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ERNA’S CHILDREN:

Rescuing the Youngest Victims of World War II

Of Nazi Germany’s countless victims, Erna’s Children were among the most

helpless and most tragic. They included children who lived under the Nazi occupation

of Belgium for over four years. And children who survived the horrors of Auschwitz

and Bergen-Belsen. And children from other occupied countries who were orphaned

in German forced labor camps. Most of them were alone, terrified, traumatized,

hungry, and hopeless. With courage and compassion over 12 long years (1940-1952),

Erna Deiglmayr saved and rehabilitated thousands of these children. This is her story,

as related by a remarkable, lovely, modest, twinkle-eyed 98-year old lady who still

walks the eight blocks to and from the weekly farmer’s market in New Orleans.

Antwerp 1940-1945

Erna was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on the eve of World War I but this story

begins 27 years later in 1940, the first year of World War II, when the German Army

invaded and occupied Belgium. At the time, Erna was living alone in Antwerp and

working as a degreed social worker in the state employment office. She vividly

remembers when the Germans bombed Antwerp on May 10 and she spent the day in

a coal cellar with friends and neighbors. There were some civilian casualties,

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including the inmates of a famous asylum that was located near the airport, one of the

bombing targets. For several days afterwards, the surviving inmates, who were

severely handicapped mentally, wandered the streets confused and unsupervised.

Antwerp was important to the Germans because of its strategic port and large German

population, so the bombing stopped after only one day. But many of those who fled

Antwerp with their fighting-age sons for the safety of France were strafed by German

Stukas on the roadways.

Belgium surrendered on May 27. Soon after, Antwerp was occupied by an elite

unit of the German Army. Erna remembers that those Germans, unlike the ones who

came later, were polite and respectful towards the Belgian citizens. Nevertheless, as

soon as the city was occupied, the Nazis ordered the local population to stay inside

for three straight days while they emptied the docks and warehouses of most of the

food and other essential supplies that were taken on trucks back to Germany. They

then opened all the bank boxes in the city, including Erna’s, and removed anything

valuable like jewelry and stock certificates as well as personal papers that might be

incriminating. The residents were also ordered to surrender their automobiles to the

Germans, as well as metal objects, like Erna’s space heater, to be melted down for

weapons and ammunition. It was a time of universal fear and confusion: “no one

knew anything.” From day one of the occupation, life for Erna and everyone else in

Antwerp became a daily struggle to survive.

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Many of Erna’s fellow citizens, including several Jewish friends, left as soon as

the Germans arrived. Erna, however, elected to stay. For the next four and a half

years, Erna and the others who remained in Antwerp lived precariously in a

dangerous and surreal world ruled by the Nazi overlords. There was a universal sense

of denial and dread. Fear was “ever-present.” People, Jews and non-Jews alike,

simply disappeared into thin air. Homes were subject to unannounced searches by the

Nazi police. The curfew, especially later in the war, was harshly enforced against the

local citizenry, so when Erna went to a friend’s house after work to play bridge (her

main form of recreation for over four years), she always had to spend the night there.

The Germans were the primary but not the only source of danger. Because Antwerp

and its port were so important to the Germans, they were often bombed by the Allies

during the war, with numerous civilian casualties, which included some 200 children

in a school that was accidentally hit by American bombs intended for a nearby

factory.

There was never enough food for the residents because most of it went to feed the

German soldiers. Some fared better than others. Survivors of World War I knew to

store and hide reserves. People with cash were able to buy food and supplies in the

fast-growing black market, if they were willing to ride a bike for 45 minutes to buy a

bottle of milk, as Erna herself did many times. Because the local women usually hid

tobacco and other black market contraband in their bodices, Erna recalls with

amusement that “big breasts” became very fashionable during the occupation. But

many wealthy inhabitants did not know how to fend for themselves and had to rely on

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the help of others. Generally, however, most of the residents were resourceful and

shared information with others. Even so, survival sometimes depended on mere luck.

Erna had a friend whose father owned a food warehouse that helped out when her

own supplies were low. At one time, there was virtually nothing to eat but

cauliflower, which was plentiful because the Germans could not export it. Erna

remembers the sheer elation of a little girl who had found “some cauliflower and a

potato” to bring home to her family. On another occasion, Belgian fishermen found a

large school of herring that “saved” Antwerp from starvation. Erna not only survived

but helped countless others in many different ways.

As a department head of the national employment office, Erna realized early on

that she was sitting on a treasure trove of information that was invaluable to the

Belgians and Germans alike, for every working resident of Antwerp was registered in

her office for employment purposes. To prevent the Germans from using her records

to find Jews, dissidents, and other “undesirables,” Erna secretly removed and

discarded many dozens of registration cards, including those of her Jewish dentist and

several other close Jewish friends, at great danger to herself. When a fire started in

the office, she used the opportunity to burn a few records (but is quick to say she did

not start it). Although the Germans apparently never suspected Erna of hiding people

by destroying their registration records, she knew there was always the risk of getting

caught and she prepared accordingly. Every day she went to work, she brought with

her a small bag containing clothes and food (notably sardines for their nutritional

value) in case she had to leave suddenly. Like so many of her friends, Erna thought

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constantly about alternative escape plans and often talked to a trusted cousin about

trying to leave Antwerp.

Later in the occupation, after Erna had joined the Belgian Resistance movement,

she used the employment records in another way to protect fellow citizens from the

Nazi occupiers. In keeping with their meticulous attention to detail, the Germans

often used inked stamps to record information on their innumerable forms, including

the notorious Star of David stamp used on Jewish records. One day Erna found a

German stamp used to identify Belgian citizens who were not qualified to work in

Germany as volunteers or forced laborers. She doesn’t recall how she got ahold of it

but she took it home that night and, working with colleagues in the Resistance, made

a copy of the stamp on the cut end of a very hard potato, which she then used to

stamp the records of young, able-bodied Belgians who might otherwise be candidates

for work in Germany. Her potato stamp worked like a charm for awhile but

unfortunately it wore out quickly and could not be duplicated.

During the course of the war, the Nazis forcefully deported countless Belgians of

both sexes to their infamous “forced labor” camps and factories in Germany.

However, in the earlier phase of the occupation especially, some Belgians actually

volunteered to work in Germany to keep their families from starving. After the Nazi

SS placed a female officer in Erna’s employment agency to recruit female volunteers,

she saw another opportunity to help her countrymen. All of the recruits came to the

employment office to be interviewed by the SS officer. It soon became apparent that

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some of the so-called volunteers were there under duress or false impressions about

conditions in Germany, so Erna set out to protect them as best she could. First, she

pretended to befriend the SS woman, who was admittedly happy to be in Belgium and

not Russia or Poland. It helped of course that Erna was about the same age and spoke

fluent German (along with French and English). Second, Erna put the German officer

at a desk in her own office, where she could be watched and overheard. It didn’t take

Erna long to learn how the recruiter reacted to the unwilling volunteers’ different

excuses for not going to Germany. Because all the volunteers had to pass through

Erna’s assistant’s office first, Erna told her aide (and trusted friend) to discreetly

identify the unwilling recruits and then advise them what excuses to give the SS

recruiter. The plan worked very well and saved a number of “volunteers” who did not

want to leave Belgium. Erna and her assistant remained friends long after the war was

over and rendezvoused in New Orleans about 20 years ago.

Erna’s campaign to save unwilling “volunteers” from deportation to Germany did

not stop with the Belgian women. On the pretense of helping the Germans to recruit,

she volunteered to translate and fill out records for some German doctors stationed in

Antwerp to evaluate prospective male recruits, but her real purpose was to listen and

observe. Of the local men who reported to the doctors’ office for evaluation, Erna

learned, by talking to them in a “plat” (or pigeon) form of Flemish that the Germans

did not understand, which of them really did not want to go to Germany. She also

discovered that the Germans would not take workers with flat feet or a venereal

disease. After conducting their physical exams, the German doctors told Erna what to

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put down on each man’s medical record, which information consisted of shorthand

codes (like “A-3”) for particular findings. Erna recorded the given information, but

for those men who told her they did not want to work in Germany, she “very

carefully” added the Germans’ medical code (like “F-1”) for either flat feet or

venereal disease. By doing this, again at great personal risk to herself, she saved over

50 Belgian men from “voluntary” deportation.

The SS recruiter in the employment office was something of a problem for Erna

after she became an active member of the Belgian Resistance. Even before the war

and occupation, Erna’s work required her to visit the factories and trade schools in

Antwerp every month or so in order to match available workers with available jobs.

