Gisela Bandurraga

CENTER FOR ORAL AND PUBLIC HISTORY

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

NARRATOR: GISELA BANDURRAGA

INTERVIEWER: Jennifer Keil

DATE: October 10, 2012

LOCATION: Garden Grove, California

PROJECT: Hitler’s Europe to the Golden State

JK: This is Jennifer Keil.  I’m conducting an interview with Gisela Bandurraga in Garden Grove, California.  It’s October 10, 2012 at 7:30 p.m.  This is Cal State Fullerton University Oral History Project entitled From Hitler’s Europe to the Golden State. 

When and where were you born? 

GB: In a small spa town called Bad Mergentheim.  I need to spell this.  Bad stands for the spa.  That means bath, and that’s spelled B-a-d.  Then a separate word, capital 

M-e-r-g-e-n-t-h-e-i-m.

JK: Thank you.  Can you share with me what your upbringing was like? 

GB: How far back do you want me to get? 

JK: From the very beginning.  (laughs)  Yes!

GB: (laughs)  From the very beginning.  At the very beginning I was a very pudgy little girl of three months old in a little steel type like bed, which I have pictures of up to this day.  My father met my mother in World War I.  I have a postcard to prove it that he wrote to her from World War I, and they got married.  He was a dentist, an oral surgeon, and he started his family.  He bought his equipment that he needed, and he started a practice of his own.  We lived in a house that used to be a postal station.  On the bottom of it they have rooms or stalls that used to be for the horses at those days, but then they had gotten doors for them.  They made them wash kitchens.  Speaking of stalls, in later years they converted the bottom floor apartment and had two more floors on top.  We lived on the first floor and had about seven rooms there.  They were separated through a bevel glass door.  Half of it was my dad’s practice as a waiting room and a lab and then where he practiced in.  The other half were our living quarters.  And, of course, in those days we had no hot water and no cars.  We had one of the first telephones in the little town, yeah, because my dad needed this.  And, we had like a balcony that ran all the way through the inner courtyard.  It was like an old patrician house, and the balcony had grapes growing all the way from the bottom up to the balcony where my dad had made us a little table so that we could eat out there.  We called it a clack table because it made click-clack when you put it up or down.  He had to put something behind it to keep it up, and we as children would eat on this balcony and have a good time.  We could reach the grapes from sitting there.  Our bedrooms would go out also to the balcony with a flooring of tile.  Basically, I know very little about my father because he was always busy trying to build the family and the practice and what have you, but he did rented a plot of land somewhere.  We planted vegetables, fruit, and things, and we had a little weekend house.  On Sundays we would go there, and we would all dig in the ground.  Then we sit and have our lunch there and play harmonica.  I still play the harmonica.  Now at age eighty-nine, I read the Silent Night story, played it, and then sang it in German where I live with seniors with assisted living at Atria San Dimas. 

JK: Really?

GB: Yeah.  So, I’d play harmonica and sing and just have a good time or what we called a good time in those days.  On weekends, like Saturdays, my dad would take us on a big walk through the forest, and in fall we would gather leaves of all kinds of colors and bring them home.  And, we’d then stop at the butcher and get cold cuts.  That’s the big thing in Germany, cold cuts of all kinds of meats, you know, veal and pork and salami and turkey and whatever you could get.  Then, we’d stop at the bakery and get some fresh baked buns.  We would bring them home, and my mother would bake a cake on Saturdays.  We could smell it when we got home. We would bring her all these colorful leaves, and then we had our evening meal.  That was on Saturday nights that we would have this kind of evening meal.  My parents would get about a half a glass of wine, and we would get what they call milk kaffee.  We would get milk with three drops of coffee, but we were very proud because we start drinking something special.  (laughs)  Not only this, but we had butter on the table on Saturdays.  My mother was the only one that could get butter, and we had to eat our cold cuts on the bun without butter simply to honor my mother as being head of the household.  And, we accepted all of this.  Our daily life was normal. We didn’t have a lot of things because there were three children.  I had a sister that was two years older and a brother that was four years younger than me. 

