Aunt Ida Comes to Berlin

What a suprise!

I’m pretty sure it was around 1964 or so. We had moved the entire family to West Berlin from England where we had lived for about six years. My Dad was a captain with Pan American Airways and we got pretty used to moving around. Mostly we had resided in Oakland, California where my Dad grew up, the youngest of seven.

In Berlin we lived in a large house in the Dahlem District of West Berlin. It was a nice, quiet neighborhood not too far from the U.S. Army Base on Clayalee where I attended 8th grade. ( I do not recommend anyone attending 8th grade at a U.S. army school, but that is an entirely different story ).

One lazy weekend afternoon the door bell rang and I went the door to answer it. Standing in the door was a slight, elderly lady that I observed to be, shall we say, slightly disheveled, sporting a heavy overcoat, a head topped with a beret, and holding a suitcase at her side. “Ist dein vater zu hause?” she asked me. So I immediately called out to my father, “Dad there is a German lady here to see you”.

Dad came to the front door from whatever he was doing and stopped cold as he espied this poor woman. “Ida! What are you doing here?” “Well I’m here she said” and brushed past him and headed indoors.

That’s my Aunt Ida I thought. What was she doing here?

My Aunt Ida is kind of a legend in our family. My dad’s oldest sister, we could always remember how old she was because she was born in 1900 to my dear grandparents Johanna and Carl Zahner who imigrated from Switzerland about that same time.

And, of course, they spoke German and Schweizerdeutsch. The little I remember of my Grandma is that she rarely spoke English, mostly German and Swiss. So the family would speak all three languages on different occasions.

My Aunt Ida lived in a house, (more like a cabin actually), in Walnut Creek, California, just east over the hills from Oakland and Berkeley. She owned an MG Midget automobile but would mostly travel from “The Creek’, as she called it, by the “Hound”, AKA the Greyhound Bus.

Her abode was somewhat of a mystery to all of us because she was rumored to be quite a pack rat, saving newspapers and magazines and stacking them up around the house.

We lived not too far away, in Oakland near Lake Merritt, as my Dad was stationed at San Francisco Airport then.

On certain occasions, like Thanksgiving Day or on the day of the Rose Bowl she would show up at our house, uninvited, and ring the door bell at about 8:00 am. “I’m here to watch the parade,” she would announce. And then she did.

When Aunt Ida entered a room you didn’t need to actually see her to know that she was there. She was somewhat odiferous and could announce here arrival just by her very presence.

My Aunt Ida had a different way of speaking to and behaving around children. If a baby was crying she would stare at them and say sternly, “Cry tomorrow, kid!” If kids were getting fidgety and rambuctious she would declare, “Just give them an avocado pit to hold in each hand! They won’t know what to do then!” I never did figure out the logic to that. But logic was never her strong suit.

My Aunt Ida is also the reason I can never eat a raw tomato to this day. But, again, that’s another story.

After watching the Thanksgiving Day parade and staying long enough to be there for dinner she would again summon the “hound” and head back to the “Creek”. Which by the way is approxiamately 5,637 miles away from Berlin.

And to get to West Berlin you have to fly to Frankfurt and then change planes to fly over East Germany to get to West Berlin. To clarify, West Berlin was an island city in the middle of Russian-controlled East Germany.

And here is my dear Aunt Ida from an earlier time.

So my Dad chatted with his sister, Ida, for a while and we got her bags, etc., settled into a guest room. So now, what to do with Ida?

“Joe, why don’t you take your Aunt Ida and show her around town?” Okay.

So twelve-year-old me and my Aunt Ida headed out. The UBahn, ( underground ), wasn’t far away so I first took her the the Kurfurstendamm. (Cool cats and people who are spelling challenged like me just call the street The Ku Dam ). We visited the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which had been bombed during the war.

Then we headed for one of my favorite places - Checkpoint Charlie. It was the border between the American sector and the Russian sector.

It was pretty simple to cross into East Berlin if you were an American civilian but my classmates, being military dependents, didn’t have that same luxury. Interesting that when you did cross into the East with your passport the guards would make you walk across a disenfectant-soaked rug to kill all of the hoof and mouth disease that Westerners carried with them everywhere. But today, I thought, let’s not go crazy. We’ll just tour the checkpoint and along the wall.

Along the wall on the West side they had constructed small viewing places where folks from the West could look over and see the East.

So, as I was passing one, I said to Aunt Ida, “Stay here for a minute. I will be right back.” I scampered up the stairs to catch a glimpse of the other side. You could see the rolls of barbed wire and the East border guards marching back and forth just a few yards away, marching with their rifles. It was said they were doing everything to keep the West Berliners out of East Berlin when the reality was just the opposite.

I watched as the guard marched past and I spied strands of barbed wire right in front of me. I thought a piece of that wire would be a nifty souvenir. I grabbed the end of one strand and started twisting it back and forth to snap a piece off.

I just about had it free when I heard a shout, “Auchtung! Was machst du dort?” The East German guard yelled at me while also raising his rifle. I slunk down slowly below the top of the wall but still twisting at the piece of wire. “What’s going on up there?” Aunt Ida yelled. “Oh nothing. I’ll be right down.”

The wire snapped and I had it. I scampered back down the stairs with an extremely elevated heartbeat and my prize. We continued our tour.

So after a lovely stay in Berlin Aunt Ida headed back to the “Creek”. Unfortunately Aunt Ida is no longer with us because, if she was, she would be 124 years old today.

I have seen and done just a few things since that wonderful tour with Ida, 60 years ago.

Oh, and I still have that souvenir.

An intersting side note is that many years later, when I was the GM at the Hazelden Center for Youth and Families, one of my dishwashers was an elderly Ukranian lady. One day while chatting with her I told her that when I was a kid in the 60’s I lived in Berlin. She immediately perked up and said, “I too lived in Berlin in the 60’s.”

“Oh, wow. What were you doing there?”

“Well,” she said, “my husband was with the Russian Army and he was a border guard in East Berlin”.

“Oh, wow! How interesting?” I said.

And I wondered……………………………