Willow Hill Elementary School: Fill & Download for Free

I was immediately attracted to this question. My 79-year-old father is German and was a young boy during WW2.I asked him to write something to respond to this question, and he provided this excerpt from his memoirs. (I've changed the names of my uncles.)tl;dr: During the war, bad. After the war, worse."In the spring of 1942, as the RAF bombing raids started, our family was evacuated by the German authorities from Krefeld to the Black Forest in southern Germany. The operation was called MUKI (for Mutter und Kinder).By train my mother and we 3 children arrived in Schönmünzach in the Black Forest. We were ordered into a requisitioned hotel. The money the government paid the hotel must have been pretty low, judging by the unfriendly service we received.After a few weeks, we were moved another 15 miles deeper into the forest to the little village of Obertal into the Hotel Sonne and a little later to Hotel Günther. There we had a single room with toilet and washroom down the hall. The hotel was run by two sisters and a brother, who also was a blacksmith. Two of their nieces, Lilo and Inge, were the food servers. The food was without much variation: potatoes, carrots, mushrooms that we helped collect in the woods, and blue trout. I hated the trout because of their bulging eye balls and disliked the mushrooms, they were so slippery.It must have been in the summer of 1942 when we kids played in the garden of the hotel. There was an umbrella stand with a heavy concrete base. In passing, I pulled the stand askew and let it snap back. Unfortunately, my brother Hans was close behind me and the pipe of the stand hit him in the face. He was bloody all over, but this guy is hard to kill, he healed soon enough, but today still has a scar under the left side of his nose.In the fall of 1942, Hans and I started elementary school in Obertal, Walter, our younger brother, followed 2 years later. We were so proud of our satchels, packed with a slate board with attached sponge, and our freshly sharpened slate styluses.One winter evening my mother left us alone in the room and locked the door (this was before the invention of baby-sitting). We were up to some mischief: I collected pine needles from the Christmas tree and stuffed them into an electric outlet. All of a sudden there was a big flash and the light went out. I had managed to put the entire hotel into darkness.Shortly thereafter, in early 1943 we were moved to a farmhouse near the edge of the village. The farmer by the name of Haist and his wife were not happy at all to see the unwanted guests they were forced to take in. They had two children, Alma, who was about 4 years older than I, and her younger brother Egon. We were placed in the upstairs of the small house and had one bedroom, a living room and a small kitchen with a single spigot for cold water. The toilet was half a flight down and consisted of a board with a lid-covered round cut-out hole and a cesspool below, no running water. The bedroom had no heat but was placed above the stable where a pig and a cow were supposed to warm the room from below. It was not quite sufficient, and during the coldest part of the winter we had to hack the ice off the jug and wash basin that served as our bathroom.One day my mother had to run some errands. She again locked us up in the living room and we thought of some new mischief. We found matches and tried to burn off the fringes of the curtains by the front windows. To our disappointment the fringes didn’t burn very well and only generated smoke. So we gave up on the idea, extinguished the smoldering fringes and looked for some other entertainment. I suppose my mother was upset when she came home, but I don’t recall any punishment.Food in those days was strictly rationed and we had to use food stamps for every purchase. My mother managed to get beef bones once a week. First she made a soup from it, then burned the bones on the charcoal in the stove. She recovered the ashes and we had to eat them as our calcium supplement. It tasted almost as bad as the weekly cod liver oil that we had to swallow. (Cod liver oil is rich in vitamins and chemicals, such as iodine. The lack of iodine was causing a high occurrence of goiters among the locals.) One day the local grocery store, the Konsum, had a big surprise: they sold strawberry jam without food stamps. Everybody rushed to the store and bought as much as the store keeper would hand out. The jam was delicious, sweet and crispy. A bit later we found out that the crispiness was dozens of wasps that got processed with the strawberries.In the spring of 1943 I got scarlet fever and an infection of the middle ear. I was quarantined in our bedroom while Hans and Walter were moved to stay in the bedroom with Egon. When I got worse I was sent by ambulance to the hospital in Freudenstadt, some 10 miles away. I must have been pretty sick because I had to stay at the hospital for more than a month. Later I was told that both of my ear drums had ruptured. When I finally was