COLUMN: My life growing up in Nazi Germany

Editor’s note: Brigitte Monjo is a resident at Oakleaf Village of Lexington. She celebrated her 100^th birthday May 12.

Born in Berlin, Germany in 1926, my childhood was a happy one with a loving mother, a hard-working father, and a brother who was nine years older. We had a house and garden in a subdivision of Berlin. My father had his own construction business, which included building cobblestone streets, which remain today.

Seven years into my life, Adolph Hitler became the German chancellor. At first, under his leadership, Germany prospered. At the end of a long depression for the country, men gained employment, factories opened and highways were constructed. 

Germans did not recognize that Hitler was preparing to go to war. He had taken control of the state and over time it became obvious that a dictatorship had been formed.

One of my schoolteachers was a strong Nazi. German custom called for religious lessons at school every morning, whether Protestant or Catholic. One morning, my teacher entered the classroom and said there would be no more religious lessons. He was wearing a black SS uniform, which signaled elite Nazi status and absolute loyalty to Hitler.

He said, “we are Deutsche Gott Glaubig,” which translates to: There is one God, Hitler. 

By law, all citizens under the age of 18 were required to join the Nazi youth group. Once a week, for two hours, we were taught politics and anti-Semitism. My group also received instructions on how to defend ourselves in case of war. We also learned how to attack the enemy. I was about 12 years old.

As part of the instruction, we crawled in the dirt, much like basic training for soldiers. My mother was very upset about this. She informed the party leader that she did not believe in these practices, and I would no longer attend the meetings. To speak out against the party leader was dangerous for our entire family.

Soon after, we received a letter from the Nazi Party informing me that I had been dismissed from the youth group. 

As time passed, it became clear that Hitler was against the Jewish race. Persecution of Jews became intense and widespread. My parents were friends with a Jewish couple. One day, the couple visited our house to tell my parents they were leaving Germany. For their safety and ours, they did not disclose where they were headed, and we never heard from them again.

A small sewing store around the corner from our house was operated by an elderly Jewish couple out of their basement.

Since my mother sewed all my clothes, I was dispatched to the store frequently to purchase supplies. I knew the couple well.

They were like grandparents to me. One night, they were gone.

At some point, Germany declared that Jews were no longer permitted to receive food ration cards like the rest of us. We were fortunate that my mother’s two sisters each operated a grocery store. Often, we received envelopes from my two aunts containing additional food ration cards. My mother and I went for walks in the evenings and occasionally slipped one of these envelopes with food stamps into the mailbox of a neighborhood Jewish couple.

Soon after, that couple was also gone. We surmised that the couple was picked up by Nazis during the night. One after another our Jewish neighbors disappeared. We were afraid to talk about these vanishings.

Jews also were not allowed to walk on city sidewalks. The image of Jews --- big yellow stars on their jackets walking on the edge of curbs with heads tucked in shame --- is forever etched in my mind.

Life was not all bad for us, despite what was going on around us.

Most summers I lived with one of my aunts near the Polish border in Sorau, Germany. My mother was born there and many of her relatives lived there. Summers there included swimming in the lake with my cousins and participating in various outdoor activities. I was disappointed when my parents picked me up each August to return to school in the fall. 

At the end of my summer break in 1939, my father told me he had an inkling Hitler was preparing for war. Papa said Hitler’s speeches had become very aggressive and there was a large Nazi troop movement toward Poland. On the first day of September that year, Hitler occupied Poland to precipitate the beginning of World War II.

My brother was drafted into the military and on September 9 my schoolteacher called me out of class and told me to go home.

My brother had been shot twice through the lungs while in Poland and survived.

The first years of the war did not affect me much. I was young, attended and graduated from business school. 

My father, who had served in World War I, was 42 years old at the time --- too old to be drafted into the military. Instead, he was forced to close his construction business and was drafted into the German workforce, so others could serve in the military.

I started a job in the personnel office of the workforce in Berlin’s inner city. My mother and I were alone through the six years of the war. We believed we would not get out alive.

