The radio was turned up loud.

Everyone stood quietly waiting.

Then the announcement came.

Germany had surrendered.

The war in Europe was over.

The room stayed silent for a long moment.

Then some women started crying.

Others collapsed into chairs.

A few smiled with relief.

Most just stood there trying to process what this meant.

After 6 years of war, it was finally finished.

Germany had lost.

Everyone they fought for had lost.

Everything they believed in had crumbled.

Greta felt her knees go weak.

She sat down hard on the floor.

It was over.

The war that killed millions.

The war that destroyed cities.

The war that took her fiance.

Over.

She whispered.

Thank God.

Thank God it is over.

Leisel cried into her hands.

Not from sadness, from relief so strong it hurt.

Maybe her brother survived.

Maybe he could come home now.

Maybe the dying would stop.

Magda stood with her arms crossed, her face blank.

But inside she was thinking, Germany lost.

The Nazi regime was finished.

What happened now? What would become of Germany? What would become of them? In the following weeks, news came from Germany.

It was worse than anyone imagined.

Berlin was rubble.

Hamburg was destroyed.

Cities they knew were gone.

Millions of people were displaced and homeless.

Starvation everywhere.

The Nazi leaders were being hunted and arrested.

The whole country had collapsed into chaos.

The Canadian government began planning for repatriation, sending prisoners home.

But they gave the women a choice.

They could return to Germany, or they could apply to stay in Canada.

If they stayed, they needed a sponsor, a job, and had to pass security screening to make sure they were not dangerous.

This choice tore the women apart.

Stay in the country that was their enemy, or return to the homeland that had lied to them.

Both options felt wrong and right at the same time, Greta decided to return.

She had to find her mother.

had to know if her family survived the bombing.

Even though Germany was destroyed, it was still home.

She could not abandon her mother.

She promised Framidt she would write.

Fra Schmidt gave her a package of food to take with her and an address to write to if she needed help.

Leisel chose to stay.

The Bower family offered to sponsor her.

They said she could work on the farm and apply for citizenship.

When Leisel told Mrs.

Bower her decision, the older woman hugged her and cried.

“You are family now,” Mrs.

Bower said.

Leisel thought about her village in Bavaria, thought about the small farm with no electricity.

Thought about the future waiting there, if anything was left at all.

Then she thought about Canada with its abundance and freedom.

The choice was clear.

There is nothing left in Bavaria for me, she told Greta.

Here I have a future.

Magda also chose to stay.

The hospital offered her a permanent job as a translator and nurse.

She had no family left in Berlin.

The city was divided between the Soviets and the Western Allies.

Now the Soviet zone was dangerous for anyone who had worked for the Nazi government, even in a small way.

Staying in Canada meant safety and a chance to help other refugees.

She accepted immediately.

Of the 847 women, 300 decided to stay.

The other 547 would go home.

The German Canadian community organized a farewell ceremony at the Concordia Club in October 1945.

The same place as the October Fest two years earlier.

Everyone came.

The women who were leaving, the women who were staying, the German Canadian families who had helped them, the guards who had watched over them.

There were tears and hugs.

Addresses were exchanged.

Promises to write were made.

The German Canadian community gave each woman returning to Germany a care package.

Food, soap, clothes, medicine, things Germany did not have anymore.

things that might keep them alive.

The guard commander, a quiet man who had supervised them for two years, gave a short speech.

“You were never our enemies,” he said.

“Just people caught in a terrible war.

We wish you well.

We hope you find peace.

” Greta hugged Framid.

They were both crying.

Framid pressed a letter into Greta’s hand.

For my cousin in Hamburgg, if you find her, please give this to her.

Tell her I love her.

Tell her I pray for her.

December 1945.

The 547 women who chose to return boarded ships in Halifax Harbor.

The journey was different from their arrival.

They knew what waited for them now.

Rubble, starvation, a broken country.

But they also knew something else.

They knew the truth.

They knew what freedom looked like.

They knew their government had lied to them.

They carried that knowledge like a heavy weight.

What they physically carried were Red Cross parcels filled with food and clothes, letters of recommendation from their Canadian employers, contact addresses of German Canadian families, photos and small momentos from their time in Canada.

Greta carried her diary, now 192 pages long, every word a record of her transformation.

What they mentally carried was harder to describe.

Knowledge that everything they believed was false.

Understanding of what real freedom meant.

Guilt about what Germany had done to the world.

Hope that Germany could rebuild on better principles.

Memories of kindness from people they were taught to hate.

The ship docked in Bramer Hoofen in January 1946.

The women walked down the gangway into a country they barely recognized.

The port was damaged.

Buildings stood half destroyed.

People shuffled past looking thin and gray.

