One Loaf of Bread

By Frank Nadell

As a child facing the fiery mayhem of Germany's raging World War, then moving to the vibrant streets of fifties and sixties Chicago, where prosperity is a possibility for everyone, Frank Nadell will rise above his tough past, overcoming prejudice and obstacles, to become one of the Windy City's most successful restaurateurs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662483400

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One Loaf of Bread

Frank Nadell

Copyright © 2023 Frank Nadell

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 978-1-6624-8335-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8340-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

About the Author

Shortly after my arrival in the US in 1953, I was bombarded by news on TV about millions of Jews murdered by Nazi Germany and also the new arrival of yet another Holocaust Museum. Shouldn't a young German immigrant develop a guilt complex if they listened to this continuous drumbeat? I had many sleepless nights. How could I tell the people who would listen? A TV or a megaphone was not available to me, so my first thought about writing a book entered my mind.

I may not reach 350 million people, but it is a humble start. Thank you for your interest in this book. May God bless you.

Sincerely,

Frank Nadell

Foreword

1944 as me and a friend of mine walked on a street in Munich, suddenly a bread truck made a sudden u-turn and lost several loaves of bread. Luckily me and my friend rushed to retrieve one loaf and wound up with stomach pain after wolfing it down.

Chapter 1

Insanity

It was 1943 in Munich, Germany. The sirens were wailing, and it was two o'clock in the morning. My mother was yelling, Come on! Get up! Hurry to the shelter! I was thinking, What shelter? It was just a trench that was eight feet deep and six feet wide with a wooden roof. On top of the roof was a big mound of dirt that the prisoners from Dachau had shoveled to make it fairly secure from shrapnel. After all, a direct hit would probably kill the people underneath. The kind of bombing that was happening then was mostly incinerating bombs designed to burn everything that was hit.

Just about every night, we went through this routine. It was mostly women, children under the age of fourteen, and old men over sixty-five who went to the shelter in our neighborhood. All other men and male children had been drafted into the army. We ran into the shelter every night. The shelter had long wooden benches on both sides and a walkway in the middle. Nights were mostly uneventful, except for the wailing of the sirens. Then we heard bombs hitting in the distance. As the bombing came closer and closer, the excitement in the bunker escalated, making it a very noisy place. The screaming of the children became louder and louder, only interrupted by the loud prayers of the adults.

I was only ten years old, and my little sister was four. My mother was twenty-eight, but her facial expressions were almost like those of the old ladies sitting next to us. That was what war did; it made you old. My mother was old at twenty-eight, and my sister and I were robbed of our childhood. My little mind was wondering why this was happening to us. It was getting to be a nightly routine to run to the shelter after the warning signals pierced the night with their wailing sounds. As we sat in the flimsy, makeshift bomb shelter, the grown-ups were talking when we heard the drone of the bombers overhead. It sounded like there were hundreds; the noise was so great. The adults were yelling, Where are the German flaks? Why don't they shoot them down? Another said, Don't be stupid. The few antiaircraft flaks we have in Munich are no match for the armada of hundreds of bombers under the cover of night. Yes, there were a few searchlights, but they were easy targets for the bombers.

One day, we heard the deafening drone of bombers. We thought they were directly over our little bomb shelter. Suddenly, all hell broke loose, and the bombs were hitting close to us and maybe even above us! Everybody was too scared to look outside. The crying, yelling, and frightened praying were as deafening as the sounds of the bombs exploding themselves. It was so scary that my heart almost popped out of my little chest. Just as the noise inside the trench became unbearable, there was a nearly direct hit, or it was close enough to pressurize the inside of the shelter and lift the benches with the people on them off the floor! Now there was panic in our little surround. People were prostrating themselves on the dirt floor, and others were kneeling in very vocal, intense prayer, shouting over the outcry of bombs exploding. Children were screaming, and everybody was terrified, thinking that it was the end of their lives.

But we got lucky once again and lived another day. The bombers must have dumped their load and were heading back to England. We heard sporadic flak fire from the German positions and, finally, the welcome sound of sirens signaling the danger was over singing in the distance, lulling us into a false sense of security that might be short-lived. As we dragged our tired bodies back a few blocks to the tenements, we saw the damage that had been done to the surrounding buildings and to the city. Everything was in flames. Needless to say, we were totally exhausted when we went back to bed. My mother did not wake me up in the morning because she heard through the grapevine that the schools were closed today to clean up the damage from the night before.