When Hitler began bombing London, the British retaliated with heavy bombing of Germany, especially Berlin. I sometimes had a difficult time getting home from work. Quite often, the subway rails were hit and we were forced to leave the train, walk part of the way, or walk all the way home. I was always so happy when I came to our street and saw our house still standing, and my mother still alive.

Our house was hit four times. The damage was repairable at the outset of the bombings, and we could still live in the house. The broken windows and damaged roof got covered with tar paper and we postponed the repair of the structural damage until after the war.

Sometimes the German government sent foreign workers to assist with our temporary repairs. They were prisoners of war, from France and Poland.

My mother fed these foreign workers when they repaired our house. She also let them listen to their own radio station in their languages. By permitting this, she was tempting fate. Listening to foreign radio stations was punishable by death.

My mother constantly listened to BBC London radio. That way, we knew if British airplanes were headed to Berlin. We also found out how the war was really going because Hitler and his propaganda minister did not tell us the truth.

By 1944, Germany was losing on every front. Hitler should have surrendered to save lives and all the beautiful old German cities.

The German soldiers could not survive the cold Russian winter because Hitler did not provide them with proper attire.

One day at work, my boss asked if I had heard from my father in Russia. We had not heard from him in months. The Russian front was a chaotic retreat. Eventually, they did find my father and sent him home to Berlin. It was a joyous occasion upon his return.

In 1945, the Americans came from the West, and the Russians were very close to Berlin. On April 22, my father believed the Russians would arrive the following day and would begin their offensive early in the morning, maybe around 4 o’clock. 

We prepared ourselves for a long, hard time, working almost the entire night. My mother cooked and baked. My father and I emptied our cement fishpond in the yard. We removed the water and fish and laid the pond out with tar paper. We filled the empty pond with linen, fur coats and jewelry, everything that was worth anything. Then we covered it with tar paper and threw sand on it and raked it to hide it from the Russians.

We all finally went to bed between 1 and 2 in the morning. My father had us sleep in our clothes. I went to my room in the back of the house and got very scared. I asked my parents if I could sleep with them in their front bedroom. And I did. We could hear the artillery fire and bombing. 

Just as my father had said, the offensive started at 4 in the morning with heavy artillery fire and bombing. Our house began to shake. My father screamed for us to get out of bed. We waited a few seconds by the front door for a break in the fire. 

“Now, run,” my father ordered. We crossed our front lawn. I looked up at the sky and it was as if someone had emptied a match box, fire bombs everywhere. The three of us jumped in our five-foot by five-foot cement hole, our little bunker, in the front yard. We closed the iron lid above us. Our house was gone.

I do not know how long we stayed that day in the hole with the lid on. When my father opened the lid, he cried. I had never seen my father cry. Everything we worked so hard for had been lost.

The artillery fire and bombing continued. My father said that we cannot stay any longer in the hole. He was afraid that our little bunker was too close to the pedestrian walk and street. If a bomb hit the street, we would have been squeezed to death from the pressure.

We waited for a break in the fire and ran to a neighbor’s house.

The gate was closed. We ran to another neighbor --- nobody came out. We ran to the house on the corner. The door was open, but my father really did not want to go in there.

This was a Nazi house. People were huddled in the house’s basement. Upstairs, in the living room, pictures of Hitler and Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler were hanging on the wall. The black Nazi uniform of the owner was still in the house. The owner had fled to Greece. His wife and four children were in the basement.

We could hear the Russian tanks coming along our street. My father ripped the pictures off the wall, took the uniforms and threw everything in the basement furnace. We had a very cold spring and the furnace for the central heating was --- luckily --- still operating. The door from the furnace was not even closed when the first Russian soldiers came into the house. My father saved our lives by destroying the pictures and uniforms.
A Russian soldier took the watch from my father’s wrist. Then, while the bombs were still falling and the artillery exploding around us, a Russian Army officer began playing classical music on the grand piano.

My father grew concerned about my safety. The first Russians who came to Berlin were from Siberia. They raped women, and they killed and burned everything they did not understand. We were all at the mercy of the victorious Red Army.

That night we all hid in Papa’s trailer, one made for his construction workers. It was filled with hay. Papa feared the Russians would need hay for their horses and would find us there. 