discharged the nurse confiscated my only toy, some kind of a construction set with interlocking wooden chips, because it was “contaminated”. Really they did disinfect it and let other kids play with it. I was very unhappy about the loss.In the summer, war came to Krefeld. On 6/21/43 the Royal Air Force (RAF) launched a heavy air raid on Krefeld where we had lived. Our house took a full hit and was totally destroyed. We would not have survived had we not been evacuated before.Once a week we were ordered by the school to collect potato beetles in the fields around town. The beetles were threatening to kill the potato crop and rumors were that the Americans dropped the beetles on Germany, an early application of biological war fare. We had to pick the beetles off the leaves which was ok; they looked pretty in their yellow and black stripes. What I didn’t like was crushing the larvae and the eggs between my thumb and index finger and, most of all, I didn’t like the young Hitler-youth supervisor who hit us with a switch in the back of our knees when we didn’t work fast enough. However, when we were doing well we received small propaganda stickers with a printed “Kohlenklau”, the energy thief with a sack of coal over his shoulder, and “Pst, Feind hört mit” the sticker to remind you that enemy spies where everywhere.During the summer vacation of 1943 we helped our farmer to collect ferns in the woods that he used as bedding for the cow. The fern was spread in the courtyard to dry and piled up overnight. I still remember that one night the three of us kids were allowed to dig some cave into the huge pile and sleep in it. The fragrance of the dried fern was wonderful. We also helped to make hay, a very labor intensive process. In the morning the farmer went out to his large meadow behind the house and cut the grass by hand with a scythe. Every half-hour or so he paused, pulled out a whetstone from his hip pocket, and sharpened the scythe. Frau Haist, Alma, Hans and I used rakes to spread out the grass to dry. In the early afternoon, the grass had to be turned and in the evening it had to be collected into piles. This was repeated for several days until the hay was ready to be collected into a big net which the farmer then carried on his back into the hay loft above the stable. Every evening the farmer sharpened his scythe by straddling a stone bench that had a small anvil at the end, and hammering the edge of the blade razor thin. He then finished the sharpening with a whetstone.To obtain firewood the forester assigned and marked one tree for each family and sent a notice where to find the tree. Our tree was up the mountain some 10 miles away near a logging road. The farmer, my dad, who was on furlough, Hans, Walter and I set off at 5 in the morning. After some searching we found the tree. Dad and the farmer cut it down, chopped off the branches and sawed it into 3 ft. sections. The 3 kids had to drag the pieces up the hill to the logging road and pile it up for pick-up by the forestry people. Hans didn’t like touching the slippery, mossy branches and decided to go home. He snuck away, took the cart with all our food and beverage and rolled down the road all the way home. You can imagine how furious we were, no food or drink and another 6 hours of work and a 3-hour hike back home. At home Hans got a severe thrashing, the only one my father ever administered to him. As a further penalty Hans had to do overtime in chopping wood after the man with the mobile band saw came by and cut the sections down to firewood length.In the fall the farmer called in the local butcher to slaughter the pig. From our bedroom we could hear the poor beast squeal. When we went downstairs, the pig was already in a tub of hot water where it was being scrubbed clean and its bristles were scraped off. We kids had the job to wash out the intestines in the fountain in the courtyard and get them ready for sausage-making by turning them inside out. When the whole pig was processed we all sat down to a “Schlachtfest” (butcher’s party). The farmer’s wife dished out “Metzelsuppe”, the broth of the sausage cooker, and freshly baked bread, followed by various cuts of meat and sausages with potatoes and sauerkraut. It was truly a feast because we could eat without needing our ration stamps.In 1944 we moved from the farm in Obertal to Baiersbronn into one side of a duplex that the town had built for bombed out refugees like us.The house was very small, the living room was 7 by 12 feet, the eat-in kitchen was 8 by 14 feet, and there was a single bedroom upstairs, about 10 by 12 feet. Hans and I slept in a regular bed, Walter slept in the big bed with my mother and later, after my dad got back from the POW camp, he had a crib in an alcove. Later that year, Frau Ilse Mueller - who lived in the other half of the duplex - let us use her upstairs bedroom and the 3 of us kids had a bit more room.The house had no road connection and no water. We had to haul the water by bucket from a neighbor some 300 yards down a path to the road. For three