Dear Martl, A companion to the book Dear Hanna

By Rudolf A. Zimmer

Dear Martl is based on Hanna’s journal and on letters she wrote to her husband, Martl, on the Eastern Front during World War II. While in Dear Hanna we see through Martl’s eyes the experience of a man who has been forced to participate in a treacherous odyssey through many countries, we see in Dear Martl the trials and tribulations of an insular domestic scene on the home front.
Hanna’s journal describes her growing up during World War I and the working conditions during the following lean years. She falls in love with and marries Martl. They open a café and pastry shop in 1930. With the rise of the Nazi party in 1933, they were pressured to join the Party, which for Martl’s conscience as a pacifist was impossible. Thus they were subjected to harassment and boycotts of their business, which forced them to close it, leave town, and move to Erfurt, where Martl found employment.
Blacklisted by the Nazi Party, Martl is called up in 1941, much too early at thirty-eight years and a father of three children. He is marched with eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-old men to fight in Russia. Hanna’s letters to her soulmate Martl are full of longing and sadness, but never despair. They deal with the struggles and anguish of women who had to deal, without the help of an extended family, with raising children and rationing life’s necessities; frequent air raids; and the almost constant anxiety of losing their loved ones.
Finally, from Hanna’s journal entries we learn of Martl’s save return after four years of absence; the struggle to survive after the war; the extreme shortage of food and life’s necessities; and the eventual rebuilding of a successful pastry business and café.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rudolf A. Zimmer
• Release date: May 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9780994085283

Rudolf A. Zimmer

About the Author Rudolf A. Zimmer immigrated to Canada in 1957. He received his B.A. (Honours) and M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Western Ontario in 1965 and taught mathematics at King’s College, London, Ontario and St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He joined the Faculty at Fanshawe College, London, Ontario in 1968. In 1972 he established the Mathematics Learning Centre, the first of its kind in Canada. He is the author of four textbooks suitable for individualized learning. From 1992 to 2000 he was semi-annually seconded by CIDA, Canadian International Development Agency to develop culturally appropriate learning material and to train teachers for Jamaica and Guyana. He retired from teaching in 1999. Zimmer lives in London, Ontario with Bridget, his delightful Irish wife. They have four children and ten grandchildren.

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Introduction

My mother’s maiden name was Johanna Gertrude Engler. She was born on February 4, 1904, in Zell im Wiesental, Germany. Her parents were burghers of the little town of Zell im Wiesental. Her father was a master glazier and had his own business. Her mother was a Ruemmele. The Ruemmeles were carpenters and cabinetmakers. Both the Englers and the Ruemmeles were old and well-established families in Zell. It is said that the Englers came to Zell from the lands of the margrave of Baden, specifically from the Rhine Valley just north of Basel, Switzerland. The Ruemmeles had come to Zell from Canton Luzern in Switzerland. As far back as 1563, records show that the Englers and Ruemmeles had been in Zell as mayors, millers, farmers, and skilled craftsmen.

The picture below of Josef Engler, his wife, Magdalena nee Wiedmann, and their three children was taken in 1863. Josef was a master shoemaker, and Magdalena came from a Zeller merchant’s family that owned a general store in the centre of town.

Family Josef Engler, Johanna’s grandparents on her father’s side.

From left to right: Rosina Engler (1857); Johanna’s father, Stephan Engler (1862–1940), sitting on the lap of his mother, Magdalena Engler (1828–1898); and Maria Engler (1859), in front of her father, Josef Engler (1829–1878).

Anna Engler nee Ruemmele and Stephan Engler.

This is the wedding picture of Johanna’s parents. They were married on December 16, 1889, in the Catholic church in Zell im Wiesental.

Family Stephan Engler.

Top row, from left: Theodor Engler (09/11/1895), August Engler (01/03/1892), Rudolf Engler (03/07/1897). Bottom row, from left: Berthold Engler (04/05/1905), Oskar Engler (31/03/1901), Anna Engler nee Ruemmele (28/02/1868), Helen Engler (08/05/1909), Stephan Engler (26/12/1862), and Johanna Engler (04/02/1904).

By all accounts, my mother, Johanna Engler, enjoyed a carefree youth. However, her young adult and middle-aged life was affected by the ravages of two wars and their after-effects. Since her husband, Martl, was an avowed pacifist, she had to endure the full force of the Nazis’ treatment of people who didn’t align themselves with the party’s program.

