Röper / Gade "Let me have a Chocolate Kiss!"

A GI Baby in postwar Germany searching for her daddy
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-3-7412-5764-3
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Ingrid R. Gade is a so called GI Baby. Her story is a true story. It is an unbelievable story.

Ingrid R. Gade ist ein GI Baby. Ihre Geschichte ist eine wahre Geschichte. Es ist eine unglaubliche Geschichte.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Röper, Lars

Gade, Ingrid R.

Leseproben

Chapter 5 - “Martha, don’t sin against thee to the Child!“

The small house on Marktstraße No. 4 in Nürtingen, back then with a population of approximately 16.000, still exists today. It looks pretty run down with its lopsided wooden shutters and the stained plaster, but in the end it didn’t change much since back then. The house is approximately 40 kilometers from mom’s attic apartment in Geislingen from where she was exchanging love letters with her fiance‘ Werner Schabel.

At the age of three, in November of 1949, I walked into the house for the first time. This was the foster home. With Martha, her one year old son and the bedridden, old grandmother. All together they lived in the small, cold and dark servant’s apartment.

Within the next three years I never saw the grandmother sitting or standing. She stayed in a large bed by the window in the live-in kitchen, kept in a slightly upright position by pillows. All I remember about her is wrinkles and white hair. Immobilized as she was she couldn’t help me during the time. However sometimes she raised her voice and called over to her daughter with her trembling voice “Martha, don’t sin against thee to the child!”

Martha was a 25-year old, blonde, slightly plump and strong woman back then. She prepared my room in time for my arrival in November 1949. In the junk room potatoes and apples found a place, boxes filled with old clothes and shoes, and the wood for the kitchen cockle stove, the only heating source in the apartment.

A naked light bulb was hanging from the ceiling.

Martha had pushed my crib into that small room. A frame made of wooden boards with a straw mattress, as it was common back then. A hearty welcome! This was supposed to be my room for the next three years. The entrance to that room was from the kitchen, down by the footboard of the bed with the old woman.

My chamber didn’t have a window.

It was jet-black in there, no matter if day or night.

An unbelievable complete darkness.

Martha locked up the small doll with the porcelain head, which my mom gave to me, in the large farmhouse cabinet in the hallway. I didn’t see her all those years.

Unbelievable the loneliness I felt since I was accustomed to always have kids around me.

This loneliness was something new to me.

In the darkness me, a three year old girl, covered in a blanket and full of fear. Every drop of blood in my body, every centimeter of my skin, every curl, my mouth, my eyes, my insides, everything was full of fear. During many of those nights I had the urge to use the bathroom.

In the next room Martha and her son Uli were sleeping in a large bed. In the kitchen the old grandmother was snoring.

The toilet was outside in the hallway. And at night it was just as dark as my chamber. Maybe I would run into an adult, a neighbor or whomever. I was terribly afraid of that, too. As I was afraid of every adult.

Actually I never went to this wooden shed of a toilet during all of those years.

Pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to hold it any longer.

Getting out of my bed, walking through the apartment, opening the door and stepping into the pitch black hallway?

To me that was impossible.

I didn’t move. I just let the urine out, running down my legs, everything got wet. It smelled bad. It soaked into the mattress. Martha will beat me again, I thought. The fear never stopped. At some point I fell asleep.

I woke up.

And the first thing I heard, as often before, was Martha cursing “You damn bed-wetter, you will learn one day, you nigger-bastard! You dirty gypsy!“ she yelled again. She often yelled “nigger-bastard“.

Martha tore me out of bed, washed and almost drowned me in the ice cold water of the metal tub, kept pushing me under water, then put me on a potty that was sitting in my junk room. “Do what you have to do“ she said in an imperious tone and left the room.

As little as I was eating I just couldn’t. The potty stayed empty.

Every day we had sauerkraut and burnt potatoes, fried in lard. I just couldn’t eat that. Martha became nervous, mad, brutal and stuffed the burnt, lard smelling food in my mouth with her wooden spoon, kept holding me down and kept stuffing it in my mouth, over and over.

Those were the only moments I was sitting on somebody’s lap.

