Erika, who all of her children call Mutti, currently resides in Oberstedten, Germany, just outside Frankfurt. Her three sons, Heiner, Jürgen, and Willi, and their wives also reside in the Frankfurt area. Her daughter, Marianne, and I currently live in Oberstedten with Mutti.

Oberstedten is just one of three towns that are important to her story. Oberstedten sits at the base of the Taunus Mountains, within walking distance of Oberursel to the south and Bad Homburg to the east. It is a pleasant town of about 4,500 residents. Mutti’s family was the first family to come here from the east as refugees after the war. When they arrived in 1945 it was little more than a small country village with a population of about 1,500.

The other two towns, that play an important part in her story, are Nysa, Poland and Sternberk, Czech Republic. In 1993 Mutti, Marianne and I visited Nysa for a few days, and in 1995 we three along with Heiner and his wife Sigrid visited Sternberk. These were Mutti and Marianne’s first return visits in nearly 50 years. For them the trips were emotion filled, and triggered many remembrances which provide much of the material that goes into this story.

Nysa, Poland was Neisse, Germany when Mutti grew up there. It is located in the Upper Selesian region south of Wroclaw, and was then near the Polish border. When the borders were redrawn in the Potsdam Agreement in 1945 Selesia became part of Poland. Nysa has about 18,000 people and sits astride the Nysa River. It is a pretty town with the exception of the city center. It had been heavily bombarded during the war and then rebuilt during the 1950’s in typical Soviet style. Following the war, the Russians occupied Nysa for 12 years before turning it over to Poland. The outlying parts of town were almost exactly as Mutti and Marianne remembered them. The house that Mutti’s father and mother built and the garden were little changed. The concrete fence posts that Mutti’s father had constructed were still standing. Mutti’s father’s nameplate ‘Paul Zeh’ was still on the front door. The paving stone street had not changed nor had most of the neighboring houses. While we were there a small girl was playing in the street, and it was easy to imagine Marianne at about that age playing there.

Mutti’s sister Lisbeth’s second husband, Cashy, now lives in the house. We had arrived on his doorstep unannounced. He was a pleasant host but somewhat apprehensive for he thought that Mutti might be there because she was considering laying some claim to the house. This was not inconceivable, because when Lisbeth reclaimed the house some years after the war she had sworn in an affidavit that Mutti was dead. Since then Mutti has officially abandoned any claim to the property. Cashy did not offer to put us up, for he lived very humbly, but he did have us in on two occasions for coffee and sweet wafers. We treated him to dinner two nights in local restaurants. Cashy remembered the last time he had seen Marianne. It was when he pushed her, as a little girl, through the rest room window of a train in 1947. As we sat in the living/dinning room, Marianne pointed out the door of the bedroom where she was born. We stayed in a small dilapidated hotel downtown but left our car parked in Cashy’s drive. He thought the car would be safer this way, as he could keep an eye on it.

Right behind the house is the remains of an old fortification. Marianne recalled stuffing dry leaves into bags that were to be used as mattresses in the fort in the case of an air raid. Mutti recalled the British prisoners who were held there during the war. While we were in Nysa, we visited Lisbeth’s grave and also an old German cemetery where Mutti’s grandmother Grusla is buried. We were unable to locate Grusla’s grave because the cemetery was uncared for and overgrown with weeds and brush. We saw the pig barn where Grusla, Anna, Lisbeth and her four children lived right after the war. As we crossed the bridge, walking to the center of town, Mutti pointed out the spot on the riverbank where goods were thrown that had been taken from the Jewish shops on Crystal Night.

The third town in this story is Sternberk. Sternberk is located in Sudetenland in northern Czech Republic just south of the Polish border. It is about 130 miles due east of Prague. After Germany annexed the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938, they called it Sternberg. This was where Mutti lived during the later years of the war. It is a small drab town. We spent one afternoon there. The houses where both Mutti and Lisbeth lived during the war were still there and little changed. While we were there we walked to the nearby train station. We passed the entrance to the factory where Marianne and her grandfather had collected tobacco and silk. Mutti pointed out the hills to the east from where the approaching Russians had fired down on the railroad yards.