk as a reward. Mother even paid rent with the money she could take with her. That wasn’t much. And wait, let’s switch off for a moment.

07:57

A neighbor came up to us, fast, fast to the radio. They were talking about your father. We were so excited. We just heard that Obrost von Ponset took over Leipzig for defense. He retreated to the Völk and defended there until the last man. Bums. But we heard it. And mother too.

08:19

The two boys, the two twins, were missing. You didn’t know what was wrong with them. Imagine, East Prussia, all the way to the east. We were incredibly afraid of them. Because of the people’s storm, 15 years old. So, mother?

08:35

My mother was very brave. She was forbidden to move away from home for more than one kilometer. My mother said, you can do it. She ran off to look for her husband. She had the clue that her father was in Leipzig.

08:56

And the boys, when they got through, they couldn’t go home either, they knew that, so they would go back to their school in Rossleben. That was their hope and our hope. They let us two girls go back, we continued to the farm, and they left. And what that meant back then, no one can imagine today. It was strictly forbidden as a civilian to move anywhere.

09:26

With the most necessary food we had very little. We all were very hungry at that time, although we were much better off living in a farm. For example, I brought a bad horse to the mower, for which I got six eggs. We got sawdust to heat from the sawmill. As I said, we had to cut our own wood in the mountains. We had to do that with the horses and haul them home.

09:55

far more opportunities to keep us alive than the poor women who were sitting somewhere in a big city with small children and had nothing. So, Mother to Gloos. And I just want to briefly describe how we learned about her description. She took five and a half weeks from Bergen near Traunstein to Leipzig. Five and a half weeks. She is…

10:23

She walked, she hid in wagons, she drove a munitions wagon, she… It’s unbelievable what she did there. She came to Munich alone. And she wasn’t allowed to get all of that. Then she found someone who took her with her. Then she thought, how she did that is absolutely ridiculous to me today. After five and a half weeks she arrived in Leipzig.

10:50

And then she started. All hospitals, all places of contact. Every officer, every soldier, every private person asked her if she knew a high-ranking Ponset, if she had any idea what was built from the Völkerschlacht. And she was very desperate. She was there for a week. She had not heard anything about her father. And as she was about to give up and said, now she’s going to go and see if the two boys have arrived.

11:17

And there you say a lieutenant who was wounded. Obers von Ponset, of course, I know what happened to him. He disappeared without a trace. And there my mother said, fine, then he is alive. Because father was a hunter and when he disappeared without a trace…

11:34

Then it was all right. So Mother, very calmly, continued driving. So Hans was on the way, he knew where we were. He is now on the way to Traunstein. How did she not know? To take this into account, to describe it briefly, he got four days before the American march to transfer Leipzig to defense. That was his new assignment, also a fascinating assignment. He knew he couldn’t do that. In four days he can’t go to Leipzig. Defense is impossible.

12:04

to open food depots to tell the people, get what you need. And then he went back to the memorial of the people with a hundred men, from what kind of a group, and told the Americans. And he took it seriously to fight until the last man. Then one night, as the Americans were there,

12:28

he made a mistake in the night and captured about 80 Americans and took them with him to the memorial service. And that’s why the American didn’t shoot. On the contrary, he started negotiations and the amazing thing that makes me happy as a soldier’s daughter is that here is here. Whether American, German, Norwegian, my father told me a lot of nice

12:58

and my father from above the stairs down to negotiate. They shook their hands. By the way, this American officer was also a German. And they did the following. My father threw the American soldiers out.

13:18

and his troops only go through a checkpoint and are then released home. He definitely did that with the army. He could only hope that they really kept it. For him, they personally drove him to the borders of Leipzig with an American jeep, left him there with weapons and said that after an hour they would be looking for him like a rat. And dad got out, let the Americans drive off,

13:48

And they didn’t look for him there.

13:51

And then, as he had civilian clothes, he took to the road to us. He was captured three times by the Americans. He was released twice. And the third time he was caught, I’m not sure, at least in Bavaria, and he was put in a mass-caught camp of the Americans in Regensburg, 40,000 men under the sky. The Red Cross was not allowed to enter.

14:21

The prison camp. It must have been terrible. It must have been very horrible. One day, he was in this prison camp for two and a half months and he only saw the end coming, because he was so badly hurt. They couldn’t get food and it was so terrible.

14:45

an American commission came and asked all the officers to come forward. They were all called front officers. At that time, everyone in Germany didn’t know what such an order was. A bullet through the head or what? And many of these officers were afraid to come forward. Of course, not my father.

15:08

He suddenly appeared and a whole lot of others did. And then the American officer said, you are dismissed. It was a miracle. He got a bike somewhere. And now I have to finish here first. And drove in the direction of Bergen near Traunstein. Now my mother continues to go to the school of my brothers. And now listen carefully, little child.

15:35

If you don’t have to say that you don’t have that in your hand, that’s really something to look at. Mother arrived at this school. There her two boys were met on the eve of the Easter.

15:54

The principal of the school said to my mother, oh no, ma’am, leave the boys here. We want to start school as soon as possible. They had their own good, so they were a little more independent in terms of nutrients. What should they do with four children as refugees in southern Germany? And now imagine what kind of decision that was for my mother. What am I doing? What is the right thing? And finally she said, no, what I have, I have.

16:23

and she took the two boys and left. The Americans helped her very much back then to get away. They took her with a jeep and the two boys, 16, 15, 16 years old, they were very interested in the awards they had and so on. And mother was good with people anyway. So she left with her two boys, blessed that she found them. And now the clue. I can’t say for sure now,

16:53

In any case, according to the story, two or three days later, the Russians crossed the border, as was customary at the time, although the demarcation line was established between Americans and Russians. They didn’t bother, they crossed the border at night and then retreated. They did the same in Rossleben. They crossed, all the boys who couldn’t go home and who had been admitted to school in the meantime,

17:23

in the train heading to Siberia. One of these boys, a gentleman from Posa, or whatever his last name was, rolled off the train. He came through and told us. So mother picked up the boys a few days before the Russian took this school. Out! We two girls were sitting in Upper Bavaria and shivering. What will mother do? Will she come back home? What about the couple? What about our brothers?

17:52

It was awful. We were young enough and we were tired enough because we worked hard. And we just had to wait. And one day, we were happy and fresh with the two of them. I was already away from home. I didn’t see my father anymore. I’ll tell you that in a moment. In any case, shortly after.

18:17

after Musch came back with the boys. It might have been a week or two weeks later. An old man is holding Snow White by the house door with a bike. My brother Hans is at the door and asks him if he can help him. There is Papa.

18:34

So father came from Regensburg with a bike to Bergen, completely starved, snow-white in this three-month-old prison camp. Father was born in 1999, that was 1945, was 46 years old, but hard, hard

18:58

And in our family dining room, there was a small box in the wall where the ration of bread, we got one bread per person in a week, a double of bread, how he secretly got a piece of bread. He was completely hungry, right? And we got, however, the food brand system worked fantastically. We got very little, but we got it. Even the refugees. That would not have worked in any other country,

19:29

Now our family was together again. And how many families? There was hardly a family that came together again. It was inexplicable for me at that time. And father is from the Hirschberger officer corps, except one, the only one who survived the war.

19:51

And from the division in Graz he was the only surviving officer after the world war. Everything else was dead. So it was a smooth miracle.

20:05

Let’s turn it off. Ose is based on the little story of my beloved grandmother, the mother of my mother, a woman from Harnie, born free from slavery.

20:18

This grandmother I have honored incredibly. She was a lady from head to toe. She could do the same with the smallest worker, like the monarch or whatever you call it, from Morocco or elsewhere. She was a very outstanding, wonderful woman. And this woman has the following short, just briefly repeated, flight history. The two were already older. Her husband was 70. She was as far from younger than him.

20:48

They fled, I can say they were in Konrad Zwallau in Schlesien, with a little niece who was unfortunately not normal, or who had stayed back a little. She had taken them with her, and they fled to the west via the Sudeten, I can’t say how and where. They were in Heiligenkreuz, they had found accommodation there. And in a peculiar way, in Hungary, in Austria, I don’t remember exactly where they were.

21:18

The Lipizzanians were gathered in Heiligenkreuz by the Gestüten. The Americans promised them that they would provide American military protection to get these Lipizzanians out. The Vienna High School, the Vienna Riding School, these are Lipizzanians, the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. It is world-famous. The Americans wanted to have these horses to America. That was it. The Americans sent them to this small Heiligenkreuz before the Russians arrived.

21:48

they sent American military, namely tanks and tank defense. My grandparents were also there as refugees with the little niece and of course they had a conversation with the people who brought those horses there. And one of those people came in the evening and knocked on the door of my grandmother and said, do it right, we will take you with us, we will be transported to the west with American protection, you come with us.

22:18

My grandfather and my nieces, in a six-inch Le Bisson Hungarian strap-on in an old, beautifully decorated carriage, American tanks in the front, right and left and in the back, they fled. That’s what I thought in my arrogance. Just as it should be.

22:42

And one day the first, the eldest son of my great aunt, Harald, appeared. And we worked together for a while, because he wasn’t fit in the farm. And then it was said to us girls, now we have to look for work, because we couldn’t stay at home. We had to get food and especially some money somewhere. After all, you don’t have to forget, we were 17 and 18 years old.

23:09

We were in Stiftaltenburg together with an Alex von Rassler, with whom I was very close. They had a huge van for Württemberg, of 3000 t… ..morgens, directly above the Neckar. And I turned to them and asked if they knew anything about my work. And I got the news that I could come to them. So I opened up. Württemberg was then a French zone.

23:39

the French zone. The woman from the Rassler was half French, so she spoke French and thus had some advantages with the French occupation. The French occupation was very unpopular because they were also very cruel. So to have been in French captivity was not a nice experience, while the American captivity was usually quite humane.

24:09

Then I started working on the well. As what? A girl for everything. Mr. von Rassler was a choleric, with very high blood pressure. I had to take care of him first, so that he took all his medications, so that he could get a little bit of his high blood pressure down, which was very difficult for me. But I got along well with him, even though it was very difficult. I had the dairy, the dairy farm, the butter.

24:39

The chicken farm, the dog breeding, sick horses and sick people if there were any, and to pick up guests, which I really enjoyed, with a little

25:09

I had to butter 8 to 10 pounds of butter every day. The day started at 5.30 and ended at night. When guests were there, I had to take care of them, put the table, cover it, had to watch. For breakfast, Mr. von Rassler wanted to know exactly what was going on. So I had to inform myself, which was not easy either, because the businessman didn’t want to say what the inspector knew and vice versa. But it was for me a preparation for my later life.

25:39

I have been in Weidenburg for two years, what concerned agriculture, in practice I have learned in a certain sense, even if I only looked at it. But it was a colossal time of teaching for me, also for myself personally. Because I mean, it was not easy to work somewhere as a refugee and to be just as patient. I can remember how I turned 20, in 1946 I was born, right? 26.

26:05

I was in a very lonely age, and at that age you are a little bit sensitive with everything. You would have liked to fall in love or had a place to stop, but you didn’t have that. So I sat down and cried bitterly in this beautiful weather. And I said, now my life is over. Fortunately, I was wrong.

26:34

That’s just a small interlude that I remember very well.

26:40

Alex and I lived in a tower room, it’s an old castle, directly above the Neckar, a fairy tale castle. And this Mr. von Rassler needed urgent workers and couldn’t get them because, I mean, at the time there were no more men. Most of them were fallen or wounded or in prison camps. And since the French were getting along well with the French occupation, the French occupation gave them from German war-captured camps.

27:10

in the French zone, 13 or 14 or 15 men to work. And I will never forget how these poor German prisoners of war arrived. Come in, come in.

27:28

Und wie ich dieses Häufchen Unglück sah, gelb und blass und eingefallen, verhungert, elend, da beschloss ich, ihr werdet alle meine Kinder. Und jetzt hab ich selber…

27:42

all the good things, not eaten, to be able to give them up. And it was a wonderful task for me. They wanted to have a machine to make tobacco small. I got it in some kitchenware. Or I made little evenings for them later, with music and with what. It was a wonderful task for me. My dream was to always become a Red Cross sister. And since my aunt, the eldest sister of my father, was a great Red Cross leader and was on the road with it throughout the war,

28:12

She had offered me to take me as a teacher’s sister to Königsberg. And I was fire and flame. But my mother said, no, you go to school. I was very disappointed, but I could understand my mother. It was only really happening in that age. But it was always my wish to be a sister, to take care of something sick or whatever. Whether it was an animal or a human, it didn’t matter. In any case, in that case, it was a fulfillment for me.

28:42

I was young and I had my admirers with me, which was very good for me.

28:52

As I said, that was just a small break. I was so happy for them that they ended up on this farm. Because there was a very good community kitchen. Rassler did not save on food. He had everything. However, he also used his butter and his better things from the farm or from the farm to exchange. So he put a lot of effort into his friends so that they had a chance to exchange again for something. That was a paradise for those conditions.

29:22

Peace.

29:24

To make it short, I stayed there for two years. My sister, Heidchen, also came to Rasslers a year later. My parents had to deal with Rasslers. She had to have other work than what she found down there. She was terribly exploited. Heidchen is completely different from me. She is introverted and she lets herself be underestimated without saying a word and saying nothing back. That would never have happened to me. I told my Baron Rassler what I think when it came to it.

29:54

For example, a example of how I was no longer in Wadenburg, Heidchen got all the blame for things she was not responsible for at all. She stood in front of him, very modest, with her eyes down, and let everything pass by her. And as he was breathing, she just looked up and smiled at him. And then he fell down and said, it doesn’t make sense with you. So she had far the better way of getting ready with people. But they also used her accordingly.

30:24

I left Rasla’s office after I accidentally, unintentionally, had to hear a conversation between him and his wife that we refugees only put ourselves in the fat cap and do nothing about it. He was a choleric. I had forgiven him for a long time, but back then I couldn’t take it anymore. And the next morning I went to his office, where his good friend Buemüller was there, and he said, Rasla, I’m sorry, I stopped the conversation yesterday without wanting to. It was very loud.

30:52

And unfortunately I can’t let that sit on me. If we are a burden to him, I’d rather go. And he was unhappy. He came running to me from morning at half past five in the milk cold. And he said how much good he did for us. So he wanted to apologize, but he couldn’t do it. But I had decided, out is out. It was wrong, of course. But we later made peace. Heidchen and I, we drove shortly before our emigration. And he put one right and one left

31:22

He said he wished we were his daughters. So we couldn’t have gotten a bigger compliment. There was peace, but back then I was really going home. In between I want to say, Merry Christmas!

31:36

I was allowed to go home and spend Christmas with my parents and siblings in Bergen. And without asking, Rassler gave me a slaughtered goose, five pounds of flour, a pound of butter, and, and, and, and. I was allowed to take that with me. I walked with huge, heavy suitcases with all this stuff inside, all the way to our farm. And my brothers knew I was coming. And when I saw how I got to the farm, I only saw the garden with my brother Henschen.

32:06

The owl, the owl, she’s coming, she’s coming. And outside she was, what did you bring, what did you bring? And then I packed out a small pot for my mother with this duck or whatever it was inside. It was a Christmas like I’ve never experienced before. I brought it for everyone and I had to owe it to my Rassler. He was generous enough to do that. And I was allowed to bring it as a middleman. I will never forget that. I went from Weitenburg.

