Jutta: A Biography of an Amazing Life

By Hermann A. Peine

I know, as she would tell me her philosophy at the kitchen table that it was her covenant with God to live as well as she could. She lived it with a capital I, even if it meant sprinkling your lawn in 15 minute increments because you couldnt stay on your feet any longer. She never complained and she never acted like a martyr either. It was another adventure and change; one of millions of changes that she had been through in her life that would have stopped most of us cold. I know she was given a gift of seizing the situation and always coming out with positive thinking. She knew how to work her life around it. That inspired all of us. She taught me many things about this. She taught me how one can grow old without fear. How one can grow old with absolute joy.

Juttas daughter-in-law, Louise

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483610597

Hermann A. Peine

Dr. Peine is a practicing psychologist and has published many professional papers, developed story based life skills training curriculum, the books, Children and Parents: Every Day Problems of Behaviour, with his psychiatrist friend Roy Howarth, Jutta - A Biography of an Amazing Life, and this, his first novel. The idea for the story came through a dream he had while traveling the Nile River during his Cyprus Fulbright year.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1

The Early Years

Chapter 2

Coping

Chapter 3

Safety Zones

Chapter 4

The Orphanage

Chapter 5

On Her Own

Chapter 6

The Courtship

Chapter 7

A War Wedding

Chapter 8

Work And War

Chapter 9

Waiting

Chapter 10

A Son Is Born

Chapter 11

March 1945—Hell Begins

Chapter 12

The Organizers

Chapter 13

Surviving

Chapter 14

The River

Chapter 15

Janson

Chapter 16

Departure

Chapter 17

The Crossing

Chapter 18

No More Leather Pants

Chapter 19

City Life

Chapter 20

At A Distance

Chapter 21

Gordon

Chapter 22

Michigan Ave

Chapter 23

Grandma Vickie

Chapter 24

In Remembrance

Afterward

PREFACE

Sometimes an individual with a strong personal will is born into a select time and place where even outrageous experiences cannot deter them from living an abundant life on their own terms. Such a person was my widowed mother. This is her story written from her perspective with my added impressions after I came on the scene.

Forced to go back to school in her early 50’s, she wrote of her relationship to me, her only child. Hermann, I like you because you forgive my faults and you do not scorn my foibles. You tolerate my tears which I shed over a foolish television show, although you would never act in such a childish way. You forgive me for my poor driving technique, and I know that you include me in your prayers, asking the Lord to spare my life if I demolish your little car. Deep down in your heart you love me, and not only that, but you like me too. Dear son, knowing you and loving you has been the most precious experience of my life.

Mother believed in stories that gave meaning to people’s lives. She felt that a little bit of the self died without a story in which to frame it and she hoped that her recollections would become a treasure trove for her family. She stated that her experiences were not going to be gift wrapped, but they were honestly laid out with as much clarity as she could muster. Some memories pained her to recall. I will be the narrator for her inspiring journey using my interviews with her, her writings, and my recollections. I will use her written stories whenever possible.

CHAPTER 1

The Early Years

According to her birth certificate she was named Augusta Marie Marowski, but she didn’t go by that name, but instead chose to go by Jutta. She was born on the 25th of December, 1916 in Melbergen, by Bad Oeynhausen, in the western part of Germany about 24 miles south of Minden. The midwife, Frau Luise Tieckenhaenrich was unhappy that she had to work on Christmas Day, but she relented and it was an easy birth. Jutta’s biological father and her mother were never married. Her father had been born into the blue blood von Schmidt family in the upper crust of German society. He was serving in the military in Minden when he had the affair with Jutta’s mother. Jutta was the firstborn to her mother and always knew she was smarter than the rest of her siblings. She attributed her intellectual abilities to Mr. Schmidt, although her mother, Marie was also very bright in her own fashion, and was always interested in academic learning.

Marie and her infant daughter moved in with Marie’s mother, who had become a grandmother for the first time. As the following Christmas approached, Jutta could remember the pearl curtains that divided two bedrooms in the apartment and her crawling over to them and taking delight in pulling on the pearl strands. Several years later she laughed out loud when the wooden pearls broke loose after she had pulled on them and as they scattered all over the floor. Marie got quite upset and cried, Oh, oh, oh no! Her grandmother, however, said, Oh, let her play.

