Chapter I

Germany Revisited

My name is Hans William Vogel (baptized Johann Wilhelm Vogel) and I was born in Cologne-Ehrenfeld, Germany on March 14, 1922.  The following is an autobiography of sorts encompassing things that I am able to recall many, many years after the fact.  They are 99 and 44/100 % accurate.

My parents and I left our home in Cologne, Germany in May 1929 with no intention of ever moving back; we set sail from the Port of Bremen (Bremerhaven) in Germany on May 18, 1929 through the Panama Canal arriving in San Pedro Harbor, California on June 19, 1929. No Ellis Island stopover for us - thank God! We had a cabin on a passenger cargo ship called the 'M. S. Havel.' The legal passenger limit for that class of vessel was 12 because it was first and foremost a freighter. I was the only child aboard and subsequently had the run of the ship.

The entire crew were my baby-sitters, who made sure that I didn't do anything too foolish or dangerous. On one occasion they allowed me to fish off the main cargo deck and I caught a really big fish. I was very proud of myself. Quite a few years later my parents finally told me the truth about that incident - what actually happened was that one of the crew on a lower deck had reached through a porthole and placed the fish on my hook. What a letdown!

In Germany I had only attended school for less than one year before leaving for the United States. My parents had pulled me out of the school in Cologne a bit earlier than was necessary and I often wondered why. My answer to that question came on our visit to Germany in 1998.

My wife, Bobbie, and I had accumulated over 100,000 frequent flyer miles with United Air Lines and studied the feasibility of using them to get us to Cologne in time to spend Christmas in 1998 - my first Christmas in Germany since 1928. We wanted to share it with a few of my closest relatives residing there - my mother's sister Henni; her daughter Anni and husband Hans; and, their daughter Iris and spouse Heinrich. Henni, Anni and I had met in 1945 in Cologne when I was returning home from Czechoslovakia on my way to Antwerp, Belgium for my trip home to Long Beach, California after having served one and one-half years overseas in Europe during World War II.

We had maintained a friendly and very close relationship ever since. Anni and Iris had visited us several times; and we had reciprocated. Typically German, they came for the California sunshine during summer in order to be able to show off a deep tan to friends in Cologne upon their return.

Bobbie and I were typical of those tourists who rarely visited the European continent in the winter. By planning the trip around United's blackout days - popular travel times bringing in big bucks to the airline - we managed to use our miles to book a stay of nearly two weeks which included the Christmas holidays.

My German family lived in a large multi-storied house in a suburb of Cologne just off the Rhine River. Anni and Hans had a full apartment on the top floor, Iris and Heinrich occupied the main level, my aunt Henni was quartered on the third level. Overnight visitors and the storage of surplus furniture were housed on the second floor. The basement consisted of Heinrich's construction company office, the beer cellar, recreation room, laundry, freezer storage niche and a branch office of the Cologne police department.

Aunt Henni was physically incapacitated and confined to her floor; she had to be carried up and down stairs by Iris's burly husband Heinrich. She did manage to get dressed and come and go to the bathroom by herself; and, in spite of being nearly blind, she watched TV most of the time. Breakfast and lunch were brought to her room, but every night she was carried downstairs to dine and commune with the entire family.

During our Christmas visit, I would go to her room nearly every day to have about an hour of conversation. Most of it would center on revisiting my long-forgotten childhood experiences in Germany during the first seven years of my life. My initial questions to her dealt with things I had wanted to confirm about my mother and father, such as where did they live, did they both work, what kind of work did they do and why did they want to leave Germany? Henni apparently was not really fond of my father, implying that her sister could have done better than marry the son of a rich family with servants who had been spoiled rotten.

I asked her such questions as what school I attended, in which church I was baptized and where my parents and I had lived. She was able to give us sufficient information to help us locate the church where I was sprinkled with holy water a couple of weeks after I was born in March 1922. With the approximate location of our residence, school and church in hand, we found all three. They were literally within a stone's throw of one another.

We went to the office of the St. Rochus Catholic Church nearby to see what, if any, records they might have of my baptism. Within five minutes, the lady in charge came back with a slip of paper showing my name, Johann Wilhelm Vogel, our residence address and the date of my baptism - now that was real German efficiency in action some 76 years after the event being researched. The building housing our apartment above a store had survived the bombings during World War II and looked much the same as it might have when we lived there. The school now housed a boy's reformatory, causing my cousin to conjecture that was what it might have been when I attended.

I always knew that my one year of schooling had not been a happy one, remembering that my teacher had taken an intense dislike to me. The situation was so bad that my parents pulled me out of school prior to the end of the academic year before we were scheduled to leave Germany to move to the United States. I asked my aunt if she knew why this teacher didn't like me.