32:36

away and left my sister’s heart with heavy hearts. But he said to me, well, if you have to go, then go, but without your sister, because I actually wanted to take her with me. As I said, Alex and I, we had our tower room up there. I talked to Alex about it and asked her if she thought it was right. And she said, if it were me, I would have treated her like that, too. So we were friends enough to talk about it. And the peculiarity was that with my resignation at Rassler,

33:06

the first release of the first German soldiers. I was excited that the first release took place at home at the same time. We went to sleep and they had heard that I had quit. I woke up and I thought, what is this? Am I in the opera?

33:25

Da steht mein Häufchen Soldaten unten am Anfang des Turmes und singen mir den Tsarevich. Hast du dort Drogen vergessen auf uns? Ich hab das nie vergessen. Und die hatten schöne Stimmen. Die haben das mehrstimmig gesungen. Also da ist mir das Herz in die kleine Zehe geflogen. Und dann haben sie mir zum Abschied einen selbst geschnitten Brotteller mit Vater unser, unser täglich Brot gibt uns heute. Und dieser Teller,

33:55

This plate brought my whole married life to life. In 9 emergency times. I still have this plate and it always comes to the table. I have this plate for the old Mosel farmer who has been sitting on his farm for 600 years. I visited him with Friedrich Kahl and told him about it. He is over 80 years old today and he was so happy about it. This Mosel farmer wanted to marry me urgently. I told him, listen, you are engaged.

34:25

You have a fiancé at home and you marry her. I was very strict. Then he said, you know, Mrs. Rosemary, if I put the 10 most beautiful men in the world here and the most beautiful horses in the world here, I think they would go to the side of the horses. That’s just a side note, it sounds like an indication, but I know that very well.

34:47

So I left and was looking for a new job. I got it from a friend of mine. I was working as a maid at a head doctor.

34:57

He was a chief doctor in Traunstein and I was supposed to help his wife in the household. And here I got to know the penibble household, which was also very good for me, because I was a little too generous with everything. And strangely my father had put himself in my head, I should take singing lessons and I had to be checked and I was crazy about it, because at that time the artists were walking around on the street to thousands and had no job. My dad, I could understand him.

35:26

He wanted to get a little shine and shine through one of his daughters. I had a nice little voice, but it was hopeless for anyone. And I didn’t want to, I wasn’t made for that. But I took singing lessons from the money. I earned 20 marks a month. You couldn’t even buy a pair of shoes for that. They went to the chamber singer from Hamburg, a Urbayar by the way, on the women’s island.

35:56

you couldn’t imagine that. And my friend, Elly Weiler, she also had singing lessons and we always went to the lessons together. And I have to say, even if it was pointless, but it was nice. So when I think about what we sang and how he encouraged me and how we tried to make him happy, because of course our 20 marks were nothing, but he didn’t have anything either. So 20 marks were better than nothing to him, you know. And when we missed the ship, then we quickly took a boat and rowed over

36:26

the women’s island. So it wasn’t a long time, but it was a nice time. And my father had the nuked, I had singing lessons. That stayed there. I mean, that was natural. After a while I saw, so this is not my profession, maid. I’m sorry, but I quit then because I got a job on a full-blooded Arabian steed at the Chiemsee. And there was my heart, right? And I took the position,

36:56

We had horses and two girls, also a Rosemary and me. We had the horses before working hours, which started at 6 o’clock, so from 4 to 6, and then there was a small farm and then we worked what was. Here I could now get my love of horses out of me. We had very, very tight work. Here I also learned how to drive a tractor, which was then acquired later. And that was also a preparation for Africa.

37:27

I had the Hengst department and the Fohlen department. As I said, it was a very tough time. I had to go when guests were there or when a support manager from Hannover came. And from here I was sent to driving tournaments. I drove the horses, which were full blood Arabs, in Hungarian tension, to look at them in awe. They were then driven to the tournament by a professional driver.

37:57

Then I was transported with four horses to these different tournaments, to Ludwigsburg, for example, where Gretchen Broderich came from, or to the Allgäu. So that was a lot of fun for me. And then I had two hangings, then she sold two Arab hangings to Hannover Zelle. gesture. And I took two and a half days, or even three days, until I arrived in Zelle in a cattle car.

38:27

And I gave up the hangar and watched the training parade. And when the young hangar was being trained, he asked me if I wanted to sit on it. I said, of course I want to sit on it. I immediately flew down. Because without a saddle, they were so nice and fat, it was so smooth, it didn’t have any grip. So I really enjoyed that. That was the balance of the harbour work.

38:49

Well, and at the same time, to use a little interlude, as I was in Weidenburg and still in Bergen, she wrote to me one day, listen, an owl has appeared here, from Moroccan captivity, that would be something for you. And I replied, take care of your own nose. Well, and I got to know this owl on vacation,

39:19

in Bergen, to which we had fled. Only that he was with the Aalefelds and we with the Ponsitz. So we met for the first time there. But that took four years until we got engaged. I was on the road and he had to look around for work. The Aulocks had a small house in Berchtesgaden. That was very exciting, we got engaged secretly, because my father would never have agreed. So I said, then without you.

39:47

Well, that’s not all. I worked there until 1951. I quit because my father was determined to emigrate. He had been searching Africa for five years. His eternal dream was to be transferred to the German colonies, which was fulfilled. We had a family in the southwest.

40:17

I can say here that South Africa after the Second World War was the only country in the world that paid German capital. The only condition was that one came and got it by himself. So it was clear, to South Africa. Southwest was the province of South Africa, so to South Africa. The parents would have had some initial capital there.

40:41

We needed the money to get my mother and us two sisters out of here. And that was fulfilled when the national government came to power. He immediately got the entry, while we didn’t get any entry under Smuts. So he waited about five and a half years for it.

41:01

Well, and he started in January 1951 with a contract in his pocket as a foreman on a farm in Freistaat. You don’t have to forget that. Father was a soldier in his lifetime, an officer. And then in Freistaat, with a sickle in his hand, as a foreman, and we all know what he was like back then. So we didn’t have any ideas back then. In any case, you had to have a contract.

41:31

And he drove off in January and turned around as he was on his way to the train. He turned around and said, Rösle, the Aula is not in question, is it? I said, Pa, where are you going?

41:45

I let him drive away. His ideal was to have a farm in Freistaat with his family. A lot of thorns all around. Here I have them. And I said, without me. And I went with Fritz Kahl after he was gone. I telegraphed him. In the meantime he got to know Herbert Otto. You may know him from your parents. Herbert Otto helped my father a lot to buy a farm in Freistaat.

42:14

to his uncle Ben Labiskachni, who wanted to sell his farm for a long time. Otto said to him, listen, I have someone here, you have to give him the farm. And as he heard that we were Germans and father was an officer, he got the farm. That was it.

42:31

And Otto, as our neighbor, who helped us a lot. And with Otto, the contract with the farmer in Freistadt, that didn’t work out well. That was to be seen. So Otto accepted his offer. Don’t ask me how they met. I don’t know. Anyway, he lived with Ottos. As long as this cabaret went back and forth, buying a farm or a job or something. And then the bee Otto gave him a little detail.

43:01

And when you get a telegram tomorrow and say, I got engaged, what do you want to do? You sit here, she sits there, you can’t do anything. No, no, she doesn’t do that. And a few days later the telegram was there. Then they laughed to death. Well, that’s just side by side. But it was also good that way. Because we knew our father as an adult and he was a little despotic. And his daughters were too holy. No man was good enough. So I wanted to get rid of him.

43:30

I think I have to check now. So father left in January. In May my sister and I shifted to Venice via Bozen with the Amati-geige of my mother in arms as the only possession we had saved on the trek.

43:48

and were very afraid that they would steal our money. Italy was in need at the time, and they were musical, and they saw what we had in our hands. We didn’t have as much hunger as these two days in Venice, where we stayed in a hotel room. We had received the money from our parents. That was enough for these two nights. We were afraid to lock the bars, because all the lockers were open and we couldn’t lock them. And we had no money to eat.

44:18

And there was the ship Jerusalem anchored in the harbor and we couldn’t get on the ship. We looked as good as possible at Venice, even bought some white bread from the last fans and then we got on the ship to Jerusalem. This Jerusalem was a German ship and was originally called Krakow and was given to Italy after the First World War as a ransom.

44:48

was very desperate. He said, this stupid ship doesn’t want to break. It’s still running. He wanted to have a new ship. The people who were in Jerusalem were very interesting. A wonderful time began for us two sisters. Heidchen was blond and young and pretty. And she had admirers from day one to the last. The Italians knelt in front of her with the mandolin and prayed to her. It did me so good that she was the one.

45:18

was dark. I wasn’t blonde. But I got a marriage proposal from a man who wanted to sell marble to South Africa, but was engaged.

Part 3

00:01

He was engaged and I was engaged, but he didn’t want to know anything about it. I think I handled it well, for my age back then, which was very inexperienced in these things. The ship that the population took with them were mainly Italians who also emigrated, because they didn’t see a future at home. But there were also a lot of Germans there. The first class, the second class, to which you couldn’t get on, we were of course the third class,

00:31

What Heidchen very appreciated, I also drank red wine, was delicious red wine, while the first and second classes had to pay extra for it. That was what we were very happy about. Our trip now went from Venice to Brindisi, on the foot of Italy, to Port Said, Egypt, to Eden, where it hadn’t rained for seven years. And I know what an incredible impression that had made us. It was so hot in the night that I couldn’t believe it, that it could get too hot at all.

01:01

And life was at stake there in the night, according to this. Nice people on the ship. An old man, Hötter, or Hütter, who lost his farm in East Germany after the First World War, because it was forbidden to own the German land, who took us to Dar Salaam later with him to the country. And two or three young gentlemen from Germany, who apparently had a little money,

01:31

Nase in neue Gebiete stecken konnten. Von Eben ging es nach Sanzibar, wo wir Trinkwasser einnehmen mussten. Dann ging es über Mogadischu, über, das ist doch eine der Haupthäfen von Portugal, von den portugiesischen Kolonien, Angola, oder was ist es? Ja, da setzt die Erinnerung ein bisschen aus der Reihe nach. Es war natürlich die Ostseite der Suetz, der später geschlossen wurde, aber wir sind durch den Suetz gefahren, drei Wochen lang, waren

02:01

in Dar es Salaam, where we went ashore with Mr. Hütter. And the first one explained to us everything about the ships that were sunk there and there. And it was very interesting for us. The first Kizuaheli he found on the street, he spoke to Kizuaheli. The two fell around their necks, they muttered, we didn’t understand a word. And afterwards he explained to us, the black ones there in the mountains still had the Emperor’s pictures hanging in their offices and they waited eagerly

02:31

the German revolution. I’m only telling this because I personally experienced it. So, against all the anti-German propaganda that was still being carried out back then and today. And then it went… We landed, after three weeks, after just three weeks we landed in Dürm. Heidchen and I. Now we were at the finish line. What would await us? Down at the

03:00

Bronn abholen würde und die hockten so richtig in der typischen Hocke und schwarzen und wir fanden, dass sie alle sehr alt aussahen. Naja, wir waren noch jung und die afrikanische Sonne waren wir noch nicht gewöhnt. Einer davon war unser sehr sehr lieber Herr Kaiser aus Heilbronn, der in vierter Generation im Freistaat lebte und immer noch fließend Deutsch sprach und der meinem Vater und meinen Eltern damals kolossal geholfen hat, auch unseren

03:30

made an application for free for us. You know, if you get married you have to have a contract. The municipality of Runefleet, Blomfontein, also left us with no costs. We are still grateful for that. He took us very seriously to the hotel where he was on vacation, like so many Africans, in winter. We arrived. It must have been at the end of May or beginning of June. I don’t remember the date anymore.

04:00

I don’t have time for that. So we arrived, it was already the cold time, and he took us with him and kept us there for a few days, because a train to the free city only goes once or twice a week. So he put us on the train. We thanked him very warmly for the exciting recording. And Durban is beautiful in winter, and we were very excited. We were also approached by young policemen and spoke from the first moment of Africans.

04:30

We had to try to speak Afrikaans immediately. They had a great pleasure. They treated us with coffee and cake. It was a very nice reception. You have to say again and again that we were young and that we were open to any experience. Then we were put on the train. Now a journey began that we will never forget. We thought we were in Africa and didn’t get anything warm out of our suitcases. We got the shnatter like a dog.

05:00

The free start was white, sugared with rye, the grain was thick and rye, and the sun was very wintery, and there was no heating in the train, but we were still happy. Then some men in the gang always walked up and down with old English military uniforms and always looked very curiously into our department. And this train was a milk cart train and therefore stopped at every smallest station, where there

05:30

But there was a milk jug. So we doused the jug, the milk jug, which it was. He took all the milk from the area to the flower fountains and so on to bring it to the milk factories or to the dairy. And we were surprised, Halchen and I, that at this station an incredible amount of people went out and on.

05:56

and couldn’t explain where they came from and where they went, because we saw a farmhouse at most, and that was all. And to our…

06:05

To our amazement, one of the farmers couldn’t stand the train anymore, opened the door, apologized unbelievably for his cheekiness, simply to address us, and said he had to be honest with us. He just wanted to know if we really and actually came directly from Germany. And we smiled and said, yes, we came directly from Germany. Exactly, freshly imported. And now we explained to each other,

06:35

on these train stations that passed by our window to see what we looked like, if we were human. Oh, it was terribly amusing and we were very happy.

06:46

Finally we arrived in Heilbronn, where our father received us, who was already there. He met a Mr. Otto, Herbert Otto, who as a foreman at the first contractor, he also only came to work contracts out to Africa, where he solved and took over. And arranged that he could possibly buy a farm from a Ben Labiskachni in Hupveld,

07:16

about 17 miles from Heilbronn. He was very charming, this Herbert, helped my father and us later tremendously, and we saw each other again and again until his death. He really respected my father, which contributed to this. And he helped us to this farm. Ben Laviscachni sold the farm to my father. Sold? That means we had, I think, a thousand pounds, that was all, or if it was that much,

07:46

the

08:16

father, who hardly managed to cope with this situation, did a very good job. He put his implements on the border, he had a neighbor farm and two more farms, so that we could use the implements without having to buy our own. That’s how we started. The first task of Heidchen and me was to free an endless hectare of termite hills. That was a difficult

08:46

There were huge thermite hills every 2-3 meters. We had to lift them as low as they were up there to destroy them. They were then destroyed, which I’m sorry for the thermites, but it was a typical sign of overgrazing, that the thermites had eaten everything and there was nothing left on them. We were young and we took everything as it came,

09:16

even if it was hard work. And what we particularly enjoyed was the far-off neighbors of our farm didn’t come to us. They let us be alone for the first three months. But when we two girls were working on this field then you could see two horse ears and a binoculars at the back of the field. And on the other side, an hour later, someone came with a binoculars and a horse head

09:46

So, um,

09:51

We didn’t have any black workers, we did everything on our own. Hedgien and I, we were carrying six cranes of shit out, because we were used to it from Germany, that shit belonged to the country. Ben Labiskachny always had, when a crane was full of shit, he left it standing, built a new one and that was driven into a new one. And we carried out the shit. I don’t know how long, it was an incredible job. We were alone, but we did it. With the success that everything that grew, whether it was sunflower, or soybean, or wheat,

10:21

Growing up, you hadn’t seen that yet. I wasn’t on the farm anymore, as the first harvest was supposed to be. But I take the story forward to make the African’s willingness to help us shine very brightly. It was so developed. My mother was very diplomatic and very thoughtful about it, to get to know everything. And she got it done, that people came out of the agriculture department

10:51

sunflowers that would later be too big to be harvested with a machine. So Heidchen and I, we clapped our chests, were very proud, as I said, I was no longer there. Shortly before the harvest, I now take a little step forward, in November I married, in December, that was how the first wheat should be harvested, a 100% year old came, in 30 years, in 30 years, the first time on the farm

11:21

the last sunflowers. My father was supposed to have run back and forth with his hands in his hair, which you could understand very well. The entire harvest was zero. And it was our first harvest. And we were so tired of it. Or rather, now the parents and the siblings.