more months we kept hauling. When the town finally installed a single tap in the kitchen, it was truly a high point in our lives.The toilet was a hole in a wooden bench, again with a cesspool underneath. It smelled terribly, especially during the hot summer days. Worst was the maggots that kept creeping up from down below. We didn’t have any toilet paper; none could be bought in the empty stores. So my mother sacrificed the love letters my father had written to her from the war, for us youngsters they were fascinating and so romantic.Meanwhile, our neighbor, Herr Lampert, decided we needed a road, so he organized the neighborhood and we built a dirt road, about 200 feet long, to connect to the main road. We logged tons of stone from the nearby Sankenbach creek and set them by hand into a foot-deep road base. The bed was consolidated with rams made out of tree stumps. On top we put gravel and sand, and our foot path turned into a respectable piece of road.In early 1945, the front was drawing nearer and bombs started falling nearby. One bomb hit Café Mueller and killed their only daughter. My mother barely escaped a machine gun salvo from a low-flying French fighter plane. She feared for our lives and we all went back to the more remote village of Obertal. There we shacked up with our friends, the Siehr family, into a 3 room+kitchen apartment. They had 3 boys, our best friends, and a younger daughter. Their father was a chemist who had volunteered to join the army in 1939 and was killed in action during the first few weeks of the war. Frau Siehr became a war widow at age 28 with four children, then 4, 3, 2 and 1 years of age. There was one bedroom for the children with triple bunk-beds for the boys, and the three of us doubled up with the boys head to toe. The girl had a small bed in the same bedroom.Then, one day in April of 1945, the French army moved into the village. The German army had retreated to guard the next bigger town of Freudenstadt. Hans and I, at age 8, had to join the “Volkssturm” (People’s Army), the last resources of the army, consisting of men over 70 and kids of 8 to 15 (everybody between 15 and 70 had been drafted earlier). We had been trained, using wooden mockups, to shoot RPGs at the incoming tanks. But the German army retreated and had taken all the real weapons with them and, luckily, we didn’t have to make that “last stand against the enemy”. The village surrendered to the French without a shot being fired.Then the French started to search each house for soldiers and also for quarters for their officers. They came to the upstairs apartment and knocked (!) at the door of the children’s room. My mother had posted all 7 children by the door; when the soldiers opened, they exclaimed “Mon Dieu” (dear Lord) and shut the door. We kids then moved swiftly through a connecting door to the living room where Frau Siehr posted us near the door. The soldiers knocked again at the next door and saw another mother with 7 more children. With a baffled “beaucoup d’enfants” (lots of children) they gave up on their search for accommodations in the house.After the armistice was declared there was great joy all around. Our family went back to Baiersbronn to our “Behelfsheim” (emergency shelter) as it was officially called. There we found a big mess. French soldiers had celebrated the end of fighting with a big party and had turned the place upside down. Also, they ate all our food and we had nothing left to eat. One of the French soldiers, he called himself Bari Mulut, an Algerian, came by a few days later and asked my mother to hide him; he was a deserter and just wanted to go home. We hid him in the attic and played ignorant when the French MPs came by and searched the house. They overlooked the trap door in the ceiling, leading to the attic.At that time, food rationing was not working anymore; the whole civilian service structure had collapsed. We went around to several farms and tried to get enough food but the farmers were reluctant to accept the worthless “Reichsmark” currency. My mother taught us some French and we went begging at the hotels the French had requisitioned. “Avez-vous des conserves pour nous?” we asked again and again. We also eagerly picked up cigarette butts, rolled them into new cigarettes of ever increasing nicotine content, and traded them against food at a farmer’s. One day we were very lucky, a French officer gave us eleven 32 oz. cans of meat and vegetables, it was a memorable day. Other days we were not so lucky and the entire food for the four of us consisted of a single sugar beet that the farmers usually feed to their pigs.There were no toys around so we made some ourselves. We carved little boats from thick pine bark and let them float on the puddles in the ditch behind the house. We made whistles from willow branches, stilts from square-cut slats, catapults from beer-bottle tops and slingshots from inner tubes, discarded by the French soldiers.The French commanded every inhabitant of the town to watch a film about the Holocaust at the movies. Everybody was