Germany after World War II - a tv show review

First, let me desribe Trudy to you, because I feel I must. She was about five feet two, and yes, she had eyes of blue, and medium length straight platinum hair. She spoke with a hoarse low voice, possibly from smoking, and she was about mid thirties. She was my only friend when I lived in Germany rom 1967 yo 1969. After 1969, my then husband was discharged from the US Army and we lived on the road in an Volkswagon Van for a year traveling around 38 different countries.

When I first got to Germany, we lived in a tiny third floor apartment with slanted atttic stye ceilings. It was very cosy and comfortably furnished. Th army post was all filled up with the soldiers returning from Vietnam or on their way there an officers of Wharton Barracks were given the option of living "on the economy" which meant in a local town, Heilbronn, in a civilian apartment.

Trudy lived across the courtyard from me in a 2nd floor apartment with three toddlers. Her means of living as I soon gathered, was as a 'temporary' wife to an American soldier. They would get to live a comfortable life with a wife and family in a local apartment, and Trudy would get her rent paid and child support and PX groceries. I would visit her regularly and we would smoke and chat and she would regale me with her tales of romance and manipulation. For example, once when she needed (or wanted) new furniture, she told her live-in American soldier boyfriend that she was pregnnt and needed seeral hudnred dollars for an abortion. He paid the money, no questions asked and she bought new furniture with it. When one soldier shipped back hoe, she would get 'dolled up' and go to town and attract another. When I knew her, her live-in was a 19 year old boy from Texas. He was crazy about her. And indeed she was a hugely charming and entertaining woman. Eventually, she married him and he took her back to Texas with him, along with her toddlers.

We never ever spoke about the second world war, Trudy and I. We tlked about her boyfriends and her children and her romantic adventures. I was so young and inexperienced that I didn't think anything at all of the new construction of our apartment complex, a aguely Roman style series of concrete structures around a garden center where oldeer women who had known scarcity and hunger, worked every day on their life-giving vegetable pathces. I never thought when I looked at them at the time, that they had lived through the total destruction of their town through artillery bombardment. and street by street, house by house gunfire. Their town had been a Nazi stronghold History wa nowhere in my mind at that time. I was learning how to cook, newly married, and just took things as I found them, no questions asked.

Many years later however, I became very interested and read a book about the Battle of Heilbronn which opened up many questions in my mind about those yers directly after the end of the war when everything was destroyed but the common German civilian population still had to find a way to stay alive. I realized after searching that there was scarcely anything written or filmed about that time. Plenty on the concentration camps, plenty on the battles nd the allied invasion, but almost nothing on the aftermath and how the people who were left alive managed. There was one fine film, The Marriage of Maria Braun, which had a great influence on me and was a mgnificent film depicting the complexities of life for a woman in that aftermath.

Recently I found, to my delight, there is a PBS tv series called "Our Miracle Years" about three sisters, the daughters of an iron magnate and their struggle to make lives for themselves in the debris of the world they have grown up into, and the death of their father. It is beautifully filmed and well acted and if you have amazon prime and pbs you should watch it. This August, of course was the 75th anniversary of the end of the war as I know well since I was born in 1945 - a war baby, to my Philadelphia navy yard worker mother and my US Navy sailor father. Sometimes I feel a great camera light in my soul and as though a film strip were running through me with the vivid, colorful, and entirely rich and plentiful life of the post war years for people like my family - a car, a television, a house, a new house, a big brick barbeque grill in the yard, five children born to happy, deeply in love parents who were bathed in the glow of prosperity and vigor and post World War II boom time. At the same time that it feels like a bright light it eels like a weight, a weight of memory and of years and of love.

Hope you get to watch this series! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com