As a result, she was well known to all of the union officials in the city. On one

memorable occasion after Antwerp was occupied but before the SS official came to

the employment office, Erna received a frantic call for help from the president of the

big dockworkers’ union. When she arrived at the union hall, there were hundreds of

angry workers inside and outside the building. They barred her from entering until

one of the workers recognized her and told the others “she’s one of us.” Inside, the

union officials asked her to talk to the dockworkers because they adamantly refused

to unload a German ship as ordered. So Erna, the only woman there and a very small

one at that, went up on the bridge and talked to the mob of large, irate dockworkers

below. It was the first time, but not the last, that she “almost wet my pants.” Some of

the workmen tried to shout her down but she eventually convinced them that the best

thing to do under the precarious circumstances was to hold their noses and unload the

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ship. The dockworkers undoubtedly would have suffered severe consequences at the

hands of the Nazis had they not done what Erna advised. Her periodic visits to the

factories and trade schools continued as before without further compications until the

SS officer showed up in Erna’s employment office. After a while, she insisted on

accompanying Erna on her rounds and usually drove her in an official SS car. To be

seen in public several times with a member of the dreaded SS was not only

embarrassing for Erna but also dangerous because she could have lost the trust of the

Belgian Resistance, something that worried her deeply. Fortunately, she remained a

valuable and active member of the underground until the end of the occupation in

1944.

Like many of her fellow citizens, Erna’s anti-German efforts started even before

there was an organized underground movement. The Belgians naturally fell into

categories that were understood rather than named: collaborator, neutral, or resister.

Some of the resisters, like Erna, participated actively but others simply cooperated

passively. To join the actual Resistance later, one had to be introduced to an active

participant or have a connection to a known member. For reasons of safety, names

were rarely exchanged, but Erna knew who she was dealing with and frequently had

important members of the Resistance stay in her apartment later in the war.

Erna was valuable to the Resistance for many reasons: she came from a prominent

family and thus had many contacts; she spoke many languages, including German;

she was single and unencumbered; and she lived simply and inconspicuously. In

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addition, the travel restrictions imposed by the Nazis did not apply to Belgian women.

Erna therefore became a tireless courier of information, money, and people for the

Resistance. Nothing was put in writing that might fall into enemy hands, meaning the

Germans or their Belgian collaborators, so she spent a lot of her time carrying oral,

sometimes coded, messages back and forth between members of the underground.

She also carried money, usually two or three times a week, from the Resistance to the

families of breadwinners who were away from home working for the underground.

What’s in a name? Apparently a lot if it happened to be “Deiglmayr.” Erna’s

family name proved to be quite valuable to the Belgian Resistance because it was

unique to her. Once the Nazis occupied Antwerp, many of its citizens developed

simple or complex codes of their own to communicate with friends or relatives,

especially in public places where conversations might be overheard by informers and

reported to the Germans. Codes were even more essential to active members of the

underground, which is where Erna’s name came in. The key was that her name had

nine letters that were all different. Therefore, as Erna pointed out to the Resistance, at

great personal risk, each letter could represent one of the nine single digits. For

example, the first letter “d” in “Deiglmayr” stood for the number 1, the letter “l” for

5, and the letter “r” for 9. The letter “o” was used for the number 0. Thus, an address

of 7350 was “a-i-l-o” in code. The “Deiglmayr” code was used widely and

exclusively by Resistance members for times, addresses, and other secret numerical

information. Luckily for Erna, the code was never cracked by the Germans or

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betrayed to them. If it had, Erna as the sole owner of that name would have been a

sitting duck for the Nazis.

Erna’s relative freedom as a woman to travel was the key to her most dangerous

mission for the Resistance. She was asked to escort a four-year old girl on a train

across the border into occupied France and deliver her to someone at a particular time

and place. To protect Erna herself and the whole underground network, she was given

no information about the child, not even her real name, but she understood the little

girl and/or her socially-prominent parents were in some kind of danger from the

Nazis. Erna was chosen for the mission because she looked somewhat like the girl

and could therefore pass as her mother on a family trip. Acutely aware of the grave

risks to herself and the child, Erna recalls that she “almost wet my pants” several

times during the journey. The most harrowing moment occurred when she was

detained at the border on her way into France, separated from the child, and

interrogated at length by Nazi policemen. Because the little girl did not know Erna

very well and was left alone on the train for such a long time, Erna was frantic that

she might become frightened and tell someone that Erna was not her mother, but

fortunately the child remained silent. Erna of course did not know that at the time she

was being interrogated, which was a nightmare in every way. Since the war, there

have been hundreds of movie scenes just like it, where the plucky heroine escapes her

enemies through a combination of quick thinking, fast talking, steel nerves, and last

but not least, a lot of feminine charm. But unlike those Hollywood versions, the

villains and the dangers to Erna and the child were very real indeed. They both faced

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imminent arrest or worse if Erna had failed to convince her Nazi interrogators. She

remembers thinking several times that the police had discovered her secret but they

eventually released her and she completed the journey with her ward. On returning to

Antwerp, Erna learned that the mission had been successful and the child was safe.

Later in the war, as we’ll see, she undertook many similar missions with other

children and rescued Allied soldiers.

Erna’s work in the Resistance put her in jeopardy constantly. Another close call

occurred in Brussels at a gathering of six underground members in a café to discuss

organizational finances. Whenever they met openly like that, the Resistance usually

included a female member, for the simple reason that Belgian women, unlike the

men, did not have to stand up when a German approached. On this particular

occasion, that distinction saved Erna’s life and paid some dividends to boot. As

frequently happened, two Gestapo officials came into the café to check the patrons’

identification papers, which was usually not a problem for the underground because

they all had impeccable ID’s. However, the man sitting next to her, a friend and key

member of the Resistance, quickly slid a small briefcase under her seat, where it was

concealed by her body and coat, and told her not to move. The five men, all in coats

and ties, rose when the Germans came to their table but of course Erna did not. After

the Gestapo left the café, her friend told Erna she was literally sitting on a

considerable sum of British pounds that had been smuggled into Belgium to help the

Resistance. Had the Gestapo discovered the contraband money, everyone at the table

would have “disappeared” into a German prison or camp.

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Not surprisingly, Erna developed a keen nose for danger and the ability to think

fast, as demonstrated by a bizarre incident in late 1941 when a “tall, good-looking,

high-ranking” German officer appeared unexpectedly at her door. Since Erna had

revealed her address to only a handful of trusted friends, it was quite a shock to

realize the Germans knew where she lived. After introducing himself, the officer told

her that she had inherited some $50,000 (about $678,000 today!) from her father, who

had invested in German industries before the war, but she would have to pick up the

money in Berlin. Smelling a rat, Erna assured him she would arrange to go as soon as

she could get away, but she had no intention of ever going to Berlin because she

knew it was a clever trap: if she went to Germany, she would probably never be

allowed to leave; and if she did somehow manage to return to Antwerp, the Belgian

Resistance would probably execute her as a double agent. So she kept making

excuses about going but never did.

Things got even worse the next year. Erna and three other department heads of the

state employment office in Antwerp were “invited” to join a pro-German union

organization. Erna and one other declined to do so and were immediately fired from

their jobs. Shortly thereafter, while Erna was away, the Gestapo ransacked her

apartment and questioned her landlady about Erna’s friends and activities. She knew

her landlady, who was a very close friend, did not reveal anything, but it was

nevertheless terrifying for Erna because the Germans obviously suspected her of

something. Nor did she know if they found anything in her apartment that might be

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considered incriminating, so she quickly and quietly moved to another obscure

apartment. In addition, she could not find another state job because the Germans had

blacklisted her. Having a legitimate job in occupied Belgium was critical to Erna’s

safety because it provided cover for herself and her underground activities. Without a

job, she ran the considerable risk of attracting the Nazis’ attention and being forced to

work for the Germans.

So she looked diligently for work of any kind and eventually took an unpaid but

full-time job at a local fish market that had been arranged by a friend’s father. It was

her responsibility as a supervisor to inspect the women workers at the end of the

workday to make sure they were not stealing fish to sell to the black market. During

the several months she worked there, Erna recalls with a wrinkle of her nose that she

“never did so much laundry in my life” in a futile effort to get the fish smell out of

her clothes. In fact, well-placed friends in the Resistance finally found her another job

because she was “too smelly!”

