Mary Aa and Frederick Stagbrook de Clairmont

[00:00] MARY AA.: My name is Mary Aa I'm 82, and today's date is Monday, September 12, 2022. We are in Salt Lake City, Utah, and my interview partner is Frederick, who is my friend and neighbor.

[00:19] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: My name is Frederick Stagbrook de Claremont. I am 51. Today is Monday, the 12 September, 2022, Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm interviewing Mary Aa who's my neighbor and friend. Mary, why are we here? Why did you want to come to StoryCorps?

[00:41] MARY AA.: Well, I've been wanting to tell a story about my childhood, both during World War two and part of the occupational forces in Germany, because so many people, even military people, don't seem to be aware that children were part of the occupational forces almost immediately after the end of World War two in Germany. And then I want to link that to some experiences I had in my forties that I realized that were connected to trauma that I. I don't know, like a sponge, like kids are when they're in a dangerous, traumatic situation. And I'd like to get that known to the public, especially with children in a traumatic situation now in Ukraine.

[01:45] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Where did your story start?

[01:49] MARY AA.: Well, I think it would start with my thinking that from my own experience, that we think of children as really being quite resilient. And they are in many ways, because they'll play even when there's a time of upheaval. But with my own experience being five six in San Francisco during the war and in Germany from 1947 to 49, when I was in my mid forties, I started having some physical pain and some general psychic fear that with some good luck and connections on my part, I was able to heal that easily and quickly once I knew the connection. And so I want to pass that on to others.

[02:59] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Can you tell us more about the sort of pain that you experienced?

[03:04] MARY AA.: Well, the pain was on the upper part of the arch of my right foot, and it just gradually got more and more intense, to the point that I was limping, had trouble wearing a shoe, and thought I needed to see a doctor about having surgery. But a friend who suggested I see a massage therapist first, and he said he had just been. Now, this was in the mid eighties. He said he'd just been studying about a new theory of muscle memory and that how you can receive an injury like in one part of your body, but another part later on will start to give you pain or problems. And he went through muscle testing with me, and it came up. Grief was the overall emotion that was in my muscle memory and about age eight. And so he asked me, well, what happened to you. And when you were eight, did somebody close to you die? Now, I was very puzzled because I had no memory of anything like that. And so I went to my mother and I asked her about it, and that when I was eight, we would have been in Germany in 1948. And she said, oh, yes, the whole atmosphere was full of grief. The Germans had lost the war. They were hungry. They didn't have coal to heat their houses in the wintertime, and it was a very cold series of winters, and their economy was in ruinsous. Yes, the whole atmosphere was full of grief. And after I heard that, I noticed. Now, this is hard to believe, I know, but I experienced it. I noticed the pain started to decrease, and it was gone in about a week and a half. Totally gone. Never came back.

[05:16] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Do you feel that just becoming aware of the connection between the pain in your foot and your traumatic experience as a child helped the pain vanish?

[05:31] MARY AA.: Well, it must have, because it was only after I was made aware of the guilt in my age and asked my mother about that, that it just went. I didn't do anything more. And it just went away very quickly. It almost sounds like voodoo or. No, not voodoo, but something, you know, but that was my experience.

[06:01] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: So it's almost as though you had released it and let it go?

[06:05] MARY AA.: Yes, yes. Almost like it felt recognized and didn't need to hold on anymore.

[06:14] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Can you tell me a little about how you ended up in Germany as a child?

[06:20] MARY AA.: Yes, but I could tell you. You want me to wait and tell you about the psychic experience I had?

[06:27] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Yes.