horrified and some people said this was all propaganda. Apparently, they had lost their clear thinking after years of Nazi propaganda.During the summer of 1945 stores had nothing to sell. To survive, my mother, Hans and I went on “Hamster Reise” (shopping trip), where we scratched up some tradable goods, among them mother’s pretty lingerie that dad had sent her from Paris, loaded them on a hand-wagon and walked first from Baiersbronn to Obertal, staying at Siehr’s for a short night. The next morning at 3 am we moved on across the “Ruhestein”, the watershed between the rain-drenched (130 in/yr) eastern part of the Black Forrest were we lived, and the fertile Rhein valley. We walked 22 km (14 miles) to Kappelrodeck, Hans and I barefoot because we had no shoes, to a farm where we traded our goods. We got some 140 pounds of potatoes, fruit and vegetables. By then it was almost noon and we started our trek back. While progress in the valley was fairly good, things got really slow climbing up some 10 miles to the “Ruhestein”. Luckily, that day there was a farmer who put a pair of oxen to work, trailing a bunch of ropes for us and other “Hamsterers” to hang onto, helping them to move their handwagons up the steepest part of the climb. Down the other side it was easier, 5 miles back to Obertal and then another 5 miles to Baiersbronn. We got back home just before curfew at midnight, an exhausting 21 hour, 33 mile barefoot trek. The trip added several new layers to the callused soles of Hans’s and my feet.The next day we had to start preserving our food. All fruit was sliced and air-dried. For that we took the doors off the hinges and covered them with the fruit slices to dry outside on the grassy patch in front of the house. After the drying, the unpainted doors had a negative leopard pattern with light spots where the fruit slices had been and sun tan around them. Carrots, potatoes and beets were stored in a sand bed in the basement. Cabbage was shredded, salted and fermented into sauerkraut in a big ceramic jar, eggs were stored in silicone gel in another earthen jar, and bread was air-dried. We had no refrigerator, and only glass jars with lids, but without rubber gaskets which then rendered them useless (all rubber had been reserved for tire production for the army).We did the trip twice more during that summer. On one of the trips we found another friendly farmer who too was trailing half a dozen ropes behind his tractor for people to hang on and get pulled up the mountain for a few miles. His tractor had a “Holzvergaser” (wood chip gasifier) that generated carbon monoxide by partially combusting wood chips in a man-size vessel mounted on the side of the vehicle. The monoxide was then burned to carbon dioxide in the engine, generating just enough power to pull the whole convoy up the hill.My dad had a tough summer as well. During the last days of fighting in April of 1945 he was with a few other soldiers on the south-shore of the Danube River in Ulm. The Americans were on the north shore. My father was happy to see them, so he stood up and waved to them across the river. Next thing, the Americans trained their mortars on him and he jumped back into the trenches, barely surviving the attack. A short time later his unit was overrun and he ended in a POW camp in St. Avold in Lorraine, France. The Americans were mean to the officers, ignorant about the difference between the regular army and the SS-stormtroopers. My dad was regular army, but the Americans gave all of them their Holocaust special. They fed them 4 course dinners where, e.g., the fish course was a single sardine that had to be divided between 8 people. They made them sleep under the clear sky, no tents or other shelter. Luckily, it was a dry and warm summer, so they survived. My father weighed 210 pounds going into camp and 98 pounds when he was discharged 7 months later.Things got better when my father came back from the POW camp in November of 1945. As a former officer, dad had to register and report every Saturday to the police station in Baiersbronn. Hans and I were with him one day when Hans saw a sign on the way out where the new administration was looking for “Applicants with business education”. Dad applied and just a few weeks later got a job with the “Preiskontrollbehoerde” (price control agency) in the newly established regional administration. He got a 98 cc motorbike as the official vehicle. His job was to visit shops and businesses and control that they adhered to the fixed prices set by the authorities. But his main concern was how to feed the family. So, he always brought a brown bag with him when he checked the local butcher or baker. He told them “I am not corruptible, but I have to feed my family with 3 small children”. Depending on the “crimes” he discovered, the bag got filled, more or less, with food. Once he brought back 4 pounds of lard, an exceptionally good day. At home, we cut it all up into little cubes and rendered it on the stove. The greaves tasted delicious with some salt, and the grease was a welcome