At Leningrad's Gates

by Wehrmacht Captain William Lubbec

  While never explicitly requesting a raise, I regularly asked my employers for more responsibilities. As I proved myself, I continued to earn more responsibilities and a higher income. Meanwhile, the experience that I received working with the first arc electric furnace of its type in North America would prove invaluable to my career.

  Anneliese and I were ambitious and our life continued to improve in Hamilton. We moved to progressively larger apartments three times and bought our first car. During this time, my English language ability also improved through daily practice.

  In November 1954, Anneliese opened her own shop, “Kenilworth Florist,” in the center of the city. She had my support to pursue this long-time dream of hers, though it meant further changes in our lives. Harold (formerly Harald) had already begun grade school, but we had to place Marion at a daycare center run by nuns while Anneliese was at work. On my lunch hour and in my spare time, meanwhile, I played delivery boy for the florist shop. Unfortunately, her business made little profit despite her hard work.

  On Christmas Eve 1954, Anneliese was stuck in the shop preparing flower arrangements while I delivered them around town, preventing us from being with our children as usual. Listening to Christmas carols on my car’s radio with the snow falling outside, tears ran down my cheeks as I despaired at the thought of Harold and Marion alone when I had enjoyed such wonderful Christmases as a child. It made me cherish that Christmas Eve even more when we finally were able to celebrate later that night.

  In the end, Anneliese decided to close her shop before the following Christmas after giving the business venture her best effort.

  ESCAPING EAST GERMANY

  In the early 1950s my brother Hans was still living on the farm in Püggen with my mother, my sisters, and Aunt Hedwig, while Otto had married and was living and working on the farm belonging to his wife’s family in nearby Hohengrieben.

  The East German government had not yet attempted to seize our family’s farm in Püggen outright, but continued to require ever-higher production quotas from my remaining family members after my father’s decision to remain in the west. Although other farms were also unable to meet their quotas, the Communist authorities continually persecuted my family because of its known hostility to the regime.

  Shortly before Christmas in 1951, Otto received an order to go down to the office of Püggen’s mayor. Growing concerned when he failed to return after an hour and a half, my sister Marlene went down to check on him and learned that they were waiting for the arrival of Communist authorities from the city of Salzwedel, about 10 miles away. When the officials appeared shortly afterward, they took Otto away in handcuffs.

  In Salzwedel, a judge sentenced my brother to 15 months in prison because our family’s farm had failed to meet its production quota, apparently unaware that my mother now held the title to the farm and that Otto himself was now living in Hohengrieben. The court also informed Otto that the farm would be confiscated as a result of both the failure to meet the quota as well as my father’s illegal departure to the West in 1948.

  When people in Püggen learned about Otto’s prison sentence, they were so upset that they cornered the local police detachment in a basement in the village until his release was granted. The East German police soon rearrested Otto, but allowed him out of prison again in the middle of February 1952. He returned to Hohengrieben and had little further involvement with affairs on the farm in Püggen.

  At this same time, the government went forward with its confiscation of my family’s bank account and farm, placing it under the supervision of a government Treuhändler (trustee). In addition to claiming furniture from our home, the government also began confiscating horses from the farm to use elsewhere, and starting killing the farm’s cattle for meat, even if a cow was pregnant.

  Because my sister Christa was working at a photography shop in Salzwedel, my oldest sister Marlene had the primary responsibility of looking out for my mother and my sister Margarete. Now an employee of the state, Marlene earned hourly wages to work on our farm. Because it was now state property, my family was no longer able to take eggs, milk, or anything else from its production. Though she fed and took care of the remaining animals, all other operations on the farm ceased.

  In March of 1953, Herr Schmerschneider, the same local Lutheran pastor who had warned that my father would be arrested if he returned to Püggen in 1948, passed along new information. This time, he alerted my mother and sisters that the Communists intended to take Marlene and Christa to a camp on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea to perform manual labor as punishment for my father’s illegal departure six years earlier.

  Under mounting pressure, my mother and sisters finally made the heartrending decision to leave our old family farm forever and escape to West Germany. It was more than leaving a house and property; it meant accepting the surrender of the family’s legacy, land on which our ancestors had lived for centuries.

  In preparation for their departure, my mother and sisters began collecting our personal items, clothing, bedcovers, and other belongings for shipment to my father in West Germany by mail, posting the parcels from different locations to avoid detection. While they were able to mail some of our valuables, they could not risk sending everything by that route.

  Among the items not sent were some very valuable old coins that my parents had dug up from our farm’s ornamental garden in the 1920s. Dating from the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648, these coins had likely been buried by the earlier residents before they fled into the surrounding woods to escape marauding soldiers.

  When I was a student in Wolfenbüttel and my parents had no money, they gave me part of the collection to help me out. Though pawning part of the collection, I returned the remainder to my mother before I left for Canada. As she readied to leave for West Germany, my mother entrusted the entire collection for safekeeping with one of the few neighbors on whom she felt she could rely. Sadly, this neighbor betrayed that trust and sold our family’s treasure.