That job involved a new Belgian government agency called Boerenhulp that was

formed with the stated mission of “aide paysanne aux enfants des villes” (farmers’

help for city children). The mere act of surviving in an occupied city like Antwerp,

with its Nazi overlords and its ever-present shortages of food, heat, and clothing, was

a constant struggle for the local population. Even the better-off families never had

enough food for their growing children. As a result, scurvy was widespread among

the children of Antwerp. There was also the risk of errant Allied bombs intended for

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military targets in the city. To protect their children, many families, rich and poor

alike, sent them away from the cities to live on outlying Belgian farms where there

was more food and less danger. The Boerenhulp agency was formed to expedite this

effort to get city-dwelling children out of harm’s way. The Germans, who generally

treated the youngsters of Antwerp well, chose not to interfere with the new program.

Their forbearance would have been short-lived had they known, as Erna did, that

Boerenhulp was conceived and set up by Resistance leaders and other anti-Nazi

Belgians, including some friends of Erna’s. In addition to moving children to safer

parts of the country, Boerenhulp provided cover for people like Erna to travel more

widely and freely than most Belgians. As an employee of the agency, Erna personally

accompanied several hundred children to their new rural homes, so she was able to

travel constantly all over Belgium in her official capacity. That created countless

opportunities for her to make contacts and carry messages and money for the

Resistance.

The Belgian underground also made good use of her peripatetic work to save

Allied soldiers and airmen who were stranded in Belgium. On four or five occasions,

Resistance leaders assigned Erna to accompany a soldier or airman on the public tram

from Antwerp to the Dutch border, the first leg of a dangerous trip back to England.

Since none of her companions spoke Flemish or knew the local conditions, it was

Erna’s job to speak for them if necessary and look like a girlfriend or sister so as to

avert attention from a young man traveling alone. During the two-hour journey on a

crowded tram, they always rode in silence for fear of giving themselves away to a

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collaborator. Erna vividly remembers that each of these trips was utterly “harrowing

and nerve-racking.” If she had ever been caught with an enemy combatant in Nazi-

occupied Belgium, the consequences would have been dire for both of them.

One of the Boerenhulp children in Erna’s care, a two-year old girl named Josette,

was turned away by the selected farmer because she looked quite ill. Knowing that

Josette’s father was a disabled mine worker and her mother an impoverished beggar

with six other children they could not take proper care of, Erna took Josette home

with her and put her into a local hospital. After staying there four days and receiving

treatment for severe impetigo and worms, Josette moved into Erna’s apartment. They

lived together for five, happy years and loved each other deeply as mother and child.

Unfortunately, Josette’s natural mother eventually had a change of heart after the war

and took her back, which was heartbreaking for Erna. Josette visited Erna once after

that, but the pain of separating again was so terrible for both of them that Erna ended

all communication for the child’s sake. However, just last year, Josette wrote Erna a

long letter when a mutual friend gave her Erna’s address in New Orleans. To hear

from Josette after 60 years and know that she is happy, healthy, and married was a

truly memorable moment for Erna.

What happened to the Jews of occupied Antwerp is one of Erna’s most painful

memories from that terrible time. It was no secret that Jews were at great risk because

of what happened to their German brethren before the war. Many of them had fled to

Belgium and lived in Antwerp. In addition to the horrible stories they brought with

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them, Erna had been in Vienna visiting a sick friend in 1938 when Hitler marched

into Austria and she had seen firsthand how that had terrified the local Jewish

population. The Jews of Antwerp were treated no better. The Nazis started rounding

up Jewish residents for “deportation” in 1942. Erna had many Jewish friends who

“disappeared” and still has vivid memories of seeing truckloads of Jews on their way

to concentration camps. Their ultimate fate was well known to Erna and practically

everyone else in Antwerp who listened secretly to the BBC despite the Nazi ban. One

particularly sad case involved a bright and happy 17-year old Jewish girl whom Erna

came to know when she applied for work. The prospect of being “deported” to

Germany scared her so profoundly that her thick blonde hair turned pure white. She

eventually did “disappear” just as she feared and Erna never heard from her or her

parents again.

The Nazis of course made it crystal clear what would happen to citizens who hid

or sheltered Jews. Therefore, it was a proud but daunting moment when Erna learned

that two middle-aged sisters and close friends of hers, at great personal risk, had been

hiding a Jewish boy in their apartment ever since his parents had been picked up by

the Nazis and probably “deported.” She had been visiting her friends for several

months without knowing the boy was there – he apparently hid behind a long curtain

whenever visitors came by. Her friends finally told Erna about him because it was

becoming difficult for them to find enough food to adequately feed themselves and a

growing teenager. Since food in Antwerp was always in short supply and strictly

rationed, Erna used her own ration coupons to buy extra food for them. The boy

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remained undiscovered by the Nazis and survived the occupation, but his parents died

in a German concentration camp.

[Antwerp had the largest Jewish population of any Belgian city in 1940. Of the

estimated 50,000 Jews living there, the majority were immigrants who had escaped

from Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria, and Poland. When the Germans invaded

Belgium, over half of the city’s Jewish population fled to France and other points

south, but most of them were convinced to return to Antwerp by the Nazis’ initial

forbearance towards the Jews there, which eventually turned out to be a dreadful

mistake. In 1942, the Nazis started deporting the Antwerp Jews to concentration

camps and literally annihilated the entire Jewish community before they were

through. About 800 Jews came out of hiding when Antwerp was liberated. How many

of the other 40,000 or so survived the “Final Solution” is not known.]

Even though Erna was very careful not to provoke the Nazi overlords, they

obviously suspected her of anti-German activities and probably had her on some kind

of watch list throughout most of the occupation. In addition to the close calls already

noted, it was obvious that she was a person of suspicion because of the unusual

number of visits by former, now pro-German friends (including an opera singer she

knew well) who clearly came there to spy on her. Once she joined the Belgian

Resistance working against the Nazis, she was well aware that she was in constant

danger of being arrested and possibly deported or executed. From our perspective

almost 70 years later, the word “heroine” perfectly describes a young woman with a

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bright future in front of her who put her life on the line every day in order to protect

her fellow citizens against a brutal enemy. Erna, of course, does not see it that way

and does not consider herself a hero. In her own mind, she was lucky enough to be in

a position to help and only did what she had to do. But her altruistic actions under

great personal risk speak for themselves and clearly went far beyond the call of duty.

Although Erna would never describe herself like this, the person who emerges from

her recollections is a dedicated social worker with extraordinary compassion for her

fellow victims of Nazi terror, especially the Jews and the children, and the courage to

act on that compassion in ways that made a difference. It’s certainly not surprising

that the guiding principle of Erna’s life is, in French, “Il faut toujours considerer plus

petit que soi,” which translates as “You always have to consider those less

advantaged than yourself.” Erna honored that principle whenever she destroyed or

changed a record, carried a message or money for the Resistance, took a child or

soldier across the border to safety, or otherwise opposed the Nazis who occupied her

country. And that was just the start. What she did for the Lost Children of Europe

after the war made an even greater difference.

Even before the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, the weary citizens of Antwerp

knew the tide of war had turned against the Nazis. For one thing, the German

occupiers became more agitated and more belligerent toward the Belgians. Erna also

heard the BBC news on her small, clandestine radio that the Nazis had not found

when they ransacked her apartment. The frequency of Allied bombing raids also

increased dramatically. Most of the British and American bombers flew right over

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Antwerp on their way to Germany because they followed the River Scheldt that

flowed through the city. As Erna remembers, the excitement of seeing “friendly”

planes going after the Germans was always tempered by the fear that some of the

bombs aimed at military targets in Antwerp might go astray, as a few did. The city

therefore remained completely dark on most nights. Unlike other military targets, the

Allies did not bomb the large port, knowing how valuable it would be later in

connection with the coming invasion of Germany.

Antwerp was liberated by the British Army on September 4, 1944. It took only 24

hours because the Germans did not defend the city and the Belgian Resistance did

such a good job in preparing the way. The arrival of the British was celebrated wildly

throughout the city, except by those collaborators who had not left with the Germans.

Erna and most of the other residents invited British soldiers into their homes for

dinner, not only to celebrate the liberation but for a very practical reason as well: the

guests always brought their military rations and shared them with the hungry hosts!

Erna thought they were quite tasty. That a canned meal could bring such pleasure

surely illustrates just how much the local population had suffered under four years of

Nazi rule.

Erna’s initial introduction to the British Army in Antwerp is one of her few funny

memories from the war. She was selected to guide an unknown British officer around

the port because she was so familiar with it. Since the damaged port was not readily

accessible by car, she asked him to bring a bike if he could find one. So they met at

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the port and toured it for 2-3 hours on bicycles. When they finished, there was a large

automobile waiting for him and lots of soldiers saluting him “like crazy.” Only then

did she realize her fellow bike-rider was a very important general in the British

Army!