Johanna started the journal in November 1986 and finished it in April 1987 when she was eighty-three years old. Her husband, Martin (Martl), always called her Hanna, and that is the name I use for her in what follows. I have made some notes to explain facts that are not generally known; and I corrected a historical fact as it relates to my stay in Wies. I have translated as accurately as I can what my mother wanted to say.

Rudolf Alois Zimmer

December 2010

PART ONE

1904 – 1944

CHAPTER ONE

Growing Up

Early Days

For my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, I shall try, as far as I still can remember, to tell the story of my life. I had to think long and hard whether or not it makes any sense to dredge up all those memories from the past or whether to let them sink into obscurity. However, my son Rudolf has insisted that I write down my story and just today he has written and again reminded me to do so. He says that he himself remembers very little about the time spent in Weil, Zell, and Schoenau. So in God’s name, I shall start to write about my childhood.

I was born on February 4, 1904, at half past five in the evening in my parent’s house at Teichgasse 7 in Zell im Wiesental, a small town in the southern Black Forest near Basel, Switzerland. I was the seventh child, and two more were born after me. Berthold, my brother, was born on May 4, 1905, and my younger sister, Helena Frieda, was born on May 8, 1909. I had an older sister, Anna, who was born in 1894, but died at the age of five months of whooping cough. There was an outbreak of this disease in our town then, and many small children died.

On November 13, 1906, when I was two years old, my oldest brother, Joseph Stephan, died of appendicitis. At that time in our town, one couldn’t operate and surgically remove an infected appendix. It must have been terrible for my poor brother to face death at sixteen years of age and suffer the intolerable pain. This must have been a heartbreaking experience for my parents, who could do nothing to help him. I then grew up with five brothers until the birth of my sister Helena in 1909. So I learned how to live with and deal with boys. Perhaps these years were my apprenticeship for my life, in which I had to fight again and again to assert myself in a male-dominated world.

People said that I was my father’s favourite. I never saw that myself. Today looking back, I realize that this may well have been true. However, it happened without my noticing it at that time. I remember quite well when my father took me to the hospital in Zell to visit an old lady, who was his aunt. She gave me her jewellery. I was three or four years old. On several other occasions, my father took me along on a little journey. One time he took me to a wood auction, and I still remember his wearing a large green poncho.¹ Because our family was in the business of making windows, he bought wood for making window frames. I also remember his taking me along to Schopfheim, a town about 10 km down the valley from Zell. We went there by train to attend a meeting of master glaziers. An old woman told me some years later that I was a very pretty little girl with black curls. Perhaps that’s where the answer to the riddle lies of my being his favourite.

Later, as I grew older, I went to school and came home with excellent reports and graduated with two awards. Naturally, my parents were very proud of me. My mother told me that she saw the principal and inquired about the possibility of my becoming a teacher. The principal was very encouraging in this respect. However, the time was 1918. The war was ending and had been lost. There was inflation, and my father’s business was very bad, and my parents couldn’t afford to pay for my education. Yet, I wasn’t fully aware of the terrible time that our nation went through. After all, I lived at home and had everything I needed. Of course, our needs were modest. We planted our own large garden with vegetables. There were two large fields on the side of the Moeren Mountain where we planted potatoes, rye, and barley. Besides vegetables, we planted poppies for oil and chicory. The chicory we mixed with roasted barley to make coffee. In the fall, we went into the beech forest to collect beechnuts, which we traded for oil at the mill in Schopfheim. During these bad times after the First World War, we didn’t starve, as many people in the cities did, but it was a lot of work to produce our own food, and I had to help and work hard in the garden and the fields.

From left: Berthold, Hanna, and Oskar Engler (1906).

Hanna’s first communion in 1915.

Graduation and After

After I graduated from the eighth grade, I took one year of home economics classes. At the graduation ceremony, my teacher told me that I should join the church choir as soon as I finished the next year. When the year was over, the teacher sent his daughter to my home to remind me to attend the choir practice. I still see myself going for the first time. I wore a white Swiss embroidered apron with frills over my shoulders. I was, of course, the youngest and sat in the back of the room. The next time, I went without the apron because no one else wore one in the choir. That is how my singing career in the church choir of Zell im Wiesental started, and it ended when I married. By that time I had been singing many solos at concerts and musicals.²

When I was married and we lived in Weil am Rhine, I joined the Lutheran church choir for almost four years,³ and after fleeing Erfurt to Zell im Wiesental in 1944, I joined the church choir in my hometown again. During the years after the war when we operated a café and a confectionery store in Zell, I was too busy to participate in the choir. However, after my retirement, I joined the seniors’ choir that consisted of retired people. We made trips and gave performances. When I was eighty years old, I developed severe asthma and had to quit. Singing was my life. I sang with joy and enthusiasm, and it gave me many happy hours. I am missing the seniors’ choir now because I no longer have contact with my singing friends; and since we live somewhat outside the town without a car, we are cut off from the world.