Jutta could actually remember reaching up at six months of age and trying to grasp shining dust particles drifting with the air currents across the sun rays streaming in through the window above her crib. She began walking three months later.

Her grandmother was in her forties, a small woman with prematurely gray hair and nearsightedness. Her blue eyes complimented the ruffled skirts and white blouses she liked to wear. With a first marriage that had ended in divorce, she was now living with her second husband and her youngest daughter, Hanna, only six years older than Jutta. The five of them occupied the house.

They lived in the large upstairs space of a factory that made bricks. The bricks were made in wooden forms and laid out to dry on long rows of wooden shelves. In a corner there was an oven to fire them and give them the hardened glaze they needed for use as pavers for sidewalks and other dense traffic areas. An outside iron staircase led up to their large upstairs apartment. A meadow around the factory was filled with tall flowering Margarieten (daisies) growing over the young girl’s heads, with sheep grazing around them. Jutta felt as if she were in a forest of flowers and felt happy and secure there. The neighbors, but for one, lived more than a mile away.

The nearest neighbor was the Niebels Wuerstchen (sausage) factory. The family had a little boy Jutta’s age and she often played with him at his home. One day the boy’s mother had to run an errand and locked both the kids in the house. Both children screamed loud and long, with Jutta assuring herself that she was not going to be locked in by anyone. She must have been very convincing, for she was never invited to come over and play there again.

The family prospered in that setting for over four years under the protective and watchful eye of the grandmother. The two women worked by buying vegetables wholesale and then selling them at an open market twice a week. Grandmother knew a lot about the trade because her first husband had been a gardener with a big nursery. By age two, Jutta was playing grocery store on the iron steps. Hanna would take the role of the sales girl and Jutta the shopper. The grandmother made cottage cheese for the girls to sell, but in the end they ate it all themselves. Flowers were also gathered from the meadow to sell at their make-believe store.

Jutta’s mother, Marie, was somewhat estranged from her mother, for she felt the woman was vain for wearing a beautiful hat with artificial flowers on it to church on Sundays. No other women in the village wore hats like that, but it had become the grandmother’s pride and joy. Marie felt her mother looked like she belonged in a circus wearing such a thing and was embarrassed by it. She also resented her mother spoiling Jutta, for Grandmother had conflicting ideas from her daughter on how to raise a child. When Marie was off to work, Grandmother reared Jutta as she pleased. There were arguments between the two women, but the small and not so old grandmother had many tricks up her sleeve to outwit her daughter. It was unfortunate for Jutta that Marie was of legal age to make decisions for the two of them.

Jutta recalled that one spring Sunday they were serving spinach for dinner. She hated the stuff and refused to eat it. Marie insisted it be eaten, even if it took Jutta the rest of the night. After dinner everyone went into the living room while Jutta was restricted to the kitchen by her mother. The full plate of spinach was in front of her. Grandma repeatedly came into the kitchen and each time ate a spoonful or two of the dreadful stuff until it was all gone. Marie was pleased with her child’s obedience, and Grandmother winked at Jutta to not reveal their secret. After that Grandma never cooked spinach again, claiming that it gave her indigestion.

Grandmother had a way with flowers and plants. She didn’t care if the house was clean as long as there were flower arrangements throughout it, an attitude in sharp contrast to her oldest daughter. Things were reasonably stable in that setting, until Marie had another affair and got pregnant and had another daughter. This one was by a Herr Schlueter. Jutta was 3½ years old when Ursula arrived. Ursula’s father was a nice man who brought treats to the house and was kind to Jutta. Conflict again arose between the grandmother and her daughter. Marie wanted to let Ursula go for adoption, and Grandmother wanted to keep her. Marie could make the legal decision, but with some indecision and apprehension on her part, for she wouldn’t sign the adoption papers for years. Marie had found adoptive parents for Ursula in Bielefeld, but hoped the placement would only be temporary.

