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The hunger stays for life
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Lioba Lau holds old family photos in her Bethany West apartment in Lower Allen Township. (Jason Minick/The Sentinel)
Lioba Lau was just an infant when her family posed for this portrait more than 65 years ago in Mannheim, Germany. She was 9 when the Third Reich fell. (Submitted photo)
Lioba Lau slowly lifted the trash can lid so as not to alert American guards as she and other children used the cover of night to sneak into the United States Army camp.
The slightest sound could draw attention as Lau, then 9, slipped her hand into the garbage probing for a scrap of food — hoping for no rude surprises.
This was survival in what remained of Nazi Germany and the Third Reich as World War II came to a halt.
A native of Mannheim, Germany, Lioba was 3 years old when the war started in Europe.
Now 69, the Lower Allen Township woman recalls the starvation of the war's waning months and the early years of Allied occupation.
It is a hunger that no one ever forgets — one that makes her insist to this day that her grandchildren always eat what is on their plate.
The war touched Lau and molded her. It also taught her to be self-sufficient. "I learned early in life to stand on my own feet and make decisions."
Although never a refugee, the war years were tough on Lau and her parents.
In March 1945, her family was bombed out of their home for the third time. They huddled together in the bitter cold — sleeping out in the courtyard of their apartment building.
During the day, they picked through rubble looking for any item worth saving. Small children did much of the recovery work because they were just the right size to crawl through gaps in the debris.
Months later, Lau saw U.S. soldiers march into Mannheim.
"The Americans were very compassionate to the children ... They took care of us," Lau says. "They knew we were not responsible for anything. The adults, however, had to suffer it out."
The soldiers gave the children treats including cubes of dehydrated sweet potatoes to chew on. It was the first time Lau ever tasted chewing gum.
Later, the Allies reopened the schools and started a program where every German child received a steaming bowl of hot cereal every day.
"Mostly oatmeal or cream of wheat ... sometimes with raisins in it," Lau says. "Sometimes it was the only meal I had the whole day."
For years, she lived on the barest of rations in a suburb of Mannheim. She came to the U.S. in 1956 and retired in 1993 as an employee of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
The same war that made Lau so independent filled Hildegard Shollenberger, now 75, with a deep sense of duty and gratitude. Like Lau, she lives in Bethany Village in Lower Allen Township.
For 20 years, Shollenberger has spoken at churches across the mid-state and as far away as Ohio and Illinois — sharing her story of being a refugee to rally support for relief agencies.
She prays her experiences bring tolerance and a better understanding of a world full of adversity caused by human weakness.
Hers is a message of hope following the despair of the final days of Nazism when hundreds of thousands of German civilians fled west from the eastern provinces of the Third Reich. It was a desperate exodus inspired by horror stories of Red Army soldiers pillaging towns, torturing residents and gang raping females of all ages.
In January 1945, Shollenberger saw Soviet planes bomb and machine gun a caravan of covered wagons carrying women, children and old men evacuating Danzig, her hometown.
The first leg of her flight took her into deep snow and sub-zero temperatures on country roads choked with refugees. For nine days, they struggled onward, sleeping three nights in the bitter cold with only three hot meals the whole time.
Cut off from escape by Red Army forces, the family settled on a farm run by an aunt and uncle to await ship passage through the Baltic Sea to safer regions out west.
Russian submarines sank half the ships leaving Gdynia. The largest single loss of life in maritime history took place on Jan. 30, 1945, when the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff went down with more 7,000 refugees and wounded soldiers aboard.
On April 9, Shollenberger and her parents crowded into a shower stall onboard the Deutschland — a liner carrying 3,000 refugees, more than double its capacity. Somehow the ship evaded three torpedo attacks before reaching the German port of Rostock.
To this day, she wonders how the Russians could have missed such a large ship.
"Maybe they drank too much vodka," Shollenberger says.
The next ship to leave port was not so lucky. It sank with only 150 survivors out of 3,000 passengers. The dead included several of her aunts, uncles and cousins.
On reaching Rostock, Red Cross workers loaded Shollenberger and her parents onto a train bound for the resettlement in the Hamburg area.
"By then, we had resigned ourselves to our fate," she says. "Whatever was going to happen was going to happen."
The family made it safely to Rellingen, a northern suburb where the native population saw the refugees as intruders taking away precious food, space and privacy.
Within weeks, Germany surrendered and, for the next three years, the family struggled with starvation supported by a strong faith and relief efforts from churches worldwide.
At one point, Shollenberger ate edible weeds and moved from farm to farm begging for potatoes.
"Today, I never say I am hungry ... only that I want something to eat. I know what being hungry means."
Her family moved to Uruguay in 1948 as part of a colony of German refugees established by the Mennonite Central Committee.
She eventually married and came to the United States in 1955.
Grateful about the help given to her, Shollenberger shares her story hoping it will inspire others.
What few Americans realize is that hundreds of thousands of German civilians who had nothing to do with the fighting or politics of the Nazi regime, were killed in World War II, Shollenberger says.
According to the book, "The World at Arms," an estimated two million German civilians were killed or missing in the war along with over three million German servicemen.
"That does not make it right what the Germans did to other people," Shollenberger says.
"But not all Germans were monsters ... not all its soldiers. Things just happen like that in war."
She cited, as an example, the abuse of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and of the Allied air raids on German cities during the war.
In 1995, she visited Eastern Europe — scene of many Nazi atrocities.
Being German, she felt the need to "lay low" even 50 years after the war ended.
Around the same time, U.S. News and World Reports sparked public outrage for publishing an article examining the German side of the war.
"People in Poland and Czechoslovakia did not want to see the Germans as victims," Shollenberger recalls. "They said they were the victims. In war, nobody wins."
She recalls the sorrow felt by an American war veteran who took the same trip and, 50 years earlier, followed orders to bomb civilians to demoralize the German people.
"He knew he probably killed innocent women and children," Shollenberger says. "He had to live with that for the rest of his life."
Friday: In the final installment, The Sentinel examines the lesson of the Holocaust and its message of never again.