With such a large family as ours, my mother had to carry the main burden of the work. Because our two fields were situated on the north side of the Moeren Mountain and they were on a relatively steep incline, the topsoil would move down to the bottom due to rain, walking on it, and cultivating the soil. So the first thing to be done in the spring before planting was to move soil from the bottom of the field to the top. My father and brothers did this by digging a 40-cm-wide trench at the bottom and carrying that earth to the top.⁴

After they finished moving earth to the top, my father would hire a farmer to plough and harrow the fields. Then my father would sow rye and barley. With planting, weeding, and heaping, and with the digging in the fall, the potatoes took most of our time of working in the fields. I remember one year especially when the harvest produced a lot of beautiful red potatoes, most of them the same size, so that it was a real pleasure to see them roll towards you as one was digging them out. We didn’t have enough bags and had to get an extra cart to carry them all home. When we arrived at home, my father couldn’t believe his eyes seeing the amount we had harvested. He normally didn’t go to the fields and garden. Our mother and the older children did this work. He had to make money and was busy with his trade of making and repairing windows.

As soon as I graduated from elementary school, I went to the home economics classes given at a school that was operated by Catholic nuns. Girls from the little villages in the mountains around our small town came early in the morning to this school and went back in the evening. They warmed their food, which they brought with them, on the big stove in the sewing room. I was an enthusiastic student and loved to sew. In the sixth grade, we were taught how to patch holes in stockings and socks and mend torn clothes. When I told my mother that I greatly enjoyed learning how to patch and mend, she said, I am very happy, too, that you are able to do this, because from now on you will be given the job of patching and mending the clothes for our family. In our large household with my brothers — five young men — my sister, and dad, there was an awful lot of patching and mending. So when I went to the sewing school later, I had a lot of experience and became accomplished in restoring torn clothing.

At the sewing school, I learned how to sew my own clothes and later sewed my complete dowry and embroidered it with all kinds of designs. For my dowry, Mother regularly ordered linen from a linen factory at Christmas and at my birthdays. Since my father was contracted to make or repair windows at the Zell–Schoenau, a weaving and spinning factory, I had the opportunity to get high-quality damask from that factory for covers of quilts and pillowcases. During this time, I was also allowed to take two special courses at the sewing school. One dealt with embroidering techniques, and the other with pattern making and designing clothes. I enjoyed taking both courses very much.

However, of all the activities I was involved in, I enjoyed singing the most. Today, I cannot recall anymore the number of times I sang on stage in musicals or how many solos I sang in the church at weddings or at concerts given by the church choir.

Hanna, 1926.

CHAPTER TWO

Meeting Martl and Getting Married 1922–30

I have to say that during my teenage years, I felt liberated and was happy and carefree. It was during the time that I got to know Martl (Martin) that I also experienced grief and sorrow. I discovered how difficult life is for a young man who comes from a home where his aspirations are not recognized and where ingrained parochial attitudes are imposed on the children. His parents didn’t approve of our relationship. Martl was supposed to marry a girl from a bakery business. However, that was firmly opposed by Martin, and, because of that, he didn’t receive any support from his parents and had to go and work for seven years in distant places with strangers without any help from his family. During this time, he had to survive under sometimes almost impossible circumstances in order to reach his goal of becoming a first-class "Konditor" (pastry chef). However, he did eventually achieve his goal. When I first met Martl, he was working as a baker.

Hanna, 1922.

Martin, 1923.

I Meet Martl

I was nineteen years old when I met my dear husband-to-be, Martl. He had plans to open his own café and confectionery business, and he wished for me to become skilful in business and domestic affairs. So he arranged for me again and again to work in homes, restaurants, and cafés. Once, I worked at a restaurant in the city of Baden in Switzerland.