It had become a monotonous habit of listening to the radio as it announced which schools were open or closed. Sometimes, the undamaged schools would take in the kids from the damaged schools, requiring long walks to and from. Well, today, there was no school, and the neighborhood kids hung out in the various courtyards. Some of the courtyards had huge piles of bricks and timber from collapsed sections of our tenement buildings. There were five-story walk-ups in our neighborhood. The children played among the rubble.

Early in the mornings, after the night bombings, trucks with prisoners and guards from the Dachau concentration camp would arrive. The prisoners' job was to defuse the unexploded bombs on the spot. Of course, the guards kept the children at a safe distance. One of the guards told us that if a prisoner disarmed three bombs, he would get his freedom. These men chose to play Russian roulette with their lives rather than return to the hell they lived in. The prisoners were always begging for food, but sorry to say, we were also hungry. Food was very scarce in the cities, so we had nothing to give them.

My father, who was in the German Army since 1939, came home on leave every six months for one week. He waited until we, the kids, were supposedly asleep before the serious conversations started. I was a curious kid, so I listened many nights to the secret conversations in our apartment. It was very small with thin walls and ill-fitting doors because our building was heavily damaged from the bombings.

My dad was very anti-government and very anti-Nazi Party. He talked with great secrecy and reminded my mother often not to mention anything to her friends or neighbors. He said, You can trust no one. He said that he would face deadly consequences if the party officials found out his true feelings. He predicted that Germany would lose the war as early as 1943. My father, even though he was only a low-ranking soldier in the army, seemed very wise to me at my tender age. I was easily impressed by his knowledge. My mother was not as worldly as my father and asked him many questions. My curiosity led me to love listening to these forbidden conversations.

One day, my mother asked my father, Hans, why we never had enough food to eat and why all the shelves in the grocery store were always empty. The food stamps we got were just enough to keep us from starvation. My father explained to my mother that German farmers could not produce enough food to feed everyone. Germany was dependent on imports from other countries, especially from the colonies in Africa, but now during the war, he said the Allied forces and their navies blocked all incoming supplies into Germany, and that alone spelled doom for us.

Furthermore, my father explained in simple terms to my mother: Assume you had to feed one thousand people, and you only had enough to feed seven hundred. The government would set priorities for distribution. The number one priority would be the fighting German Army. The number two priority would be government officials and employees, Nazi Party affiliates, and various agencies. The number three priority would be army hospitals and rehab facilities for wounded soldiers. The number four priority would be dependents of the army. That was me, my mother, and my sister; and we were constantly hungry.

He continued. The number five priority would be general hospitals and senior centers, followed by the general German population. As we go down the list, food gets scarcer and scarcer. Now my father spoke in a low voice, and my ears perked up. The government has to euthanize the mentally ill, the seriously crippled, and in general, the undesirables where there is no food left after the priority list. So you can imagine what happens in the prisons and the concentration camps.

Many years later, when I was in my forties and fifties, my mother and I discussed those secret conversations between her and my father. I sometimes only remembered snippets, but she reinforced my memory and clarified what I had forgotten. She reminded me of when I tried so hard to catch a pigeon so we could have some meat for dinner.

My pigeon hunt began after one night of extreme bombing in our section of Munich, which turned out to be a night of horrors. When we finally heard the all clear siren, we left the makeshift bunker and walked forward to our apartment complex. It was just breaking daylight as we approached our building. We saw the heavy damage it sustained. It looked like a giant with a huge hatchet had sliced through part of our building. A support wall was chopped clear off, leaving just a big pile of bricks and timber in the courtyard. Luckily, the staircase was intact, and we managed to walk up to our fourth-floor apartment. We walked through the front door, and my god, the whole living room wall was missing! We saw the stars in the sky shining down on the burning city at the crack of dawn. We saw the flustered pigeons looking for a new place to roost.

Now reality set in: our small apartment was even smaller than it was before. Now we had only one bedroom, a kitchen, and a hallway left that were safe. There was a half bathroom that was a community affair. It had a bathtub and a shower for three apartments on each floor. It was located at the landing of the walk-up staircase. Each apartment had prearranged days when the bath could be used. It had a wood fire and water heater, and you had to start the fire three hours before you intended to bathe if you wanted hot water. The living room floor was unsafe and, sadly, sagging.