change from frying potatoes without any fat. We didn’t mind that the grease was more like wax and stuck to the roof of our mouths.Here ends the WW2 story and what it was like for me to grow up during that time in Germany."Copyright (c) 2015 by Klaus Schatz, not for reproductionHope you enjoyed reading this, I sure did. :-) War sucks...EDIT: My daughter and I traveled this summer with my father to see this area where he grew up, and many of the landmarks that he describes in his memoirs. Here is a picture of the elementary school he attended with his brothers:This is one of the main forest trails that they used (not paved back then):The town of Kappelrodeck that they did the very long hikes to:The little duplex house in Baiersbronn shared with Frau Müller:And a picture of a photo of my dad and his brother Hans going to school:All photos (c) Derek Schatz, not for reproduction

Ask her.Seriously, I tried more indirect methods earlier in life and they really didn’t work out so well. (see story below).Jennifer's Invitation(Appeared summer 1997 in the e-zine, The Empty Shelf)In Northeastern Ohio, my birthday comes in spring, real spring. This business about three months of spring is silly. Spring lasts about two weeks -- the time from the first onion grass, crocuses, and daffodils shoot green through bare black dirt, through the greening of the willow switches, the white exploding dogwoods and cherry blossoms, till at last, every tree's gold and red has turned dark green -- that takes two weeks. And, square in the middle of nature's renewal comes my birthday. At the age of nine -- more than forty years ago today -- it seemed so lucky -- yet, so right that this was my birthday! Perfect.The only thing more perfect would be having Jennifer come to my party. Jennifer! Her family, Gunnerson, was from Scandinavia and she looked it. Long, light blond hair, deep sky blue eyes, pale white skin. Best of all, she liked me -- kind of. I lived nearly a world away from her -- three blocks -- but luckily she lived on the way to David Hill Elementary School so I could walk part-way to school with her. We could continue up residential Davies Street, littered with maple-seed helicopters, or cut over to Archwood. Urbane Archwood held the branch public library and even a filling station.My mother had promised me a party this birthday and I could invite whoever I wanted. Or, so she said. Actually, her friend from the bridge club had two daughters that I definitely did NOT want to come to my party, but my mother, of all things, had promised that they could come. Really! Imagine! I never told her she had to invite Jennifer's mother to her bridge club! Actually, it wouldn't have been a bad idea, but I didn't think of it at the time.No matter, so long as I could get Jennifer to my party. The tricky part was -- how to get her there. Of course, you might think, "Well, hey, why not ask her?" You might think that if you were born in New York or California or have forgotten what it's like to be a nine year old boy totally overwhelmed by the goddess beauty of a nine year old girl. No, just walking up and asking her was definitely not an option.Instead, I hit on a brilliant idea, bound to succeed. I made a newspaper. It had three or four articles on the front page and three or four more articles on the back page. It only took me one week-end to make. And there, right on the back of page two, in the lower right hand corner was the story of my upcoming birthday party, complete with a list of invitees. That list included Jennifer!Now, for part two of my plan! The very next day, I contrived to walk home from school in front of Jennifer. I slowed down till she was only twenty paces behind me and "accidentally" dropped my newspaper. I continued to walk, but held my breath, heart racing. Soon, I heard the soft, bell-tones of her voice call out that I had dropped my paper. Yes! She handed it to me. I stared into those infinite blue eyes. Nothing. Hadn't she read it? Hadn't she seen her name right there on page two? Was she blind, and I didn't know?I scurried on ahead. Maybe she just hadn't noticed. I dropped my paper again. Again, I heard her call out my name! She had seen me drop the paper. I waited for her to catch up with me. She handed me the paper. I swallowed hard. I looked in her eyes. She looked at me. I said, "Well...did you read it?""Oh, no!" she said. "I wouldn't do that.""Oh," I said, and turned, crimson glowing in my face.I thought about dropping my paper a third time, but what was the point? She took it as an invasion of privacy to read my private paper. I'd have to come up with something else.I did. I got pneumonia and the party was canceled. I did get a record and a book as presents from my mother's friend's two daughters but I never read the book and never listened to the record. The next year, my parents moved to a new house and a new school district and I never saw Jennifer again. Except in dreams. Where her blond hair is still blond and her young smooth skin is still flawless. And, spring -- spring lasts forever.