One of the most absurd places I worked was as a domestic in a home in the city of Hanau on the Main River. The first Sunday after I had arrived, the lady of the house brought me a little dish with sugar cubes and said, From now on, every Sunday I am going to give you your portion of sugar for the week. Three cubes per day make twenty-one cubes of sugar for the week. This way, you don’t have to run and get the sugar all the time. I thought I didn’t hear right and counted the sugar cubes, and believe it or not, there were exactly twenty-one sugar cubes in the little dish. However, that was not all. I was supposed to get three pieces of bread with butter, one for the morning, one for the afternoon, and one for the evening. To make things even more ridiculous, she put the butter very thinly on the three pieces of bread herself. I was allowed to take a cup of coffee in the morning myself. After the milkman had delivered one litre of milk, I first had to give the dog, called Max, one cup. In addition, I had to make three cups of cocoa with this litre of milk for the man of the house, and the rest I could have for myself (one little cup of milk). The lady of the house got one-eighth of a litre of cream every day, and she complained every day that the milkman did not give enough. Of course, it was very difficult to judge the amount. The milkman didn’t have little bottles holding one-eighth of one litre, so one couldn’t tell that one had exactly that amount.

I think the most bizarre event occurred when we baked Christmas cookies. I made the dough, formed the cookies, and put them on the baking tray, but I wasn’t allowed to take the cookies off the tray after they were baked, because then she wouldn’t have been able to see whether or not I ate one. At Christmas, her dog, Max, got the best cookies, and I didn’t get one of those. I got a small dish of the cheapest kind and no Christmas present or money.

On my first Sunday, I left the house at six o’clock in the morning for the long walk to church, where the mass began at 6:30 a.m. I was home again at 8:00, and then Mr. and Mrs. Huber went to church and came back at 10:00 a.m. At this time, I still had not eaten any breakfast and hadn’t had any coffee. The same thing happened the second Sunday. So when I came back from church, I looked around in the fridge and found a little liverwurst and bread to eat. She normally locked up all the cupboards with food except the fridge. That evening, Mrs. Huber was running around like a chicken with its head cut off, evidently looking for something. I asked her if she was looking for something, and she said, I can’t find the liverwurst. So I told her that I was hungry in the morning and had eaten it. She answered, Well, then there is no use me looking for it, and from then on she locked the fridge as well.

For the whole nine months I worked at the Hubers’, I didn’t get out of the house once during the week, not even to go shopping. It was only on Sunday after I went to church in the morning that I could go out in the afternoon from 2:00 to 10:00 p.m. At 10:00 sharp I had to be home, and I had to go in through the back door, which was bolted as soon as I was in. I had no house key.

At 7:00 in the morning, I had to go downstairs and start to work. Apart from cooking and washing dishes, I did nothing all day but to clean the house — scrub floors, dust, etc. Every day was a major cleaning day. At that place I didn’t learn very much. I felt as if I were in a prison. If it hadn’t been for Martl, my husband-to-be, who came to visit me in the evening in the kitchen, and with whom I went walking on Sunday afternoons, I wouldn’t have stayed that long. On top of all of this, the pay was very poor — only RM 25 per month. That is how those people got rich. At first, they had only a little tobacco kiosk; and when I worked for them, they owned a laundry and dry cleaning business in town and a patrician villa with three floors on the outskirts of town.

I left their employment to work at a confectionery store and café in the same city. One day as I went to shop, Mrs. Huber, my former employer, appeared and asked me if I wanted to come back to work for her. For a moment I was speechless; and then I told her that I wasn’t going to be working as a domestic anymore.

The new employers were very nice to work for. However, the café had no windows, and I worked from 8:00 in the morning till 11:00 or 12:00 at night. I wasn’t used to working day in day out in an electrically lighted room without seeing the sun for days on end. Once every fourteen days, I had only a half-day off. The rest of the time, I saw nothing of the town or world outside. Since we didn’t get any tips, I didn’t earn much money at this job, either. The customers paid at the till where the lady of the house sat. That’s the way it was in those days. My nature needed sunlight, and after eight months, I became ill and went home to my parents by train.