[Although the British marched into Antwerp unopposed, the port itself remained

closed to Allied shipping for another three critical months. Antwerp was essential to

the Allied forces because its enormous deep-water port was the key to supplying the

imminent invasion of Germany, especially since the supplies coming in through

Normandy were slow in getting to the front. Given the importance of the prize, the

British Army, with valuable tactical assistance from the Belgian Resistance, raced

toward Antwerp at breakneck speed and arrived there before the Germans had time

to dynamite the large unloading cranes and other port facilities, as they had done to

other ports lost to the Allies. However, the retreating Germany Army then took up

strong defensive positions along the 60-mile long estuary of the River Scheldt that

separates Antwerp from the sea, thereby rendering the port unusable. Only after three

months of intense fighting were the British and Canadians able to dislodge the

Germans and open the port.]

Soon after Antwerp was liberated, Erna returned to the state employment office

and worked to place Belgian citizens in temporary jobs helping the Allied forces. The

need for local people to work the very busy port and the factories was acute and

essential to the war effort. Erna recalls that lawyers and other professionals signed up

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to unload ships in order to eat, because food was still rationed at first. In addition to

finding and contacting potential workers, Erna also acted as an interpreter for the

British officers. Since she never understood the different officer rankings, she simply

called them all “General.”

Unfortunately, the war did not end for Erna and her fellow residents even after the

liberation of their city. Now on the defensive, the Germans soon started attacking the

city with their infamous V-1 and V-2 rockets to prevent the Allies from using its

major port facilities. Both types of rockets were highly destructive but not very

accurate, so the ensuing devastation of life and property in Antwerp was widespread

and indiscriminate. Rockets often fell on densely-populated areas of the city. Very

few windows or ceiling survived the explosions. Although Erna and Josette escaped

physical injury, the relentless attacks were harrowing. The Germans launched their V-

1’s at night to maximize the terror effect. On many nights, there were 50 to 100 huge

explosions all over Antwerp. After a V-1 rocket destroyed the entire front of a nearby

house, people on the street could see an elderly lady just standing very still on a long

stairway inside, wearing a nightgown and holding a suitcase. Erna worried constantly

that Josette would be killed or injured by one of the German bombs. They often slept

in the basement of their apartment house, near an exit with a shovel, hammer, and

hatchet so Erna could dig a way out in the event their building was hit. Spending

nights as helpless targets of random rockets in a cold, dark basement was utterly

terrifying for both of them. The noise made it even worse. The V-2’s were soundless

but the nocturnal V-1’s made a loud buzzing noise (thus the name “buzz bombs”) and

22

then went silent for several seconds before exploding, which was a psychological

nightmare for the citizens of Antwerp. This state of constant terror and destruction

continued for many long months, day after day and night after night.

[It’s widely assumed that London was the primary target of the German rockets,

but that dubious distinction actually belonged to Antwerp because of its strategic

value as a port and its proximity to Germany. In the six-month period from October

1944 to March 1945, Erna’s hometown was hit by some 2400 V-1’s and over 1600

V-2’s. 30,000 men, women, and children were indiscriminately killed or injured by

these rocket attacks. Antwerp was called “The City of Sudden Death” for good

reason.]

For almost 70 years now, Erna has lovingly kept a photograph that tragically

symbolizes the sheer randomness of war’s terrible toll on non-combatants, young and

old alike. It’s a studio portrait of an adorable, happy two year old child named

Claudine. On the back is an affectionate note from Claudine’s parents to Erna (“ma

chere tante [aunt] Nana”) dated May 2, 1941, about one year into the German

occupation of Belgium. They had been close friends before the war but rarely saw

each other during the occupation because Claudine’s family lived in Brussels, some

distance from Antwerp. Erna’s friends did, however, continue to write her about how

bright and beautiful Claudine was becoming. Then disaster struck when and where it

was least expected. In the spring of 1945, after Belgium had been liberated but shortly

before Germany surrendered, Claudine and her grandfather were out walking on a

23

quiet residential street in Brussels when they were killed by a V-2 rocket. Compared

to Antwerp, Brussels was relatively free of rocket attacks, but sadly enough, everyone

anywhere in a war zone is a potential target 24 hours a day. Claudine was just six

years old when she died – another perfectly innocent victim of war. She was her

parents’ only child.

As bad as the rocket attacks were, Erna and the other newly-liberated residents of

Antwerp were quite content that they no longer had to live under Nazi rule. Their

elation changed abruptly on December 16, 1944, when the Germans, who still held

eastern Belgium, launched a massive counterattack aimed at re-capturing Antwerp,

just 75 miles away. The ensuing struggle, known as the Battle of the Bulge, would

rage for another six weeks. Erna remembers that the residents of Antwerp were

surprisingly calm, even at the outset, when it appeared the Germans might break out

and seize the city again. Everyone understood it was a big and important battle, so

they just worked all the harder to help the Allied cause. The amount of supplies

coming through the port increased dramatically, which in turn created more work for

Erna and her colleagues in the employment office. When the Allies stopped the

German offensive and started pushing back toward Germany itself, everyone in

Antwerp breathed a little easier because they knew the war was winding down,

although the V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks remained a constant threat.

[The Battle of the Bulge was a major battle in every sense of the word, involving

well over a million soldiers locked in bloody combat for forty days. The German

24

attack, planned by Hitler himself with the utmost secrecy, caught the Allies entirely by

surprise and came very close to breaking through their defensive line. If that had

happened, the Germans planned to drive straight towards Antwerp in order to split

and encircle the two Allied armies and force them to sue for peace on terms favorable

to Germany. Fortunately for Erna and her fellow citizens, the Germans’ initial

success was finally halted by stiff Allied resistance and the shortage of fuel for their

Panzer tanks.]

U.N.R.R.A. 1945-1947

In the spring of 1945, near the end of the war, Erna left the employment office

and joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA),

which had been established to help the massive number of refugees in post-war

Europe. UNRRA had recruited Erna because of her language skills and her training

and experience as a social worker, including field work in Germany just before Hitler

came to power. She was assigned to the British Zone of Occupation in Germany, to

work with “displaced persons” of all ages who had survived the Nazi concentration

camps and forced labor camps. What Erna encountered in Germany is still mind-

numbing 65 years later.

Once she had arranged for a sitter to stay with Josette in Antwerp, Erna reported

to UNRRA’s orientation facility in northern France shortly before the war ended.

25

From there, she traveled to the port city of Lubeck in northern Germany. It was a

miserable four days. She and her colleagues rode in trucks and slept on the floor in

noisy military camps along the way. No one was allowed to leave the roads for any

reason (including the call of nature) because of explosive mines planted by the

retreating Germans. To add insult to injury, there was no toilet paper. And the large

numbers of German civilians they encountered on the way were openly hostile to the

UNRRA workers because of their association with “the enemy.” After a very

uncomfortable ride, Erna arrived in Lubeck only days after the Germans formally

surrendered on May 8, 1945. The final straw was that Erna and her colleagues all had

to be de-loused to prevent a typhus outbreak among the “displaced persons.” It was

not a pleasant experience. Erna had to lie down buck naked on a table and be washed

all over with a strong liquid spray for about ten minutes. But she did learn firsthand

what each “displaced person” would have to go through in the very near future.

The next few days in Lubeck were unreal. Early on, because of her background in

social work and her membership in the Belgian Resistance, the British military took

Erna on a tour of the notorious concentration camp at nearby Bergen-Belsen, which

had just recently been liberated. Although the camp had already been emptied of all

the prisoners and bodies found there on liberation, Erna had heard about the horrible

atrocities, the typhus epidemic and lice infestation, the meager food and drinking

water, and the rotting corpses. So it was a truly gut-wrenching experience for her to

walk on the actual ground where men, women, and children had been systematically

brutalized and destroyed only weeks before. At the other extreme, she was also

26

allowed to visit one of the luxurious nurseries used in the Nazis’ “Lebensborn”

program to breed allegedly “pure” Aryan children. The ten or so children in the

nursery, ranging in age from infants to two-year olds, were the offspring of

Norwegian mothers and SS fathers. They all had been lavishly pampered from birth,

including different-colored spaces and clothes, and were pictures of good health and

feeding. But as official wards of the now-defunct Nazi state, they too were refugees.