  The increasing use of barbed wire fencing, guard dogs, and minefields along the border had made an unauthorized crossing to the West almost impossible, but at this time there was still an escape route through the divided city of Berlin. Because anyone who tried to depart to the West without official permission faced arrest and imprisonment by the East German secret police, my mother and sisters kept their intentions secret from our neighbors and continued to behave normally until the day they departed.

  Leaving everything behind except small suitcases, they began to sneak out of Püggen on Friday, April 3, 1953, just two days before Easter. Agreeing to meet in West Berlin, they split up to avoid drawing the attention of one of the many government informers.

  While my mother crossed a field out of our village and caught the train in Beetzendorf, Margarete left from the stop nearest our farm in Siedenlangenbeck, where she joined my mother on board the same train. Meanwhile, Christa remained in Salzwedel after work on Friday and Marlene stayed on the farm to feed the animals.

  Telling the Treuhändler that she was leaving Püggen to attend a church confirmation of a relative, and would not be back until the beginning of the week, Marlene said goodbye to Aunt Hedwig. On the morning of Easter Sunday, she walked out the entrance of our farm for the last time with our dog barking behind her. After boarding the train at Siedenlangenbeck, Marlene met up with Christa in Salzwedel.

  Upon reaching East Berlin, my mother and Margarete and my older sisters separately caught the subway train that still ran between the Communist-controlled eastern zone and the Allied-controlled western zone. Their joyful reunion at Spandau in West Berlin meant that they were safe and free, though they lacked the money to buy a ticket to West Germany.

  Finally, about a month later, they purchased plane tickets to Hannover with funds that I sent them from Canada. When they arrived by train in Lüneburg from Hannover that May, my father was waiting on the platform to embrace them all for the first time in four and a half years.

  Lea
rning they had fled, the East German government immediately assumed total control of the property in Püggen. Soon afterward, it demolished all the buildings, except for the Altenteil where my grandparents had lived.

  The fate of our home and farm was tragic, but this loss was far outweighed by the sense of euphoria that my mother and sisters felt as a result of their successful escape from Communist control. Though my family never expected to recover our farm following its seizure by the East German authorities, my three sisters eventually won a court battle to regain title to our property following German reunification in 1990.

  My family was thrilled when the border dividing Germany suddenly disappeared during the wave of East European revolutions in 1989, but Otto was the happiest one of all. He and his family finally had a chance to live in a free society and travel for the first time in decades. Tragically for him, some members of our family had already passed away before the wall came down. As for most Germans, my family found that the nation’s defeat and division had lasting consequences that proved much greater than the direct impact of the war itself.

  THE UNITED STATES: July 1956–December 1982

  By the mid-1950s, Anneliese and I had decided not to return to Germany after growing increasingly comfortable with our new lives in North America, but we still wanted to try to emigrate to the United States as we had always planned to do.

  At the American consulate on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, I applied for a visa that would permit me to bring my family to live in the United States as legal aliens. Because of my background and work experience, they issued us a visa to emigrate in less than three months.

  Shortly after receiving permission in the summer of 1956, I resigned my job at The Steel Company of Canada and drove down alone to Cleveland, Ohio. Given my experience, I had five different job offers from construction companies and a steel manufacturer within a week. Many of the positions interested me, but I ultimately accepted a position as an electrical engineer with a large industrial construction firm that offered to double my salary.

  After spending three months back in Germany, Anneliese, Harold, and Marion arrived in the United States and moved into the new home I had found for us in Cleveland. We quickly settled into a quiet family life, driving around northern Ohio for sightseeing on weekends. About a year later, on October 22, 1957, our son Norman Ralph was born. Afterward, Anneliese and I joked that our children could form their own United Nations, representing Germany, Canada, and the United States.

  In late 1958, I left the job with my first American employer and went to work for another Cleveland firm. At the age of 38, I became the chief electrical engineer at Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Working with two 200-ton capacity electric arc furnaces, I now began to develop an international reputation for my innovative expertise in maximizing the efficiency of these furnaces in terms of the amount of time and energy used relative to the quantity of steel produced.

  Today, the industry uses this type of furnace to produce roughly 50 percent of the steel made in the United States, but it was a cutting edge technology during the late 1950s.

  During the ensuing decade, we took the children to visit our family in Germany about once a year. My parents doted on their grandchildren, though my conservatively dressed mother sometimes thought that Marion wore outfits that were “too colorful.” While sometimes missing our families and Germany, we never regretted our decision to build new lives in America.

  As immigrants, Anneliese and I constantly sought to blend our German heritage with the American lifestyle. While we spoke German together, we usually tried to speak English with our children. Instilling German values like hard work and punctuality were particularly important to us and probably led Anneliese and I to be more strict than most American parents. To teach responsibility, we assigned all the children regular chores in the house and in the yard. The children knew that when I told them to be home by five o’clock, it meant five o’clock. They also learned to value our time together as a family.