JK: What was your sister’s name?  And your brother’s name? 

GB: My sister’s name was I-n-g-e-b-o-r-g, and my brother’s name was G-u-i-d-o.  Ingeborg and Guido.

JK: What were they like? 

GB: Well, my brother fell in my father’s footstep.  He became a dentist.  My sister, she married her childhood sweetheart.  She was working in a hospital as a receptionist, and then she married her childhood sweetheart.  They took over one of these, you would call them sanatoriums in Germany.  It’s like a restaurant, and on the bottom floor they had huge bathtubs.  They would give mud baths.  This is where the word Bad came from. They would give mud baths with a mud that was said to have some ingredients that were healing, and the people going there were directed there by their doctors.  And, in those days, everything was paid for.  It was a total social state then, you know.  This was law before Hitler took over.  They would send these people there, and they would stay there and sleep there and have their meals there.  Three times a day they would have to go to what they call a cure hall.  It was a long hall with glass walls and three fountains of so-called healing water that these patients dad to drink for liver and gall and internal ailments.  The ingredients, the main ingredients, were glauber and bitter salts.  The three wells where this water flowed from faucets were in those cure halls.  Patients would have their ticket number and their glass.  They went in the morning and filled their glass, and they walked all the while they drink this.  The hall was in a big garden.  They called it cure garden.  Then these sick people would go and eat, and then they’d take a sleep.  What they didn’t do was what the doctors told them to, which would be a lot of rest and to heal.  Besides the healing water, my hometown was also known as being surrounded by vineyards.  Lots of them.  They had wines that were named by adjoining villages names and by the part of Germany famous for all of this.  So, in the afternoon on Saturdays and such they went out, and they would drink heavily.  They drink this wine, and, of course, that didn’t do their gall and liver any good.  (laughs)  So, this is more or less what my hometown was like, touristy for the ill and well. 

[00:11:32]

JK: Okay.

GB: Other than this, it had a castle in my hometown that was occupied by the—they called them Rote Kreuz Ritter.  That means the Knights of the Red Cross, and it comes from I believe—I’m not quite sure about this anymore—but I think it came from the times way back when they had a war with other religions than the German religion, which was mostly Catholics at those days until Martin Luther came on the scene.  My father he was once ordered from the city to stand in one of the watch towers on the outside of that castle.  He stood watch for twenty-four hours.  And, my daughter here, Christine, she was there twice or three times even, right?  Yeah, she was there when she was a young child when I came with my husband from America, and we took a trip through Switzerland and such.  She stayed with my mother, and she had a good time she tells me.  (laughs)

JK: That’s great.  What other childhood memories do you have? 

GB: Childhood memories? 

JK: Of specifically, Germany. 

GB: My dear, there were very little.  I have to tell you this.  I cannot remember being showered with gifts and things like people [in] our days do.  I remember when I was about seven—first of all, I never had a doll on my own.  My sister had a doll, and if I washed my hands then I was allowed to play with it.  I remember when I was about seven the three of us got a ball.  Mine was blue, my sister’s was red, and my brother’s was green. 

JK: How cute. 

GB: I remember that.  And then, one Christmas that I remember when my father was still with us in our life we got ice skates.  Our boots were pretty worn, but my parents allowed us to put on these new fatigues.  What you call them these days, with the wooly stuff inside?  What do you call those?  Everybody wears the top and the bottom. 

CB: [Christine Breese, daughter of Gisela Bandurraga]  Parka, sweats?

GB: Sweats.  They were the only Christmas present with ice skates. 

JK: Oh, okay.  Right.  