[The infamous Lebensborn or “fountain of life” project grew out of the same

“master race” ideology that spawned the Holocaust. Founded in 1935 by Heinrich

Himmler, head of the SS, it encouraged and facilitated “racially pure” women,

whether married or not, to have children with German men in the SS or Army.

Luxurious homes were set up across Germany and later in some of the occupied

countries where unmarried women could, in complete secrecy, “rendezvous” with

German men and later give birth to their children. Any baby with a birth defect was

killed outright or sent to a concentration camp. Aside from a few who were kept by

the mothers, the other babies were turned over to the SS to raise and educate and

eventually place in a “good” German home. After the war started, it became part of

the Lebensborn program to encourage German officers and soldiers to have children

with suitable women in the occupied countries, especially Norway because the Nordic

natives were considered “racially pure.” By war’s end, some 10,000 German

children and a similar number of Norwegian children had been born into

Lebensborn. But unfortunately, the program did not stop there. In Poland and other

occupied countries in eastern Europe, native children who met the Nazis’ criteria of

27

blond hair and blue or green eyes were kidnapped by the SS and sent to Lebensborn

centers to be “Germanized.” Some were taken out of orphanages but many, even

infants, were taken by force from their parents. It’s estimated that 100,000 such

children were kidnapped from Poland alone. “Germanization” involved propaganda

and intimidation to make the stolen children reject their birth parents and native

heritage. Those who complied were then adopted by SS families. Those who refused

were often beaten or sent to concentration camps for extermination. After the war,

UNRRA found and returned many of these children to their homelands and parents,

but sadly enough, some of them were too “Germanized” to go and most of them

suffered from severe psychological wounds for the rest of their lives.]

When Erna’s UNRRA team of 20-30 members encountered their first survivors

from Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, and other concentration camps, it was a scene that

she will never forget. All of them, young and old alike, were skeletal and catatonic,

half dead and irretrievably broken, relics of man’s inhumanity to man. It was difficult

to estimate ages accurately because they all looked so much older than they really

were. Many of them had barely survived the typhus epidemics that had devastated

most of the camps. Erna and the other UNRRA representatives had been briefed in

advance but were unprepared for what they actually witnessed. Of the children, those

from the Nazi nurseries arrived first at the UNRRA camp, accompanied by nurses and

impeccably dressed with complete identification information (name, birthdate,

weight, health history) attached to their backs. Then came the young concentration

camp survivors, who looked like ghostly scarecrows in comparison to the nursery

28

children. The contrast was so overwhelming that even the men on her team wept

openly.

[The camp at Bergen-Belsen was initially used only for prisoners-of-war until the

Nazis converted part of it in 1943 to a concentration camp for Jews, gypsies, political

prisoners, criminals, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Although there were no

gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen, it was a “killing field” in every other sense of that

term. Conditions there deteriorated rapidly between 1943 and 1945 as the Russians

steadily pushed the Germans back into Poland and then Germany. Many Jews, like

Anne Frank and her sister Margot, were transferred under brutal conditions to

Bergen-Belsen from Auschwitz and other concentration camps in the path of the

advancing Russian forces. As a result of the terrible overcrowding that ensued at

Bergen-Belsen (over 75,000 prisoners in a camp designed for 10,000), typhus,

typhoid fever, dysentery, and malnutrition were rampant. It is estimated that some

50,000 Russian POW’s and a similar number of other inmates died at Bergen-Belsen

from disease or starvation during the last two years of the war. The Frank sisters

were among the 18,000 inmates who died there in a single month just before the camp

was liberated. When the British Army entered Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, what

they found inside was truly appalling: 60,000 prisoners, most of them desperately ill

or starving, and 13,000 unburied corpses lying everywhere. Since this was the first

major camp on the Western Front to be liberated, the BBC’s shocking pictures of the

carnage there opened the door on the Nazis’ “crimes against humanity.” The bodies

were buried in mass graves and the camp was eventually burned to the ground to

29

eliminate the typhus-carrying lice infestation there. Despite the massive efforts to

help the survivors, 9,000 of them died in the first two weeks after liberation. In the

meantime, the war raged on throughout much of Germany and continued to take its

toll on the innocent victims of Bergen-Belsen. On April 28, just ten days before the

Germans surrendered, the Luftwaffe bombed a nearby Red Cross hospital for

concentration camp survivors, killing or injuring several of them. After the war, some

of the survivors who had been transferred from Auschwitz insisted that Bergen-Belsen

was worse than its more infamous counterpart.]

Over the month following their arrival in Lubeck, Erna and her colleagues met

separately with every one of about 10,000 concentration camp survivors assigned to

them, for the purpose of identifying them and eliciting as much personal information

as possible. As Erna so vividly recalls, it was intensely sad and shocking work, but

absolutely essential and ultimately successful. The fact that UNRRA processed and

prepared so many devastated victims for the trip out of Germany to Sweden was a

remarkable testament to the efforts of the new United Nations and its partners, the

British military, which provided all the transportation in its occupation zone, and the

Swedish government, which supplied medical teams for the various camps. (Among

other duties, the Swedish doctors and nurses had the unenviable task of de-lousing all

10,000 concentration camp survivors in Lubeck.) UNRRA took care of identifying

and registering the camp inhabitants. Erna is justly proud of participating in such a

massive humanitarian project and cannot say enough about UNRRA’s effectiveness

in dealing with the chaotic post-war situation.

30

The UNRRA team next turned its attention to the many children from Germany

and the concentration camps who were “unaccompanied” by parents or other adult

relatives. This too was gut-wrenching work. When the children were asked what

happened to their parents, all too often they simply answered “Auschwitz.” One

survivor told Erna how she somehow escaped the gas chamber alive because she was

covered by dead bodies. Perhaps the saddest case involved a 16-year old Jewish twin

who had been subjected to brutal medical experiments (like her twin, who did not

survive them) and died shortly after Erna met with her. In every other case of sibling

survivors that she personally handled, Erna remembers that they clung desperately to

each other and the younger children would not accept food from anyone except their

older siblings. Although it was also rewarding, the depressing work took its toll on

Erna and her colleagues, some of whom had to quit their jobs because of the resulting

stress and emotional costs.

The time spent by Erna in Lubeck was not only depressing but also quite

dangerous. Having lost the war only recently and been reduced to virtual beggars, the

once-proud Germans in and around Lubeck were extremely bitter, angry, and

desperate. To make matters worse, many of the German soldiers returning from

occupied Norway through the nearby port city of Hamburg were unwilling to admit

that Germany had lost the war. And there were reports of former Nazi officers hiding

in the dense woods around Lubeck. As a precaution against these many threats, Erna

and the other UNRRA employees were instructed to keep the office shades drawn at

31

all times in case someone fired a shot or threw a rock through a window. There were

also stories of Germans stringing piano wire across roads to decapitate Allied

personnel riding in open Jeeps, which was the primary form of transportation, so Erna

always put the windshield up to protect herself. Just walking down the street posed a

risk because some of the local Germans bumped and pushed the foreigners off the

sidewalks. In many respects, Lubeck was still a war-zone for Erna and her colleagues.

The horror of war was vividly captured in another incident at Lubeck that Erna

remembers well. She had been invited by British officers to have tea at Travemunde,

a well-known former beach resort. When one of the officers abruptly left the table a

couple of times, she became curious because the British were meticulously mannered,

so she followed him out and asked him what had happened. He said that he had been

called to help count and identify the victims, still floating in the water, of an Allied

attack on a German ship one day before the war ended. Erna learned later that the

ship, which sank, had been filled with escaping Germans and their prisoners. It was

apparently quite easy to tell the difference: the dead Germans wore boots and good

clothes; the prisoners had no shoes and tattered clothing.

After processing the concentration camp survivors and “unaccompanied”

children, UNRRA disbanded its team in Lubeck and transferred Erna to Wentdorf, a

city southwest of Hamburg in the British Zone, to help care for about 14,000

“displaced persons” in various camps throughout the area. Most of them came from

Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, and other countries in eastern Europe that the Nazis had

32

overrun. They had been forcibly uprooted and brought to Germany to work in

factories and fields during the war. (The total number of such forced laborers in

Germany during the war was over 10 million, a figure that does not include the Jews

and others put into concentration camps.) Needless to say, they had to endure

working and living conditions that were abominable because the Nazis considered

them expendable and replaceable fodder for the German war machine. They had been

housed in so-called labor camps throughout Germany that were separate from the

extermination camps but no less appalling. It was sometimes difficult and often

unsafe for “displaced persons” from eastern European countries then under Soviet

control to return home because the Communists considered them to be

“contaminated” by their exposure to German culture (which is the same reason why

the Soviet authorities killed or imprisoned many of their own soldiers who had been

captured and held in Germany during the war). The displaced population included

large numbers of children who had been brought to Germany with their parents.