German soldiers in ragged uniforms begged for food.

This was the great Germany they had believed in.

This was the powerful nation that was supposed to rule the world.

It was broken and starving and defeated.

Greta took a train to Hamburgg.

The journey took two days because the rail lines were damaged.

When she finally arrived, she could not believe her eyes.

Hamburg was gone.

Not damaged.

Gone.

Block after block of rubble.

Buildings burned to shells.

Craters where streets used to be.

People living in the basement of destroyed houses.

She found her mother living in what remained of their old apartment building.

just two rooms still standing in a structure that once held 20 families.

Her mother was alive but barely.

She weighed 43 kg.

Her clothes hung on her like sheets on a skeleton.

When Greta walked in, her mother stared like she was seeing a ghost.

Greta dropped her Red Cross parcel on the floor.

It split open and cans of food rolled across the broken floorboards.

Her mother fell to her knees and started crying.

Real food.

Food from Canada.

Food that might keep her alive another month.

Greta knelt down and held her mother.

The first words she spoke were, “Mama, I brought food.

” The second words she spoke were, “They lied to us about everything.

” Her mother just nodded.

She already knew.

Everyone in Germany knew now.

The lies had become obvious when the lies could no longer protect anyone from the truth.

Leisel wrote letters from Canada to the neighbors in her old village in Bavaria.

She described Canada.

She urged anyone who could to immigrate.

She sent packages of food through church organizations whenever she could.

Her mother wrote back in March 1946.

The letter said, “You were lucky to be captured.

You were saved.

Lucky to be a prisoner.

Saved by the enemy.

The world had turned upside down.

1946 to 1950.

The years after the war were hard for everyone, but especially for those who returned to Germany.

Greta stayed in Hamburgg with her mother.

She used her English and her Canadian experience to get work with the British occupation forces as a translator.

The British soldiers needed help talking to German civilians.

Greta helped process refugees flooding in from the eastern territories, people who had been forced from their homes by the advancing Soviet army.

She never forgot Framidt.

They wrote letters back and forth for 40 years, long letters about their lives, their families, their memories.

In 1948, Greta met a British soldier named Robert.

He was kind and gentle and reminded her that not all military men were cruel.

They married and she moved to England with him.

She was German, lived in Canada as a prisoner and became British by marriage.

Her life crossed all the battle lines of the war.

In 1961, Greta published a book.

She called it the enemy who fed us.

It was her diary from those years in Canada with extra details added from memory.

The book told the truth about how Canadian enemies treated German prisoners better than the German government treated its own soldiers.

Some people in Germany got angry at the book.

They said she was a traitor, but many more people read it and nodded because they knew she was telling the truth.

Leisel became a Canadian citizen in 1950.

It took 5 years of paperwork and interviews and waiting, but finally she stood in a courthouse and swore loyalty to Canada.

She cried through the whole ceremony.

In 1952, she married Johan Bower, the youngest son of the family that sponsored her.

They had four children together and raised them on the farm outside Kitchener.

Those children grew up speaking German at home and English at school, just like their father had.

In 1953, Leisel brought her mother from Germany to Canada.

The old woman stepped off the train in Kitchener and looked around at the clean streets and the well-fed people and the shops full of goods.

Her first words were, “Now I understand your letters.

You were not lying.

This place is real.

” Leisel’s mother lived another 20 years in Canada, never once regretting leaving Germany behind.

Magda became the head translator at the Kitchener Waterlue Hospital by 1955.

She never married.

She said she was married to her work and her work was helping people.

She dedicated her life to helping German refugees settle in the Waterl region.

Between 1947 and 1960, she personally helped process over 2,400 refugees.

She found them housing, jobs, and language classes.

She translated their documents and their fears and their hopes.

In 1982, the Canadian government gave Magda the Order of Canada.

It is one of the highest honors Canada gives to civilians.

The ceremony was in Ottawa.

Magda stood in her best dress, now 71 years old, while the Governor General pinned the medal to her chest.

The citation said she was being honored for humanitarian work and for building bridges between communities.

People in Kitchener called her the angel of Kitchener.

She smiled when she heard that, but said she was just doing what anyone should do.

The 300 women who stayed in Canada built lives there.

By 1950, all 300 had become citizens.

They married and had children and became part of the community.

47 of them married Canadian men, mostly men of German descent, who understood their language and culture.

These women helped sponsor over 3,000 German refugees in the 1950s, using their own experiences to help newcomers adjust to Canadian life.

The 547 women who returned to Germany had harder lives.

They lived through the rubble years, the cold winters with no fuel, the hunger that lasted until the Marshall Plan brought American aid.

But many of them became advocates for democracy in the New Germany.

They had seen what freedom looked like.