GB: They were dark blue.  My sister’s had a little ring of red, white, and blue.  I remember this, and mine were red, black, and white.  We were allowed to try them out.  We went to the schoolyard where they pay football, and the whole schoolyard was made an ice skating rink.  Our noses were running and we had colds and our boots were leaking but we had a good time.  That’s about the only present I could remember.  Other things as a child—actually, nothing.  I went to grade school after I was born in ’24, and it was about the time that Hitler took over that we were not allowed to have any other thing in school than Germany, Germany, Germany over everything.  At my school we did not have any geography about any other countries, only bad rumors about that they were bad countries and not to talk about.  And, we had no religion.  They made all religious training into what they called a state youth day.  So, Saturdays, instead of having bible study, what they call it now, we would have to go to the forest and bring a sandwich and put it on one big mountain.  For the children that didn’t have that much to get a better sandwich and the ones that had more to get one that just had peanut butter straight on it or something—but my mother always gave me two.  I ate one, and I put one on this mountain.  That went on until I was out of school.  I never had any religious training whatsoever.  The reason I mention this is because I remember I did go on the sly to my first communion. That I remember. And, I remember what song they played there.  That was something out of the ordinary.  I remember my mother put a little white dress on me.  Otherwise we didn’t have all that many clothes either.  I remember having two skirts for weekdays and maybe two or three blouses and one Sunday dress.

JK: Did your mom make your clothes, or did you purchase them? 

GB: No, she made lots of our clothes. 

JK: Okay.  Did she teach you how to make the clothes as well as you grew up? 

GB: She tried.  She had a reason not to get through with it because she started turning the collars of the shirts, of my father’s white shirts, to the other side when they were worn.  And then, my dad said, “Why can’t you make just a new shirt?”  She thought, Well, I’ll show you that I can do this, and so she did it.  And, from then on he wanted her to do his shirts, and she said to my sister and I, “Don’t tell your husband’s later what you can do because you have to do it all the time.”  So, that was some of the reason.  I could sew a little bit, you know, but straight lines only, no dresses or things like this.  But, I learned how to knit and to crochet.  I remember one time I made a Norwegian sweater with a light blue and white buck and doe on it.  I made mittens with it and a wool cap all in the same navy blue with light blue in it.  

And, we played games you know.  On Saturday nights we played board games, like the Scrabble now and Halma and Checkers and all of those light stuff because we were children you see.  After I became fifteen years old, my father was warned by certain Nazi or SS [Schutzstaffel] people to give up his Jewish patients or else he would have to go, but he did not do this. He was a dentist and also oral surgeon.  In other words, he was the kind of dentist that could do operations also.

[00:20:20]

JK: Okay.  Very skilled. 

GB: Once he was summoned by a family named Eichenbrunner.  I still know the name. You want the name? 

JK: Yes, please.

GB: E-i-c-h-e-n-b-r-u-n-n-e-r. And, I myself in grade school had Jewish friends too.  I had a girlfriend named Erika Hirschberg whom I helped out on Saturdays when Jews were not supposed to work, you know, and I took her school bag home.  Her mother was waiting for us with baklava and cookies and all of this, yeah.  There was another girl named Ilsa Prager.  They had a store with home articles like noodle machines and sieves and kitchen articles.  I remember these names.  But, my father did not heed that SS warning because he had to live by his ethics. He was a doctor, you know, and he also regarded everybody the same.  So, he took his little satchel one night, and he went.  He saw this Mrs. Eichenbrunner, which had an impacted tooth, and he never came back.  That was the last I saw of my father.  I was fifteen years old.  In later years we found out the whole process of what they did with him.  They put him through the concentration camps, like in Poland and towards Russia.  Then the Germans went over to occupy France, and that’s where he wound up eventually.  They stood there with a little satchel of velvet, and they opened it. And they said, Over here are six hundred Jews.  They are stripped naked already, and they’re going in the oven any minute.  We already took the clothing.  Here’s a pair of pliers.  You take the gold teeth and put them in there.  And, that’s what they made him do. 

JK: Wow. 