11:44

Father, my sister, my younger brother, I have twin brothers, Franz has now landed in Pretoria, I’ll tell you that in a moment.

11:53

He studied, but Hanschen was still there, and Heidchen and my father took the small, small, gray Ferguson tractor and started to fly immediately, to get a second seed in the ground. And Heidchen had flown and was released by my father in the morning at three o’clock or something, because the tractor was so small, with two-speed flight, you needed a very long time until you had flown such a farm.

12:23

why, what a noise was there in the attic. There was a colossal thunder. He said, is there a helicopter landing? Or what’s going on? It was foggy, you couldn’t see. It was still too early. And as the fog began to rise and it became bright, the entire neighbors of us came together with their entire tractors and flew us the entire farm in one day.

12:51

Yes, tears come when you think about it.

12:54

And not enough with that. The day after, the post office called us. There were still these phone lines, where you had a certain sign. Whether we had hair loss, whether we had damage. They wanted to know. The bank called us. We didn’t have to be afraid, they would give us the interest for next year. The garage called us. If we had repairs, they wanted to do repairs for free for so and so long. And that’s how it went. Even the school in Heilbronn

13:24

And that was a lot of money for us back then to help us out of the first emergencies. The neighbors came with fat and with lamb oil and with vegetables and whatever it was, grain and flour and slaughtered cattle to help us out of the time. I will never forget that and we all will never forget it. Mother was immediately very realistic. She took the camera, photographed the tractors that were flying there.

13:54

photographed the things that were brought to us, made a comment together, wrote a short article, sent it to a gentleman from Dirksen, whom we met during the refugee period, to Germany, who was ambassador for Germany in Moscow and Japan. And he brought it, he had a connection, and he brought it to the South German newspaper and sent the excerpts to my mother with the photos and what was under it,

14:24

neighbors, so that we had the good feeling that we were a bit anti-propaganda, because even back then there was propaganda in Germany how evil the South African is. So I tell my children so that they can also counteract a bit. They were incredibly helpful and helped us. Well, I’ve taken a little bit of that now.

14:49

Heidchen and I, we arrived at the end of May, beginning of June, we arrived and started working as I described.

14:56

In September, at the beginning of September, my brothers and my mother came over. My brothers and my fiancé had their money for the coal mines in West Germany, which were working again, because Germany had no coal, of course. The East German areas were gone. They were working to earn the money for the coal mines. So they came out on their own steam, also with Jerusalem, while my fiancé came down with the English post office. What were these ships called?

15:26

That was the Kassel line, as Orsel just told me. He came up with the English ship and had to go down to the west coast and didn’t have very nice experiences in England and on the Kassel because he was German. But luckily my Fritich Karl was calm and listened to everything and that was down on his shoulders. He came exactly on my birthday on September 28th at the Hubs. So now we were together as a couple.

15:56

My mother started organizing. I had the… Heidchen and I… I assume I was the one who was in charge of the forebook. ..have the… ..um…

16:07

I promised the young people living around us that I would dance at my wedding. Because it was a death sentence back then. It was the doppers, or whatever they were called, who were particularly strict. You weren’t allowed to read on Sundays. Doppers. You weren’t allowed to read, you weren’t allowed to work, you weren’t allowed to ride, you weren’t allowed to do anything. So it was pretty awkward for me. But the young people were young too. And I said, I’ll dance at my wedding. Not knowing how to arrange it.

16:37

So, our wedding was fixed in November. I don’t want to name the exact date, I have to think about it first. And my mother started preparing, how do we do that? All the neighbors were invited, otherwise we had few people we could invite, because they were all too far away. My siblings were there. And a good friend of ours, a gentleman from Gordon, who had a farm in Bethlehem,

17:07

We called, yes we are allowed to. Tracker, relaxed, went to Bethlehem, got a piano, put it in our empty house in Hupveld, we didn’t have furniture, we had a few mattresses. And now I still don’t know who should play at my wedding.

17:25

Ich lie mir ein Brautkleid, ein langes weißes Brautkleid. Das war meine Bedingung. Ich heirate nur in weiß und in lang. Lie ich mir von einer Lehrerin in Heilbronn. Mein Brautstrans bestand aus Farbblume, aus Lilien, aus weißen Lilien. Und dann…

17:45

we came into contact with our pastor, whom we didn’t know yet, who was in Blomfontein. Now Osel has to help me if I say something wrong. We were in the diaspora community two or three times now, Hohenfley, which was on the other side of Heilbronn, and we did some services there. But we didn’t get to know Pastor von Delft, because he, I don’t remember when he was released from the camp,

18:15

Blum von Tinner Gemeinde übernommen und hatte das erste Gemeindeauto seines Lebens erhalten. Und die erste größere Abhandlung seines Amtes war unsere Hochzeit auf der Farmhubwerke. So kam er an.

18:31

My brothers had built an altar out of potato boxes, and of course they had my little

19:01

It all went so fast. We thought we’d arrived in September. My fiancé was already at the wedding. We couldn’t offer anything to the guests, but our neighbors took care of it. One came with fish, he was taking care of them. Another came with pork. We were given butter and everything. Mother made a great cold buffet that was very memorable to our pastor and his wife.

19:31

hungerzeit kam. Wir kamen aus einer Hungerzeit und er kam aus einer Hungerzeit. Und Mutter war groß darin. Sie kochte sehr mit dem Auge und es sah alles sehr nett aus. Nun kam der Tag der Hochzeit. Ich wurde verbannt zu einem Nachbarn mit meinem Verlobten und mein Wunsch war es mit einer Pferdekarre zur Hochzeit gefahren zu werden. Also William spannte seinen Cupcar ein und es gibt ein einziges Bild unserer Hochzeit und das war, wie ich in weißem langen Kleid in dieser Cupcar

20:01

the groom, who is hardly recognizable on the picture, drove to the farm at the wedding. To not to make it too much. The sermon of Pastor von Delft was wonderful. Everything around was wonderful. The wedding itself was not so well visited. As I said, Mr. Vogel came from Pretoria. My fiancé had borrowed ten pounds to buy a pair of shoes to come to me after the free start

20:31

We invited him, Willi Günther, if anyone knows him, who also came to our wedding. But after the wedding our neighbors fled to do their work. And in the evening, or in the late afternoon, was our They all came, because it was supposed to be danced. And it was danced. I, in my despair, I didn’t know who I should ask to dance.

21:01

I could only play the C major. And then Aunt Hester Labesschanie came and saw my note and said she could continue playing. Oh, I thanked my guardian angel, because I couldn’t play much. So I was relieved. I sat next to Ben. And now the pastor of Delft stood up and I tell you that because it remained in my memory.

21:31

I asked my mother to dance. Ben touched my wrist and pressed it so hard that I almost stood up. I said, is that Dominic? Is that Dominic? I said yes, dancing is not a sin for us. He started to dance until the first ones started to dance. And then…

21:56

He hated his wife. And then he followed her. It was a mess. Well, it all goes to waste. Now I can’t paint it all out, because it would be too long. The next morning, Ursula just asked me, I don’t know if I mentioned it, we got married in November 1951. On the farm. I just have a blackout, at the moment I can’t remember the date, I know it of course.

22:21

The next morning, Friedrich Karl and I had to go to a contract. You only came to work contracts outside of South Africa, mainly in agriculture, because there were so many people needed. My dear learned agriculture in a prison camp in Morocco. He had already worked as a student. He had a good idea of agriculture. In this prison camp, prisoners were taught and he had studied a little further.

22:51

no official studies. So he had an idea of agriculture and could become a foreman at a Mr. Milly, Müller in German, he was of German origin, married to a French woman, where he had his first position at the dairy farm, and a white man had to be there in the dairy industry to keep up. That was the law at the time. So that was his first job.

23:21

to our first work start, which Fridgital had already started.

23:28

and we got a lift to the train station. The train station was 17 miles away and we didn’t have a car. The parents didn’t have one either. So someone got scared of us and took us to the train station the next day. We had to wait a long time until we got to Pretoria. In Pretoria we were received very kindly and politely by the employer and brought to the farm. And here we got a bungalow, a very desired bungalow. We leased a bed.

23:58

and electricity was there, and a bathroom was there, even though it was very primitive, but that was our beginning. We started out like donröschen in a fairy tale castle, in the middle of a forest, surrounded by meadows. And that was our beginning. We were incredibly happy, we both were. We didn’t know how it would go on, but that didn’t matter at the time. We also had friends very quickly. Through Willi Vogel and Willi Günther, a lot of people came to us,

24:27

Germans who worked at the office on a standard. And we didn’t have any shortage of applications. And there were a lot of Germans in Pretoria. But we didn’t have the opportunity to go to Pretoria. The first thing my dear was doing was to take the biog from his employer to Pretoria with an order and drive the Krugerplatz in reverse. We weren’t used to that. Thank God nothing happened.

24:56

Shortly after we disappeared in December, my brother Franz showed up and said, Olle, I have a fund in my pocket, I want to study. Oh, that was a good company. We immediately entered our newest connections, the office on the standard. He got a job there. Franz was very talented in mathematics, physics, chemistry, had a great graduation in the subjects and wanted to study BSc. That was difficult, of course.

25:26

He had English in school, but it wasn’t good enough. And he was also speaking in Pretoria African. My brother was very concentrated. He started working at the office on a standard. He enrolled at the university. He completed his exams in three months in African and English. With the help of Professor Zömpelmann, who was at the university in Pretoria at the time, he had at least one German accent

25:55

I can’t tell you the whole story now, but Franz came down very quickly with his fund in his pocket, earned quite well, studied and that was the first one who left home. He couldn’t do very well with my father, which we all understood well. And it was also reasonable that someone tried to become independent.

26:20

Very quickly my husband and I realized that this position can only be a progressive position. There were many difficulties. We only earned to explain to you how difficult it was. We earned 20 pounds a month. The black milk boy who drove the lorry, there were fewer blacks who could drive back then, he earned 25 pounds. We had to pay the seaport tax from the 20 pounds

26:50

We had to buy curtains because we were very transparent in the bungalow. And for two windows we had to pay debts at a shop because they were too expensive. They cost 17 pounds something for two windows. We earned 20 pounds. Just to tell you how difficult it was for us to somehow survive. We only got 1 liter of milk a day from the farm products.

27:20

And Kurs was a charming black man. We felt sorry for him and he secretly brought us a few eggs, which was very embarrassing because it was actually unofficial.

27:34

We knew that it wasn’t something for long. It had served us well to get out. And we were also I mean, even for the employer, it was certainly difficult because we were not familiar with the conditions. We had to stick our noses in everywhere first. So I don’t want to blame anyone at all, but I just want to emphasize how difficult it was to start like that. What happened?

28:04

was in the direction of Swartkop, the military airport, but it was much closer to Pretoria than to Johannesburg. I can’t remember exactly, I think it was about a quarter of an hour or an hour’s drive from Pretoria to Johannesburg, is that right? About that, yes. On the old route. Anyway, how it is with young married people, I was expecting my first child.

28:28

and we agreed, dearly beloved, that I had to open up. We had now met a Professor Reinicke, also through the connection, through office to office, somehow, who had a farm in Caledon, near Gnadental, in Moderas, and who urgently needed an entrepreneur, I would say, to take over the farm, because he wanted to let his former foreman walk. And we didn’t know what kind of offer that was, but we were very happy, because we were

28:58

We can’t go on here. And it sounded quite acceptable. So Schätzle sent me with a lift, a good bread, a baker, a younger man who earned his bread by selling good bread and doing the service in the garage for good bread. The good bread was in the stand to drive 45 miles per hour. It was a small delivery van. And with that I drove everywhere, zigzag, through the country

29:28

to come to find Caledon. We said goodbye, but no arrival time. And I was so upset. And Mr. Becker was not allowed to notice anything. So I had to take all my Prussian discipline together not to spit in his presence. And I had a find in my pocket. So I had to go back and forth. Mr. Becker was a very sociable man. He was also a charming man. He was a man of arms.

29:58

And I mean, these people were terrible. They were being followed everywhere. The SS was a military department, it had nothing to do with the political SS. And yet there was the SS. I experienced in my refugee time in Bergen, at the American occupation, that they were shot without consideration when they were captured and taken. I have a lot to forget about that. Anyway, it was an exciting journey for me. I got to know South Africa.

30:26

The journey went to the Wustl garage of Hendrich’s. The old pastor Hendrich, whom I’ll introduce later. He had this garage. And he, Willi Hendrich, was so nice and arranged a lift over the mountain with a very nice German gentleman who drove a wonderful car. He drove me to Cape Town, where I had an address. Thank God, I would have been lost. Anyway, we came over the Detoiskloof.

30:56

that he would not be left in shock. The cup was in front of me, after Freistaat and Transvaal, it was green in front of me. I was so excited and my heart was already half-way there.

31:09

He took me to Cape Town, to the address I had never found. I stayed there for a few nights. I played with the lady in the mushroom farm. I played with her bridge. She asked me if I could play. I said, very badly, I learned a little from my father. I won and the lady got so angry because I won. I said, I have no money to play. Then a co-wife gave me money. It was a penny. But I was iron, I had no money.

31:39

I was so angry that I won. I lost in the next games and I didn’t think about it. Those were just small experiences. Somehow I set myself on the train towards Caledonia to reach my final destination, to Moderas.

31:57

I probably called and said I was here. Dr. Rheinicke, Professor Rheinicke picked me up. Another small experience. I was in the train. A lady across from me, she always looked at me, probably because I had a strange impression. I didn’t speak African or very, very badly in the beginning. And she asked me where I was from and so we came into the conversation. And she was very surprised that I was so civilized or took the appearance. She had imagined it very differently, that we are all barbarians.

32:27

in Germany, through English propaganda of course. That was new to me. We had a very good chat with my radical African. And how she got out, she got out before, she pressed two buttons in my hand. I would never forget that. That saved me. Professor Reine got me out.

32:50

He showed me the farm, two hectares of onions, he would have hunted the sheep in there. They would have been too small. I thought, strange, small onions are needed too. He showed me one hectare of coal, the heads would have been too small. I thought, for God’s sake, what would he expect from an economist if he didn’t have the water? I was already sceptical, but what was left for me? I got along very well with him, also with his wife. We had a wonderful conversation.

33:20

The foreman he had had nine children and earned 15 pounds a month. He didn’t have the right to use products for his family in the countryside. And that scared me. I don’t want to hurt Professor Dr. Reinecke, but that really shocked me. I said, what will we expect when we come back to the country and have to get used to the new conditions? I was afraid.

33:50

He also let me earn money. In the time, in the week, I was there for ten days, because I didn’t know how to get back to Pretoria. At that time, I built him small boxes to store his proteins. And I got a fund for that, too. And I was very grateful for that. But I was a country child and I was enthusiastic about the area. Gnadenthal, very close, German mission, close.

