Helga Clark Interview

Helga Clark

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Helga spent much of her early life in a small village in western Germany. As her father was a teacher, the family resided in a schoolhouse. At the age of 5, her family would move to a slightly larger village. It was here that she began her education at the age of 6, with her father being her classes' teacher. The family would remain at this village until 1938. Due to her older sisters enrolment to middle school, they moved to Hannover. Here, Helga would resume her education and soon make the move to middle school herself. ■ Jump to the full interview   However, the move to the city would prove to be a brief endeavor, as barely one year after arriving, Germany would initiate WWII with its invasion of Poland in September of 1939. Helga would remain in Hannover for about two years before the first major bombing raids targeted the city in 1941.[1]

Palast Theater, Hannover 1938, the theater would be completely destroyed by Allied bombing.

At this point, Helga and her mother would be forcefully evacuated to the district of Pommern by the government in a larger evacuation of German urban centers, separating the two from her older sister. They would stay here for six months until her mother moved them again, this time westward near Hannover, due to its proximity to the Eastern Front, reuniting the family. This village did not have a middle school, so Helga would have to take a train to a neighboring village which had one. However, due to allied bombing, the train would often be frozen to avoid being targeted, and this would hamper her education considerably.

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I asked Helga what knowledge she and her family had of events on the Front. She told me that any news was censored by the government, and any letters that they would receive from her father at the front would be screened for sensitive material by the censors. The propaganda of Nazi Germany at the time proved to be extremely effective at limiting information about the course of the war, and this would lead to shock by many when enemy ground forces began to penetrate into Germany itself.^[2]  

Here the family would remain for the duration of the war. Some time in 1945, American forces advanced into the village. Helga recalled the sounds of machine gun fire gradually getting closer to the cellar which they were hiding in until everything went quiet. Then, an American soldier made his way into the building which they were hiding in soon after the three then being brought into captivity.  Helga spoke rather highly of the American behavior during this time, with the soldiers allowing the farmer who owned the property they were staying on to remain at the request of her mother, as well as providing food when possible, Helga would get her first banana from these rations. 

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After Germany's surrender, Helga decided not to finish middle school as it as well as all other German institutions at that time were in a state of chaos.^[3] In 1947, her mother, sister, and herself moved back to Hannover. Here, she would become a dentist assistant, a position she would hold well into the 1950s. Her family would eventually be fully reunited after 2 years when her father returned from the Eastern Front. Due to his older age, being 39 at the start of hostilities, her father was assigned to a non-combat role, this being an army payroll unit. He was likely attached to Army Group North as he was involved in a large naval evacuation to Denmark, part of Operation Hannibal, which evacuated over a million soldiers and civilians from the oncoming Soviet advance. After this he would surrender to the Western allies, who put him through a Denazification program for 2 years after the war. This would mean that he could not return to his teaching job in Hannover, so he opted to work for a construction firm as a means of income.  

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Hannover Devastated, 1945.

After the surrender of Germany, Helga and her family, including her father,  would return to Hannover, which would undergo a reconstruction; this would take decades to complete. As part of the Potsdam Agreement, Hannover was in the British zone of occupation, though Helga stated that they only initially had a heavy presence in the area, gradually being reduced to insignificance.[4]   Helga would marry her first husband sometime after the war. He was an engineer working for Preussen Elektra, and they had two children: one born in 1955, and the other in 1959. He had been involved in some of the fighting in North Africa with Rommel's Afrika Corp, until 1943, when he along with most axis forces on the continent surrendered. After having her first child, Helga would end her career in dentistry. Her husband's company would get their family a modern apartment, which they would reside in for the duration of their marriage. The two would eventually divorce in the 1960s.

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Hannover 1950s: Postcard of Hannover, following reconstruction.

Life in Germany in the years immediately after the war proved to be very difficult for the family. Food was scarce and rationed through a ticket system, and most infrastructure had been destroyed. Things would improve with the introduction of a new currency system, the deutsche mark, and a free market. Before this most goods came from either the black market, or rationed by the occupiers. I asked Helga about her experience of the effects of the splitting of Germany between the East and West.

During this she told me about some of the horrors that occurred across the border. One of her friends in the Soviet occupied zone was witness to her mother's and sister's rape by a Soviet soldier, while she hid under the floorboards. She also recalled one of her friends husbands returning from captivity being horribly malnourished and underweight.   The split also separated many families, Helga recalled one of her boyfriends being separated from his parents, who were trapped on the east side, in an attempt to reach his parents he attempted to get into the Soviet side where he was shot by security forces. Helga recalled a visit to East Germany, some time in the 1960s with her husband. He was almost detained by border security when it was discovered that he was missing a stamp on his passport.  However the two managed to escape repercussions by "bribing the border guard."

Border crossing between East and West Berlin.

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She would go on to meet a Canadian man who was visiting Germany as a vacation who she would  marry him and move to Canada  at the age of 38 with her two children. He had been previously married as well, having two children of his own. The relationship would be complicated somewhat by the language barrier as neither of them was fluent in the others mother tongue, of course this issue dissolved over time. The couple and their children would make the move to Canada in 1968, settling in Toronto for many years before eventually moving  north to Muskoka. During this time their children would move out and pursue careers of their own, with Helga's biological son becoming a Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. Unfortunately Helga's husband would pass away in his sleep during a vacation in Florida. Helga would remain in Muskoka until Thanksgiving of 2018 when she moved to Norfolk Manor in Guelph where she resides today. 

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Click here to listen to the full interview.

Click here for the interviewer, Michael Fraser's page and reflection on this interview.

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Endnotes

[4] France, USA, USSR, UK. Potsdam Agreement: Protocol of the Proceedings, August l, 1945. (1945) https://www.nato.int/ebookshop/video/declassified/doc_files/Potsdam%20Agreement.pdf