Since my mother occupied the small bedroom, my sister and I had bunk beds in the living room. The beds slid down to the pile of debris in the courtyard. The floorboards had only one wall of support. This morning, my sister and I slept on the floor in the hallway. We were so exhausted that it did not matter. When I woke up, I saw the whole extent of the damage, and I held my sister in my arms in hopes of stopping her uncontrollable crying. The door from the hallway to the living room was wide open, and nothing was aligned anymore. We could see beyond the drooping living room floor into the wild blue yonder. Our mother had strictly forbidden us to go beyond the hallway door into the sorry floor of the living room.

From the hallway, I saw our pantry door swinging in the wind. The pantry on the other side of the living room was open to the elements too. On the next building, which miraculously had been only lightly damaged, a group of pigeons were sitting on the roof. I was an adventurous kid and was always hungry. I looked out at what used to be the living room, which now had two walls instead of four. I thought that if I could catch one or two of those birds, my mother could cook them for dinner.

I got the bright idea of getting a long string, attaching it to the pantry door, luring some birds into the pantry with some seeds or some crumbs or whatever I could find, and pulling the string and slamming the pantry door, catching a pigeon. But I could not tell my mother of the plan because she would never have let me go on the sagging floor to attach the string to the door. So when she was occupied with some other chore, I did what I had to do. I found some crumbs and led a path from the outside into the pantry. I lay in the hallway on my belly with string in hand, waiting for the pigeons to show up. Well, nothing happened on the first day. The next day, two pigeons showed up and ate the precious crumbs. They flew away before I could pull the pantry door shut. I would have been better off eating the crumbs. I was so disappointed that I gave up.

Hunger was our steady companion, and the meals of mashed potatoes as our supper were made only with water and salt. Sometimes, Mother got a whole loaf of bread, which lasted maybe an hour in our kitchen. When we did have food, we wolfed it down in a hurry. Maybe we were afraid someone would try to take it away from us. My mother was always searching for food, and one day, she got my little sister dressed. She said to both of us, Let's go. We are going for a train ride. I was curious and asked Ma where we were going and why. She said we had nothing to eat in the house, and we had to find some farmers and beg for food. I was very excited, because getting something to eat sounded pretty good to me.

The train huffed and puffed, and in about an hour, we got off and started walking toward a little village with maybe half a dozen farmhouses. They all had barns and fenced-in areas for cattle, pigs, chickens, and goats. As we got close to the first farm, our mother grilled us on what to say if the farm people should ask us kids any questions. Kids, if anybody asks you what you want, say, ‘I haven't eaten in two days, and anything to eat would be a blessing from God.' I could see that my mother was very nervous, and she must have felt extremely degraded by begging for food.

Now we were standing in front of the first farmhouse door, and I could see my mother's hand shaking as she knocked gently on the door. We waited for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, an older woman opened the door. She said in an aggravated, harsh voice, What do you want?

My mother said in a shaking voice, My children are hungry. We live in the city, and there is no food in our house, and all the shelves in the stores are empty.

Wait here, said the farmer's wife in an annoyed voice.

In about five minutes, she came back with three slices of bread and handed them to my mother. Then she slammed the door in our faces. We yelled, Thank you! through the closed door. My ma gave me a whole slice of bread and my sister half a slice. Then she put the rest in a cloth bag that she had brought along.

The houses were ten or fifteen minutes apart, and we were heading for the next stop. Mother again knocked on the front door, but nobody came. She knocked again. Still, nothing happened. We walked over to the barn, and the door was open. There were about a dozen milk cows in there. Then we saw a young boy maybe a little older than me. He was feeding the cattle. My ma yelled over to him and asked him if his parents were around. He came over and said that his dad was in the army and that his ma would be back in about an hour. My ma told him that we came from the city and that we were all hungry. The boy was very sympathetic and gave us a jug of fresh milk and some green apples. We thanked him profusely and went on our way down the street.

Ma and I were happy that things were going so well so far, but my little sister was getting cranky because of all the walking that we did. On the next stop, we knocked again. A really perky young girl answered the door. My ma went immediately into the same spiel about us coming from the city and so forth. The girl said, Wait here while I talk to my mom. A few minutes later, the perky young girl came back and said, Ma wants you to come in and have a bite to eat.