She was surprised by the question because she had presumed that I knew the answer. With a knowing expression and twinkle in her eyes she told me that sometime during the school year I had stood up in class and announced that I already knew everything they were trying to teach me and asked whether I could go home now.

Mr. Rietz, my teacher, who was very straight-laced and looked it, did not take very kindly to cheeky remarks from a snot-nosed first-year student in a very strict Catholic school. I told my aunt that I had never heard that story, but that it explained a lot about myself in later years. She was interested to hear that I had a photograph of the teacher with the class. In it I am sitting in the rear of the classroom, far removed from the front and the teacher's podium.

Although my demeanor became much more diplomatic as I matured, inwardly, I had never really changed. To this day I haven't an ounce of tolerance for those who suffer from an inflated self-image as to their intellectual capacity, but who are in fact incompetent ignoramuses. Nothing is more irritating than trying to work or deal with a person with such a mindset. The very reason they are so ignorant is because they harbor a perverse notion that they are highly intelligent and extremely knowledgeable; they subsequently attempt to demean anyone who disagrees with their inane assertions.

Too often, these types are in positions of authority where they are able to demand that subordinates agree with them. Our college and university faculties are havens for many of these pseudo-intellectuals. The worst thing one can do is to coddle such persons by agreeing that they are able to achieve much more than that of which they are truly capable. It is a complete disservice to them to do so since they will remain frustrated and unhappy their entire lives. Ignorance is the biggest ill from which the world suffers today.

Aunt Henni was one of my mother's two younger sisters and as she grew older, she resembled my mother not only in looks, but in behavior as well. Their mottoes were "Don't tread on me, or you will regret it!" Their minds were as sharp as their tongues - their maiden names were Winkmann - and we called their unforgiving way a typical Winkmann trait. Once you crossed them, you were stricken off the list of friends or family it didn't matter which. My mother's other sister, Maria, was the fun-loving black sheep of the family and her daughter (she and I were born within one week of each other) inherited this propensity. They were both shunned by Henni and my mother.

My mother, the eldest, and Henni, the youngest were always very close, and remained so even after we had become Americans. Henni almost singlehandledly fought to support her family during World War II, taking in sewing and doing housecleaning to survive. It made her even tougher than her usual Winkmann nature demanded. Now as she sat in front of me, nearly blind, but still a spunky, spirited and unbent octogenarian, I was in awe, but not intimidated, because I too was a Winkmann.

I didn't remember too much about the first seven years of my life in Germany. This was probably due to the trauma of being uprooted and snatched from a familiar environment and suddenly thrust into a new and much different one without possessing the ability to communicate in my adopted country's language. All of my time and energy had to be spent on adapting to, being assimilated into my new surroundings and finding acceptance by my peers. I subconsciously shut the past out of mind.

One of the few things I did remember was that where there is now a very large public school across from our German apartment, there had been a very large hog and vegetable farm. The shrieks of pigs being slaughtered is not easy for a child to dismiss from his mind later in life. And, the experience of you and your five-year old friends finding small potatoes left over from the harvest, starting a small fire and throwing the precious find into it to be cooked and eaten is also one of those enjoyable moments in life one does not forget.

Then there were the stints in the hospital with diphtheria, having a shoe hook removed from my left eye which left it permanently scarred and impaired and having my tonsils and adenoids removed. I can still smell the ether that was used to put me under.

I can remember only one Christmas in our apartment above the store with the 'Tannenbaum' lit by candles and surrounded by fresh apples, oranges, nuts, cookies and marzipan candy. I was strapped in a sort of swing in a doorway supported by its frame. I believe I was recovering from the diphtheria I had suffered and was not allowed to go outside with my little friends. What a bummer!

Then there were the times my mother took me to the movies and shopping. In those days one could buy steaming wieners (hot dogs) in most of the department stores. What wondrous moments and places those were. It was all so new and magical to this young child.

My paternal grandfather had an upscale shoe store in Cologne. It had a marble entry which glistened magically from the lights at night, especially after a rain. I still get a twinge of joy when I am reminded of it. It was in that store that a rambunctious little Hans managed to get a shoe hook caught in his left eye permanently damaging it. Shoe hooks were used to lace up boots.

Mother and I used the streetcar for transportation into the main part of the City of Cologne. To this day it remains the quickest and most efficient way to get there from the suburbs. On one of those glorious excursions we were seated opposite a young man whose one arm had no hand, just a stub remained below the elbow. I pointed to him and asked my mother how that could be. She replied that he had sucked his thumb when he was young and never broke his habit until all that was left was a stub of an arm. I was still sucking my thumb at about age four. She told me that after that when she was watching me after I went to sleep, she witnessed my thumb moving towards my mouth, but, when it got almost into it, I slowly and jerkily pulled it back. Obviously, the lesson she had been trying to teach me on the streetcar did its job very well.