GB: I do not know if he did this all the years, the three years that he was gone and we didn’t hear from him, or if they had other things for him to do, but he was completely under their control, under the SS control.  And, when they, the Germans, got into France General de Gaulle, the President of France, had to hand over all the occupying Germans to the then liberating Americans that came to Normandy with parachutes and boats.  Amongst them was my husband, my later husband, that I met here in 1952 in America.  That’s where my father was stuck into a—they called it a POW camp, but there was no camp.  There was no roof.  It was March.  It was mud, and it was snow.  And, they slept outside.  There were two hundred thousand people put into this place which only should have taken twenty thousand.  We heard later on from somebody that really did escape from there that my father snuck somehow to the kitchen facility at night.  He went through the garbage cans, and he got some rinds of sausage.  He was creating some kind of a soup, and not only did his German inmates there share that soup with them, but also he had befriended the American, the liberation army people that were supposed to watch them.  They became friends.  My father did speak French and English, and so he befriended the guards.  They did not have their own provisions come in in time either.  I think it was a week or later before they got the first food outside what they had of their K-rations.  So, some of them ate of the soup, and everybody that ate of that soup died of dysentery.  And, that’s how I lost my father.  

JK: When your father left, how did your mom manage the household when he was taken suddenly? 

GB: Well, my mother was then a widow, you know, but we didn’t know this until way later.  When they took him away, they gave my mother a very low sold [money], a sold which they gave to every soldier there because of their service, either by force or voluntary. 

CB: Sum of money.  Amount of money. 

JK: The amount of money?  Okay, thank you.

GB: Yeah.  It’s like here a widow’s or a soldier’s wife, you know.  The amount of money varied according to rank.  My dad was medic rank paid.  Mom also rented my father’s practice to another dentist, and my brother worked for this dentist.  He did his—what do you call it?  Pre-internship before he also got drafted.  

CB: Residency.

JK: Oh, his residency. 

GB: Yeah, until they drafted him into the anti aircraft, and he was seventeen years old only.  So then, that means he was gone too.  So, there was my mother, my sister, and I left.  And, at that time I worked in a hospital in the capacity of what I cannot even describe because it was everything.  I had to figure out the portions of food for different sicknesses, you know, so many grams of this and that and the other.  I had to have the key and give the linen out to the nurses.  I had to go in with the soldiers and read to them.  And, I never forget this.  I went into one room where nobody wanted to go in there because it smelled so awful.  I went and sat there for two hours reading to this man stories.  He had no arms and no legs, and he was in a hammock with drainage pipes going into a bucket. 

JK: What year was that? 

GB: What year was that? 

JK: That you worked at the hospital? 

GB: Um, that would have been 1944-1945.  Forty-five was when the war was over.  I sat in my office, and I heard this (makes marching sound).  I looked out of my window, and I saw the American Occupation Army march in on the rim of my hometown, which was in a basin.  Out of the window I could see them with their bayonettes and all of this.  Of course, I did not know the first thing about this.  I only heard about the Russian’s occupation because it was when they divided Germany into four: the Russians, the French, the British, and the Americans.  So, I stood there.  I was shivering for fear.  I had my bicycle.  That’s how you went to work those days.  No Porsches for the sixteen-year-old.  (laughs)  Then I waited until a solider came in, and I expected maybe being hit or something.  But, they were very nice.  They told us we could go home now.  When we asked, “Why and did we have our jobs back,” [they said], No, we did not because they occupied this hospital with their own soldiers.  So, I took my bicycle, and I got to drive it down there into the basin.  There was a bridge, and the American Air Force were—what do you say?  They had two planes go, one up this way, one up that way, and they crossed over on top and came down this way.  All the while they went rat-a-tat-tat, and they fired at that bridge.  That was to protect the incoming armed forces.  But, I had my bicycle, and at the end of the bridge—there were trees on either end—so I took my bicycle and each time the plane came this way and that way I went the other way ‘til finally they disappeared.  I guess they were out of ammunition.  I took the bicycle the rest of the way home, but I couldn’t drive this thing because I was sliding all over the streets.  And, I couldn’t figure out why.  The reason for this was because the mayor of that city wanted to prevent the American Armed Forces to get at the warehouses that he had preserved for the war and after the war to help his own people.  He opened those warehouses so the Americans wouldn’t get the stuff.