For lack of alternative housing and adequate transportation, the majority of these

“displaced persons” were housed in the original Nazi labor camps and military

barracks after the war. Erna often found three or four families living in a single room.

Frostbitten fingers and toes during the bitterly cold winters in Wentdorf were fairly

common and very painful. Morale was dangerously low in all the camps. It would

have been a daunting situation for an UNRRA group of any size, but Erna’s team was

the only one at Wentdorf and consisted of just three people: Nils O’Melin, the very

capable team leader; Erna, the only trained social worker; and a secretary named

33

Yvette. Both became good friends of her. Erna enjoys recounting that Nils forbade

her from going out with any British officer below the rank of Major. (As an UNRRA

officer, Erna had all the privileges of a Captain in the British Army.) While the other

two spent most of their time in the office, Erna worked primarily at the camps

themselves in close contact with the individual occupants and came to know many of

them quite well. There were about 12,000 men, women, and children at the main

Wentdorf camp and some 2,000 more at the other camps. Attending to the wide range

of needs of so many diverse, uprooted people at four scattered locations taxed the

limits of Erna’s energy and endurance, but she loved the work and the mission. She

frequently spent about 12 hours a day, from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, doing hands-on

work at the camps. It helped some that UNRRA provided her with a car and driver.

What Erna did for the camp inhabitants was critical to their welfare. She wore

several different hats, from social worker to interpreter to community organizer to

cheerleader to advocate. Many of the children especially needed individual

counseling to address their mental wounds inflicted by the Nazis. Erna provided some

of that counseling herself when she had time, but her primary assignment was to keep

the residents occupied constructively by initiating and directing numerous camp

activities. In short, she created her own “employment office,” as Erna describes it,

and put the adults to work on various projects, from improving the camps to growing

vegetables. And since the camps held Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and

Ukrainians, among others. Erna, who spoke German, French, and English, in addition

to her native Flemish, had to find ways of communicating with many diverse groups.

34

To this end, she taught herself rudimentary Polish because of the extra time it took to

communicate through an interpreter with the large number of camp inhabitants from

Poland. And, as the hands-on representative who knew the inhabitants as well as

anyone did, she was actively involved in the ultimate objective of repatriating those

who chose to return home by gathering information from each of them and preparing

them for the long journey.

But it was as a community organizer and motivator that Erna made her most

important contribution to the well-being of those “displaced persons” in her care.

When she first arrived in Wentdorf, chaos reigned in all of the camps, which was not

surprising in light of the cultural, religious, and social mix of the peoples there and

the terrible conditions they had lived under during the war. While the Nazis were in

power, they controlled every aspect of the inmates’ lives with an iron fist. They of

course provided them with no schools or theaters or playgrounds. From one day to the

next, the inmates literally went from virtual slaves under their Nazi masters to persons

who were technically free but had no supplies or resources of their own. They were

absolutely dependent on others for everything, just as they were under the Nazis. This

is what Erna found upon her arrival. And there were still no schools or theaters or

playgrounds in the camps.

Erna changed things dramatically. Given her responsibility for the social health of

the camps, it was Erna’s job to make life “tolerable” for the inhabitants, but she

naturally set the goal much higher. One of the priorities on her personal agenda was

35

to do something about the absence of schools and recreational activities for the

children and adults alike. It was not easy, given the diversity of ages and languages,

but she succeeded in setting up several schools by finding former teachers among the

camp inhabitants and collecting books, pencils, and other necessary supplies from any

available source. Erna recalls fondly that the parents were extremely supportive and

proud of the new schools. The students often put on a musical or theatrical

performance of some kind when she visited them. Erna also organized sporting

events, Christmas parties, and other group activities for the children, including a

memorable Sports Day on May 1, 1946, that she put together on a shoestring with

volunteers she recruited from the British military. There were foot-races, sack-races,

hurdles, rope-jumps, and other contests for children of all ages and abilities. It was a

resounding success and did a great deal to boost the morale of both children and

adults. Among Erna’s most cherished possessions now are numerous photographs

from that happy occasion. Sadly, it was not too long after Sports Day that some camp

children were severely injured when they accidentally detonated a buried mine or

bomb while playing and digging in the yard. Erna, who heard the explosion in her

nearby office and rushed outside, vividly remembers the heartbreaking picture of

parents cradling their bloodied children. She helped get them to the camp hospital,

which had to call in off-duty doctors and nurses, and fortunately all of the injured

children survived.

For the adults at Wentdorf, she created theater groups and various work

enterprises. Interestingly, the resulting theater productions reflected some of the

36

ethnic diversity in the camps. Erna remembers, for example, that the Poles always

picked sad plays to perform and the Ukrainians were the best actors. She also

organized the camps by assigning jobs to the individual occupants in order to improve

their fragile self-esteem and the general living conditions. Some of the jobs took a

little ingenuity on her part: After requesting soccer balls but receiving instead some

American baseball bats that were useless because no one there knew how to play

baseball, Erna noted how fine the wood was and put the camp occupants to work

making highly-desired knitting needles out of baseball bats! She did the same thing

with Nazi flags that were made into curtains, blankets, and clothing.

The camp occupants could be just as enterprising as Erna, but in ways that were a

bit more unconventional. Because of budgetary constraints, the UNRRA diet for them

consisted primarily of nutritional but bland soups and breads, so they sometimes took

matters into their own hands and stole chickens, pigs, and vegetables from nearby

farms. There was little or no evidence left by the time the farmers had reported their

losses, but the camp inhabitants trusted Erna enough to confide their exploits to her,

after the fact. On one occasion that Erna recalls with a twinkle in her eye, the

purloined prize was a nice, fat cow. Although the angry farmer immediately reported

this to the British officials, a thorough search of the camp turned up nothing. Only

later, after the residents had enjoyed themselves some tasty beef, Erna learned that

they had hidden the frantic cow in a camp elevator for several days before feeling

safe enough to butcher it.

37

Erna, as usual, is quite modest about her accomplishments in Wentdorf, but it’s

obvious from the telling that she poured her big heart into her work and made a

monumental difference for so many otherwise helpless people. So why was she so

successful at changing things for the better? Despite her reticence to claim any credit

for herself, there are many good clues throughout her story. First, and perhaps

foremost, she believed wholeheartedly in UNRRA’s mission to save and restore the

lives of as many “displaced persons” as possible. And she believed just as strongly

that all of them, especially the youngsters, were the innocent victims of inhuman

forces beyond their control and therefore deserved the utmost effort from herself and

her colleagues. The camp inhabitants in her care knew intuitively where her heart was

and they came to trust her implicitly, a trust which she honored in everything she did

for them. In representing their needs and wants to the overstretched British

authorities, Erna often had to be a relentless and unyielding advocate. At the same

time, in order to maintain her credibility with the British, she had to earn and keep

their trust as well, which she apparently did. There was one particular incident that

shows just how trusted she was by both sides of this equation: When the occupants of

a Polish refugee camp started demonstrating to protest the delay in repatriating them,

she went with several British officers to the camp, but the angry demonstrators would

not listen to anyone but Erna, whom they knew from all the time she had spent with

them. Using the loudspeaker system, she spoke in broken Polish to the large crowd,

and successfully de-fused the potentially dangerous encounter. Besides the nerve it

took for her to do that (“I almost wet my pants again”), it took the trust of both groups

for her to succeed.

38

Erna’s work was extremely rewarding for her, but it was also terribly stressful and

exhausting. She spent almost every day for over two years in very close, hands-on

contact with very needy men, women, and children who were physically and mentally

damaged by their experiences in Nazi labor camps. They were also impatient to go

home and sometimes took out their frustrations on those, like Erna, who were trying

to help them. Outside the camps, she was surrounded by utter chaos and devastation

left by the recent war. The Germans were hungry and desperate. And most of them

were openly bitter and hostile, which made things very tense and potentially

dangerous for Erna and her UNRRA colleagues. The immediate post-war scene in

Germany was a surreal nightmare, with little time or space to relax. Several times

Erna just reached the limits of her endurance and, like many colleagues, submitted

her resignation but UNRRA (no doubt on the advice of the British) always refused to

accept it. She continued to work out of Wentdorf until UNRRA finally accepted her

resignation in late 1947. Of the seven years she spent working in Germany after the

war, those first two with UNRRA, when the whole country was still in shock and

shambles, were much harder for Erna than the next five, after the recovery was well

underway.