  Growing up in Püggen, Sundays had always been a day for family. Anneliese and I tried to make this a family time in Cleveland too. Following church in the morning, she and I took turns preparing something special, typically a traditional German meal. After a nap, we would pack the kids into the car for a Sunday drive into the country or to a local park for a hike and rock-climbing. Some Sundays, we would drive up to Lake Erie for picnics.

  Returning home, we would have Abendbrot, a light meal consisting of an open-face sandwich. Like most American families, our Sundays often finished with the family sitting around the television watching shows like Gunsmoke or The FBI. Perhaps our separation from our extended family back in Germany made the bonds among our immediate family tighter.

  Twice a year, Cleveland held a festival celebrating German heritage that offered traditional food, music, and dancing. Anneliese and I always loved dancing together, frequently reminiscing about our first meeting in the dance hall in Lüneburg.

  About this time, I entered a local hospital after experiencing severe back problems resulting from the war. As I lay in traction to prevent movement, a man with a broken hip was placed on the room’s other bed. Later that night, the other patient asked me for a smoke. When I told him I was unable to move, he tried to get out of bed to retrieve his cigarettes from the drawer in the table next to him. With his broken hip, he collapsed immediately on the floor, unable to move. I pushed the button for a nurse and they lifted him back into bed.

  That drama would be repeated three times that night. As a daily smoker of cigarettes, cigars, or a pipe since the invasion of Russia in 1941, this pathetic exhibition seemed like a warning to me. If smoking was so addictive that it could cause that kind of insane behavior, I wanted nothing to do with it. Deciding never to smoke again, I quit for good.

  In 1961, at the end of the five-year required waiting period, our family proudly attended a ceremony at which we became citizens of the United States, breaking the last legal connection with our Fatherland. Making up my mind that my family and I would be Americans, I dropped the German part of my identity almost completely. Even the legal spelling of our family’s name was changed from Lübbecke to Lubbeck, though this was partly because I was tired of hearing my name mispronounced as “Lubbeckee,” instead of the proper “Luebbeckeh.”

  On January 1, 1964, I went to work for the Union Carbide Corporation after leaving the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Rather quickly, I worked my way up to the position of Manager of Arc Furnace Technology in the division which made graphite electrodes for steel-making arc furnaces.

  At Union Carbide, I also started to travel all over the country and the world, consulting with large and small steel companies and foundries about setting up new electric arc furnaces and optimizing their manufacturing process. Even though operating or monitoring an electric arc furnace was much safer than many of my earlier jobs, adjusting a furnace could still be dangerous.

  As I was operating one of our client’s large furnaces, I entered the control cubicle to adjust the manufacturing process. Inside the cramped control space, I had to maneuver my body among the uninsulated copper bars running down along the sides of the cubicle.

  When my elbow accidentally touched one of these bars carrying 380 volts, the shock nearly knocked me unconscious, leaving me barely able to remain on my feet. Though managing to avoid a fall against the side of the cubicle that could easily have electrocuted me, the experience reminded me that I could never allow myself to become complacent about the hazards of my work.

  With a growing reputation as an expert in the field, there were increasing demands on my time. I joined half a dozen professional societies in my field and wrote several articles in industry magazines as well as a book on the arc melting process. Giving about 500 presentations on the technical process of melting steel in electric arc furnaces to groups ranging in size from 15 to 300 people, I learned over the years that it was critical to speak very deliberately when explaining complex aspec
ts of my work.

  While my work-related travel schedule disrupted our calm family life to some extent, I still managed to be home almost every weekend. On my trips to Europe, South America, and South Africa, Anneliese occasionally traveled with me for a vacation.

  By 1968, Harold, my oldest son, was already in college at Purdue University studying electrical engineering, while Marion was in high school and Ralph was in middle school. At this time, we purchased eight acres of wooded land close to the town of Medina, outside Cleveland. Because our home in Seven Hills sold quickly and it was impossible to rent an apartment for just a few months, Anneliese proposed that we camp on our property during the summer of 1969 while our new home was under construction.

  Every morning, I would bathe in an improvised shower, dress for work in our tent, and walk out of the woods to my car parked on the street in front of our property. It was not particularly comfortable, but it was an interesting six-month adventure. Finally, we moved into our new home, scenically set in the middle of the woods. We enjoyed our refuge from the hustle of city life.

  Though I regularly attended a Lutheran Church before and after emigrating, as an engineer I had sometimes struggled with the lack of adequate scientific evidence to support what I read in the Bible. Only in the late 1960s did I fully embrace my Christian faith and find an inner spiritual peace.

  In 1974, this faith was tested when we received traumatic news. After Anneliese began experiencing pain, doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer. Over the course of the 14 years that followed, Anneliese endured numerous and frequent surgical operations as well as chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The cancer went into remission, but always returned.