[00:32:20]

JK: What city is this? 

GB: Pardon? 

JK: The city that that you’re mentioning of the mayor of that went into—

GB: What city that was?  Bad Mergentheim where I was born.

JK: Okay, so it’s the same location.  Wow. 

GB: Yeah.  And so, in carrying this stuff home they tucked the loads of whatever was in their cartons and lost half of the stuff on the streets.  But, I made it home. And, my mother greeted me as my sister was already home.  She worked in another hospital at those times.  So, my mother greeted me, and she stuck me in the air raid shelter which was a coal cellar.  It had from the wash kitchen, which was one of these formal postal stations years ago, a trap door that went to this cellar where we had our winter coal.  Going down to the cellar was a staircase.  On the side was a shelf, and that’s where we put our milk to sour.  We used to eat milk with about this much cream on top of it, but we waited until it was sour milk.  Then we put cinnamon on it and sugar.  As children that was our dessert and things like that.  But, we had to sleep in those cellars a lot of times because there were air raids going on.  We had feather beds, down feather beds, and we had them on crates in that cellar.  Then in the morning when the sun shone, we got them up, we hung them over the line, and by the time that the day was over it had either snowed or rained.  Or they were halfway dry only.  But, the minute we would go back into those beddings they were all wet again.  And, I honestly say I can prove some of what happened to me now because I was seventeen years old when I had the right knee operated.  They had to take out all kinds of pieces.  I remember seven pieces.  The doctor was Dr. Dörner.  I’ve got a good memory.  (laughs)

JK: Yes, you do. 

GB: Dörner was his name.  He operated, and he took seven pieces out.  I was anxious to see what they were, and I said, “Can I see what you took out?”  He brought these pieces in a glass, and these were slivers of bone and fragments that had disintegrated.  They did tell me, Well, that’s the way we lived our days.  That’s lack of calcium.  You have no milk; you have no nothing.  We had nothing.

JK: How would you prepare meals with such limited resources during the war? 

GB: Meals? 

JK: Yeah. 

GB: Well, we took potatoes that we stole in the neighbor’s field.  (laughs)  And, ditto with onions.  Or, we waited until the harvest of the potatoes were over and then we went with deep shovels and tried to dig a little potato there, way down there still, up.  And, my mother and I went with a little hand wagon, about seven miles walk, to some of my father’s former patients that were living in adjoining villages.  We took our curtains off the window and exchanged them for eggs and milk.

JK: Was it a strong community where people shared with each other and helped each other throughout the war? 

GB: It was strict, by the government.  I would say it was help yourself.  No, in wartime—and the way the people, the younger people even younger than I was were raised right from the beginning of the Hitler, there was no sharing because whatever you got was community shared already.  We had to stand by the slaughterhouse under set rules.  If you were there at four o’clock in the morning and you liked horse meat, you would get like two pounds of meat for the month.  If you didn’t like horse meat you had to have other meats.  You only got one pound for the whole month.  Likewise with butter and other things.  I was telling my daughter tonight when I came here, [that] I was told about the hardship of rations in the U.S.A.   I asked somebody, and she says, “You have no idea.  We couldn’t get Columbian coffee anymore.  We had to drink what, coffee maybe from Africa or something?  I don’t know.  Chocolate was rationed, too.”  And, I’m thinking, You don’t know what rationing means because I had to walk out of my underwear because of rationing simply because we were allowed only this much rubber because the rest had to go to Hitler’s soldiers for band aids and such.  The rest was a string so if it didn’t hold it you just walked out.  That happened to me on the train station in 

