Bitte stellen Sie Ihre Erinnerungen von Hildegard Dillon (Kleinn) - schreiben Sie unten.
Please add your memories of Hildegard Dillon (Kleinn) - post a Comment below.
My mother was born, Hildegard Kleinn, on October 3rd 1925 in Köln (Cologne) in the Germany that is nowadays called, the Weimar Republic. It is a place that is becoming better known nowadays because of the TV series "Babylon Berlin" but the young girl growing up in a professor's household would have seen little of chaos that swirled around in those days. When she was 8 years old, her country begin its transformation into the Third Reich. She grew up in a coastal city on the Baltic named Stettin, Nowadays that city is in Poland and is named Szczecin. At age 15, she became a Wandervogel and went off, all by herself, on a bicycle tour through the new territories of Germany that were formerly part of Poland. She told me of one night that she spent in a Polish castle and the noble family living there were having a ball, and loaned her a dress for the evening so she could attend.
One summer she went to a summer camp organized by the Hitler Youth. She was assigned to help in the kitchen cooking porridge for breakfast every day. One day, there was no fuel for cooking, so the lady in charge said, we will make do, and told her to mix raw oatmeal, sugar and cocoa. She made this chocolate porridge in big bowls, and the kids scooped it out into a bowl and ate it with milk. This recipe became a frequent breakfast of my own childhood in Canada.
Soon, however, she finished school and went to work in a camp near the railway yards, as a Red Cross nurse, because the war on the Eastern Front was beginning to turn and the trains bringing supplies to the boys on the front lines were returning with a steady stream of wounded, and of Soviet prisoners. She told me of one time when a trainload of prisoners was parked in the train yard calling out for food, which she understood because she had studied a year of Russian language in school. Meanwhile another trainload of milk cows were mooing in distress because they had not been milked. Hildegard organized some of the other nurses to take buckets and milk those cows, then they took the milk and gave it to the Soviet prisoners to drink. I often wonder if any of those prisoners returned home and told the story about the young German nurses and the fresh warm milk.
Of course, not all my mother's stories of the war years were so nice. She was a very observant person and very smart. Later in the war she lived with relatives in the Rheinland. Regularly there were planes bombing and strafing factories in the area. She had noticed a pattern. So one day, when the planes roared over the horizon, and her friend urged her to run and hide under the railway bridge for safety. She went the other way and lay in a ditch beside the road. She was close enough to see arms and legs fly through the air as the bombers made a direct hit on the railway bridge.
After the war. she found herself in the British zone and her school English came in very handy and got her a job as a stenographer for a British medical officer. There she completely mastered English and developed an accent so genuine that she could pass for an English woman on the telephone which allowed her to use the British army telephone system, that was strictly reserved for British personnel. As the new country of West Germany returned to normalcy, and people had jobs and could travel again, she joined a travel agency. First selling railway tickets and then selling holidays abroad sailing on the Holland America lines. One of the perks of this job was free travel, and she visited London England.
Like many Germans of that age, in 1954 she decided to emigrate for better opportunities in life. She bought passage to Australia, but shortly before she left, one of her girlfriends came in desperation because she had met an Australian doctor in the British army, and after he returned home, they wrote back and forth and now she wanted to marry him. But she could not afford tickets to Australia. Hildegard gave her the ticket, and instead got a cheaper one to Halifax in Canada. She then went to Toronto where some distant relatives in the Gieffers family lived, and got a job working in a plastics moulding factory. In my childhood we had piles of plastic combs of many colors and shapes, plastic pitchers and cups, all rejected at the factory for some minor defect.
She wasn't in Canada for long before she met a young Irish man, Frank Dillon, who had also emigrated to Canada after serving in the British Merchant Marine during the war. He was a driving instructor and he taught her to drive and get a licence. Then he married her. A bit more than a year later, after the first child was born, they left the city of Toronto and bought a house and 6 acres of land in the countryside near the town of Newmarket. It had a big old chicken barn and they started raising chickens and selling eggs. When battery farms took over the egg business and dropped the price below profitability they switched to raising pullets for meat. Much of the farm work was done by Hildegard because Frank spent his days at a coffee shop in Newmarket. He had his business phone installed there and taught people to drive. When he was out on a lesson, a waitress at the coffee shop answered the phone for him. This was the last half of the 1950s.
More kids came along, six in all, the farm was sold, and the family bought a former general store in Ravenshoe a few miles to the north. Unfortunately, in 1968, Frank died. Hildegard had made friends with the bank manager and knew that the accounts would be frozen until the will was processed. So she called them up and managed to make a withdrawal of enough money to keep things going for a while. She struggled to get the general store open again, became the official postmistress of Ravenshoe, Ontario, and looked after 6 kids. It was a tough time for her and so she sold the business and bought another country home, on about 3 acres near Orillia. She took a course at a local college to become a carer for mentally retarded people, and then got a job at the Ontario Hospital in Orillia. This was not a hospital, it was a government institution where mentally retarded people lived out their whole lives. Even though the government soon stopped taking in new children, Hildegard worked their to the end of her career, looking after the women that were already there and had known no other life.
All of her children inherited a bit of Hilde's wanderlust, and moved away from Orillia, so when she retired, she decided to wander a bit as well, and came to live in Vernon, BC. It was there that she finally went into a care home when she could no longer cope on her own, and when a new home opened in Armstrong, she moved there a couple of years later. That is my mother. Since I am the oldest child, I remember more of the earlier days, and also, when she was beginning to work at the Ontario Hospital, it was a learning curve for her, and she used to sit with me in the evening and talk about her past, and about the problems she ran into during her day's work.