The farm lady and the perky daughter were extremely nice to us and asked us to sit at their table. It took only a few minutes for the farm lady to whip up a plate of Spätzle and gravy. My god, we hadn't had anything that delicious in a long time! I could see that my mother had tears in her eyes, as she was so thankful for having met such nice people. As we were thanking the two women and getting ready to go, the farm lady said, Wait a minute. She went to another room and came back with half a dozen large potatoes and some Kolyma. She said to my mother, Take these with you. My mother was so overwhelmed that she thanked God in front of the generous farm lady.

We headed straight back to the train station for the ride back to the city because my little sister could not walk anymore. It had been a very exhausting day for all of us, but we thanked God that our stomachs were full, and we even had some food leftover for a couple of days. When we finally arrived home, we went straight to bed and slept like logs. For a few hours, we had peace and contentment in our hearts, and we dreamed of new lives as we slept.

Chapter 2

More Insanity, Escape to the Countryside, and Occupation

At 2:30 a.m., the alarm sirens went off again. I knew it shouldn't have been a surprise because it happened every night, but it was always a bit of surprise. Munich was not really a big city—perhaps about a million people. According to my parents, there were no military manufacturing in town or anything that would have been a military target. There were just old people, women, and children. The young people were in military service or civilian services called Arbeitsdienst. Perhaps the Allies chose Munich as a target to show what they could do to a city or a nation. The night bombings sure kept the prisoners from Dachau busy.

Without fail, every morning, there was an appearance of trucks, prisoners, and guards. My mother warned us children not to talk to the prisoners because they were mostly undesirables and foreigners. But through those secret conversations late at night, when my father was on furlough, I heard through the closed doors that those prisoners were mostly Untermenschen, a German slang for less than desirable. They were less than human.

I learned my first lesson on prejudice. My father, as early as 1943 and 1944, was a precursor of Archie Bunker, which later in my life I would experience through TV. It seemed like my father hated everybody. He only got to see his family for one week every six months, and he progressively became bitter toward his wife and children. When I was eleven or twelve years old, my father beat me worse and worse as time went on. He also became very abusive toward my mother. Every time he left to go back to the war, my mother made excuses for him. He was under extreme stress on the front line to save his life, she would say.

One particular time, when he came back from the front line at Stalingrad, he was totally distressed. He said to my mother that if Hitler ever came close enough to him, he would kill him with his bare hands. He said that the war against Russia was the final nail in the German coffin. Hundreds of German trucks and tanks were stuck in Russia with no fuel to go anywhere. The supply train had broken down, and his comrades were left behind in the Russian countryside, frozen to death for lack of proper food and clothing.

It was a crazy war. A little country like Germany was fighting the world. Insanity was the word. Hans Gnadl, my father, got one week's rest in Munich with his family before he was shipped to Italy for the rumored Allied invasion. He was so bitter and against the commander in chief, Adolf Hitler, that I thought the blood vessels in his head would burst just talking about him. He said this to my mother in confidence during one of their late-night conversations, which I wasn't supposed to hear. As early as one or two years before the invasion, the rank-and-file soldiers already knew that it was a hopeless cause. Only a madman like Hitler could have kept the war going, but it was either follow orders or get shot. After Father went to Italy, he never came home. We figured he was either dead or a prisoner of war. We prayed daily that he was still alive.

As Munich's destruction got worse and worse, the government started a program where young soldiers' wives and children were sent out to the rural countryside. It was supposed to be an escape from the war. There were no air raids, and kids could go to school on a regular basis. My mother, my sister, and I were sent to a little village in the foothills of the Alps called Bichl. It was a government order that any property owner with spare bedrooms would take in city mothers with children. After our last experience in the country, we expected great things. It wasn't quite like that.

As we got off the train in Bichl, there were government people who greeted us. We waited to be assigned to a person or couple whom we could stay with, hopefully until the war was over. We stood there on the platform of the train, anxiously awaiting whom we were assigned to. After a long wait, we were introduced to a couple called Mr. and Mrs. Stark. We stood there with our belongings all in one suitcase. Mr. and Mrs. Stark seemed to be very old to us, but when you were eleven or twelve years old, everybody seemed old. My mother was around thirty, my sister was six, and I was close to twelve. As it turned out, the Starks were in their sixties. The Starks had a car, and we all piled into it. I greatly anticipated the new digs we were about to live in.