34:20

Papa Vedder Ken, who was a missionary in Gnadental, who built the upper schools there, who was a mission agent. Wasn’t it the lady? Is that the lady? He was incredibly committed to this mission station. Gnadental was flourishing under him. He was very old at that time. His wife, a charming Sandmuth woman. They were my guardian angels. And later on. In any case, a telegram arrived from my husband

34:50

Torja, take a look at this. The situation is getting unbearable. Good. I accepted. Order was order. I had my big doubts. I was at Junk and said, what? We’ll make it. I accepted.

35:06

I drove back with Mr. Becker, whom I was fishing for. I knew roughly where he was. I said, please, Mr. Becker, take me back. And so on. He took me back. It was like a miracle. And afterwards I thought to myself, I didn’t do it myself. There were two dozen guardian angels with me. So somehow I came back to life, smelly, I came back to the pretoria.

35:32

We made an appointment with Mr. Becker. He was stirring enough. He had to go back to the Cap after a month or so. We made a proper announcement. And he came and picked us up with our suitcases. And we were on our way to Sügen again. I don’t want to tell you more. We arrived in Morderas. We moved into these old economic buildings. And the poor foreman who is suffering in my soul, he was already gone. So we moved in.

36:02

And I just stood there, praying, hoping we’d do everything right. And we started working very simply. There our Monica was born. Now I have to light up.

36:16

We met Papa Veda from Gnadental, our very nice neighbor in front of Greiton. And from Papa Veda we got our kitchen table, which is still standing with me today. You know it. On this table you all grew up. I bathed you on the table, wrapped you. I later sorted vegetables and slaughtered chickens. I centrifuged and made butter on the table. Everything played out on this table.

36:47

I will tell you the story of the table, which is very interesting. I bought it for two pounds at Papa and Mama Weder. It was a lot of money for me, but I had to have a table, as we started there. And I liked this table, it was big, I could do anything with it. He is with General Leto Vorbeck from the southwest. He was on a mission in the southwest. He went to East Africa in a tross in the war.

37:15

is back to the south-west after the first world war. I have no idea which mission station I am going to go to.

37:22

From this mission station he somehow came to Gnadental, to the Herrenruther mission. There he served, you can really say served, as a table. And Papa neither needed, they were old, the mission was completed, all these activities were no longer, so he left the table to me. And as I said, this table has accompanied me until now and was the table on which my practical life has run in every form.

37:52

If it was Easter eggs, as I said, everything was on this table. That was this table. I acquired it.

38:04

Now a great time started for us both. We had a lot of initiatives, of course. We started planting strawberries, and I got a lot of workers from Gnadental, especially women, and I cooked them, and I grew chickens. Professor Reinicke wanted to start a chicken farm, that was easy said, without means, and I thought, well, I have to do that. I did what I could. I took two old, arranged rooms and made them into chicken farms. I started with chickens.

38:34

We had to work with as few workers as possible, of course. We worked in the interest of the owner, so we saved where we could. I also flew with four horses to show Fabian that you can do it alone, because they only flew with four horses in three. One on the flight, one on the front horse and one on the rear horse. And I proved to him that he could do it alone and so I also flew a little with four horses. I just had fun, because the horses were also on the ride.

39:02

What we didn’t expect was that our presence in Modera would spread very quickly. How it is when new people come and then very fresh Germans. And what they do and of course that I had flown with four horses. You could see that from the street. That spread. The old father didn’t know us well in the meantime and they took care of us. And through him, now I start to feel a little bit painful and that was the birth of my first child. What do I do? How do I do that?

39:32

Where do I go? Who can help me? It was my first child. It didn’t kill me, but it was quite uncomfortable. And, as always, when I started to think about something very carefully, my guardian angel came to me in the presence of Papa Veda and said, Listen, we know a German doctor very well, a doctor in Caledonia, Dr. Bene. We’ve already told him about you. You have to go and discuss it with him.

40:02

I didn’t know. And I didn’t have a penny in my pocket and wanted to have a child. Can you imagine how horrible that was? But in the end I had nothing else left. I think I am, I don’t know, I don’t want to go crazy, but in the fifth or sixth month I went to him. He had a Norwegian dirndl that my father from Norway brought with him. That was the only dress, dresses were a luxury at all, which was far enough to shake off.

40:32

Dr. Bene. You can’t imagine how shaky and weak I was in the waiting room. How do you tell your child? It was a terrible situation. Now it was my turn. My heart was beating in my throat. I was still young and inexperienced. I mean, it’s… Anyway, Dr. Bene sat down and said nothing. And I didn’t say anything either.

41:01

I thought I had to start with my problems. I started to stutter. I said, Doctor, here I am. I’m expecting a child. We’re working there and there. And then I stopped. I didn’t know how to tell him what my problem was. He started to smile, he still hadn’t said anything. And then he said, Mrs. von Aulach, I’m talking now. So, you’re working with the doctor.

41:29

Professor Reinicke, and they expect a child, and they have no money. I knew that. I was told that. I said, thank God.

41:41

And he said, we have a nursing home in Caledon, which is subsidized by the state, so you can get your baby for free. That was a stone in my heart. And it really was. And I am her doctor. I said, doctor, I don’t need a doctor, that might not be necessary. Maybe the nurse can do it. He said, now I’m talking. You are my patient. And I’m making sure your baby comes to the world.

42:11

I can tell you, children, I’m out of this doctor’s room. I have a rock in my hand. And they come back again and again. I want to examine them again to see if everything is all right. And I get some fresh air again and say, but that’s not necessary. He says, that’s necessary. Good. So this problem was solved for me too, without me touching my finger for it.

42:36

I noticed that you had little influence on everything that happened. My darling and I, we created a weight, a body. I don’t know where it came from. A soul that was warm with us. We did it right. I bought a piece. We paid the first salary that we received from Professor Reine or the second. We still paid on the ship trip from Fröhlichtal. We went to Caledon and bought the most necessary.

43:06

That was a small bath, the most necessary diapers, and a few clothes for the baby. So, what I thought was absolutely… Well, we came home to the sea and started setting up. On the floor, that was canvas floor, we had the hand-stitched carpet that was lying on the bed of Fr. Karl, so that it was at least a little bit comfortable. We also had the beds leased. So, we were always helped. But if you think back today, you don’t know how you did it.

43:36

This big Damocles sword was taken away from me and I was so sad, I only worked. I didn’t take a retreat, as expected from a baby. Nobody told me to take a retreat. Everything went well. However, in this respect, it didn’t go so well. I was then at the post-examination at Dr. Bene, I think after the sixth month, and he said to me, you still have to be patient for a while.

44:06

I had a terrible cramp in my back. It was the first pain. I didn’t know. I was always waiting for back pain. I didn’t want to show it. Finally we got a visit. They didn’t leave before midnight. I had unbelievable pain. Until I said to my husband at 3 a.m. Listen, something is definitely wrong. I don’t know if it’s pain. Then Fritz Carl called me. I was very desperate.

44:35

because I didn’t know what was going on. I said, you get a car and we’ll go to Dr. Bini. That’s the most important thing to me. Now he didn’t find anyone. The car was gone. Reinke was gone. The neighbor was gone. And now I was able to panic a little. Because the pain was unbearable. Somehow, then Professor Reinke came and wanted to help me at birth. And then I started to scream, I said… And that didn’t work, for many reasons.

45:03

I said, now I want a car. I don’t care where it comes from. I was so angry. I was so angry. My poor darling ran and called. And we got a car. I think it was from Reinke. It would have been his duty to help us get to Caledonia. And I finally got there. Finally. Yes, it was about seven months.

Part 4

00:03

I immediately noticed that Monika was on her way.

00:06

And then a nurse examined me and said, you have to wait a little longer. And I was a little bit desperate. I took myself very seriously. I said, you’re lying here for nothing. You have a doctor for nothing. You have to take yourself together now. Well, as it is. Relative and also right. But finally Dr. Bene arrived. And I, and I, I, the tears just ran. I couldn’t hold it back anymore. And then he asked me, is it so bad that you have to cry? I only said yes.

00:35

Naya.

00:36

And finally, the birth pains started. And I didn’t want to explain it. It was terrible. I was supposed to press, but I couldn’t. Then Dr. Bene came, who had been called away, to someone else, came in with big eyes, because I was starting to scream, and realized I couldn’t be born because my head was wrong. You could have found out beforehand.

01:06

Then I got a baby and I don’t know how many hours I woke up and Monika was there. A Sunday child, born on Sunday.

01:16

I was born on October 12th, seven months, seven months and a week or so. She was a spindle. She was long and a spindle, but thank God she didn’t stay back. I am aware that after this birth, I think I slept two days and nights. I didn’t wake up at all. I woke up, Bena sat in my bed and said, how do you feel? I said, not yet asleep.

01:44

And he kept me a few days longer because, well, because a few come.

01:54

Then he looked at me very calmly and said to me, sleep quietly. But I would like to tell you this before you start worrying. I am your doctor. I am fine. You are not. So it is natural that you have my permission.

02:15

So, very great and fantastic. We never forgot that. Later, when we were on the farm, I sent him a box of red wine every year, because I knew he liked to drink it. His wife was also very white, she came from Caledonia. She brought me two flowers from the English church. Those were the only flowers I had. Because my darling was not allowed to visit me in the first two or three days, because he could not leave the farm, which I also found strange about Mr. Reinecke.

02:45

But she didn’t want to see me, I wanted to see my husband. In any case, everything went well. Our Monica, we went back to the farm with Monica. I started working again, it went pretty fast. We were allowed to bathe them from a pastor, Schmidt, who was very old. Veders somehow brought us a tablet, because we didn’t know where we were supposed to bathe them. There was no German community around except the Herrenhuter community,

03:15

And Mr. Schmidt has baptized our Monica on this farm, Moderas. Even her only paternal uncle came from the free state to function as a paternal uncle. And it was a very simple action. Mrs. Reine gave us a plate that I still have today, but with a jump, but it is still there. And she gave me six darts. I will never forget that.

03:41

After Monica was born, the relationship became unbearable. I don’t need to tell you everything now, I’ve already told you, I don’t want to have that on tape. Anyway, we are hotly over our heads, again with the help, through help, of other people who ran us into the crossroads, into the witch’s alley to pick up grapes. It was harvest time and they were looking for hand-wringed workers and whoop, we were in the witch’s alley, in the Dones,

04:10

and Pity Meiring and got a brand new house that he had built for his son and that was still empty. And the house was wonderful, we didn’t have furniture.

04:23

But that didn’t do anything. We borrowed a bed or two or three beds from Mairing’s. And now the work started immediately. Friedrich K. was outside picking grapes and I was packing grapes or sorting grapes. And I first got to know what was required in the export wine. That’s incredible. That was an intense work, but I could sit in the main thing.

04:53

My little Monica was in the new house. I rushed over every hour and a half to see if she was okay. Because it was too busy in the open basement where we worked. And she was fine, she was terribly nice and kind and drunk and did everything I wanted from her. But it was pretty nerve-racking for me. We packed from 4 a.m. with short breaks until night, sometimes until 12, because the wine was ripe.

05:23

and we got a salary, I also earned this time, but after three and a half months the very nice daughter-in-law of Meirings, who was a German, got me a kitchen credit, a whole kitchen, a very nice kitchen cabinet, two earplugs and a sofa, which you could take out as beds,

05:53

auctions laden in kapstadt und das bezahlte ich mit meinem dreieinhalb monatlichen lohn von dort da blieb kein fennig übrig aber wir hatten unsere ersten möbel

06:06

I said, Hooray! In Worcester is a German community. I got on the bus at some point, or by elevator, I can’t remember, to Worcester. To the German Pastoral Household. There was the old pastor Hendrich in office.

06:24

I said, pastor, you’re German, I’m a refugee, I need a bed, do you have advice for me? He took me by the hand, we both went to an auctioneer’s shop and we bought the first big bed for Schätzle and me for 2 pounds, which was very expensive, but we had a bed. So the connection was…

06:47

German community, although we didn’t have a chance to be really active. We didn’t have a car, we didn’t have any opportunities. Here I also want to show you during this time in The Dawns.

06:59

Pastor von Delft called us from Teehn. He said he had to go to a conference in Kapstadt. He wanted to see us. He said the train would be too long. So we dressed up and took off. We said we couldn’t work for an hour. We had a box of wine and grapes in our arms. Pastor von Delft came out of the window. I remember what he was wearing. A white shirt with a blue sweater.

07:29

We knew some of them. Was that your Domini? I said yes, that was him. He didn’t look like that at all, they told me. Maybe that’s what makes him even more fun. I also told him. That was a joy for us. To see our pastor who had trusted us so that he could see that the trust was successful. That’s just a little thing. Was Monika with you? I know that. Yes, she was definitely with me. I didn’t leave her alone.

07:59

So we definitely had them with us. In any case, in the Don’s my husband was employed as a foreman and he made many promises that one day he could get his own piece of land. But these farms in the Don’s were already very small, were very intensified by the pigeons. By the way, the export pigeons were then, especially the balinkas, the big spade pigeons, the big giant pigeons, extra-big, bred for the English Royal Court.

08:29

And not just at the Royal Court. Also funny, isn’t it?

08:33

The harvest time was over, my work was over, now I have to shed some light. In Caledon, with my Monica’s birth, I met a lesbian woman in the ward. We were a very funny society. And this lesbian woman, her husband had a garage in Hermannis. She helped my Monica to feed the first ten days, so she could get at least some breast milk.

09:03

So she got her first ten days of breast milk. And then she had to be put on a bottle. And this lesbian woman…

09:15

Wait, I’ve lost a thread. We got in touch with the Gillespies. Simply because we shared our first child. Bene brought us to read books. I know, I read Albert Schweitzer and several books. And Mrs. Gillespie wanted to learn German, so she got some fairy tales from Dr. Bene, which was very nice. And somehow it connects. And somehow we got in touch. So they knew that we were going to get married in the Dorns later, that we were gone from Gnadental or from Molleras Refiere.

09:45

We told him, I think we visited her once in Hermanes, and told him that it looked very bad for us, that the grapes were packed, that I had no work anymore, and that Frédéric Carle didn’t earn enough. And there, Lesbians offered us a farm, which they had bought at the Brandfleet Dam, which was empty at the time, there would be a new house on it, and nobody would be there. They offered us this farm for one year.

10:15

without a pension, so we could see if we could do anything about it. And we were excited, of course. We didn’t see the farms very much, but we were there once. But we saw in the dance, the promises weren’t kept. We were greenhorns, we didn’t know how to handle everything. So we thought, this is one step further, now we can work independently. But working independently, without a penny in the pocket,

10:45

It was really hard. It was short and good, to not make it too long. We went to this farm, Riverside. It was in the sand dunes of Brandfledam. No telephone, no electricity, no neighbors. The next neighbor was about 5 km away. But we started with enthusiasm. We were jealous that someone had to earn money. So we said, of course, that has to be our man.

11:12

Schätzle sat down to work and I started working. We tried everything. It was sand. When the wind blew, the vegetables we planted tried to plant and it was immediately black.

11:27

That makes it very difficult. But we were very positive. Our little Monika, who enjoyed the sandy ground. I already brought… Wait, I don’t want to go crazy. But I thought I’d start with the chickens. And a room was taken and I made the chickens big. And I thought I could earn some money and so on.

11:52

Friedrich Kahl found work with a blind piano player. He couldn’t drive. He drove the car for the piano player. Mr. Tauter, speaking German, Mr. Tauter tuned the piano and Friedrich Kahl drove it and repaired the piano. No shimmer from the inside of a piano. He did that very quickly. Somehow, somehow he did it. He also has a calm temperament. He just looked at everything and somehow did it. Don’t ask me how. Your father was incredibly brave.