When Jutta was four years old her Grandma took her to the village barber and had him cut her hair. Jutta wrote that, I was sitting in front of the mirror when Mother came home. She was quite upset about my appearance and started a great argument with Grandma. She held my head under the water pipe and washed all my curls out. That night I was very unhappy and cried myself to sleep. Early in the morning Grandma came into my bedroom and said, ‘Now don’t cry, my baby. Tomorrow we will curl your hair again.’

By the time of Jutta’s fifth birthday, the growing animosity between Jutta’s mother and grandmother came to a climax. Marie packed up their things and moved the two of them in with the grandfather living in Minden, the man whom Grandma had divorced. It was a crummy neighborhood and they all lived in one room. Next door there were horse stables and one day a horse kicked through the wall making a big hole and mess in their room.

The grandmother, meanwhile, was keeping busy. She bought and then moved into a little cottage in Schnathorst within the hills of the Weser Mountains, west of Porta Westfalika. A few visits were all that Jutta was now able to experience of the countryside, but one happened to be significant and she was there without her mother. On this particular visit at the age of five, Jutta and Hanna were put to bed early because the next day was going to be another moving day. Grandma had bought another cottage in a little village called Werste, 40 miles away and about a six-hour wagon ride by horse. Werste was not far from Melbergen by Oeynhausen.

Early in the morning, with the help of a kind neighbor, Grandma had moved all the furniture onto the side of the road and a farmer with his wagon and horse team drove up. The furniture was placed in the wagon with the couch up front. Hanna, Jutta, and the driver sat comfortably in it for the next 40 miles taking all day. They arrived early in the evening in Werste. Grandma had sat in her seat loaded and perched on the belongings in the back of the wagon.

They had driven through several farms and villages and marveled at all the apple trees in bloom along the way. It was a sunny, cloudless, springtime day with bees humming while busily going about their work. Jutta had not felt that good for a long time and blinked her eyes thinking that she might never feel that good again. How very prophetic.

The journey took them through different villages and as was the custom of the time, kids would span a rope across the road and block it in their efforts to demand a passage toll. This was a custom well practiced on the Rhein River for preceding centuries. To nullify the local pirates, Grandma threw a handful of pennies to each group they encountered, and each time the rope was lowered for safe passage.

During the journey Grandmother remarked to Jutta that she wanted to be called Mama because she felt much too young to be called Grandmother. Jutta agreed and always called her Mama after that. That night Mama made a fire in the old coal stove and cooked a nice potato soup. They all enjoyed it along with a good slice of rye bread. They put up the beds and went to sleep. While Jutta was closing her eyes she could hear the crickets chirping outside the open windows and distant frogs croaking. Everything seemed in good order with herself and the world.

The new house and setting were enchanting for both Hanna and Jutta. The yard had an outdoor baking oven and to the side of the house was a meadow with a sloping hill where the girls could pick flowers in the summer and during Jutta’s winter vacation visits join Hanna to ride their sleighs. Mama often joined in on their sleigh rides. They all crowded on and with a hardy Hi-Ho they raced down the hill. Once they were sufficiently cold they would return to the cozy cottage, pull on warm slippers, wrap themselves in warm blankets, and eat an offering of hot-baked apples.

On the other side of the property there was a half-acre garden where Mama raised beautiful flowers and vegetables. Jutta was able to spend that summer in Werste. The house was always filled with flowers and sometimes there were so many that the girls had to ladle the soup directly out of the pot because the soup tureen had been turned into a flower vase. The garden was bordered by a little brook where Mama taught Jutta to swim. Mama didn’t know how to swim herself, but she thought she knew how it was done. The two of them stood in the stream, Jutta fastened around her waist with a belt, being told to make movements like a frog. It worked, and soon Jutta was able to swim the breaststroke.

Against her daughter’s judgment and custom of the time, Mama invited Jutta to wear boy’s pants, reasoning that her grandchild would have more fun playing when not worrying about the care of dresses. Jutta loved the idea, but her mother didn’t.