The following day, we asked our neighbor, two houses away, if we could stay in her place. She was what we called a white Russian. We stayed in her house for a long time yet were essentially homeless. If Russians came to the garden gate, she spoke with them in Russian and they left.

On May 7, 1945, Germany finally surrendered. The war was over.

Later on, the temporary German government rented us a house that belonged to a Nazi who had departed the country.

Germany and Berlin were then divided into four Sectors: American, Russian, British and French. Unfortunately, we lived in the Russian Sector. We remained in constant fear of the Russians. They went into houses and took what they wanted.

Because most of the available food in our Sector went directly to Russians, we received almost no food. My mother started a garden right away. She planted potatoes, beans, cucumbers, carrots, and tomatoes. It helped, but it was not enough. We never discarded potato peels. We washed them and put them through the meat grinder, made potato pancakes and fried them in cod liver oil. 

We considered ourselves lucky to occasionally receive horse meat. My mother made it sweet and sour since horse meat is a bit sweet. It tasted like sauerbraten.

Once, I saw a field with cabbage and told my mother I would go and get one for us. When I went to the field, a German police helper with a gun jumped out at me. He asked for my name, but I refused to give it. Finally, he let me go, not before taking my cabbage.

When I learned that trains were carrying Germans to surrounding farms to purchase food, I decided to go. I took items of value that we had buried in our fishpond, thinking I could barter the items for food. I was 19 at the time.

Everyone deboarded the train into a village. It was already dark.

I felt abandoned, so I rang the doorbell of a farmhouse. 

 “What are you doing here on the street?” asked the woman who answered the door. “Don’t you know that the Russians have a curfew and that they take anybody they can catch?”

I told her I wanted some bacon or butter in exchange for my items. 

“Come in the house, you can sleep on my couch,” she said, “and I will give you something in the morning.”

She gave me bacon and other food in the morning, although it did not seem like a fair exchange. Nevertheless, anything was appreciated.

When I departed, I could see all the people in the field waiting for the train with Russians in the distance. Suddenly, a German police helper with a gun ordered all of us into a ditch, and he took everything from us.

When I returned home, I cried that I had nothing. My mother took me in her arms and cried, too. 

“I should have never let you go,” she said. “I did not sleep all night. I worried so much about you and I prayed for you. I am just happy that you’re back safe.”

Life did not get any better under the Communist regime. Many fled the Russian Sector to Western Sectors. I did the same and secured a job with the Allied Clubs and Schools Division in Berlin.

After returning home from Russia at the end of the war, my brother stayed in the Russian Sector and built --- from the old bricks from our bombed-out house --- a small house and took over my father’s construction business.

In 1948, both divides of Germany established a new currency and food ration cards. That same year the Russians began to blockade the Western Allies and the western city of Berlin. The Cold War had started between the Russians and the Americans.

That’s when the United States conducted the greatest undertaking in history. It supported the western part of Berlin with food and coal for heat. Every minute, two American aircraft landed in the isolated city of Berlin, which was surrounded by the Russians and the Russian Sectors. The pilots had only a small airfield to land their aircraft, and many pilots lost their lives.

We were on an 1,800-calorie food ration per day and everything was flown in by the American pilots. I will never forget the wonderful American milk powder we received. The airlift cemented a close relationship with the West Berliners and their former enemy, the United States.

I met my husband, Nicolas, in 1957, and we were married a year later in Berlin --- 13 years after the end of the war. My husband was the Chief of the Criminal police in Berlin for the Germans and the Americans.

I eventually learned how to drive a car and worked on my English. We moved to a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1960.

Three years later, I passed a test and became an American citizen.

Our son, Garry, became an officer in the U.S. Air Force.

When my husband and I left for the United States, he promised my mother that he would take care of her when she got older.

My mother came to visit us almost every year, staying anywhere from three months to nine months each time. My mother was 87 when I went to Berlin and dissolved her apartment and brought her permanently to the United States. She received a permanent visitor’s visa and stayed with us until she passed away in my arms when she was 95.

After 45 years living outside Washington, D.C., we moved to Chapin in 2006 to be closer to our son in Lexington.