Her biological son Uli had it so much better. How loving Martha was feeding him apple sauce, oatmeal and chocolate. He always had something delicious in his hands. And if I would have taken something from him Martha would have beaten me to a pulp.

I never had contact with Uli. Even though we could have played together.

Martha didn’t allow it.

I didn’t have any toys either and took what I could find in the kitchen. For days I folded and unfolded pieces of paper. Sometimes I played “family“ with the silverware on the kitchen floor. The different sizes spoons were my little family. They talked, they cuddled, and sometimes they slept and laughed. That was beautiful.

The potty mostly stayed empty.

It drove Martha insane.

Once she barged into the room with a broom, looked inside the potty, yanked the broom into the air and yelled at me “If you don’t take care of your business now I will beat you up.“

I was so afraid and shocked that I pushed with all my might until it only hurt and bled. All over, pain and blood. My intestines had come out.

Doctors call that “rectal prolapse“,the rectum comes out to the anus with all its wall layers.

Everything was full of blood. There were screams.

Martha got scared, pulled me up, dragged me to the bed and ran out.

After an hour she returned. A doctor was with her. He sat down on the bed and tried to push my intestines back into my little body with all his might.

It was the worst night of my life.

I was five years old at that time.

Five.

My overpowering fear got even worse. It was recurring and from those days on I had night terrors.

Sometimes I woke up at nights and was extremely hungry and thirsty. I got up and look for an apple in the darkness. I quickly ate it. Then I thought of a worm that probably lived inside the apple. So I threw it away and jumped back in bed where I was freezing as I was always freezing because the wind blew through all cracks in the roof. “You will pay for this!“ Martha’s screams woke me up. “You stole an apple!“

She dragged me out of bed by my hair and beat my emaciated body as hard as she could.

She took wooden spoons to help beat me.

How many broke on my body.

I screamed as loud as I could.

And the suddenly the voice oft he old woman again: “Martha, Martha! Don’t sin against thee to the child!“ Then she let go of me. Until the next time she beat me for something small. Or because of me wetting the bed. One day Martha had come up with another plan. Simple. She wouldn’t give me anything to drink starting in the afternoon. For sure I wouldn’t pee in the bed then.

Since that day I was very thirsty at nights. I woke up. My tongue was dry. Sometimes it was unbearable.

I pulled the potty out from under the bed and drank the urine in one gulp.

At first it was disgusting.

Then it got better.

And surely it was better than to die of thirst.

One day my mother came by.

She visited me. A bar of chocolate in her hand.

Martha welcomed her with curses:

“You US-whore. You Nigger-slut.“ Mom backed away.

“This damn bastard!“, Martha yelled and pointed at me. “This bimbo-child, she wets the bed. She doesn’t listen. She knocks everything over. She cannot be educated. And you bring chocolate to this piece of dirt.“

Mom literally fled from the apartment.

She never returned.

Later on mom stated that she was afraid to come in the apartment and that she had sent the chocolate bars with a note attached “For my Ingrid!“ These packages never got to “her Ingrid“.

In reality it was true that “Ingrid“ knocked over things a lot, spilled fluids, stumbled, and was clumsy: “Stupid, gawky nigger-child!”

Since Martha never took me to a doctor nobody knew that I was short-sighted, because of malnutrition and a vitamin D deficiency due to the darkness. When I was one year old I was taken to the hospital in Esslingen because I had diphtheria and would have choked to death. That also damaged my eyesight.

I knocked things over, I was a bed wetter, played a little on the kitchen floor, but most of the time I stood in a corner when Martha ordered me to do so. And still she found a reason to punish me even worse as with constant beatings. She dragged me out of the small apartment, down the stairs in the backyard. That’s where the entrances to the basement rooms were.

Martha tore the door open and pushed me inside.

Behind me the basement door slammed shut.

I was sitting in the darkness. I cried. I heard the rats and mice, their scratching and squeaking, the footsteps and the gnawing. I screamed for help.

The basement door still exists today.

People passing by must have heard that a child was screaming for help and fear for his life on many days, for hours. Beating children wasn’t considered condemnable. I would find out about that in school. But screaming for help for those long hours?

The pictures were taken during a...