Later, I accepted another position at a town called Zschopau, which is in the Erzgebirge Mountains in the province of Saxony. There, I had another bad experience. The café belonged to a gay man who treated the waitresses very badly and with disrespect. In addition, the food provided wasn’t good and it wasn’t enough, so that I ended up writing home and asking my parents to send me some food, which they did right away. When I finally got a day off, I took a train and then a cable car to Augustusburg, a town with a castle in the mountains. The journey was a little over an hour. I knew that there was a man there by the name of Karl Schaeublie who came from my hometown. He had been unemployed and found a job in Augustusburg. At home, he had been training the local soccer players, which at that time included my future husband. He was very much surprised to see me. He didn’t expect to meet somebody from Zell, way out there in Saxony. I had to stay one night at his place because there was no train to take me back to Zschopau till early the next morning.

After four months, as soon as I had saved my fare, I left this job and went home. I took on all these jobs for Martl, who wanted me to get experience in running a confectionery and café business. As for myself, I would have preferred to stay at home. I always was very homesick for my lovely mountains and longed to sing in the choir. Whenever I was on the train on my way home, I looked forward to seeing the familiar Black Forest Mountains as we approached Freiburg im Breisgau.

I wanted to travel for recreation and in freedom to enjoy myself. I did want to see the world, but not from a cage in which one could hardly breathe. I did want to work, too, but also be a human being with some freedom. However, this was in those days very difficult to achieve for girls, especially since one didn’t encourage girls to acquire a profession. The culture was to train girls for the domestic scene in sewing, patching, embroidering, cooking, gardening, and in everything that had to do with the beautification of the home and raising children.

Hanna and Martin in Zell i.W., 1928.

Wedding picture of Hanna and Martin, February 19, 1930.

After Martl and I had known each other for eight years, we finally were able to marry, on February 19, 1930, in Zell im Wiesental, my hometown.

We had rented a business, that is, a property containing an orchard, apartments, and a café and confectionery store in Weil–Ost on the border of Switzerland near the city of Basel. We would have preferred to rent a property in Basel, but Martl’s father wouldn’t lend us money to settle in Switzerland. So that we finally could marry, we compromised and went to Weil–Ost.

CHAPTER THREE

Our Café and the Rise of the Nazis 1930–41

Weil–Ost was not the place that would have the clientele to appreciate Martl’s confectionery expertise. Since we had little cash and capital, it was a very difficult beginning. The business we rented had been in a very bad state of affairs and had a poor clientele. However, we worked very hard in order to change that, and I remember telling one customer in the café who behaved very badly not to come back.

After two years, the owner of the property went bankrupt, and we bought the property. My father gave me RM 3,000 as part of my inheritance, and we got a mortgage from the Schweizerische Spar-und Kredit Bank in Basel, where later our son Rudolf worked from 1955 to 1957 before he immigrated to Canada.

The property Hanna and Martl bought in Weil–Ost.

Martin junior, in the orchard of the property.

When we bought the property, our business was doing well. We had attracted the business people from town to frequent our café and generally had acquired a good customer base. Now the business had a good reputation in town and across the border in Switzerland. On Sundays, half of our proceeds were in Swiss Francs from Swiss customers, especially from the neighbouring town Riehen, across the border, which had a large Jewish Diaspora. Radios at that time were still a rare commodity among the general population, and we bought a very good one for the café, and that also attracted customers to our establishment. Martl joined the local men’s choir, and I the Protestant church choir. The Catholic church choir was too far away for me to attend.

When Hitler came on the scene, we had settled in well, and our business was good. We heard Hitler’s first speech on our excellent radio, and soon the local Nazi disciples chose our establishment as their meeting place. Every time Hitler gave a speech, our café was packed with members or sympathizers of the Nazi party, and of course, they soon expected that we would join the party. Martl tried for a while to stave off the impending decision by telling them each time that he was going to think about it. Finally, after two years, members of the executive committee of the Nazi party came and promised us many advantages and a secure customer base for our business if we became members of the Nazi party. When we didn’t accept the offer to join the party, their behaviour toward us changed, and we started to feel their wrath. The business went further and further downhill as we lost more and more customers.

As time went on, our Swiss customers stopped coming, too. To avoid the now rude and offensive behaviour of Hitler’s German border guards, they didn’t want to cross the border. The people had to show how much money they had with them, and they were not allowed to bring any Swiss newspapers into Germany. When they went back home, they were checked to see how much money they had spent in Germany, and finally they were frisked. The Swiss people didn’t put up with this; they were annoyed with this treatment and simply stayed home. At the end, as we learned in later years, it was announced at a public Nazi party meeting that Café Zimmer was to be off limits and everybody should avoid doing business with us. The Zimmers, so it was said, were politically unreliable. We knew that our business was going from bad to worse, but at that time we didn’t know why. We could only suspect.