Then the Americans got in.  We were down in the cellar here, and after the second day I looked out.  It was like what they call a surprise.  The cellar had a window—called a sub terrain window—that had one foot toward the street, and the rest was in the cellar.  I was starting to look out and seeing these soldiers.  They were playing marbles with stones on the street, and I told my mother, “They couldn’t be that bad.  They’re playing like children.”  So, my mother went out on the street.  She spoke English somewhat.  She used to be a governess for a very rich girl.  The family handled her like a second daughter, and she gave school and piano lessons and language to this girl.  That was a Dutch family.  Therefore, she knew some English.  And, she went to the street, and she approached these soldiers.  She said, “Do you have a mom at home?”  And, of course, they said, Yes.  “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”  “Yes, two brothers, I have.  And, I have a sister.”  “And you?”  “I have two sisters and one brother.”  So, she stood out there like an iron woman, and she said, “Well, if you both have sisters and mothers at home then honor your mothers and your sisters.  You keep your hand off my daughters because I have two daughters, and I put them in the cellar because we heard all these rumors about rape and such.”  But, the rumors came from the Russian zone occupation, and they were true.  I have friends here still that were in the city of Berlin when the Russians came in there.  They really had to lock their daughters away because of rape, see.  But, it was not happening in the American Zone.  I only know of one American case, and I know because I later on worked for the Americans in this position where I was helping to listen and to handle that case when it was prosecuted years later.  So, my mother kind of made a pact with them, and they exchanged rations for onions.  We had to go out and steal a lot of onions because the U.S. soldiers wanted onions to cook with their rations.  We had these little pipe stoves.  What do you call these little stoves, little round stoves? 

[00:41:43]

CB: A wood stove?  

JK: Wooden? 

GB: Yeah.  [Kacheloven]

CB: It burned wood I bet. 

GB: Yes, and coal and fried onions, etc.  And, not only this, but the German women have what they call a parade blanket over their feather beds.  They have these long feather beds, and then they have this parade sheet that was all embroidered hanging on the wall.  There were two strings and a ball, like a broomstick, round.   In the evening they would take this parade cushion cover sheet and hang it up there.  Then in the morning it goes back, one on the parade cushion, which was double the length of the cushion you sleep on, and it goes on the feather bed.  But, they quartered seven American GIs in our house.  We were confined to the kitchen and one bedroom, and the GIs had the rest.  And, of course, I mean, they’re soldiers, and they have combat boots on.  They went into my mother’s feather bed with all these things.  And, she cried.  It was all handmade, you know.  But, they got peace with her, and they had to do their job.  Every hour on the hour they would take their machine gun, and they say, Mom, it’s time.  She would go in front of them, and they’d go upstairs and downstairs with guns loaded.  They’d say, Mom is here.  SS, Mom is here.  She says, “How many times do I have to tell you we would never harbor the SS?”  That’s what we’re running away from, but we cannot get out.  We couldn’t get out of Germany. 

JK: You shared in our pre-interview conversation that you held a position in the new post-war government? 

GB: Yes. 

JK Would you tell me about that?  

GB: That’s coming up. 

JK: Is it?  Okay.