12:22

And I said, yes, let’s go, let’s start. My Monica, I borrowed a horse and a mule on a farm in Brere 4. There, Friedrich Kahl had already got to know through his work, through voices and piano, they borrowed a horse and a mule. I picked it up, sat on it, rode these 40, 45 kilometers to Riverside,

12:53

At a Roseville farmer, the kitchen was set up, my Monica sat in the middle and started to fly. There we started building melons, watermelons, the canal, that all went very fast. Now I have to light up. That’s how I started. Then…

13:12

And then he came home on Saturday, Sunday, and was gone on Sunday evening or Monday morning. He had changed his job. Mr. Tauter, that didn’t go on. No more Schimmer, which was the reason. He worked with prisoners at the water supply channel from Brandfledern to Oberzen. He earned more. Good. He took care of it. But he was only home on Sunday. And how he was home on Sunday, my Monica played.

13:42

She didn’t start running. She ran along the little grid, along the stable grid, but she didn’t take a single step. And I will never forget. I come into the living room. It was a bright, friendly room. Our earplugs were there, our sofa was there. It was already set up. And Monika was playing with daddy and he was holding a ball for her and she wanted to catch the ball. And at that moment I come in to the door and see that one foot is flat and one foot is on the tip. And then it went through me like a flash.

14:12

and said, that’s the mistake, why she doesn’t walk. And we quickly called Dr. Bene, we drove to him, a gift from God that we had this doctor. And he said to me, Mrs. von Aulock, the child has to go to the hospital, it has a dislocated hip.

14:32

And he was in charge of the hospital, the specialists. And you can imagine what that meant. Our first child had to go to Kapstadt Hospital. She was one and a half years old. I don’t need to describe it to you anymore.

14:51

What had to be done had to be done. I called my mother, who was now back in Germany, and asked if she could find out in Munich what the dislocated hip was, how it was treated over there. And I got the soothing news that we had very good specialists in Kapstadt. Southwest hadn’t had a department for it yet. That’s why there were a lot of German children from Southwest in the Lady Miquelis Home in, what’s it called, next to Weinberg, I can’t remember the name, I don’t care.

15:21

that we would have good specialists in Capstan. That was in the Lady MacKiello’s home. I was very calm there. And then we brought our little spaetzchen to this Lady MacKiello’s home.

15:34

Everything was very nice, she was immediately taken to bed. Just to be brief, for you, especially for you Monika, so you know how it was back then, although I have told you this many times. We were so badly affected by Riverside. We had bought a very old Ford buggy from Gillespie. The six-cylinder engine was still running, everything else was still running. We paid for it.

16:04

I’ll never forget that. It was very hard for me to pay for it. It was a very cruel situation. But the heavens were watching over us. Because we had no income, our child was taken for free. Later I brought a black child from the farm, but to Prince Ellis Home, which was the modern orthopedic hospital. She was there for three and a half years with a completely broken back.

16:34

And I brought the child to the hospital after he broke her arm because she played with one of his chickens. And she was there for three and a half years for one edge. And my Monica was there for one year in Lady Micaeus, also for one edge. So black and white were treated absolutely equally. I would like to emphasize this here. Our black workers received medical help for free.

17:03

in Breere 4, where only the city had the weekly doctor and the sister. I want to call this extra here, so that propaganda can’t make you a complete X-Four. It was certainly not right, but it was absolutely fine. Now we could only afford… Well, now I have to go on. I then slaughtered chickens. My husband worked at the…

17:32

On the channel he had a better job through a Berlin guy we met, who was a construction instructor. The Staten’s Clou was built. He was hired as a concrete specialist, where he earned more. So he was now there. And I was sitting on the farm alone, without a child, without a baby, and I thought, yes, and now I have to earn money too. I got a bicycle in my hands, no shimmer. I think that was my own bicycle that we brought with us. A men’s bicycle.

18:02

I drove to Wuster in the evening, I pushed the night watch to an old lady, who was not allowed to be left alone, and I earned a little something. At the same time I brought my slaughtered chickens to Wuster on the back of the bike, and sold them there. That was at least somehow so lucrative that after the first batch of chickens were sold, I could buy two cows, of course also through connections that were a bit more transparent in price, and so I started with cattle, which are on the island.

18:32

Thanks for watching!

18:33

Here I also shine a little back on our farm in Freistaat, where the parents were still. My sister Heidchen went to advise my mother, thank God, praise and thanks, she did her sister’s education at the General Hospital in Pretoria. My brother Hans went as an entrepreneur for a farmer who urgently wanted him, who had seven farms and he took over only one farm and then three farms, because my parents wanted to sell the farms.

19:03

My father, over time, had normalized everything in Germany. The old officers were even offered their pensions and put them back in operation, which was only fair and cheap. And he got a pension from a high-ranking official. That was really better than being in the hands of a poor man. But this pension was not paid abroad at that time. So the parents decided the right thing. My father would never have grown roots here in South Africa as a farmer, not at all.

19:33

it was clear that he would go back and the parents settled in Monau, at the Stapelsee, where they had good friends and lived there. Their mother stayed here to wrap everything up, as it is in the farm sales, and to pack and send the things they wanted to take with them. She then earned money through painting. She painted a lot in Freistaat for farmers who wanted to have pictures of their farms, to live in style. And she painted porcelain in Johannesburg, for example.

20:03

a small room apartment and thus earned a little money to finance their return. I can’t say how the farm sales went, it definitely didn’t go well. Just to show you, the farm time in Pukver at Heilbronn was over. We four children stayed here, mother went later after everything was done, also over and lived with father in Monau.

20:32

Now our story continues. Monika was in the city of Kapstadt and we tried to get on her feet. The Statenskluft dam was finished. Friedrich Karl looked for work and found it at a contractor who built dams for farmers with large machines. And he learned that very quickly. He was a tank man after all, a tank defense man. And he always told me, gasoline makes the character. He is always with some motorized troop.

21:02

So he quickly befriended himself with these big machines and built dams. In this way he came to a woman, Annie Smith, in Avonsson, on the Avonsson farm in Breerevier. He built a dam there. And my darling was very good with people and got in touch with this Annie Smith. Her husband was also there at the time. And they had a single son. And this son was at the agricultural school.

21:32

a third of the farm could take over on its own because it became too much for them. That was part of the farm that was pretty much thrown away. The wine was no longer cut for three years, the apricot trees were not… well, and so on. And he learned how to know Breerevier, which was very important for us, because one day, I don’t remember exactly which month it was,

21:57

came an unbelievable flood with the Brehre 4. It didn’t rain at all with us, but in the beginning of the Brehre river it rained like crazy.

22:10

And above all, it was so bad that you didn’t even notice it. Because the island I wanted to develop, that was my initial plan, was between the canal and the Brehreva. And our cow grazed and grazed on the island, which I then always brought home in the evening, across the small bridge to the canal. And as I go to get my cow, I wonder that they are all standing on the shore, towards the canal. And as I want to cross, I notice that the bridge is already under water.

22:40

I am incredibly shocked. I tried to get this, I don’t know how many, seven pieces or something, I don’t know how I did it. I myself, up to the belly in the water, I got my cow. Fortunately, they were not used to violence, so they were not afraid of it. I somehow got them across this bridge. I honestly don’t know anymore how I did it or the cow was willing.

23:09

A calf swam away with my canal. It didn’t make it to the bridge. I followed it and pulled it out. So I had my cow there. And somehow my husband came along. Because he had heard of it. Within hours, the whole area was covered with a row of water. Everything was destroyed. My fields were flooded. My self-built diesel pump, which I,

23:39

who belonged to the municipality of Wuster, helped me a lot in how I had to build this cement block. He got me the diesel pump for a ridiculous price, because I wanted to water my planted water, and the canal flows past the house. But within six hours everything was gone. The diesel pump was gone. The water was up to our house. The house was a little higher in the sand dunes. I evacuated my borrowed horse with Muli.

24:09

My few chickens, the old Ford we already had, I evacuated to the sand dunes as high as I could. The horse stable was much higher and thank God the flood did not reach the stable. And Frédéric-Karl and I, we sat there at full moonlight at night and the water reached the living room. We rolled up the great-grandmother’s carpet and thought, what do we do now? We can still walk into the sand dunes.

24:39

In any case, he went to a water fiscale at Brandflederm, that was about three kilometers or four kilometers, I don’t remember exactly, and he asked himself what the radio said and so on and so forth, and he said, no, the highest point of the flood has been reached. Back then, it was a very big flood, also in Wuster. The entire municipal meadows were flooded. The water from Breivik went up to the border of Wuster.

25:09

This was in 1900? This flood took place at the end of 1954. The descendants of the winter period, it could have been November, I can’t say for sure, but it was at the end of 1954 that this flood took place.

25:30

When we got the damage, everything that we had planted had been washed away. The trees that I had planted against wind protection, the little land that I had planted for melons, everything had been washed away. The diesel pump was unusable, it was full of water, so everything was gone. And we both knew that we couldn’t stay here. Because even if that happens every ten years, as soon as you somehow have your foot on the ground, everything will float away again. So we said, that doesn’t make any sense.

25:59

And Friedrich Karl had the demand from Annie Schmidt. Here I say, I emphasize again, we did nothing about it. He got the demand from Annie Schmidt, if we didn’t want to come to Avonzon and take over this part of the farm. Well, we sat there wet in the puddle, so we said yes. I brought the vessel back to Rosenwill, thanked the farmers. I rode the horse and the molly back to Breerevier.

26:29

who was now our neighbor, and the mule belonged to Annie Smith. So I delivered everything again and we moved around. In January 1955 we moved with our old Ford with two or three hundred chickens, with five animals, we moved around Avonso. So that was a new part of our lives. Here we kneed ourselves enormously, because there was already,

26:59

And we had a few pieces of cattle. We bought two more. Also, we had calves. And in the last three years, we had a herd of about 15 cattle. I already had sheepdogs. And the best thing was that our little Monica was allowed to be picked up. After a lot of fighting and a lot of incidents that happened, we picked her up.

27:29

In 1950 our Roberto saw the light of the world. He was not in a hurry to see the difference to his sister. He was born with open eyes. He was not curious to see the world. He was at least 14 days late. And he was born in Caledon in the home for poor people. Or for people who could not afford it. Dr. Bene was my doctor again. And we just had faith in it. And we had nothing else left.

27:59

except for the piece of cattle that had grown a little more and the few chickens we took with us. But as I said, I don’t want to stress that at all. He was born there, the journey there was incredibly exciting, ilies afterwards, and I already had, as I saw the lights of Caledon, I always shouted at the moment, drive, drive, get petrol, get petrol!

28:21

Luckily, Hubertus was born quickly and we had a lot of fun with him. He had a funny face and was a huge baby. He weighed 8.5 pounds, was much bigger than the others, but he was late. So our second chick was the one who stayed.

28:40

And three months after he was born, we took our Monica out of the hospital. She was in the hospital for exactly a year. We asked a specialist to explain that the child needed a warm bed, because the hip shell didn’t want to develop properly.

29:00

She came to us at 8am. No, that’s not true. On her birthday, the plaster was taken away. She came to us at around 55 in winter. And that was very shocking. This little black girl was especially afraid. Everything was new to her. She didn’t know a car, she didn’t know a dog, horse, cows, people who ran away. Everything was new to her. And she was just afraid, especially because she didn’t know it. That drew a lot of strength from me.

29:29

I sat down with her on the ceiling and explained to her and gave her flowers. And it was a joy to see how she slowly lost her fear, how she slowly began to live. And how we brought her to the hospital, she already said, Dad, Mom, she had learned all this in the hospital. Every time a stranger came to visit her, she took both hands and shunned against these people. Not with us, because we always visit her regularly, even rarely.

29:59

And here she started again with dad and mom. The specialist came once a month to Wuste for his external patient and we had to contact him every month. He wanted to see if the child made any progress.

30:18

I saw through a sister who had shown me the x-ray in the hospital that the hip had not yet closed around the bone. After four weeks the hip was already on the way. So the specialist was very right. All that was missing was Nesbjörn. And to my great luck, that was my most beautiful birthday so far, except for my 70th birthday, of course here, right?

30:46

And that’s how the plaster came off on my birthday in Kapstadt.

30:50

Her legs flew over her head, they were weak, she had no muscles, and she was not allowed to walk on her legs or knees for another six months. But we managed to do it. First she couldn’t do it, then she started to slip and to scream, and I had to stop her. And then after six months she was allowed to start to scream slowly. And as I said, everything went well.

31:20

I don’t know why he was in Wuster at the time. It was probably a vacation between the different pastors who served there. Pastor Schanz was there later. Well, it doesn’t matter. In any case, she was baptized in the church. Leonhard Rode, three quarters blind, decorated the baptismal basin with flower vases. I would never forget that. Papa Rode helped us a lot later. He was in the department of water beings.

31:50

to build our dam on the farm. So we have, all these people who fell into the house have helped us ever and ever. My mother was also here for the funeral. She visited us. And I have a very nice picture of grandma with Hubertus on her arm and Friedrich Kahl with Monika still in the spread seat in the Gips, but not in the Herrenspagat anymore, but already very withdrawn.

32:19

So we ended up there and worked hard there. We had good success. We saw Lucerne, we had cattle. I threw wine out and we planted onions because we were used to it from Caledon and could sell them well. That was in Texas, they were very early on. I started with vegetables and a little fruit between what I don’t know where. The dam that Friedrich Kahl had built, we got our water from it. The apricots were doing pretty well in the first year, although they were completely neglected.

32:49

As I said, the first wine harvest was great. We had such a success and I was very surprised myself that we had, we didn’t know any wine.

33:02

I had a black kossa, an old man, who took care of our animals, who got the herbs for the cow and for the cow the herbs, and he took me to it, if I didn’t do what he wanted with the cow. I will never forget that. It was a kossa from the old barn. Really. He helped me so much. Unfortunately, he died later. Let’s take a moment.

33:30

Ose asks me why we called him Hubertus. The fallen brother of his father, Hubertus, who was brutally murdered in Poland as a seriously wounded person.

33:43

He had the name Hubertus from that. His grandfather was also called Hubertus. It was a family name of the Aulox, who went back a long way. Even, I don’t know, I can’t swear, but he went back a long way. Someone was always called Hubertus by the Aulox. That’s why the name Hubertus comes. And, strangely, Hubertus has a similarity with this uncle. His eyes are a bit far apart, with the eyebrows, they are completely Hubertus from Aulox. So it was very important for my husband

34:13

Now we start. We are going to close the community of Wuster, which was close, even if it was 30 kilometers away.

34:28

Then I thought, we had bazaars and we always needed money, as it is still the case today. And I thought, maybe I could go and collect a little with our farmers. And then a Chris Nodé, a neighbor of ours, helped me. He took me everywhere for the first time to show me the way to the farmers and to introduce the farmers themselves, so I knew who is where. Because we hadn’t been in Brehre for a long time and I didn’t know anyone.

34:58

We didn’t have time to drink coffee. And so I came to a farm in Fervio, the highest farm on the mountain. And Chris brought me up to a man from afar and I got out, took a deep breath and said, that would be a place for me.

35:17

But I mean, that’s it. I liked it that way. It was so beautiful. You had a wonderful view. You lay against the mountains, all in front of you, the deep Breereviertal, and behind you these enormous Alpenhohen mountains. It was wonderful for me. Well, I collected a few years. I always do that in winter. The bazaar was in October. So when it rained, the farmers knew they were coming to collect.