A lot of painful things happened then about which one can hardly talk. To the left of our property, we had a neighbour who was a 200-percent Nazi, and so were his sons. On a Sunday morning when we were eating breakfast in the café, two men came in and identified themselves as being customs officers. They accused us of smuggling substantial amounts of sugar. It was reported that at night trucks entered the back of our orchard and unloaded bags of sugar. They then started to search the whole house and the buildings in the orchard. They found the sugar that I had in our store, otherwise they didn’t find any. I was able to produce an invoice for the sugar, which we had just recently bought.

We did have customers who came from a poor family. This family had accumulated some debts with us, and I suggested that they could pay us by getting for us their daily allowable free ration of sugar from Switzerland [sugar was cheaper in Switzerland]. On a daily basis, this service amounted to only a few cents. In addition, this was used to accuse us of smuggling activities and the local newspaper printed an article saying that there are always people who can’t stop smuggling. In any case, Martl and Helen, his younger sister, who at the time was working for us, were taken away, interrogated, and jailed for two days. They [the authorities] couldn’t find any evidence to support their accusation. Despite the fact that we were innocent, we had to pay a fine, and I still remember having to go every year to the customs office to pay a few marks while living in Weil.

This was all part of a concentrated effort by the Nazis in town to make our life a living hell. We couldn’t understand how they came up with the accusation, but then realized that the man who was renting the orchard and outbuildings had eight pigs that he let out at night into the orchard. It was probably the noise they made roaming around that aroused the suspicion of our Nazi neighbour, who then reported us to the authorities. It was terrible for me, with Helen and Martl in jail and not knowing the outcome. Despairing in the house and business, I was all alone with little Martin who was then just one year old. I think this happened in the summer of 1934. The next day, the two customs officers came once more and searched again through the whole house and property. Helen was released first, and the next day they let Martl go.

Then, one Saturday morning, a policeman came and demanded that my husband follow him immediately to city hall. I told him that I would go with him because my husband was at the moment in the process of baking and wasn’t able to go. When I arrived at the city hall, the mayor of the town stood behind his desk, and at the door, left and right, were two young men whose names were Fischer and Kaufmann. They were city hall clerks and evidently there to witness what I had to say. As soon as I arrived, the mayor yelled at me that I had done business in an unlawful way. I had paid out Winterhelp stamps with money instead of with consumer goods. I fought back vigorously and told him that I had given the customer the thirty-five cents because I didn’t have one of the items he wanted in stock, and with the money I gave him, he would then be able to buy the item at another store.

I never was afraid of men, and he wasn’t going to intimidate me. When he realized that he didn’t have anything on me, and I was fighting back, he changed the subject to our business. He asked, Is it the Nazi party’s fault that your business is so poor? and I answered him clearly, You said it, not I. So that was the question with which they wanted to catch me: I was to accuse the party of wrongdoing. When I didn’t fall for this trick, the mayor fell into a rage and yelled at me, saying things that were unworthy for a man in his position. Finally, he left the room and I could no longer keep my tears back. I left the room through an antechamber in which a number of clerks were working. When I entered the hallway, I noticed two policemen waiting outside the door. I realized that they had been posted to arrest me, if I had said anything that would have incriminated me.

In those days, it took very little, such as the thirty-five cents or an unflattering remark regarding the party, in order for someone to end up in a concentration camp, especially for those who were considered politically unreliable. You can imagine how I felt leaving city hall without being arrested. What really made me very angry was to find out later that the same man, who was mayor during the Nazi time and had put me and probably others through this ordeal, was again elected mayor after the man had died who was installed by the French occupation forces.

The years from 1933 to 1938 were very difficult for both Martl and me. The downturn in our business had many repercussions. We had a first and a second mortgage on the property. The first mortgage was held by the Swiss bank in Basel, and the second by the construction firm Helfmann in Haltingen, a little town nearby. Because of the edict by the Nazi party not to frequent our business, our income had gone down to the point where we weren’t able to pay the interest on the mortgages and could only pay a few of the invoices for our inventory.

To be able to rent out as much as possible of our property, we moved out of some rooms. Then Martl allowed his sister and her husband, Franz, and son, Heinz, to move in. They were living nearby in Loerrach and had to move out of their house. Only later did we hear that they had been living in Franz’s family home and that Franz hadn’t paid any property taxes in years. The house was going to