OBERSTEDTEN, WEST GERMANY (November, 1945 - December, 1946)

They go to the address of Ernst’s father and find that he has been evicted because he had been a Nazi.   The family who lives in this house puts them up for one night realizing they are exhausted.  The next day they go by streetcar to his new address in the Hohemark in the outskirts of Oberursel and find him and his wife, Ernst’s stepmother, living in a two-room apartment.  Ernst’s father and stepmother are happy to know that Ernst and his family have survived the war however they are not very happy to have to share their meager rations and quarters. Mutti and the three children stay there waiting for Ernst.

Ernst arrives after two weeks.  He had come across the border with the same farmer.  He had not seen the message on the barn, but some people had told him that a woman with three children had left on a truck to the west a couple of days before.  Upon his arrival in Oberursel Ernst immediately starts looking for a place to live.  He goes to the home of an ex-soccer-playing buddy in Oberstedten. The buddy is missing in the war but his family gives them a room to stay in until other arrangements can be made. The family runs a bakery and Mutti helps with the bread making chores in the wee hours of the morning.  They stay there for a month.  When the woman of the family finds out that Mutti is Catholic she tells Mutti that Oberstedten is a Protestant town and not friendly toward Catholics.  Mutti and her family become Protestants.

They are the first refugee family to move to Oberstedten.  Most of the local people are not very sympathetic because they have their own problems.  Through the town Mayor Ernst locates an apartment for them in a house in Oberstedten.  The house is one of two houses in town that had been damaged by a bomb.  It needs new windows before it can be moved into.  Glass is very hard to find but through a friend Ernst gets some from a greenhouse.  The carpenter accidentally drops his ladder on the panes and breaks them.  More glass is obtained; the house is repaired haphazardly; and Mutti, Ernst, Marianne, Heiner and Jürgen move in.  It is December 1945.  This is Mutti’s family’s first permanent residence since early May.

Their apartment consists of two bedrooms and a kitchen on the second floor and a half bath on a lower landing.  The landlord and his wife live downstairs.  The windows and walls get ice on them in the wintertime.  The mattresses are filled with straw.   The woman at the bakery, where they stayed before, gives them a kitchen table and some chairs.  They buy a wooden tub in Oberursel and haul it home in the wagon.  Every Saturday they carry the tub to the kitchen where everyone gets their turn.  The bomb crater in the yard and the nearby creek makes great playgrounds for the kids.

Ernst can not find work.  He applies for a job at the county office.  The mayor of Oberstedten tells him that some one in the county government has blackballed him because of his father having been a Nazi.  The rent is 30 marks per month.  They are very poor.  Mutti and the kids make some midnight raids on some of the neighboring farmers’ fields.  Marianne is enrolled in school as Marianne Landsiedel. 

Ernst returns to Thuringen in 1946.  He takes Heiner with him.  When he arrives his aunt Alwine tells him he should hide because he is on the wanted list.  Mutti becomes pregnant and Willi is born.  

Through the Red Cross they find out that Lisbeth, her four children, Anna and Grusla are alive and living in Neisse which is now Nysa, Poland.  Mutti writes a letter to Anna and describes the difficult time she is having feeding her family.  Anna persuades Lisbeth to take some food to Mutti.  But Lisbeth arrives empty handed.  She had left Nysa with two suitcases of food.  On the train she had developed a headache and a man in her compartment gave her a pain pill.  She fell asleep and when she awoke the suitcases were gone.