[06:28] MARY AA.: Okay. That was also during my mid forties. And I found myself driving home after work. And several times I would be biting my lip or gritting my teeth and gripping the steering wheel so tightly that I could see my white knuckles, as they say. And I had this overwhelming feeling of doom or danger and just flooded on me, and I didn't know what it was. And then one time, about the third time, it happened, I started paying attention to it, and somehow I knew. I thought about some managerial training I'd had in terms of motivating volunteers that are working for you. And the training was to look at the first ten years of that person's life and what was going on in the family, the community, the nation, that would affect their value system during that ten years, and that would be your key to how to motivate them. And we were even broken into groups with each decade to brainstorm about what we knew about the predominant values. Like during World War Two, duty, responsibility, loyalty, were highly valued. And thinking about that, I suddenly started talking to myself in my mind, and I said, mary, you're not eight years old anymore, and you're not in occupied Germany being guarded by army soldiers all the time. You're a grown woman, and you're in Salt Lake City, you're in your forties, and you're safe. You're safe. And I've never experienced that again. That awful feeling of fear and overwhelming doom or danger. It's never happened again.

[08:40] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: So it suddenly vanished. Just the realization that that was the connection and that you were safe, apparently.

[08:48] MARY AA.: It's like a miraculous event in a way, isn't it? It's puzzling, but when I tell you about it, it just seems I'm a skeptic, and it almost seems unbelievable to me, but that is my experience.

[09:04] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Yeah. You are a rational person. However, you do recognize that that's what actually happened.

[09:12] MARY AA.: Mm hmm. Yes. And it's never returned. And it was like a snap of a finger. It was. It just never came back.

[09:24] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: What else would you like to tell us?

[09:27] MARY AA.: Well, I think it would be good to tell you about the experiences I had that were the trauma that led to that.

[09:32] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Yes. How did your family go to Germany?

[09:38] MARY AA.: Well, my father had been in world War two, gone back to the job that was held for him. And then I think the government was recruiting for men to go back into the army, but with their families, take them over into Germany. And it took me a long time to understand why children and families would be part of the occupational forces. It took me a long time to figure that out. We left. And I guess when I did finally figure out was when former President Trump wanted to pull families out of South Korea and North Korea said they would consider that a very aggressive act. And I thought, ah, now I understand it. Military groups do not fight with their children right there. They don't carry them or have them near battle. It just isn't done. So I'm thinking that having children in Germany soon after the war with the occupational forces gave us a friendly look. No one has explained that to me, but that's what I'm guessing.

[11:02] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: But where were you before you went to Germany?

[11:07] MARY AA.: We were living in San Francisco because my father was out in the Pacific, and at times he could come into port and see us. We were living in a navy base called park Merced, and it was kind of out in the country from San Francisco then. Now it's part of the whole bay Area. But I remember going to school, and there would be, we'd pass holes for foundations of buildings. Doug. But as soon as the war started, that was stopped. And even though it was about four, five, maybe six, there was an overall feeling of fear that the Japanese were going to attack the coast of California and certainly the major cities like San Francisco. I remember hearing that there was a metal net put across the bay to stop submarines from coming into the bay. My older brother had a poster on his wall identifying japanese and american fighter planes. And I remember hearing that there was a civilian volunteer corpse who knew those and were watching the skies on a regular basis. So that was an atmosphere that, as a young kid, I must have been soaking up like a sponge, so to speak. And then, of course, it was intensified when I went to Germany.

[12:46] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Where in Germany did you go?

[12:47] MARY AA.: Well, we went to three different places. We left New York in a ship that had carried troops into Germany just a little less than two years before to go fight the Nazis. And wives and children were filling that ship, going. And we went to Bramahaven, and I think that's in the north. North of Germany. Yeah. And then a train. We got on a train from there because we were stationed in Bamberg at first, which is in the southeast region.

[13:21] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Yes.

[13:22] MARY AA.: Okay. And I remember distinctly on that train, and now I was seven. It was February of 1947. And I remember there was a guard with a rifle on each car, and occasionally it would stop so that we could get off and stretch our legs, as they said. But I remember a commanding voice saying loudly, mothers, keep your children beside you. Do not wander away from the train. Hold your children close. Do not go near the Germans.

[14:03] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: So these guards were from the allied forces, the soldiers?