So, I’m a 3rd generation Californian, and I have interacted with the Calif. Div. of Forestry (CDF) which is now called CalFire, as well as a number of other private, State, and Federal partners. The State has tripled, roughly in population since I was born (it was 17.5 M when I had to deal with a figure for it in elementary school (maybe 3rd grade); it’s now about 40M), and the first big fire I can recall was the Bel-Air fire which burned a lot of the Santa Monica Mtns on both sides of the soon to be opened San Diego Freeway (I405) which was about 1962 or 3.CDF S-2 practice water drop.So a major part of “the destruction” is human property in the form of people moving into heavily forested who romantic notions about a rural life. This rural life isn’t for everyone. This is not where people lived before. Fire is merely one problem for the people who live in coastal mountains, Sierra foothills, etc. 1 friend ended up taking her life (rural life wasn’t the only factor). So stop moving people into the rural-urban interface.From the Bel-Air fire for about 3 decades, the annual fire season didn’t kill too many people, then the Oakland Hills fire killed about 20 people (I was acquainted with 3) and burned down the homes of half a dozen people. That was a beginning. And 2 decades, finally had fires beyond the “normal” later summer-fall fire season. And bigger casualty counts. We had fires in December, a couple years ago (one of those killed due not to the fire but the mud slide).Interstates and other big freeways were thought to be capable of being fire breaks (that’s a topic which needs covering). Offshore winds, called Santa Ana’s in the South part of the state, provided more oxidation (it’s not all just about fuel). “Defensible space” has sort of becoming a joke, because now you need about 100 ft (30 M) in all directions. So one has to check on friends who live in these area. An urban fire is more complex.If you got a USFS map of the Angeles and Los Padres Natl. Forests through the 1970s into the 1980s, the legal map vegetation colors were green and yellow. The USFS took it upon itself to close the yellow regions for fires from as early as June until maybe the end of October. People carelessly tossing cigarettes was a major ignition source during this period. We lived with fire closures.I should not that I’m not particularly interested in biology. Just another carbon based life form. I hang around enough biologists.The fuel in California “forests” has changed; I’ve seen old towns like Johnsondale and Johnsonville disappear. The lumber mills in towns like Mt Shasta, McCloud, Dunsmuir disappeared. Most of these forests are either gone into chaparral or into 2nd or 3rd growth. So I hear newbies talk about forests near Lake Tahoe talk about old growth (there is none there, it all disappeared as timbers in Comstock silver mines in NV. You merely have to tap and age a tree (I did that for a conference about 1971). And I’ve also heard people claim 8 ft diameter trees (a single tree does not an industry make) and that pines grow fast (e.g., 40 years) for timber (no way, qualitatively as (weaker wood) well as quantitatively).Timber is merely 1 form of fuel. Grasslands are a problem, and chaparral (called brush by some) has particularly problematic fuels which have oily sap (e.g., manzanita, madrone, oaks), as well as badly selected attempts to introduce species like eucalyptus (a problem in many ways, and was just watching a slew being cut down (they are also major driving hazards)). It’s not even clear that you can bring back a climax forest after removing timber.So what many locations do is build and maintain fire/fuel breaks. I used to like to run up and down these. They followed ridge lines.Another problem is that a lot of the California topography is way steeper than other parts of the West Coast, the Rockies and the East Coast mountains. The airport at Willows, CA was where air tankers got a monument (next to Nancy’s (24 hr) cafe). Winds are part of the interesting problem in this terrain. It’s one thing if the fuel is burning near the ground but there was/is little you can do if you have the upper part of any big tree burning (crown fires in the case of timber).So the terminology of fire fighting changed since Bel-Air. And that’s why the word “containment” came into use. Before that it was “out”. And we learned about retardants (Phos-chek is the current one, finally placed into wikipedia) and fuels for back fires (aluma-gel (like napalm, only burns hotter and faster, not yet in wikipedia (now don’t go putting an entry in there, let it get there naturally)).It’s merely a matter of time before one of these fires kills 100 people (we are in the 80s now, 1 was a boss’ mom; Paradise (S. of Lassen NP) was sort of a nice town). Sort of like mass gunnings which is happening in US cities.And it’s not just CA, it’s OR (2 friends lost their homes), and WA, and the other states. And the fires won’t be restricted to the old ideas of a fire season. The precedents have been set.Prevention is a tough nut to crack in part because humans, Americans in particular, like to prefer to think of themselves as heroes rather than planners. Makes them think they look good. Optimists will kill you.So it’s going to happen again. Maybe as early as tomorrow.And most of you will be finger pointing.