Inge Bernhard Part IV: Trying to Move Forward

After the war, Inge picked up the pieces of her life and threw her energy into studying....

When the English came, they thought that all Jews had been killed. They didn't believe us that we could survive or we could have survived the war. Our house became the mess of officers. My mother had to cook for them. A neighbor came and helped her. I became a secretary of the English organization that took care of the Olympic Stadium. I don't remember what they were really doing, but they were organizing the reconstruction of Berlin and of their own offices and all this. So I was a secretary there. I made some money, and they were very nice. They didn't like my American accent, because meanwhile, well, actually it was later, when I went to America. Anyway. But I learned a lot of English with them. They did me a great favor. They took me in one of the closed trains to West Germany, because it was almost impossible to leave Berlin.

I wanted to study, but I could not study. I could not because only soldiers who came back from the war and didn't have the possibility to study in Berlin or in other places were accepted at the university. I wasn't. So I went to West Germany to a place where there was a Jewish professor who accepted me as a student. This officer for whom I had worked took me in the train. I was very lucky I could do that. It was incredibly difficult to go
I had to walk a lot.

Later on, after I was over the border, I had to cross the American zone by foot because the place where I wanted to study, Erlangen, near Nuremberg, was in the American zone and the other was the English zone. It was very difficult to move around during those years. I mean, that was after 1945, 1946, 1947. I studied in 1946, 1947, 1948. But there was no food. There were no rations, especially for somebody who came from Berlin there was no ration card. They said, First you have to be accepted at the university, then you get the ration card. But to give me the ration card of the town, they said, First you have to be accepted at the university, the other way, then you get the ration card. And then it was the other way, also. See, they said, You have to study already and then you get the ration. So it was so difficult that I ate what I could get, which was a soy soup or something that the Americans had given to the universities, and I got this every day and some food which was not rationed in a restaurant. I made some friends.

But everything was so difficult, living experiences were incredible. I had to live in a little village a few kilometers from the university, and there was no heating. There was no electricity. So finally, I had to go home again. This was the time of the English.

(What did you study when you were studying?)

I started with German literature and then I went over to English literature. But this was only one year. I also studied some music, I went to seminars, which was very interesting. It was just an introduction for me to university studies. When I went back to Berlin, the same story as before. I couldn't study. I studied privately music. There was no music school yet. And I prepared myself for an entrance examination at the music school once they would start.

At that time, our American friends that my father met when he was in America, who came and wanted me to come to America, they offered me to come to America and study there two years. So for me this was a great temptation, and I chose America instead of finishing my studies.

In America I studied English and music and I got a degree.

(What year was this that you went to the US?)

This was in 1949.

(1949. And where?)

1949 to 1951.

(And where did you go, exactly?)

I went to Fayetteville, Arkansas.

(Fayetteville, Arkansas?)

Everybody asks this question. Where people don't wear shoes. But I wore shoes. And then I met Carlos. I took a boat in 1949 to New York and Carlos came to meet me at the boat. I had some German friends who had meanwhile emigrated to America. They had lived in El Salvador for two years, I think, and they also came. So then I stayed with them.

(What was their name?)

Their name was Hader. Actually Hamburger. This was Maria Hamburger. She was a friend of mine in the Siemens Company. We worked together, and she was Jewish, not even half-Jewish, and she had to hide her Jewishness. We had another friend like this. So we were in the Siemens Company three people who stuck together. We shared our food, the little bit we had. We had company. It gave us a very good feeling of security. With her, I survived a bomb attack where one day a bomb hit the Siemens Company. Before this happened, we knew something was going to happen. We aabove ground a shelter, which was overground. It wasn't even underground. This experience was so terrible that afterwards I was always very nervous--this is what I wanted to tell you before when I heard bombs coming down. My father's lab was completely destroyed then, and the place where I worked was not hit, for some reason. I think the English wanted to destroy the labs where the atom bombs were developed, and that's where my father worked as a scientist. They really hit it to the ground. There was not such a big building, but it was nothing. It was just rubble. And we survived somehow.

So my friend and I, we were embracing, and we thought this is the end. So we were standing there and waiting to die.

But then, all of a sudden, nothing happened. But the noise was so terrible that I couldn't forget it for a long, long time. We got out alive, and we saw a mass of bicycles that were all melted together. There were stones on trees. There was a man dead on a tree. It was just a terrible, terrible experience. This is what I remember. This was the worst experience of the war.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC