Published: July 06, 2008 04:55 pm            

Larue Barnes: Proud to be an American

This holiday weekend, I hope you enjoy reading again about a Cleburne resident who knows what it’s like to be without freedom.

Her survival during World War II and its postwar days remains timeless.

When Gisela Schindler McCurdy of Cleburne became an American citizen on May 1, 1964, she changed one letter in her first name and became Gisele.

“Gisele McKenzie was a famous musician then,” she said. “I thought people could remember that name.”

Johnson County residents may remember Mrs. McCurdy as an accomplished clothing designer and seamstress. She served an apprenticeship with a famous fashion designer in Berlin and used her artistic ability to look at the photograph of a garment, take the patron’s measurements, and create without a pattern.

“My father, Adolf Schindler, my mother, Anna, and my younger sisters, Ingrid and Trautchen, lived in the Southwest part of Berlin, Germany,” she said. “My father worked for the city, building cobblestone streets and sidewalks.”

But the family’s neighborhood was bombed every day and night. Gisele remembers 26 bombs in one attack. A bus depot was right across the street.

“My father was not a Nazi. He served his country, not Hitler. He was drafted into the German regular army in 1940. He was captured in France in December 1944, and was turned over to a French prisoner of war camp. He died three weeks later, of pneumonia, at 37 years of age.”

Gisele’s education was sorely interrupted. Schools were closed in 1943 and 1944 because of frequent bombings.

“I recall how we would go to the basement during bombing raids. Stuff fell from the ceiling on us. There were a few old men, but mostly women and children.”

In March 1944, Gizelle’s mother agreed to be evacuated, along with her three girls.

“For seven months we lived upstairs in the mayor’s house in Vieritz, about 80 miles west of Berlin. It was a very pretty apartment there. We cooked on a wood stove. The smoke stack was dirty and the weather, humid. The smoke came out in the room. We decided we could not stand another winter there. My aunt hired a truck, and we went back to Berlin with my aunt and her family.

“Every month, we went back to check on our apartment. I still remember how anxious we were when we turned the corner to see if it was still there and not bombed out.”

There were times when the people knew that Adolph Hitler was coming to make a speech. Gisele wanted to go and hear him.

“My mother would say, ‘You don’t need to see him. We are against him and his regime.’”

Gisele missed a friend and asked her mother about her. She was told the Jewish child and her mother had been killed by her father before he committed suicide, fearful the Nazis would capture him.

“We had ration cards. There was very little available food that you could buy. So the black market was the only way you could get what you needed. I remember when my aunt got 200 pounds of onions from a farmer. We put them in lots of 2 and 5 pounds and sold them at a big empty place there in Berlin. There were huge crowds. You could buy things like baby shoes, coffee and cigarettes if you had the money.”

But a loaf of bread cost an equivalent of $7.50 there. After the war Gisele and her family were hungrier than ever.

Gisele graduated from grade school in Berlin in 1945. The government required each young person to have a “duty year” of work that involved living on a farm or with another family with at least three children. The disguised servitude provided a meager income and food and shelter.

“In 1945, at age 13, when I went for my year of work, a German officer spent the night at the farm house where I was in Vieritz. The farmer’s wife asked him if he would take her children and me with her to her sister’s house 25 miles away. He drove us there in his car.

“I had to take care of the little boy all by myself. I fed him, changed and washed his diapers as if I was his mother. They treated me like their slave, I suppose.

“There were three German soldiers living in the attic there. One was recovering from malaria. The Russians were getting closer; I could hear the shooting. They were going to go across the border and wanted me to escape with them.

“They asked me how old I was and told me, ‘That lady cannot take care of you. The Russians will rape you.’

“I wondered what they meant. Did that mean they would torture me, kill me?

“They said I might have to sleep at a neighbor’s house but that I must not stay there. They gave me instructions to pack up my things and to leave with them that day.”

The shooting was coming closer when the farm wife who had hired her came to her sister’s house and announced they were going across the border.

“The Americans had been on the west side of the Elbe River for about a month. I learned later that at the Yalta Conference it was agreed that the Russians would take Berlin. The Americans could not cross the river.

“After we crossed the river we hid in the bushes where the American soldiers were. We were afraid to show ourselves as we thought they would take us to prison. We watched the Jeeps going up and down the street as we started walking. I pushed a bicycle; the woman pushed the baby in a stroller. The Americans paid no attention to us.

“We had brought along five gallons of milk, which soured, of course. We knocked on the door of a farmhouse and asked for shelter. They said we could stay if I would help their daughter plant potatoes.

“I helped her plant for five weeks until the woman with the children decided she wanted to go home. We went back to the Elbe River and spent a week on a barge with other people. We had the small end of the barge with two beds downstairs.

“Then I saw something that worried me so much. Across the Elbe I noticed none of the factory smokestacks were burning. I wondered if all the people had been sent to Siberia and that perhaps there was no one left. I cried when I considered that I might have to go to Russia, from camp to camp, searching for my family.”

As they traveled, they saw an entire company of German soldiers, wading across the river to get to American soldiers in hopes of being captured.

“After a week on the barge we reached an inlet of the Elbe. My boss got a rubber raft, and we crossed the river. A Russian soldier asked her questions, and she told him she wanted to go home. She also told him she liked the Americans better than the Russians, but luckily he didn’t understand those words.”

As they walked towards the farm they saw the war’s devastation.

“The woods were burned on either side of us. I remember that we walked for two days. My 14th birthday came and went along the way.

“Finally we reached her farm, only to find 16 Russian officers living there. We huddled inside an attic room that had no stove. I was so worried about my mother and sisters. I told her I wanted to go back to Berlin to see if they were alive.”

Gisele received her employer’s permission and rode on a coal freight train to make the trip, sitting in a tiny compartment usually occupied by a switchman.

“I was shuttled from one train to another. We would go a distance and then reach tracks that had been blown up and have to go to another one. I began to recognize some of the town names as I got closer to Berlin.”

When she approached her apartment the front door was locked.

“They never locked it in the daytime, only at night. I called to my mother on the first floor.”

She added quietly, “No one answered. I was so frightened. Then a neighbor shouted that my mother had left the day before — to see me!”

Although she was worried, her mother returned the next day. The joyful news came with her: The war had ended.

“As the U.S. troops rode into West Berlin, oh how the people cheered for them!” Mrs. McCurdy said. “Americans, our heroes. They had freed us from the Russians.”

Gisele, honoring her promise to the farm family, returned to finish her year of work. The work was harder than before. Afterward she worked as a designer’s apprentice in Berlin.

In 1948, Gisele met her husband, Howard McCurdy, an American soldier.

Both were 17. He assisted with the Berlin airlift.

She and Howard married in 1955. She made her wedding gown after admiring the dress in the movie, “Elephant Walk.” Seeing it only on screen, she was able to remember its details exactly.

Missiles brought the McCurdys to Johnson County in 1970, where he served at the Nike base in Alvarado. After moving to Cleburne in 1970, he established Howard’s Electric.

“Howard died in 2002. The greatest compliment my husband ever gave me?” she said with a wistful smile. “Perhaps when he told me that I was a wonderful American.”

The pride she feels in being an American is reflected in the story she tells about the first time she went to the polls to vote, only two days after she received her citizenship in 1964.

She said, “The primary elections were on separate days back then. I had paid my poll tax early, so I was eligible to vote.”

Later she reported to vote at the other party’s primary election, too. She was told that she could not vote in both.

With her German accent she said firmly, ‘You don’t understand. I am a new American citizen. I voted for only one person at the other primary. Now I want to vote for the others.”

She was so convincing they let her vote again.



This story was suggested by Terry Broumley.



Larue Barnes may be reached at laruebarnes@yahoo.com.

        

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