35:47

I had a lot of fun collecting. When it was raining and I couldn’t get out of it because I drank too much coffee and talked too much, they said, we’ve been waiting for you for two days and you’re not coming. That was very lucrative for the church. Because we had such a good relationship through this collecting, or we wanted to, both together. I would have liked to have gone to bed and slept on a rainy day, but I said, first the list has to be finished and the farmers waited for me.

36:17

They said, no, they had a bad harvest, they can’t give anything. Then I said, come on, let’s see what you gave last time. Then I had the list with me. He said, you gave it like that last time. Oh, please, please, you’re not so poor that you… They all gave it. They didn’t… One of them put me in front of the door. One of them is down there in the valley. And then I always had to overcome myself to go there. But I went there. And most of the time I got something. And if it was a few farm products or something. So, this collecting.

36:47

Later, I learned to get to know and love each individual person. And vice versa. They were all incredibly helpful, as we later found out on the farm.

36:59

Now, in a peculiar way, came to me Mrs. Grießbach, my former bread-seller, with whom I worked on the full-blood Arabian steed at the Chiemsee. I want to say that my correspondence was great and I stayed in touch with everyone. Which helped me a lot when you think about it afterwards. I have always written to her what we do, how we are doing, she also wrote again. She had a daughter who went to South America for Volkswagen, she was an animal doctor.

37:29

a wealthy woman. Back then the government was on fire and in Germany people were afraid that it would be very socialized and that their wealth would be very burdened. And she wanted to bring wealth abroad and asked us if we would like to buy a farm. Well, we didn’t want to. Of course we wanted to. But I wrote back to her, I couldn’t accept the offer because we wouldn’t have a security for her. But we would look around and we

37:59

We have done this honestly. Because we saw that the son was almost finished at school, he came back soon, and then he wanted to have the third of the farm with him to his three quarters farm to earn more. And in the three and a half years we have brought this third to Vordermann. I have to say that. In any case, now I have the farm again.

38:30

We looked around and saw many farms that were on sale. We went there and saw the possibilities. We did everything we could to get ourselves clear. We sat down and said what we needed. We need a standing income on the farm to be able to pay interest. We really tried to determine, based on our ability, what we needed, how much we could spend, etc.

39:00

The one farm was a developed farm, which had a good income, which was unpaid for us. And then there were farms that had many possibilities, but were underdeveloped or not developed, where you definitely needed a lot of money to set foot on something. So it was pretty hopeless, we couldn’t afford both, because we knew what kind of sum Mrs. Grießbach wanted us to get.

39:30

We had two farms sorted out of these many farms. One was at Verlierstor. It had a tiny little working house as a living house. The ground was flat, sandy. But it had a relatively good standing income. It was relatively livable and big. And on this farm was my understanding.

39:56

And then one day Mr. von Waig came to us, especially from the mountain farm in Breelivier, and told us he had heard that we wanted to buy a farm. He wants to sell his farm.

40:09

But the price was of course unprofitable for us. It had a standing income, it had a living ground, it had springs. So that was our main concern. The farm must have a standing income, it must have water and it must have a deep ground. Otherwise you can’t survive as a farmer. It was shabby, it was a mountain farm, very difficult to process, but it was beautiful. As I said, when I came up with it, I said that would be a place for me. And that came back to my mind.

40:38

Now, Fritich, Karl and I have been struggling. What should we do? Should we say yes to a farm or not? Both properties of the two different farms have been increasingly urgent. They had to make a decision. We thought about it for a long time. We calculated and calculated. And finally, on one evening, when I knew we had to make a decision, I threw all my knowledge into the sky. My dear Lord God, please help us. I don’t know

41:08

My heart was on the farm in Breere 4, my mind in Vlierstop. Ha, and you will laugh. The next morning the owner of the farm in Vlierstop says, he is sorry, he had to cancel his sale. The neighbour next door was afraid, he wanted to renovate his farm and he didn’t want to let the farm slip out of his hands. He would have offered him a better offer. Hooray, my heart had won. I knew it.

41:34

So, now we started a canister-paint, because we had too little money to buy. So we went to the executive room in Nepal and said, we have so and so much money, how much do you give us? We didn’t say that it was our money, not ours, but borrowed. And they lent us more than double the amount, in terms of contract. We had our paint. 150 percent debt.

42:04

If I started today, I would never do it again in my life. But we were young enough, we had three children. Until now we worked for others, but now we are going. My husband…

42:19

So we went to the farm. He was still doing the harvest downstairs. The son moved in in Avonzon. After three and a half years, four years went by, our contract. Just in time we got our farm up in the mountains. I was already moving up, started working there. Fritich Karl came after. The children came after. And wait a minute, that was… Yes, I’ll say it right away. In any case, we moved up and started working.

42:46

with these 150% debt. My brother Hans gave us 200 pounds and said, Olle, in 10 years, I’ll pay you the debt. So… Well, we started with a lot of courage, and it had to be courage. The house was small, clay floor, no water, no electricity, it didn’t bother us, it was crumbling. The water ran about 20 meters above the house,

43:16

a source, we will definitely start. I have to mention that Volkskass knew and supported us. They were very loyal to us. When I later warned them, they should not be so generous. We never liked Volkskass, but we never had a plus. We always stood at zero.

43:36

I warned her that anyone who wants to bankrupt us can do so. The organization, the agricultural association, just needs to say that they won’t give us any more money. Then he laughed at me. He laughed straight in my face. The director said, but Mr. von Aulock, not you. They just didn’t believe us, even though they knew exactly how we were.

43:59

I found out later that the rich farmers from the Hexfallee had tens of thousands of debts at the bank. And we who didn’t have any, we had no debts at the bank. We were only thinking about 0.8, right?

44:12

Who helped us a lot and what helped us was that the agricultural association gave us a year’s credit in advance. So we paid after the harvest. When the harvest was over, we paid the debts of the past year. By the way, most farmers did that back then in South Africa. A very unhealthy situation. And we tried to get to the point as soon as possible where we had the harvest money

44:42

was done.

44:47

To tell you all, you can all remember the Breher Führer’s time. You all grew up up there. You had a paradise on earth. I had it too. The days were very long, the nights very short. I started with vegetables to pay the cash we needed in the week. One or two workers, that’s how we started. Dad and I. I built vegetables and sold them on Saturday morning. I was in Wuster at 6 a.m. and sold them on the street.

45:17

We took the cattle with us, took them up, but we had to sell them very quickly, otherwise they would starve, there were no cattle. We had a huge mountainous area with proteins.

Part 5

00:01

Big area of mountainous areas, but as I said, no meadows. So that had to go away, which was actually a relief for me. For that I then, as I said, made the vegetables and I started breeding chickens, partly self-brewed, I brewed them on petrol batteries. That was maybe an excitement. Always on the road at night, set up a kitchen stall. Later I slaughtered chickens for hotels in Buster. And so we did something to get as quickly as possible

00:31

to get cash in. I just want to show you quickly. My sister Heidchen completed her sister’s education in Pretoria and then started working. She bought her Isetta, this small, tiny car with which she drove through everywhere and through every traffic. In the Isetta she even visited the Delfts in Blomfontein and stayed there for a night, on any tour.

00:59

In 1959 she did her training in St. Petersburg and then worked again in the monastery in the city of Kap. It was a hospital that was responsible for all the sea men. That’s what happened. So Heidchen was now also here in the land of Kap. My brother had three farms in Freistaat. He was a man of honor and he always told me… He was our sun brother. He always said to me,

01:29

The more I get, the more expensive cars I buy. That was the guy. We always had our joys in him. He didn’t react at all, even if he felt bad. He was wonderful. Well, fortunately he got married later. Now, what I have to emphasize in particular, on May 5, 1959 our third child was born. Our Marie-Louise, our Sissy.

01:57

That was a great pleasure. She was born in Wuster with the Catholic Mary sisters. Because I didn’t have the courage to drive to Caledonia with her anymore. The driving path would have been enough to bring me to the end. I will never forget that. They were all German-speaking sisters who came from all over Germany. They were so nice. It was my most beautiful first holidays that I experienced with my Cissi’s birth.

02:27

They made me look like a

02:57

I was allowed to take my hot bath there and my food was ready in the pipe in the kitchen. They were mostly at the Andach at the time. And I have, so it was a very attractive relationship that still lasts to this day. I just got a letter from a sister. There are only a small handful of sisters left. They were all pretty much on the old side anyway. And they now live in Konstanzia, right? That’s her mother’s house. Konstanzia is her mother’s house. So we had a wonderful relationship.

03:27

They sewed me clothes for my flu game in Worcester. There was a sewing sister. They came to our bazaar to support us. And I told Pastor Rust, now I almost said a terrible word, Pastor Rust was a bit forced to sit down with the sisters for a moment, to have a cup of coffee, which he didn’t want at all. And from that came a very nice relationship between the Evangelical Church and the Catholic Church. So if there were Christians for me, then it was these sisters.

03:57

They didn’t get any salary, they didn’t have any vacation. The vacation was in Constanze, in the maternity home. And I experienced it, from Germany, from the maternity home, that I visited in Germany, in Württemberg, it turned out that the sisters were allowed to go home after so and so much service time. And the excitement among the sisters. They didn’t have any handbags, nothing, suitcases. They didn’t know anything like that.

04:27

to get them and so on. So I am very grateful to these sisters. That was on the farm. They were there two or three times. I took them to the farm. It was an experience for them to be on a farm and walk through proteins. It was really exciting. They prayed for us and they had a lovely little chapel. I gave them flowers for the chapel. It was a wonderful experience. And they took part in our process of becoming

04:57

The children had to admire their crypt after the service in our church. We went over and looked at the large room full of crypts. So it was, I want to emphasize this again, although you still know all this, because you have all experienced it.

05:14

The first seven years on Avonçon were just work, I would say. We were unlucky. There was great drought. The harvest was getting smaller and smaller. It was extremely dry. With the help of the German state we built a dam that we could get cheap. Your uncle Wilhelm Aulock was in the refugee ministry in Bonn. And through him we got this help from the German state.

05:44

German farmers who had lost everything and had emigrated, gave help. In South Africa there were four people who received this help. And we were the only ones who paid back everything. With the others it went wrong and I can understand that. The conditions were very favorable. 5% and 1% interest at the beginning or 4% interest at the beginning and at the end 4% payment and 1% interest.

06:13

The dam was built with the support of the South African state, which did everything to stop water. They were very interested in natural dams, which were fed and filled with small rivers in winter and a farm was in progress. And you know that, that was an incredible excitement. The dam was built in the mountains, so it had to have twice as strong a wave. It was 10 meters deep at its lowest point,

06:43

Not too much for its size or depth, but it was a mountainous area. A lake was a clay soil that was suitable for dam building. When the dam was finished and started to run full.

06:59

and maybe it was a quarter full, and of course it was very exciting for me, to finally have water for wine and fruit and so on, and not only to have to suffer from the small springs, which never reached, and also not to go up the mountain slopes. One morning I come out, and there comes a huge stream of water. And my heart sank into the little lake, and I rushed to the dam. There it was, where the exhaust pipe, the lowest point of the dam,

07:29

And that was last summer. I can’t even tell you how I got rid of all of that. Because the water was the lifeblood of the farm.

07:40

We took Papa Rode from the water department. Everyone was examined and gave me the advice that I should try to dig a tunnel to see where the pipe was broken. And now I sent a prayer after prayer. With two or three men, I had a tunnel for three weeks through this ten-meter-high…

08:01

We were digging a dam wall with our hands, of course, always down at the pipe, and prayed that the crack outside the dam wall, not on the inside of the dam, but on the outside of the wall, would have happened. And it was like that. Finally we arrived at the dam wall. It was empty in the meantime. We arrived at the dam wall. It was exactly on the crown of the dam wall. What happened?

08:31

I didn’t care about that. Because I had too much to do. They were all experts. They wanted to help us save and didn’t put the exhaust pipe into cement, but only the tabs into cement. And then the man who filled it up, who did the earthworks, rolled huge stones over it, not being careful that it didn’t happen straight over the pipes, and then the pipe cracked. So.

09:01

Papa Ode kommt raus!

09:03

with a pump that was replaced from the outside. The pipe could be pulled out, replaced, and I have assumed that it will be completely in cement, although it was on the outside. And we also made a supply material. We made a tap inside the dam, at the outlet pipe, so that in case of emergency we can close the tap from above with a wire frame, so that the water does not run away. That was my idea, or probably the idea of Papa Rode.

09:33

So that’s what we did. And then I left. I couldn’t stand the tension. Now they put artificial pressure on it. The pressure that the full dam would have had if it had been full. And then I was scared. I ran away. And he held on.

09:50

So, you know, it never went without a fright in the morning or in the evening. After seven years we were so far that we realized that we couldn’t pay interest and pay off and raise children from the attraction of the farm.

10:07

Schätzle and I drove with my Monica, who was 12 years old, to Germany, invited by your father, who lived in Hamburg, and his secret mission was to ask him for help. He refused. With the reason that we would be a barrel without ground, which the in-laws were right about, because in agriculture you can’t create a safe exit. I am grateful in retrospect that we didn’t get any help. Now we absolutely had to decide for ourselves what we should do.

10:37

So we decided to work with the Schätzli.

10:42

He also got a job very quickly, because at that time, you could find work anywhere. At a company in Kapstadt, I forgot the name now, Andrachs was also in it, he stayed there for only three months and then switched to a German-Italian company, or German company at that time, with a Mr. Gerike, in Kapstadt, where he first had to sell water irrigation, and later on, agricultural machines were made from it. So he worked as an agent.

11:11

Just to tell you the beginning. He started his position. I don’t have the date in my head now, it doesn’t matter. We still had the ancient fort, which still served us faithfully, but the machine was still rattling. Our father brought you three in the front of the driver’s house down to the Bainscliffe, so that he could go to Cape Town by elevator to work.

11:37

I can’t tell you where my heart was. I turned around with you three, he got a lift very quickly. You three with my three little pups. The harvest right before the harvest, right before the harvest with three workers on the road. So I can’t tell you.

11:55

That was a moment when I really felt the need to change. Because I didn’t know if it would work. But we had to, and that was the choice. So, please, eat bird or die, my darling told me that so often. So I didn’t want to die, not even for my little ones. We did the harvest, we worked, we continued, we paid our taxes, then we had to buy a small tractor. We still had the little Ferguson, that was impossible, he was so old, he left me every two hours.

12:25

We bought the tractor on credit. One day I didn’t know where to get the 100 pounds. Or were they already 100 rand? I don’t know. And a Grefinso came from Munich to visit. And as she pulled away with Redwitz’s friend from his consul, and as she drove away again, my darling found his glass for his glass of wine. 100 rand. Lying.

12:53

And then I took the 100 Rand and drove to Rusta and paid my tractor and they claimed that I had already paid. And I said, I had, I was exactly on the book. I was exactly on the book. I said, this is my last rate for the tractor. Then they laughed at me, then he said to me, Mrs. von Aulow, if you want to give me the money, I’ll put it in your own pocket. I said, no problem, then it stays with me. So ask me, tell me now.

13:17

The sky was definitely in there.