Behind the house there was a big cherry tree and one summer day Mama made a swing for Jutta and fastened it to one of the big branches of the tree. Jutta’s mother felt it would kill it, but Mama didn’t care. Jutta tried to swing as high as she could and attempted to pick cherries with her toes. Mama also rigged up a makeshift fishing pole for Jutta. There were a few small fish in the stream and as luck would have it, Jutta hooked one of the largest. She was so excited at catching a fish that she jerked it out so quickly that it flew over her head and wrapped itself around a tree branch, resulting in a desperately flapping fish floundering in the breeze. Jutta was slightly taken aback, but quickly calmed down when she heard her Mama’s laughter at her success.

Jutta enjoyed those weeks with her beloved grandmother and Hanna, but when she was sent back to Minden, her apprehension that such bliss couldn’t continue proved true. It would prove true over the next eleven years with but a few interspersed escapes to her safe Werste haven.

By that fall Jutta was forced to go back to Minden. There she often entertained herself by walking on the street curb while day dreaming. One day she failed to pay attention to what she was doing, and made a misstep on the curb that flung her sideways into the street. Because she was walking with the traffic, she hadn’t noticed the horse-drawn wagon passing her from behind. Her fall coincided with her head hitting the cobble stone street just as the rear wooden wagon wheel with its metal outer band rolled over her head. It was miraculous that the wagon’s weight didn’t crush her skull, but instead the metal band grazed off of the right side of her skull. Jutta of course reeled back and landed hard in the gutter. When people gathered around to see what had happened and attempt to give assistance, Jutta wouldn’t let anyone touch her, and while screaming bloody hell, ran for home. A ghastly sight arrived at the apartment door and after one look, Marie fainted. F.M. (Jutta’s future step-father) picked her up and carried her to the hospital only a few blocks away. It was the only good thing Jutta felt he ever did for her during the years she was forced to live with him.

In the hospital Jutta continued to cry out in response to both her pain and her frightful trauma. She was immediately taken to the operating room to clean the wound of all the dirt and bone fragments. The staff placed an ether mask over her mouth and Jutta felt herself going into a downward spiral of comfort leading to darkness. The reality was that within the next 24 hours, she had quickly developed a high fever due to massive infection in the wound. She was taken again into surgery and after repeating the anesthetizing procedure, an incision was made to drain the accumulating puss that had to be drained numerous times over the ensuing weeks. The accident would leave a dramatic six inch long, one half inch wide scar on her head that could only be seen when she parted her black hair.

Jutta felt the staff pampered her in that large room with so many beds and sick children. She felt they did this more specifically for her since they may have had a feeling she wasn’t going to make it. Antibiotics had not yet been developed and it took a six month stay in the hospital for her body to overcome the infection, and for her to become stabilized. After three months on the children’s ward, a scabies infection spread to all the children and they were all placed in quarantine in the hospital basement. During this time period, Mama, her beloved grandmother, had visited the hospital but was not allowed to see Jutta. Mama placed a doll on Jutta’s children’s ward nightstand, but when Jutta returned upstairs the doll was gone.

Jutta was six by the time her mother came to pick her up and take her home. A few days later, Marie married F. M. and they moved into a small place at Bartlingshof 17 in Minden. She later felt the worst day of her life had occurred when her mother married the young and good looking Friedrich Marowski. Jutta was now a Marowski. Over the course of her life, she rarely spoke or wrote his name and simply called him F.M. She felt that the marriage was the biggest mistake her mother ever made.

Their home was on the ground floor of a small multi-unit building behind an even bigger apartment house. There were two rooms for the family plus access to a wash house serving the tenants of the big apartment building. One of their rooms contained a stove for cooking and heating and the other was for sleeping. It was much too small for the three of them.

The apartment was damp and thick mildew grew on the wall separating the buildings. Mildew also grew on their outside wall facing the other building. The rooms had no water and the family had to go to the front vestibule where everyone could pour it into buckets and bring it back to their apartments. The W.C. was also there for use by all those in the house, with every apartment having a key. If someone lost or misplaced their key they were out of luck.

In the W.C. there was a clearly marked city notice that read it was clearly forbidden to put anything into the toilet including sand, kitchen waste, ashes, or clumps of paper, flower cuttings or anything like it. Jutta viewed the sign on a daily basis for nearly three years as had everyone else, for the sign had been put up in October 1911 by the Minden City Apartment Regulators.