But there are also many happy memories from Erna’s UNRRA work. The British

officers were always polite and attentive. The occasional champagne dinner and

horseback ride with them were pleasant interludes. Erna was the guest of honor at a

horse show in one of the Polish camps to celebrate their good fortune in recovering

39

some 600 Polish horses that the Germans had stolen. The Poles were legendary

horsemen and put on a wonderful show for her. Apparently Erna was widely admired

and appreciated by the various groups of “displaced persons,” who honored her with

many remarkable gifts, which she still cherishes just as much today as she did then.

There are bowls and figurines and pieces of jewelry, all fashioned out of scraps of

wood or metal by impoverished people who had nothing else to give her. One gift that

is particularly meaningful to Erna is a pin made from a used tin can! In 1955,

Coleman Adler, Sr., an eminent jeweler in New Orleans, saw her wearing the pin and

was so intrigued by the story behind it that he silver-plated the pin as a gift to Erna.

It’s a truly unique and beautiful piece of Erna’s personal history that she wears

constantly and is deservedly proud of.

I.R.O. 1948-1952

When Erna resigned from UNRRA, she was mentally and physically exhausted,

so she took off some time to convalesce at home in Belgium before going back to

work. She then joined another UN agency, the International Refugee Organization

(IRO), in order to focus her efforts on children specifically. For the next five years,

she worked exclusively with “unaccompanied children” as a child welfare officer. As

used by the IRO, the term applied to the non-German children who had been stranded

in Germany without parents or other known relatives when the war ended. The

Germans had brought millions of men and women, with their children, from the

40

occupied countries to work in their factories or farms under obscenely brutal

conditions. As a result, many of those parents had died in Germany, thus stranding

their orphaned children there and accounting for the legions of “unaccompanied

children” after the war. The term also included children who had been born to

“displaced persons” during or after the war and then either orphaned or abandoned by

their parents. Needless to say, all of them were scared, confused, and virtually

helpless.

Most of them came from eastern European countries because the Nazis had drawn

the bulk of their forced labor from that area. Even though the Germans used forced

laborers from the occupied countries of western Europe as well, those who survived

had been readily welcomed back by the home countries after the war. And the few

Jewish “unaccompanied” children stranded in Germany at war’s end had been

quickly retrieved and assisted by the various Jewish welfare organizations.

Unfortunately for the “unaccompanied children” from eastern Europe, they had no

place to go home to. Their countries of origin were behind the Iron Curtain and

effectively closed to them because of the widespread devastation there, the lack of

adequate transportation, and the hostility of the Communist governments.

Erna was initially assigned by the IRO to Area IV in Amberg, Germany, which

was in the American Zone near the border of Czechoslovakia. As the only child

welfare officer there, she went right to work with her usual vigor and determination.

And of course she preferred to work hands-on with the children directly instead of in

41

an office, just as she had done at UNRRA. Erna’s first job was to locate and gather

“unaccompanied children” from displaced-persons camps that were closing, from

monasteries, orphanages, and other organizations that were sheltering them, and from

foster parents and other Germans who were not allowed to keep them. It was usually

difficult for nuns and families in particular to give up children in their care, but with

food and supplies so hard to come by, they realized the children would be better off

with the IRO. Erna has a photograph (#31), with “Should I?” noted on the back, of a

Polish teenager standing between two elderly German farmers who had taken him in

during the war. She made three long trips to see him because he wanted to stay on the

farm but would soon be old enough to be drafted into the new German Army if he

stayed. Having seen his parents executed by a Nazi officer, he hated and feared

anything military and therefore decided to go with Erna to the “displaced persons”

camp at Amberg where he could not be drafted. She remembers that he eventually

emigrated to Australia and probably took up farming again.

Once the IRO took over the responsibility for the Polish boy and other stranded

children like him, Erna worked long hours on housing, educating, and entertaining

them. She eventually became a surrogate mother to many of them and provided the

love and understanding they craved. They reciprocated her feelings and called her

“Tante [Aunt] Deiglmayr” (which must have been quite a mouthful for the younger

children). The depth of their feelings for Erna is reflected in the sentiments they noted

on the pictures they gave her (usually the only things they had to give) or the letters

they wrote to her later.

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To hear Erna talk about her work 60 years later is to know that she felt a personal

responsibility for every individual child in her care. One particular incident illustrates

this quite well. When a ten-year old Latvian boy died in the Amberg camp, Erna took

it upon herself to find his mother in time for her to attend his funeral. After locating

her in a tuberculosis sanatorium some distance away, Erna obtained permission for

her to leave the sanatorium and, at Erna’s own expense, arranged for an American

Army chaplain to meet and accompany her back to Amberg. The mother arrived in

time but was terribly upset when she discovered that her only son had no white socks

to wear, so Erna sent some older boys from Czechoslovakia (see note about “the

Czech boys” below) into the village to buy some white socks before the funeral,

which they did to the mother’s great relief.

Erna made things happen for the entire group as well. One good example of this is

a 1948 Christmas party for about 800 children. She initiated the idea by talking to

several American officers about asking their soldiers for $1 each to buy Christmas

presents for her kids. The Army brass picked up on Erna’s idea and decided to throw

one big Christmas party for all the older foreign children in Amberg, including the

“displaced” children with parents along with their “unaccompanied” counterparts.

With money from individual American soldiers and the IRO, Erna had about 50 cents

to spend on each child and had to make several trips to the local toy store. For the

“displaced” children, she gave the presents to their parents to then give to their kids.

On one visit when she was talking to the store owner, an elegantly-dressed German

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lady rushed into the fairly-upscale store and announced to the owner, with an

exaggerated sense of importance, that she wanted to buy presents for her four

grandchildren. The store owner told her she’d have to wait because Erna was buying

gifts for 2000 kids! The lady left in a huff, to Erna’s great amusement. The party,

with balloons, music, good food, chocolate milk, and lots of sweets, was a special

occasion for everyone who attended. Unfortunately, it was too much of a good thing

for many of the children, who weren’t used to the rich food and got sick after the

party.

Erna was also instrumental in founding a nursery for about 15 of the youngest

children up to age four whose specific needs could not be satisfied in the larger

context of the Amberg camp. She identified the problem, found a usable building, and

had it furnished appropriately, but it was a struggle because of budgetary constraints.

Finding the necessary funds to build a small sandbox for the kids was “a very big

deal” for everyone And there were no training potties, so the staff had to use empty

cans while Erna pressed the IRO for “pee pee pots.” What she eventually received

were fine adult chamber pots that of course did not fit the youngsters. Never one to

give up easily, Erna took the chamber pots into the village and knocked on doors until

she had exchanged them for three or four training potties, to the delight of the nursing

staff. Erna recalls that the children received excellent care and the entire operation

was a marked success. She continued to oversee the nursery until the IRO’s work in

Amberg was discontinued in 1949 and it was turned over to the Jugendamt, the child

welfare agency of the new German state. On leaving Amberg, she was given a

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powder compact with the following tribute inscribed on it: “The personnel attached to

Area IV of the International Refugee Organization, U. S. Zone, Germany, present you

with best wishes and sincere thanks this souvenir of our common endeavors towards

the solution of the Displaced Persons problem.”

It was in connection with the Amberg nursery that Erna encountered the six

teenagers she affectionately calls “the Czech boys.” They had come across the border

into Germany allegedly seeking political asylum, but Erna thinks they did it just “for

kicks” because they surreptitiously went back to Czechoslovakia several times after

that. Since they were under age, they became her responsibility, but the only place

she could house them was the nursery, where they slept on cots and sometimes helped

with the small tots. They were “very bad” and would mysteriously disappear for days

at a time, but it’s obvious that Erna liked them nevertheless and they liked her too.

She does not know whether they returned to Czechoslovakia or became wards of the

German welfare agency when the IRO closed its operations in Amberg.

After Amberg, Erna was transferred to the IRO headquarters in Munich. Her

duties as a child welfare officer included the children in the displaced-persons camp

there, but much of her work during this period involved the “Children’s Village” at

Bad Aibling, Germany, which was three hours from Munich and could house up to

500 “unaccompanied” children under the age of 17. There were already schools and

clinics operating there by the time Erna arrived, but the children themselves were as

helpless as any she had ever seen in her post-war experience. Not only were they

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without any parents, relatives, or homes to return to, many of them were mentally or

physically handicapped or both. Unlike those thousands of “unaccompanied” children

who had already started new lives in new homes in the West, the children at Bad

Aibling were among those left behind.

