Here is another short story Mom wrote about her college days in Hamburg:
The late 1940's.
Fifty years ago, I was a student at the Hamburg Art College in West Germany. I remember those days very well. It was not easy living as a refugee from Latvia in a country whose big cities were completely destroyed during the war. Hamburg alone had lost a hundred and thirty-five thousand people in an air raid. Everything was rationed, you needed coupons for food and clothing, and housing was almost impossible to find. We were always hungry. A small loaf of bread had to last a whole week. At the time I believed there was a worldwide shortage of food. Only now after fifty years I found out from an article in The Globe and Mail that it was not so.
The allies decided to punish the German people for World War 2 and did not allow any aid or food shipments to go to Germany. Large areas of farmland had been given to Poland and the economy was almost shut down. It was called the "Morgenthau plan for Germany". After thousands of people died of starvation, Mr. Herbert Hoover, then chief food advisor to President Truman begged to stop this inhuman treatment. Canada was one of the countries that listened and helped.
I remembered that in 1947 we suddenly had a soup kitchen in our college. Often this bowl of soup was the only meal I had all day. I was living at the time in a small studio; I rented from one of my teachers. It was on the fifth floor of an old house in the middle of Hamburg, a nice residential area that was miraculously left standing. The only problem I had was that nobody was supposed to live in the attic. The studio was directly under the roof. I could see the underside of the clay tiles. Happily I had moved in. I was excited to have my own place after having slept for one year on someone's sofa. Of course I had to be careful not to be discovered living there. I tried to avoid the other tenants by moving one floor up or down when someone was in the staircase.
After a few weeks of absolute bliss, one of my fellow students asked me if she could move in with me. She was from Dresden, at the time, East Germany, and everybody was feeling sorry for her because she had to support herself. She was very beautiful. Her dark hair was naturally curled and she had green eyes and a beautiful complexion. She was quite aware of her beauty and she used it to her advantage wherever she could. We got on quite well, except for some of her bad habits. She would spend all her money on clothes, then watch me eat, following the spoon from my plate to my mouth, until I could not stand it any more and I told her she could have the rest of it.
Her other bad habit was to walk around the room stark naked. The summer of '48 was very hot and living underneath the tiled roof was quite uncomfortable. I used to keep a wet towel around my neck. But since she paid half the rent I put up with it. I never really found out why she had to leave her old digs. I believe it had something to do with a boy friend leaping through a window to avoid the landlady.
The most exciting thing about the summer of '48 was the turnaround of Germany and the start of the "Wirtschaftswunder". Dr. Ludwig Erhardt, an economist, was the man who did it. The Americans picked him to be the minister of economics because he had written a thesis called "The rebuilding of Germany's economy after Hitler". He had written it for a man called Goerdeler. He was a main figure in the resistance movement against the Nazis. There were not many experts available at the time to do the job as most high-ranking businessmen or economists had been arrested or hanged for being party members. On the 19th of June '48, the allies announced the devaluation of the Reichsmark. On Sunday the 20th of June we were allowed to pick up 40 DM to start life all over. On that very same Sunday, the allies were absolutely furious when Earhardt declared the "free market". He was summoned to explain himself. He said, "I did not change your restrictions, I only declared them unnecessary, furthermore if I had asked there would be no chance of Germany getting back on its feet. There was nothing they could do about it. It was done.
On the 21st of June the shops were full of goods again. Things I had not seen for years showed up in shop windows. The business community must have hoarded goods and hidden them until the money had some value again. The black market had flourished.
My first purchase with my new money was a bar of Palmolive soap, what a luxury. Up to now only two kinds of soap were available. One would float on top of the water and the other one would sink like a piece of clay to the bottom. Both were awful. Now living in Canada for the last thirty years I thank the Lord for the wonderful life we have here.