Marie continued to delay signing the adoption papers for her youngest daughter. She was living with a loving and stable couple, but Jutta felt her mother had secretly wanted Ursula back all along, and now married with her own place, as miserable as it was, Jutta’s little sister arrived. When Marie met F.M. he had seemingly promised her that if she married him, she could have the child back. The move and transition from a functioning and caring family to a dysfunctional setting was immediately felt and expressed by the three-year-old girl.

By this time F.M. had shown his true colors. He couldn’t hold down a job, he got entangled in shady deals, and he was always in and out of prison. When at home, he drank and smoked a lot. He seemed to get enjoyment out of beating his children and their mother with his leather belt. What he was good at was keeping Marie pregnant, and she eventually had four boys by him. When he had no money, he sent Jutta out to find cigarette butts in the gutters, so he could break them down and make his own. Jutta felt her new Vati (father) had all the values of a scumbag, with his only redeeming virtue being that he never sexually abused her.

Ursula’s adoptive parents had called her Wilma, and when her natural mother insisted on calling her Ursula, she cried and cried and wouldn’t let Marie touch her. This rejection caused Marie to sit at the kitchen table crying about it all the time. Jutta called her sister Wilma when they were alone and the girl hid behind her whenever her mother wanted to pick her up. The two girls slept together in a small bed and Ursula cried herself to sleep every night on Jutta’s shoulder.

Not far from the apartment block there was an empty lot grown over by weeds and a few flowers. There Ursula and Jutta picked wild daisies and planted them in the dirt. One day a young man stopped by and talked very friendly to the two girls.

Aren’t you the little girl who was hit by a horse-drawn wagon a year ago?

Yes, I am, Jutta said, being pleased that someone would remember her accident.

If you want to find some better flowers, I know where they are just over in the park.

The girls followed and once there he led them behind some trees and said, Can I look for gold in your pants?

Jutta thought the request very strange, for she thought if there was any gold in her pants she surely would know it.

She said, I don’t think there is any gold there.

Ursula began to cry then and that attracted the attention of a bypasser, so the man said, I believe you. Why don’t you run home. He suddenly disappeared in the opposite direction in a great hurry and Jutta took Ursula by the hand and walked her home. The girls never spoke of the incident, feeling they would have been spanked for going with the stranger.

Wilma was called Ursula by everyone and started going by that name, even though she only stayed with them a few months. Marie was now pregnant with Werner, the first of the boys she would have with F.M., who was by now in prison again. Marie couldn’t feed the two girls and she had no money to pay the rent. They were literally starving. One day Jutta was sent to the store to fetch a few meager items, and when she came back, Ursula wasn’t there anymore. Her adoptive parents had picked her up again, but it took Marie another four years to sign the papers for Ursula’s adoption. Many months later Jutta and her mother went to Bielefeld and Ursula’s school so Marie could see her daughter for the last time from afar. It wasn’t difficult spotting her because she looked just like her mother. Jutta wouldn’t see her half sister again for 50 years.

Ursula’s departure was very sad for Jutta, because her little sister had bonded with her, though not with their mother. For many years, Jutta would daydream that Ursula’s adoptive parents would come back and also take her with them. In her dreams, Jutta saw Ursula telling her adoptive parents that she wouldn’t be truly happy without her sister. The dream remained a dream.

When Jutta was still six, her oldest brother, Werner, was born. Her grandfather also moved in with them and all five crowded into the two little rooms that were less crammed whenever F.M. was in prison. Jutta slept with her grandfather for the longest time in the little bed. There still was no money to pay the rent. When they were finally evicted from the place, Marie was sitting there with two little kids, and F.M. was nowhere to be found. The grandfather had had it, for he took off and asked if he could live with Mama again. Mama was lonely because Uncle Peter, her second husband, had died. So she took her first husband back until he died of congestive heart failure two years later.

Jutta felt her mother would have never given up Ursula if they hadn’t been starving. Jutta reflected on her situation and knew that she was being kept around to clean and take care of her baby brothers who were arriving on a yearly basis. She hesitated to judge her mother, but knew that she missed her loving grandmother, for she felt she had