Immediately, I could sense a resentment from Mrs. Stark after she saw her husband being overly friendly to my mother. Through the eyes of a sixty-year-old male, a woman of thirty was eye candy. Of course, I figured this out later in my life. This part I probably didn't know when I was that young. At first, life was wonderful. Great Mr. Stark pulled into the driveway of a two-story house that looked to me like a millionaire's mansion. But when you were coming from a four-story walk-up apartment, anything looked great after that. Our new living quarters were not even a full basement. It was only halfway below ground level, so the windows were high up, closer to the ceiling. But, boy, the sleep was great! There were no alarm signals blasting. We slept through the night undisturbed for the first time in a long while.

The next morning, my sister and I were anxious to check out the house, the yard, and the neighborhood. We were happy with what we saw. It was a peaceful place with no more than thirty or forty houses, which were mostly farmhouses with barns, animals, and apple orchids. But the most important part of all was that we got to eat breakfast. Our mother gave us milk and pastry. What a treat that was for us! My ma said that Mr. Stark was a party official and that he had special privileges for food. The friendliness and the happiness were short-lived, however, after Mrs. Stark told my mother the house rules.

We were not to go upstairs to their living quarters unless invited. My mother listened to a long lecture from Mrs. Stark on what we could and could not do. I could see from my mother's expressions that this was not going to be a happy house. In short, we were treated as second-class citizens. But we made do with what we had and settled into a routine a couple of days later. Mother registered us in a local school. It was tough for us kids at first, not knowing anybody, but kids were fast in making friends, and we all felt good because we seemed to be so distant from the war. But the grim reminder was the almost daily groan of the heavy bombing squadron overhead, heading toward our beloved city of Munich. They caused havoc, and we felt really bad for the nice people we left behind.

Our peaceful existence lasted for some time. Then we heard the news that the Allied invasion had started. Our mother told us daily what was going on. She was really worried about our father, and we said prayers daily for his and our safety. Mother was glued to the radio, listening to the progress of the invasion. Mr. Stark said that we should have a fairly easy time of it when the troops arrived in our little town since there was no resistance. There were no German troops anywhere near our town. The radio said that in our area, we would have American troops as the invaders. The talk in the town was, we were lucky it wasn't the Russians because their reputation was one of pillage, plunder, and rape. So the female population was less worried because we were expecting the Americans.

Then overnight, we became very afraid. One man went from door to door and spread doom and gloom. He said all females between seven and seventy should hide in their basements and barns because the front line troops were savages whether American or Russian. He had a special warning for folks who had pictures of Hitler in their houses or, for that matter, anything that made them look like they were party sympathizers. Destroy these things or bury them, he said. These were very nerve-racking times. Through movies and history books, American children were taught that the German population was so happy to be liberated, that they patted the Americans on the back and offered them beer. It wasn't exactly like that. It was more of an occupation than a liberation.

Days went by, but nothing happened. Then one morning, we heard tremendous engine roars that shook the earth, or at least it felt like it. What we saw was so frightening that we shook with fear. We were out in the yard and saw clouds of black smoke and what looked like hundreds of tanks approaching our village. They spread a deafening sound as they rolled forward. The long, stretched-out line of tanks was close enough that we could see how big and frightening they were.

Mr. Stark was so scared and beside himself that he started talking at rapid-fire speed. He really spoke for all of us: I had no idea that the Americans were this strong and powerful! They can afford to come with such power and so many monster tanks into a small village like ours! Let us pray that they just roll through without stopping! But our prayers were not answered. The roar of the tank engines seemed to get less and less, and the tanks came to a complete stop. Shortly afterward, a German voice came through bullhorns, telling the mayor of the town to display a white flag from the church steeple in no more than three hours, or the town would be destroyed and the inhabitants killed! Mr. Stark was frantic. He said, We must find the mayor and insist he put a white flag out!

We were all on pins and needles because we knew that the mayor was a party official, and he would have to be forced to do what needed to be done. Mr. Stark left. We knew he was a Nazi sympathizer, but he was on a mission to save the town. The clock was running out. Two and one half hours had passed since the fatal announcement of the powerful tank column. Would Mr. Stark be physically able to force the mayor to put out a white flag?