The objective at Bad Aibling was to place as many children as possible with

suitable adoptive parents. To assess their adoptability and prepare them for placement

elsewhere, Erna conducted preliminary medical and psychological evaluations of all

the children in her care. Happily enough, most of her young friends found new

homes, but success did not come easily for Erna and her colleagues. The difficulty of

placing mentally or physically handicapped orphans in particular was almost

insurmountable. The trick, of course, was to find a match that would be good for the

specific child. That was the decision that Erna herself had to make over and over

again after conferring with the interested agencies or individuals. And as close as she

was to each child, it was always agonizing to decide what was best for him or her.

Some 20 or 30 of the children were taken into her native Belgium and many others

went to good homes in Canada, Australia, and the United States. The American

Friends Society of Philadelphia, the YMCA, and the YWCA were particularly

helpful.

Several international dignitaries visited the Children’s Village at different times,

but the one visitor who made the best impression on Erna was Eleanor Roosevelt.

During her 1951 visit, Erna accompanied her around the camp and found her to be

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very genuine and intuitive. She was “at ease” with the children, who obviously liked

her, and she did not disrupt their activities, as so many other official visitors did.

One of Erna’s most important and lasting achievements was the founding of a

separate home for the 25 or so physically and/or mentally handicapped children at

Bad Aibling who had not been adopted. As she had done with the nursery she set up

in Amberg, Erna developed the concept with the IRO, located and outfitted a building

on the outskirts of Munich (a gated villa formerly occupied by a wealthy family), and

recruited local doctors, nurses, teachers, and caregivers to work with the children. She

was very pleased with the quality of care and support provided there and specifically

recalls that a German doctor on staff donated a portable pool for the children’s

therapy and enjoyment.

Some of the mentally impaired youngsters were included in the Children’s

Village group that went to Belgium because of its excellent mental health program.

For the flight out of Munich, the Red Cross laid out a red carpet at the airport to help

celebrate the event, but Erna recalls the children were understandably frightened and

clung desperately to their caregivers. And even though treats were provided for the

departing children, most of them threw up the candy on the unpressurized plane that

took them to Belgium. One of the impaired children not on that flight was a little boy

whose family had to leave him behind temporarily in order to qualify for

immigration. He was affectionately called “the doorman” because he was always at

the gate when Erna arrived and made everyone, children and adults, wipe their feet at

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the door. Erna doesn’t remember what happened to him but hopes he eventually

rejoined his family.

The home that Erna founded for handicapped children was another total success

that lasted long after she left Munich. When the IRO discontinued its child welfare

operations in Munich in 1952, the children who were left in the home and in the

Children’s Village became the responsibility of the German Jugendamt. Erna is justly

proud of creating a facility that made such a critical difference to so many needy

children and the general community of displaced persons.

Erna was one of the last two IRO child welfare officers in the American Zone of

Occupation. The other was Eleanor “Bea” Ellis of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA,

who directed the child welfare division and left one month after Erna did. When the

IRO turned its child welfare program over to the German government in 1952, Erna

worked without pay for a month in Munich with the Jugendamt, transferring records

to the International Red Cross for safekeeping.

Bea and Erna became close friends during those three years working and living

together in Munich. One of the many things they had in common was their abiding

faith in IRO’s mission of rescuing the “unaccompanied children” stranded in post-war

Germany. It was terribly sad for Erna to leave “her” children and the work she had

devoted her life to for five years, but she left with a well-deserved sense of

achievement and the knowledge that the children would be well taken care of. And

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she had much to look forward to: seeing other parts of the world with Bea and then

setting up a new home in the United States.

In December of 2009, Erna was interviewed on camera for three hours by the

director of research at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. She was

characteristically passionate but modest about her work during and after the war.

When asked if she would do what she did for the Belgian Resistance and the United

Nations all over again, she answered “yes, of course,” without hesitation and then

went on to explain her courageous actions in these simple words: “we did what we

had to do.”

Before and After

One of Erna’s earliest memories is of war. She was a year old living in Antwerp

when the First World War started and Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Army invaded

Belgium. Over 90 years later, she still remembers her first sight of a German Zeppelin

blimp overhead while she was out walking with her mother. The sudden appearance

of that immense, noisy, low-flying machine utterly terrified the four-year old Erna.

The Deiglmayr family survived the war but her mother died soon after it ended, when

Erna was only six. She was sickly as a child and her father traveled much of the time,

so Erna spent considerable time in convalescent homes and stayed with various

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relatives in Antwerp until age seven, when she went to live in Munich, Germany,

with her father and his new wife.

Unfortunately, Erna was quite unhappy there. Her father was very strict and she

struggled with accepting her stepmother. After two difficult years, Erna went to a

fancy boarding school in Austria. That was no better because there were few students

of her own age and the nuns running the school were also strict. During a vacation

visit, her relatives in Antwerp saw how unhappy she was and asked her father if she

could stay with them. So, after several miserable years in Munich and Austria, Erna

went to live in Antwerp with her beloved Aunt Louise, a widow who had two older

children of her own. Because Erna, by her own admission, was a very “active” child

and could be a “devil,” Aunt Louise only half-jokingly described her in French as “un

lion hors de cage,” meaning “a lion outside the cage,” which is easy to imagine even

now for those who know and love Erna. (Aunt Louise and her children remained in

Antwerp during the German occupation but Erna, after joining the Resistance, kept

her distance in order not to endanger them. In addition to the constant fears and

deprivations experienced by everyone in Antwerp, Aunt Louise suffered some

damage to her house from an Allied bomb presumably aimed at a nearby factory. But

she survived the war and died later of natural causes.)

Erna was a good student in school and eventually earned a masters degree in

social work. Her studies took her to Berlin in 1932, the year before Hitler came to

power, for several rather tense months of field work towards her degree. Among other

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subjects, she studied the high incidence of venereal disease among young people in

Germany, which was a major subject in her later dissertation, entitled “Youth in

Moral Danger.” Her conclusion: teenagers generally lacked the moral guidelines and

boundaries they needed, as a result of the adults’ failure to set out appropriate rules or

take sufficient interest in the teenagers’ development. Erna recalls that her conclusion

was somewhat controversial, coming as it did in the midst of a worldwide depression

and the growing turmoil generated by Hitler’s Nazis. After graduating in 1934, she

traveled and had various temporary jobs until she found a permanent position with the

Belgian state employment office in Antwerp as a social worker trying to locate work

for all of her fellow countrymen left unemployed by the depression. She was still

working there when Hitler’s Storm Troopers marched into Belgium.

* * *

Jumping ahead to 1952: After finishing her work with the IRO in Munich, Erna

traveled with her friend Bea to Egypt, Jerusalem (including an emergency landing on

a primitive runway at Jericho on the Red Sea), Greece, Morocco, and Spain. They

ended the trip in Antwerp in order for Erna to introduce Bea to her family and tell

them goodbye before leaving for a year to see New Orleans and the United States.

But within days of going home, Erna contracted a severe case of typhoid fever and

almost died. She spent two months in a Belgium hospital and fortunately recovered

fully. Then she took a ship to New Orleans by herself and joined Bea there.

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The one year that Erna planned to stay in New Orleans has now turned into 57

years and counting. As vigorous and curious as she is, Erna made good use of that

time. She enrolled in the Tulane University School of Social Work but found nothing

after the first year to match her own extensive education and experience in that field.

After taking a number of political science courses at Tulane to fill her curriculum, she

received a second masters degree in social work and a graduate certificate in political

science. When Bea took a job in Canada, Erna remained in New Orleans and started

working for the Travelers Aid Society. She subsequently went to work for the

Protestant Home for Babies as a social worker. For the last 11 years of her long work-

life before retiring in 1979, Erna was employed as a clinical social worker in the

Louisiana mental health program.

Erna of course used every opportunity to see her new country. She spent a

summer at Smith College in Massachusetts in a post-graduate social work program.

There were several trips to see her friend Bea in Canada, which usually included

some skiing and traveling in the area. Erna also visited India, Nepal, Russia, Africa,

and South America. She lost her best friend when Bea died several years ago, but she

has remained very close to Bea’s sisters’ children and grandchildren.

Erna now lives in a New Orleans apartment, surrounded by countless friends and

admirers. In light of her frequent excursions and insatiable curiosity, she seems half

her age. She is concerned about “moth-holes” in her head that allegedly affect her

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memory of long-ago details, but she really has no reason to worry. The foregoing

account of events that happened over half a century ago is a testament to a remarkable

memory – and to a most extraordinary woman who made the world a better place.