GB: So, the Americans marched in my hometown, and then we had no jobs.  Then about two weeks later we had to eat, and I found out that the American Armed Forces had opened a—they had confiscated an office of some kind, or building of some kind, and they opened up like a labor office for the Germans to give them jobs, you know.                  They found out that I had studied journalism, which was in a trade school right across from where we lived called Saint Bernard, and it was directed by nuns, by sisters.  They were teachers.  And, when they found this out there was a young man named Jim Walers—J-i-m and the last name is W-a-l-e-r-s.  I tried to locate him here in the United States later.  That’s where he wound up too—but I couldn’t locate him.  He was coming from France from Alsace Lorraine, hired by the American troops as an interpreter because he spoke three languages perfect.  They put him in the American uniform as a civilian worker for the Armed Forces, but he was quartered where they were and he ate where they were.  It was just like he was a soldier.  He had this office, and he said to me—I went there and asked for work.  He said, “We want to send you to the city of Frankfurt on the Main River because the German people want to get on their own again.”  You know, that is what they do now in Iraq.  He said, We are helping you start what they called the Economic Council then.  That’s what it was first.  “And, you’re starting a press office there.”  I’m thinking, my god, I’m too young.  I don’t know enough.  I haven’t learned enough.  How can I do this for a whole nation?  And, I said, “Yes.”  I went there, and I did that.   I started from the first number one point of law that they made for Germany, up to into the hundreds when finally I came over here.  I went from—oh, this Economic Council then became the German Bundestag, they called it, and they stationed that in Bonn on the Rhine River.  B-o-n-n.  I was transferred there.  And then, the Germans were able to vote, and they voted for the democratic chancellor named Konrad Adenauer.  I practically became his press secretary.  I kept doing this.  There was another girl named—Elizabeth Gies I think was her name. And, we—I don’t know how to explain this.  They didn’t have all the computer things and what you have now.  I would have to go in a meeting, and I did some speed writing which was faster than the court writing.  I would have to go upstairs—they had a typing room where they had twenty-some odd girls in there typing.  And, every twenty-five minutes or so I had to bring what I gathered from that meeting from the chancellor upstairs, and they typed it.  Then it had to go through by phone to the newspapers to get out there in time for the morning news and what have you.  And, that was my job.  Then the next twenty minutes somebody else had to bring this upstairs.  And, one day I decided to go back to my first desire to go to America which wasn’t happened before because I filled out some papers, and they disappeared before World War II. 

JK: Hm.  What year was that? 

GB: When I filled out first papers?  About 1939.  I was only about fifteen years old.  That was long before I lost my father in August of 1945.  [We found out he died in March 1945.]  I was watching, with a girlfriend, the American radio.  It was called Radio Freies Deutschland, Radio Free Germany.  We had to watch this in the alley so we wouldn’t get caught.  I was telling my girlfriend early in 1939, “I can feel what’s coming on.”  As young as I was I said, “This Hitler guy is no good.  There’s going to be a war, and I want to be gone before the war.”  So, I filled out some immigration papers in 1939, and they disappeared somewhere I tried to find out.  Then later on when I was working for the Bundestag they appeared again. 

[00:50:26]

JK: Wow.

GB: They wound up on my desk.  I made very, very good money there.  My family told me, Why are you going now?  You could retire if you were fifty years old and have three homes, and you could be world touring and all this.  I didn’t want it.  I said I’m going to leave because my memories were so bad.   [I was allowed to emigrate if I had a sponsor in America.  I found a sponsor, a true German couple.]  The man was called the Red Baron because he owned the coal mines in almost all of East Germany.  The Russians disowned him and sent him to Siberia on a train.  His wife was of Mormon religion, which they had at those days also somewhere in Poland.  The train went through there—his later to be wife and some other women went and brought some bread and water to those prisoners that now had to go to the coal mines in Siberia.  And, here was a man that never wore a shirt twice.  He was very, very close to all the German artists.  Richard Tauber was one of the big musical people connected to the film industry and artistry.  So, his wife later got him off that train and walked through all of eastern Germany to get into western Germany and then asked for asylum in America.  They got the asylum, and they also found me a sponsor who lived where they were going.  They were Mormons named Surman, and they went to Salt Lake City.  My sponsor was called Stover Bedding in Salt Lake City.  Stover, S-t-o-v-e-r, Bedding.  They made feather bedding.  The man was from Munich, and he was fifty years already in America.  He helped his Mormon people to bring some people finding asylum, and they got him for me as a sponsor.  Then, later on, of course, I was supposed to pay the price and become a Mormon, and it just wasn’t in me.  I had no reason why to change anything that I didn’t even have, you know. 

JK: Where did you move originally when you came to America?  Where did you move? 

GB: Where? 

JK: Yes, in America? 

GB: Salt Lake City.  I moved there because the Surman’s let me stay in their little apartment that the Mormon people provided for them.  They both worked—that man that was a multi-millionaire.  He scrubbed the marble plates in a crematorium where they dissected the dead people.  And, h