13:19

In all these little things. I really wanted a bathroom on the farm. A bathroom! It was the dream of our family. Our toilet was very romantic, under a birch tree that had been planted by Germans. Between two huge rock blocks. And it was very unpleasant in the winter, in the meadow and so on and so forth. And we wanted a bathroom. I get the message from the parents from Germany. I get 100, maybe 100, from the government, from the German government,

13:49

But it was good. No, it wasn’t good. It was a balance of weight. No, a balance of weight. That’s the word. I say the 100. The 100 are called. A bathroom is built from that. It didn’t work. The tractor broke down. Exactly 100. So it went into the tractor. Well, that’s just a little story later how we finally built the bathroom. There we have, as in the raw construction, one sat on the toilet, the other sat in the bathroom, the third went to the shower.

14:19

And then Karl got a little extra seat, because he would have been so happy to sit down somewhere. So we opened a bottle of champagne, we opened all the cranes and we celebrated. That was a little later. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Well, in any case, we worked like this. We didn’t take a vacation. We didn’t go out. It was really, when I wanted to sit down, I said, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come.

14:49

to stop with the chicken business. It was just too much. I had the farm alone now. Besides, the first woolverse began to bring the KZ chickens to the market. The prices of us farmers were offered. It was no longer worth it. And as long as I was growing vegetables, I urgently needed the chicken stock. And then I stopped growing vegetables at some point, because the chicken fertilizer could no longer provide the fertilizer for the vegetables.

15:19

I gave up the other one of these side branches and then dedicated myself to the farm. We dried all the fruits. It was an incredibly intense work with the drying of the fruits. And Friedrich Thal started to really work in the company. And he was sent away six weeks after the Transvaal, after Natal, after the South West, after everywhere. He was very often away for a very long time and suffered a lot. Because he was absolutely a family man and a house man.

15:49

He was talking about his family. But he said that driving a car was his blessing, because he had a big open place from the war of the battle-riders, which never happened. And if he got an inflammation there, then he would immediately go into delirium, so to speak. And I was afraid of him a few times that he would make it. By the way, Christoph, as we later knew him here,

16:19

But back then there was nothing for it or against it, or we didn’t know enough. But if he was on his feet for too long, then the danger was that the cramp in his legs would ignite. This open area would ignite very badly. So that’s why I was blessed. He had found the job that was cut off for him. You could recognize my Friedrich Kahl from afar in his company car, with the hat on. He always had to wear a hat because of the sun.

16:49

And with a cigarette you could see him from behind through the mirror when you were driving behind him unconsciously. So it was for all of us, for our family, for our father. So that was one picture. And he had exactly the right job. He had to work very hard. It wasn’t easy for him. He had a very good way with the farmers, which were incredibly difficult. I know a farmer in the Hex Valley, he threw him out, said, I don’t need new stuff, I don’t need a syringe pump. And he went out quietly and went back in the kitchen door.

17:19

But look, if you do that… He had an incredibly good hand. He was completely out of politics. He was able to talk to the left and the right side peacefully. And he was able to talk to people wonderfully. It was a gift for him. And in this way we started to get some air.

17:43

We started to pay the land

18:13

E.A. on the farm in Breyrefier. We had already met him in Riverside, because he was also German. Pastor Schanz is making us aware of that. There is also a German in Brandfach. He also moves like her. Günther has an incredibly interesting life behind him. He comes from Frankfurt. And as I said, Heidchen and Günther got married later. And they lived, they also brought a whole life behind them. And then they settled here in Stellenbosch.

18:43

and worked from here. Günther was also in the camp. He was a flight instructor in South Africa, in Pretoria. For Junkers. Thanks. Yes.

18:54

And I thought to myself, Monika Spatz, upper school, where to? We didn’t have money back then for any boarding schools. So where to? To the sister’s heart. When I think about it afterwards, it was actually an assumption. But for me it was just the way out and Heidchen was of course ready. And Günther did it very passionately. So she went to school in Blumenhof. She did her graduation there, then studied in Stellenbosch

19:24

microbiologist, in the south-west, and at the meat shop in Pretoria, and then she was a teacher at Technikon in Pretoria and for the university until she got married. But I don’t want to say that now, I’m just mentioning it. Hubertus was more difficult, in this respect because he was a boy. He also graduated the first classes in Brehre 4, was not good in school, which made me very worried. 1 and 1 stayed 3 and was not 2. So I had to

19:54

He was very willing. If he loved the teacher, he would do everything right. If not, he was very playful. We later tested him because we didn’t know what to do with this child. They told us that he was a standard 7 student. His boy was technically and mechanically 95% equipped. Theoretically, it was equal to zero. We knew that. It wasn’t just our imagination. It wasn’t his fault. He was so equipped in one direction.

20:24

confirmed what to do. That was a great fortune. And I told myself, he was speechless. We looked at each other…

20:36

schools, after boarding schools. English boarding school, back then they already took out the

21:06

Then I simply prayed for it. For two years I was focused on what with our son. I knew from home that it is not good if a single son and brother is always put on a throne. He had to, it was clear to me, he had to come under other boys and if possible under youth, under normal youth. And if possible under German youth.

21:36

I was

22:06

And then a teacher came from Hermannsburg to my house and I said, if this is not a time for finger-pointing, then I wrote and I once brought my Hubertus, who was 12 years old, to Hermannsburg with a heavy heart. That was terribly far away from us. He could not come home every holiday. And afterwards I did not know if I had done the right thing. He suffered terribly. He was an introvert to the stadium, as it is so often in the years of development.

22:36

I want to break a lance for Hermannsburg. The father sent me a home witness after three months about Hubertus, that could not have been better judged than by myself. And they immediately recognized what was missing from the boy. He suffered because he was away from home. He was of course harassed, he could not say his name, instead of Oulock asshole and so on. And at that age you are there yourself. But that’s how it is among children. And they got him very quickly.

23:06

They found out that Hubs was technically fit at that age. He could repair everything electrically. They put him in as the oldest room. He was worried that the electric lines, if a fire broke out somewhere, he would be called. And that helped him to say, I am also someone. That helped him. And I want to mention that later, he also learned how the famous evangelist,

23:36

He met Mr. Vollmer in Hermannsburg, who helped him a lot. My son brought me some writings to ask me what I thought of them. I never expected that from my Hubertus. I am still grateful to Vollmer, he had such a good hand with children at that age. He really stuck to it. My Hubertus has been working on all these topics from then on, which made me happy.

24:06

that he was supposed to go to Atlas with his degree to go to Campon Park. That was the only condition that he had to go through in mathematics. And since I knew that he had big difficulties in mathematics because of his theoretical skills, I wrote to Hermannsburg, to the director, I wrote to the house father, I wrote to his class teacher and I begged them to give me any support, because if he doesn’t go through in mathematics…

24:36

he can’t start this treadmill. And they pulled him through.

24:41

And I was incredibly grateful for that. It doesn’t matter how they pulled him through, what they did, whether they pressed him in the eye or whatever. It’s not like he didn’t have an understanding of mathematics. He can explain everything in practice, what happens when the blood, the air pressure, the oil pressure, the external pressure, the internal pressure, he can explain wonderfully. But he can’t sit down and write it down on mathematical rules. And that was his hamster shoe. And that’s why we were so lucky that he could go to Kempen Park.

25:11

I also learned about it from a neighbour who was beaten up there because he couldn’t stand it. And our Hubs absolutely stood it. This training was cruel, but he stood it, he did his exam and he has his life course today. Because as they used to say, craftsmanship has its golden ground. And that is very important with the modern craftsmanship of aircraft engines and understanding of everything that is connected with flight.

25:41

because Rosal must go home and I must go home. Bye, see you next time.

25:49

So, and now we want to go a little further. That was in 1967 when our Hubertus went to Hermannsburg. On the ninth and fourth of the same year, our Monica was confirmed in Stellenbosch by Präses von Delft. In 1968, our mother settled in Cape Town, in Sea Point, and stayed with us, because her four children were here in South Africa.

26:15

In 1969 our Hubertus was confirmed and on the 1st and 3rd your beloved, my brother, uncle Hans, married in Johannesburg. We all went to the wedding and we will probably never forget this wedding. It was a wonderful party in between the many many works and we all enjoyed it very much. And now comes a… I also told little about the farm and about the work on the farm. You know it of course.

26:45

We had fruit, peach apricots, dried peach, apricot wine and plum, and I was farming with vegetables and chickens to quickly bring in the cashew. Because the fruit was mostly dried, it was incredibly intensive work. We never had a chance to relax on the farm.

27:15

These are the under-stuck for the tamed-stuck. You could work under the roof. I then brought out the radio so that people could hear their transmitter and had a little music. And then the contour waves were made on the land for the rain that we often got, also the very deep-lying snow. And then already in May, in June, we started cutting, cutting from wine, from fruit trees, depending on the…

27:45

And it happens today that I dream that our father bought the farm back because he loved it so much, and I stand at the kitchen window in October. It’s neither mowed nor I’m out of my mind. So the pressure was already very, very big. But it was a wonderful, beautiful home and ground for our children to grow up. Our Hubertus didn’t get too big for nothing.

28:15

or a beetroot or a yellow beet in the hand, always was feeding on raw vegetables or raw fruit. The children ate even lemon-roast. I could not understand that at all. We also had orange on the farm, so that we had fresh fruit on the farm from December 1st until August. And vegetables, of course. I sold the vegetables early in the morning, Saturday morning, on the street in Worcester, and had the operating capital

28:45

next week to be able to pay my two to three, later four, workers. And then the chicken farm came along, which did a lot of work. I think I mentioned it earlier that during the week you could slaughter so and so much, sell the chickens before Christmas, deliver the eggs together with the vegetables, etc. So it was a very, very, very intensive work.

29:14

Yeah.

29:14

Now comes a big event. In the meantime we had a little bit of air through Fatih’s work. He earned quite well, got paid extra by working extra. He was often away from home for weeks because he was in Transval or in Natal or in Amphal Refi or wherever. But it helped our Fatih very much with his trombone. Since he had this car job, he had no trombones anymore. And I was already very happy about that alone.

29:44

We decided, now is the time to get a bathroom. We didn’t have electricity yet, but there were already possibilities with gas. So we decided, now we’re going to build a kitchen, a dining room and a shop for the people, for my workers, a bathroom and a bedroom. Because the old house was really tiny.

30:08

So we built. And now the construction was done. And all the children came home for some holidays. Those were probably the winter holidays or even the September holidays. And now our bathroom was completely finished. The water was running, the gas was running, but it was not yet cleaned. We got a bottle of champagne. One sat on the toilet. That was certainly our father. He closed the lid so that he sat comfortably. Two sat in the bathtub. One sat down on the shower.

30:38

where I just fell down on the floor and we opened a bottle of champagne and celebrated. We opened all the cranes, the water was running, the gas was on. Hurray, hurray! We had a bathroom and warm water to shower. Not somewhere fast in the sink or in the barrel or anywhere else. It was a huge party. And we will all, I think we will all, not forget this moment. Now we have points. Points.

31:08

On my birthday on September 28th, we all went to bed tired, the children were not there, and my husband was already asleep, and I was awake somehow, my dogs were restless, and it was dead quiet outside, and suddenly a huge thunderstorm drew through our house.

31:30

And I was immediately… The mortar fell on our beds, the cement was coming off, the doors were shaking, the windows were shaking, earth quaking. I rushed out to the dam. My only thought was, the dam is breaking, the dam is breaking. I turned around and said, what can I do, I can’t do anything if it breaks. Then my neighbor came in, who was so scared of thunderstorms. And then my husband came in, who was still sleeping in the bedroom. I went in and got him out. And he said, oh, that’s protected.

32:00

He said, in his sleep. Until I had him out. This experience, this earthquake, 6.8 or 6.4, 6.8 on the Richter’s Car, as we later heard, was really an experience. It was dead silence. And then these thunderstorms that went through under one. Then I ran out, as I said, with different thoughts and…

32:25

Then a massive mountain came down. It was a thunder and a thunderbolt. I thought it was 20 meters behind our house. There were huge rocks that had fallen down at some point.

32:40

I saw how tiny the human being was against such a natural disaster. I ducked automatically and tried to cuddle under a rock. I was very grateful that the children weren’t there. That was the earthquake. And then, as the first big shock was over, I ran out behind the trees to see if I could see anything. There were these many falling rocks, stones, formations. They had lit the mountain.

33:10

And all the mountains burned in huge fire snakes. That was due to the friction of the stones, which rolled down so quickly. We had a lot of iron stones there. It was really an experience. This earthquake lasted for another two years. We still remember the thunderstorms that were going through under one. And after half a year, another shock of 6.4 came on the court scale,

33:40

in the kitchen etc. That was the biggest shock for the RP. Yes, and now…

33:49

The next morning, me and Fritich Thal walked around to see if anything was still happening. The dam had held up. It was made of clay. It was elastic enough to withstand the shock. The dam wall was twice as thick as required, because we were lying on the slope. Our guardian angels were absolutely on duty again. The dam was in order. For me as a farmer, that was the lifeblood that was not cut off.

34:19

But what happened was that our two small springs were gone. And only half of our main spring ran so fast. Of course, the movement of the spring caused water to flow underneath, which had never had water before, and we were taken away. And that was of course a big shock.

34:39

I thought, yes, that the trees don’t grow in the sky. We were just starting to really get some breath. Financially, we were so far that we didn’t have to pay our corporate pay a year in advance, but that we could already pay the running year. And we were very happy about it. And now that. So we had to drill. And drilling is an incredibly expensive thing.

35:06

We were drilling in the mountains, where the small springs were, and we were drilling down there, in front of our house. And it was all incredibly exciting. And we were getting deep air, and I don’t know if we did it again, I’ll have to look it up. In any case, we were drilling. And this joy, as if after three weeks of drilling…

35:27

We first came across a lot of stones and a lot of repairs at the drill. But we came across a waterway that a farmer’s son showed us.

35:40

He could see the fork where the water was flowing. He could already show us from afar where the water veins were flowing. For me Spanish, Portuguese. But for him he was very sure and said, here veins are crossing, here is water. And it was like that. And it was 2,500 gallons per hour as we tested it. So we were blessed and grateful that the drilling was at least worth it. But for us it was further, further, further and more and more.

36:10

So that was the earthquake. As I said, it took two more years until it calmed down completely. I would like to say that we were in the direct active earthquake belt. Wulsley, Ceres, Tulbach was the triangle where the main earthquake had erupted. And we were six kilometers away from Ceres, from Wulsley 15 kilometers per street or 20 kilometers. So we were in the direct belt.

36:40

That’s why we really got it wrong. And we are on the Wuster Bridge. It’s a big underground bridge between the highlands, Karoo and the lake. And the tension was too high and then it exploded. And there was this earthquake that went over Wuster. We were 30 kilometers away from Wuster. I think Port Elizabeth into the sea and Dürgen back in. That’s how the Wuster Bridge works.

37:10

a Japanese geophysicist or whatever he was, who knew a lot about earthquakes, and that was very interesting. That was the earthquake.

37:22

But we finished our new building, which was also slightly damaged, but because it was rebuilt, it wasn’t that bad. And again a guardian angel. What we didn’t know, we were insured against earthquakes. And I mean, we didn’t know that. And that was fantastic. People came out who noticed our damage. And of course we didn’t put the damage in the house, but we paid off the debts with it and blasted ourselves and filled ourselves out and so on.

37:52

And that’s why we’re helping to finance the drilling. And then one day my husband came to the Firsichn with his car. And I was surprised that he had never done that before.