[14:09] MARY AA.: Yes, they were american army.

[14:12] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Okay.

[14:13] MARY AA.: And they were each equipped with a pistol on the hip and a rifle. And then when we got to Bamberg, the house we were assigned to was right next to a catholic elementary school, and yet we had an armed guard with his rifle outside our house the whole time. And then we went to Stuttgart, and I don't remember very much about Stuttgart for some reason. I would have been. And I really don't know how long it was. I think it was a fairly brief time in Baumburg, and then we went to Stuttgart.

[14:54] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Was there a general fear that german civilians would perhaps harm the allied forces? Americans?

[15:05] MARY AA.: I don't know the answer to that. Later on, I'll tell you about the servants that were provided to our home in Budingen. And one of them was a maid, and she said that she believed Hitler was still alive in hiding and that he was going to come back and unify the Germans and drive us out. She would go out at night, and. And my mother fired her. But I don't know if she said that to my mother, but she did say it to me, and she would be hungover in the morning. And I think that was the major reason she was going out with Gis, so she didn't do her work. But that was the only trouble. I remember my mother having lost where I was.

[16:01] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: You were in Budigen, you said?

[16:03] MARY AA.: Oh, yes. Like I said, I don't remember very much about Stuttgart, but in Stuttgart, I do remember that our school was a one room school in the officers club, and there were maybe ten kids, and we were all grades. And I remember hearing that they were really scrounging to try to find anyone that could teach. It was that, you know, so soon getting organized. And I think our teacher had been a nurse. Oh, yeah, she was an english nurse. But when in Budingen, we were billeted in the burgermeisters or the city mayor's house. And one time I was going through the Midway air carrier, I think it's in San Diego, and talking about my experience, and a retired Navy man said, oh, no, a master sergeant would never have been put in a mayor's home. And. And I knew that was what it was. But I. My sister had been about 14 at that time, so I checked with her, and she said, oh, yeah, that's where, you know, and that's the way it was. So there's just a lot that, that went on then that even the military don't know about.

[17:25] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: What was life like there?

[17:28] MARY AA.: Well, we did go to a school that was in the back room of the military chapel.

[17:37] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Was it an american school or was it a german school?

[17:40] MARY AA.: It was an american army school, yeah. And again, it was one room, maybe ten kids, all grades. And I just remember working out of workbooks and reading alone to my teacher. I think I. I think there were two of us in that grade I was in then. Jimmy Pryor was the boy that was in the grade with me money. I remember his name. And one thing at Budingen, reason we were there is because there'd been what the Germans called a caserne, which was a military establishment. And then, of course, the Americans coming and just took it over. And Budingen was about, oh, 20 or 30 km away from Frankfurt. Aynmain, it's now Budigen. Now is the world I understand as United nations heritage site, because the walled medieval town was not destroyed. But we were outside of that town, and I guess it would have been comparable to suburbs.

[18:47] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Do you remember seeing a lot of destruction right after the war?

[18:52] MARY AA.: I do. I remember one time seeing. Well, it was frequent for me to see, especially women at a pile of rubble, pulling out bricks and piling them up. And I think I heard somewhere that they were being paid to do that, to try to. And a lot of those people I heard that were living in the basement of a destroyed building or actually down below the pile of rubble. It must have been miserable living.

[19:27] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Did they salvage the bricks for reconstruction?

[19:32] MARY AA.: I would guess so. And, of course, start to remove the piles of rubble. Frankfurt was just all piles of rubble. We drove through there on our way out at the end of our tour. And I remember the main train station, which was built in the glory days of train stations. And it had a big metal frame archite, which. And it would have had glass windows on it. And of course, the glass windows were all gone and they had cleaned it out. So the train was working. But driving through Frankfurt, I think it was in Frankfurt where we saw an apartment building with only one wall standing. And I think about what would have been maybe the third floor, just the floor of a bedroom was sticking out from the wall and there was actually a bed still on that floor. And we just. I remember the whole family being amazed at that. Now, this is when I was about nine, so my memories are a little more vivid.

