I apologize if you've already told this story and I just didn't see it, if you did please ignore me, but would you be willing to expound upon your grandmother blowing up a Nazi? Considering your and your mother's experiences I feel this is bound to be a wild ride. especially considering the at least.
Alright so I love the shit out of my badass grandma and so I’m happy to brag about her being the fucking best let’s goooo. she died last year so this is all from my memory. I won’t give super specifics to protect my identity, and hers but here’s the story. Trigger warning for- you know- it was nazi Germany.
So my grandma was born in the bronx to German immigrate parents. This was before there were laws giving citizenship to parents of kids born in America. When she was a tween her dad took her and the family to Germany to visit family despite his brother telling him it was a bad idea.
As soon as they got off the boat, he got drafted and her mom won’t leave without him, so the whole family is stuck in Germany for WWII and my little German-American Jewish Grandma is not having a good time. They have to split the family up a little bit to keep everyone alive so my grandma ends up living with her uncle in a clock shop which she likes because she loves making closes and watches and is excited to learn how to do it from a master. They get her some good fake papers saying she’s German, and use the cover that she came to live with her uncle to learn the clock making trade. (My Family still makes clocks actually!) Anyway she and her uncle “convert” to Lutheran. IE, they fake it to avoid getting found out as Jewish and it works. Grandma is good enough at German that she fits in. But she’s pissed about this Nazi bullshit. She’s a little American, and she’s real proud of that but she has to hide it.
She’s forced to attend nazi youth meetings to keep her uncles shop going. She is conveniently sick whenever they do the actual initiation every few weeks or something.When she’s 16 they force her, and several other teens in her town to work at a local factory making timers for bombs. Most of her fellow kids only know what they were taught, which was only barley enough to make the timers. My grandma realized a few things in the first few months at the factory. 1. They weren’t keeping track of who made what timer. 2. They did not test them before putting them on bombs. 3. The whole nazi party was a disorganized shit show.
So, because she knew what she was doing from her uncles shop she made the timers wrong, on purpose so that they would go off right after being set and (ideally) blow up whoever set it. She did this for several years before she got caught. They arrested her, and said she was responsible for the deaths of an unknown number German Soldiers (Nazis) and would be put to death for it with the other traitors the following day. (not a real trial, you might have noticed) That night she escaped and ran into the black forest where she hid until the war ended. How did she escaped? I wondered this myself for many years. She never told me that bit until very late in her life when said “I did the guard a favor. He was planning on double crossing me though and not letting me out. I could tell. So I just made sure he was asleep when I was done, and then I stole his keys.” Now I’d like to point out that it’s unclear if she actually did manage to blow up any Nazis. They were killing people right and left for any signs of disloyalty to the party so maybe she killed no one. Who knows. Apparently she survived the black forest by stealing a lot of supplies on her way out of town, and later she stole a gun from a French solider and used it to hunt rabbits and stuff. She said she was a pretty good hunter, which my mom confirmed. Sometimes she stole food from French farmers. She lived in an old run down cabin she found and fixed up. One French farmer was willing to trade her rabbits for cheese. She was deep enough in the forest that she didn’t realize the war had ended until she went to steal from a farmer again and saw American soldiers. It was mid June, by this time. She went home and fund her uncles clock shop had been destroyed, but he was okay. He’d fled into the forest after she got arrested, and made due like she had. He stayed closer to the edge of the forest tho and had come back as soon as he saw Americans. Her father was alive, he’d defected to the American side at the first opportunity. The Germans thought he was dead. Her mother, cousins, sisters, and rest of her family had been found out as Jewish and sent to the camps. They didn’t survive. Shortly after she got back, some locals in town put on a baseball game for the American soldiers to thank them for bringing supplies and food. (officially, in reality it’s complicated) My grandma was having a blast, she’d really missed baseball while stuck in Germany. She was having a good time. Now this part is what my grandpa told me. He was one of the American soldiers playing that game of baseball. Someone hit the ball right past his head and he failed to catch it because he was distracted by this beautiful woman playing with them, which is when that same woman, my grandma turned to him and yelled, in perfect English with a slight Bronx accent “HEY ASSHOLE! CATCH IT NEXT TIME!”
These were the first words any woman had said to my grandpa in years. And to quote him: “And I fell in love.”
When I asked grandma why she liked Grandpa at first: “He brought me some cheese on the first date.”
2087
jbbartram-illu
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