They knew it was possible to be German without being Nazi.

34 of these women eventually moved back to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, bringing their families with them.

Their experiences helped shape how Germany rebuilt itself.

Some worked with Allied occupation authorities, helping to create democratic institutions.

Others just lived their lives, but taught their children the truth about the war.

They were witnesses to what propaganda could do and what freedom meant.

For decades, the women who stayed in Canada and those who returned to Germany wrote letters to each other.

They shared news about their lives, their children, their grandchildren.

They maintained the friendships formed in that strange time when they were enemies becoming witnesses.

In 1983, someone had an idea.

It was the 40th anniversary of their arrival in Canada.

Why not have a reunion? Bring together as many of the original 847 women as possible.

The idea spread through letters and phone calls.

Women who had not seen each other in 40 years started planning to attend.

September 24th, 1983.

Exactly 40 years after the October Fest that changed everything, the reunion was held at the Concordia Club, the same building where they had cried and realized the truth.

One 127 of the original 847 women came.

Some flew from Germany.

Some drove from across Canada.

Some were brought by their children and grandchildren.

They were all around 60 years old now, gay-haired and wrinkled, but still the same women who had stood confused on a train platform 40 years earlier.

German and Canadian media came to cover the event.

Reporters interviewed the women.

Cameras filmed them hugging and crying and laughing.

They shared old photos.

They told their stories.

They introduced their families to each other.

Greta stood up to speak.

She was 64 now, living in England, a grandmother of five.

She said, “In 1943, we asked, are we in the wrong country?” The answer was, “No, we were in the right country.

We just did not know it yet.

” Canada showed us what our own country could have been if we had chosen freedom instead of following a dictator.

Leisel spoke next.

She was 59, still living on the Bower farm with her husband and grown children.

This community showed me that being German did not mean being a Nazi.

You can love your heritage and still love freedom.

You can speak German and be Canadian.

You can be both.

Germany forgot that.

Canada never did.

Magda was 71.

She stood straight and spoke clearly.

We were prisoners of war, but we found freedom in captivity.

We came as enemies and left as witnesses to the truth.

The Canadians did not imprison us.

Our own government imprisoned us in lies.

The Canadians set us free by showing us what truth looked like.

The reunion lasted three days.

The women donated materials to the Canadian War Museum and the Kitchener Archives.

Greta’s diary, 847 letters, 340 photographs from 1943 to 1945.

Red Cross records documenting their treatment.

All preserved so the story would not be forgotten.

Their story became part of Canadian school lessons about how to treat prisoners of war.

It helped shape Canadian refugee policies after the war.

When refugees came from Hungary in 1956 and Vietnam in the 1970s, Canada remembered how German prisoners became Canadian citizens.

The story proved that treating enemies with dignity could turn them into friends.

The German Canadian community gained respect for what they did during the war.

They showed that you could love your heritage without supporting evil.

They proved that culture and politics were separate things.

That lesson mattered then and still matters now.

In 1998, a university student came to interview Magda.

She was 86 years old and one of only three original women still alive.

The student asked her to explain her experience in one final statement.

Magda thought for a long moment, then she spoke.

People ask me how I could forgive the Canadians for imprisoning me.

I tell them, “The Canadians did not imprison us.

Our own government imprisoned us in lies.

The Canadians set us free.

They fed our bodies with bread and our minds with truth.

We came as soldiers for a lie.

We left as witnesses to what humanity could be, even in war.

” She paused and looked out the window at Kitchener, the city that had become her home.

The real question is not why German Canadians spoke German.

It is why we did not know that Germans could be free, prosperous, and good without a furer.

That realization that we could have had what these Canadians had without the war, without the hatred, without the death, that was the hardest truth to swallow.

Magda’s voice grew softer but stronger.

We were never in the wrong country.

We were on the wrong side.

And it took the people we called enemies to show us what our own people could have been.

The final numbers tell the story.

847 German women entered Canada between April and June 1943.

Zero died in Canadian custody.

300 became Canadian citizens.

547 returned to Germany.

127 lived to attend the 1983 reunion.

Three were still alive in 1998 when Magda gave her last interview.

Their story is a footnote in history.

Most people never heard of them.

But it is also a testament to humanity.

It proves that war is fought between governments but live by people.

that propaganda dies when confronted with human kindness.

That the enemy often has more in common with us than our own leaders.

That freedom means being able to love your heritage without hating others.

Sometimes the greatest act of patriotism is admitting your country was wrong.

Sometimes humanity transcends nationality, even in history’s darkest hours.

The 847 women learned that lesson in the hardest way possible.

They came as believers and left as witnesses.

And their witness still speaks today, reminding us that truth is stronger than lies and kindness is stronger than hate.

 

« Prev