38:10

and said, Weibeli, we’re going to Germany. I said, are you crazy? I said, as long as the kids go to school, I’m not going away, and you don’t know anything, and so on and so forth. And now a war begins in my family against me. I still see my kids, Monica. Sisi, yes, yes, Mom, just wait until your head shakes and you can’t enjoy anything anymore, and you have nothing left. You’re going with Daddy to Germany. I said, but, Kinelle, we can’t yet. They said, very funny, just,

38:40

And daddy said he would take care of it. And after a relatively long war with my family, I said, if daddy puts the money on the table, cash, that we can fly, then I say yes. And daddy muttered, it didn’t take half a year or four months, he brought me the proof that he had the cash. Now I was delivered.

39:08

And what did we do? We flew. On our re-enacted wedding journey, which was just 20 years ago.

39:18

I can say that I don’t want to tell you everything that was said about it, but it was a journey like it is in the fairy tale book. From the first moment to the last, it was a huge success. We flew, I think we flew past the 30th relative in Germany. We flew to Hamburg, I first met my father-in-law. I only saw her briefly before our engagement, but that was not a meeting,

39:48

short hello.

39:50

And I remember my heart was pounding when we arrived in Hamburg, because my father-in-law was a tough guy and was very critical. I was very slim at the time, fortunately, had a dark blue suit, it was the short fashion, I was allowed to afford it at the time, but at least knee-high. He had a huge bunch of protein from the farm in his arm. And my father said,

40:20

I said, father, you go ahead, I’ll take care of the luggage. My in-laws stood there, I took my heart into the protein straw, and I turned to them. And my father-in-law always looked past me right and left, and he kept looking, where are they, where are they? Then I made a click and said, father, here I am.

40:40

One reaction was, donnerwetter girl, I thought you were a stewardess. I won, for my husband and for my family. I had a hard time winning this father-in-law for us. I did it, I was satisfied and went home. Since then, we have had a very close relationship. Then we went everywhere, it was wonderful. And when we got home, in Worcester…

41:11

Nobody could get us out of there. We had asked our neighbors to get us out. But there were, next to our window, I don’t know how many black, crumpled legs. Next door. And I look out.

41:25

There is our Sissy from school, she has taken a vacation from school, her parents are coming back, she has to go to the train station urgently and has taken a handful of friends with her and all of them were walking next to us, they had already discovered, or were getting their suitcases or something, that we were extremely lucky. So it was a homecoming, as you can imagine, as you couldn’t imagine it better. That was it.

41:51

Now just a short overview of my children. Monika.

41:58

In 1973, he was given his BSc degree in Stellenbosch. At that time, he was the Chancellor of the University of Forster. In 1974, Sissilein was confirmed by Pastor Tötemeier in Buster. The confirmers of that time had joined together to name him Pastor Tötemeier. We called him the Pastor of Love. Whenever he went to the Chancellor, he always had something to say with love. He was so small and so loving to the children. He gave them a lot of freedom,

42:28

and the children wanted to give him something. And I had an idea and she gave it to my Cissi and she was very excited and they gave him a small plate, a small plate of bells of the German cathedral. And I will never forget the face of Pastor Tötemeyer, how incredibly he was happy about this gift. December 74.

42:55

Our aunt Heidi, my sister, got a third child, Jeanette. She gave birth on December 25, 1974. It was very unexpected, because it wasn’t possible. But she was on her way.

43:16

But she solved the birth of her and the condition in which my sister was at the time. She solved something terrible. Heidchen collapsed, became unconscious, was brought into the care of the cow in a great hurry and it was found that she had one of the worst brain inflammation that exists. I can’t tell you what kind of fear I have been through on the farm with her three little children.

43:46

She was admitted, she was taken care of by three doctors, a German, an English and a Greek. And they must have done the right thing. Heidchen was then two years later still on cortisone. She woke up, was completely normal, asked how her Janette was doing.

44:05

And she was absolutely considered a female miracle. Again and again the doctors came with students around her, told the medical history, she was considered a female miracle.

44:16

I won’t tell the whole story here. Her tuberculosis, she was operated on as a small baby by a doctor. Tuberculosis. And he apparently had a capsular disease and he got rid of it in his condition. And he went into his brain via the vertebra and triggered this terrible inflammation. In any case, our Heidchen survived. Oh, I can’t tell you what we went through.

44:46

She had a baby at the same time. She was kept for one or two months. I can’t remember exactly. And then Jeanette came to visit us for a while. Because Günther had to work. Heidchen was in the care for a long time. And the children were distributed. Volkmanns took care of the children. As I said, everything went well. Now I want to tell you a little story. Jeanette, we had a baby again. Which was of course very exciting.

45:16

kitchen table, which you know, bathed, as you were all bathed on the farm.

Part 6

00:01 I urgently needed to cook for a lot of guests. I was also at work. When Monika was there, I could entrust Scharnettel to her. Hubertus was there, and Monika was desperate. She couldn’t finish the work. The clock was chasing her. She called Hubs and said, take Scharnettel in the stroller and go for a little walk. Good, he did that very sweetly and big and well-behaved. He was such a good-natured bear, could wonderfully with small children. He took care of smaller children touchingly.

00:31 this giant guy already big back then, off with the Mitzernettel, but came back after a quarter of an hour completely beside himself, had her on his arm, Monika said, what’s wrong with her, what’s wrong with her, she had a Schlickser. He was so shocked, now he did something wrong, he immediately came home. So this is just a little cute story from practice, how it all went. 1976 our Sissi-Matrik made…

00:58 And in 1977 she went to Stellenbosch University to study. And our church in Wuster celebrated its 100th anniversary. That was a big celebration and we will all not forget it, which also many Stellenboscher came to. On 24.06.76 we celebrated our silver wedding at home.

01:21 And that was a great event. We had so many friends that we had to celebrate it in two different parties. But our children and all our friends had put so much effort into it. Now I have to include here that through the Friesens, who were often on the farm, they also brought their friends from Stellenbosch to the farm. This is how we got to know and love the large circle of friends in Stellenbosch. And that made it easier for us later, when we left the farm.

01:51 we were in the circle of friends and had nothing more to do to adapt. That’s just in between, said in between. All friends were there, a big party. And we two, we two silver wedding couples, we give ourselves free shoulders and conscience. Our flags were paid off.

02:14 So that was a double celebration. Because I mean that we had made it, through the work of our father of course. Because I would never have been able to pay it off from agriculture, I don’t think. But through his work we had really managed to pay off our farm. Here I just want to add that we both before, this of course did not happen on the silver wedding day, but a little earlier, we both consciously for the first time

02:44 in Buster and did that with the best conscience and enjoyed it incredibly. 1980 we bought our house in Stellenbosch. Here I have to add again and say, how did it come to this? After our Marie-Louise, our Cissi-Line, was finished with her studies, I said to my husband, so and now we have to start thinking about our old age.

03:10 Because that had been on our minds for a long time. How do we do that? We had no pension and no retirement. How do we make sure we provide for our old age? And after we concentrated very much on this thought, Günter Ulmstein came.

03:28 Our best oldest friends we had in Werlington, he was in business in a factory, worked as a manager and he tells us kids, if you want to buy a house, then do it immediately, because the prices will go up incredibly. That was the first finger pointing. Then.

03:47 I had a fantastic harvest, the best harvest I’ve probably ever experienced on the farm, it was on the trunk, so to speak, and I said to my sweetheart, listen, this is actually a second finger time, that we should. And the third finger time, wait, stop, I… And we were so happy. We bought a house, you all know the whole story, I don’t need to repeat it here, anyway, how it then came to be, just a little later.

04:17 As I said, there were several finger points. One came shortly after the house purchase. And that was Ralf Bellstedt. They all looked at the house, were all a little disappointed. It was a square box and quite little in front of it. But I was so happy. I found the location and everything, that a big garden and a big living room, which were my biggest conditions, they were there. So what?

04:42 And then Ralf Bällstedt said, yes kids, so listen, if you want to build on for your mother and for you, then do it immediately, because later, when you move in one day, you can’t afford it anymore. And I looked at him completely stunned, I said but Ralf, don’t do this to me now. I’m so happy now, I have a house, I’m not thinking about building on now. Of course we thought about it. I thought about it in peace with Friedrich K. together and we said, Ralf is absolutely right. If, then we have to build on immediately.

05:10 And that evening, when we were at Friesens, before the house purchase, when we had to decide, I started to tremble. I said, are you doing the right thing? Is it the right thing? How should I know, it’s the right thing? And by chance Moni was there. Moni, stupid man, and said, man, what you want to change, you just change it. Of course you buy the house. Then I looked at her and said, right.

05:31 So I just want to emphasize how important it is that you have friends, that at the right time, in the right hour, from all directions people come your way who tell you what you need at the moment. It was quite wonderful.

05:48 So we built faithfully and bravely, took on debt again, before I was so scared, but we took on debt again, which we then paid off very quickly, to make these three rooms and a small change in the house. Built on and…

06:07 We brought our mother, who lived in Seapoint and had meanwhile reached a good age, here, which was wonderful for the Friesens Voranen. They had mother on site and no longer had to go so far to Cape Town. They took care of mother incredibly touchingly, while we were still on the farm and also later. We really shared everything. I was terribly grateful to them for that. Because I could not possibly have taken care of mother intensively. We were too far away and the work simply did not allow it.

06:37 So she moved here and it was a little easier for Friesens. Now come the engagements and weddings of our children. You all know that well yourself, I don’t need to mention it all here. And it was wonderful for us. The wedding of Hubertus first in Dürben and then the wedding of our Sissilein here in Stellenbosch.

07:01 In 1985 it was time, I often sent prayers to heaven, because I knew I had reached the limits of my possibilities, I was also getting a little older.

07:15 And we tried for three years to sell the farm, which was difficult in that no African buys a mountain farm, where they were of course very right. So it had to be either a German or a lover. Anyway, we set everything in motion to sell the farm, but had to be patient for a long time. I still remember when I was delivered eleven railroad cars of fertilizer,

07:45 which were driven to the border of the farm and I drove this fertilizer up with my people. I still know like today I stood up on the trailer and thought, oh God what would it be nice if we were already in Stellenbrot schwären. In any case, everything in its time, everything came as it should come. Finally, a buyer was in sight.

08:07 It was all very exciting, in and out of the potatoes, as the Silesian says. But it worked out, we sold our farm on September 1, 1985.

08:24 Then I would never forget our move. My sweetheart pressed himself again, of course, as it always did. Unintentionally, of course. He had to go somewhere urgently on business. Our very dear neighbor, O. Matski, German, who came to me with his 5-ton lorry. We packed everything. I had decided that if I move to Stellenbosch now, I will move squeaky clean. Nothing there. It all went in such a hasty hurry that I had no chance to drive the cobwebs of 28 years.

08:54 I packed head over heels, packed, packed on the lorry and we moved with Bucky and with 3 tons Bucky and with the big lorry. And it was so nice. On the way down from the farm, everywhere the workers of our neighbors came out on the street and waved to us and it was such a harmonious departure.

09:18 Arrived here in Stellenbosch with the cargo. Friedrich Kahl then came the next day and helped me with the move.

09:26 It was raining here and I was obliged to put everything in the living room. It was full of cobwebbed furniture from one wall to the other. But on the small table by the window were flowers, there was food, there was coffee. The books were already placed in the bookshelf. As I said, all our friends, whom we had known for so many years, from the back and forth on the farm with dried fruit or without dried fruit,

09:56 Plums in the midst of a lovely, irretrievable circle of friends. We had nothing more to do. We were at home.

10:05 Then we celebrated farewell on the farm, afterwards with our workers. There were of course many tears. Our Mäbis, who had helped me so faithfully and lovingly on the farm and in the household, cried her eyes out, she didn’t want to let us go. And I also felt quite uneasy, I have to say. But it had to be done. A few days later we then celebrated farewell. The owners had already moved in. I also helped them, because they had of course driven into the ditch. And that was all very exciting.

10:35 All the friends from near and far came, especially Wuster, the community of Wuster, and we celebrated farewell under our wonderful old cathedral oak. There was also joyful gratitude and tears. Farewell, farewell. That was the conclusion. Especially for our children it was the hardest, because they lost, not lost, but that was their home. And that’s where they grew up. And grew up healthy. With nature. With animals.

11:05 with plants, with fires, with everything there was. And I think that also helped them a lot in their later life. And this connection to nature, this knowledge of where something comes from and where something goes, they got that.

11:26 Our father worked for another year.

11:28 At my request, because we were of course sitting there without cash, as strange as that sounds. We had decided to sell our farms only for cash, but we didn’t get a penny on the day we… Well, that’s a story in itself, you all know that too, I don’t need to mention that any further. In any case, Fatih worked for another year, also because with this one year he had his 20 years with the company South Straight, Cape Town, German-Italian company full. And that was a nice conclusion for our Fatih.

11:58 In March 87 our Monika, our eldest, got engaged. And it all went incredibly fast.

12:08 In May 1987, our Vati invited all his children to an Auloxon family day in Munich and with a subsequent trip through Germany. He wanted to show his children Germany. They had seen relatively little. They had all been over there, but that was… Our Vati was a family man. His children, his Witbrükkis, all together, he wanted to show them Germany now.

12:38 he wanted to introduce them to the Aulok clan, who came from America, from Turkey, from everywhere. And our Fatih held on to this project, even though he was already very sick.

12:52 I knew it, I suspected it, I didn’t know it yet. It was his heart, but why the heart etc. So I put him God be praised and then no stones in the way. I knew how he was limping on this project. I pulled him with one arm and with the heavy suitcases for six weeks Germany on the other arm. I wasn’t necessarily comfortable. But Fatih beamed. And he did it. Unfortunately Hubertus and Marina couldn’t come along,

13:22 because of Ingespatz had to stay at home, but they caught up on the trip later. But he at least showed his Monika and his Sissi in Munich and enjoyed it incredibly and was proud of his children, because with many Auloks, who had previously looked down on him, it had not gone so well with weddings and with children and so on. So it was wonderful. But the long journey with the children was no longer possible.

13:52 possible, we had to go home. Then came the wedding of our Monika. That was on August 1, 1987. Fadi had had an operation in Karl Bremer.

14:06 and was very weak and miserable. I flew up with him to the wedding in Pretoria, where Monika had a very nice apartment and he learned to walk there on my arm so that he could bring his Monika to the altar. He was very, very miserable, but he was determined. He brought his daughter to the altar and no one else. And he succeeded. The whole

14:36 that he could know his Monika, yes how should one say, married. Now there is much more to come.

14:49 On 7.11.87 our father, Fatih Ehrenritter of the Johanniter, also a wish that he had cherished for a long time. And I was very happy for him, because the Johanniter were very close to his heart. Everything else that has happened now, you know yourself. I don’t need to say much more now. That’s your life story then. I just want to mention, or I have to as a conclusion, that on the birthday, on April 26, 88.

15:19 On the birthday of your grandfather Ponsets, so my father, our Fadi had suffered out. It remains then still to say that we all feel infinite gratitude for what we were allowed to experience together as a family.

15:41 Ten years later, on August 6, our Musch, whom we all loved very much and who was an example to us all in many ways, closed her eyes at the age of 94, quietly and without fuss.

15:58 And I thank our Lord God for his protection, his help, his infinite patience and faithfulness, which never lost sight of us all. I thank him for the many dear people and friends who crossed our path or shared a part of it with us. For the guardian angels who stood by us so tangibly and demonstrably at the critical points. And I thank you for my 12 big and small sparrows.

16:31 lost and I thank him for my 12 beloved big and small sparrows, who fill their nests and mine with so much warmth and joy. And when the old, somewhat musty nest falls from the tree, rejoice for your mommy, who loves you all infinitely and who knows you safe in the hands, leading and seeing hands of our God.