[20:46] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: What went through your mind when you saw as you saw so much destruction?

[20:53] MARY AA.: Well, I think you just took it as it was. You know, as a child, we went to school. I could only play with my. I had an older brother, two years older and one, two years younger, and we could only play with each other. The other american kids lived somewhere else. They weren't next door because we're spread in houses that the army had commandeered, really. And we just played and went to school and kind of took it in hand. But I remember we had servants in the household there. My mother had a cook, a maid, a nanny for my newborn baby brother. And she, by the way, had been in medical school when Hitler invaded Poland. And so now she was lucky to have a job working as an Annie. And then we had a gardener, and he also stoked the coal in the furnace. He limped. He had an eye patch. He was missing an arm. Did I mention that he was a survivor of the russian front? But anyway, we found him rather scary and we steered clear of him.

[22:19] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Who paid for these servants?

[22:22] MARY AA.: Well, looking back, you know, I didn't know at the time. I did have the sense looking bad that they were paid by the military, the army. I know my parents didn't pay for them. And looking back, I wonder if that could have been one of the parts of the marshall plan to put money in german civilian pockets because the economy was devastated. The Deutsche mark was, you had to have. The expression was, you had to have a wheelbarrow full of deutsche marks to buy a loaf of bread. And it was very cold winters at that time, so I suspect. And, you know, like, when we went to school, a minibus would pick us up. It wasn't much of a distance, but we were always transported. And a military policeman would be on the bus with his hip gun. I don't know quite how to put it, but he was wearing a gun and it was a german driver. So there's another example of somebody being employed by the military. And when I think about it, that would have been a really person to person form of the Marshall plan that had to created some goodwill.

[23:56] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Were most Germans and german civilians civil and friendly to you and to the Americans?

[24:07] MARY AA.: Well, I didn't have any experience with them, except one time I broke the rule and didn't take the bus home and stayed in school to copy my spelling list. So I was walking home and I took a shortcut through an alley, and there was a saw a group of german boys a little older than I was, which would have been eight or nine. And they saw me. And as a group, they started coming towards me. And of course it scared me because we'd been told, don't go near the Germans, you know, like, it's dangerous for you. And so I started running. And my thought was that if I got to the main street where there were adults walking up and down the street, I'd be safe. And true enough, as soon as I hit. Hit that street where the adults were, they backed off and went back into the alley and started playing. And I just finished going home.

[25:11] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: So you told us that you experienced pain in your forties much later in your life, and that it was diagnosed by this massage therapist as muscle memory pain connected to a traumatic experience in your childhood. Tell us more about the trauma that you experienced as a child in Germany. Was it perhaps the armed guards that were everywhere, or this general feeling of doom?

[25:51] MARY AA.: You know, I don't remember any sense of that. There was another experience that would add to your question, is there was a small lake, a little bit in the country, where the duke had a hunting lodge, and it would freeze in the wintertime. And my parents had ordered some ice skates from Sears catalog. And so we went out there ice skating, and I remember it being rather scary. I could see right through the ice, german helmets, rifles, those things that they wear over the shoulder that are full of bullets. And I could see that down there. And one time I saw something about the war and saw that when the war ended, a lot of the german soldiers were trying to get rid of anything that would have identified them as a soldier so that they could just blend right back into the german population. And I find myself wondering if that was what was behind there. But as far as having any kind of fear, I don't remember it at the time, but I find myself maybe just being in a situation where I was guarded all the time and told not to associate at all with the people that were there, as if they were very dangerous and didn't know what they would do to us as children. It was an unknown. And.

[27:57] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: So not knowing also caused trauma, perhaps. Maybe this feeling, general feeling of fear.

[28:06] MARY AA.: Maybe just like an experience I think of, is that there in buding. And an officer came to the door, and I went with my mother to the door, and he said that he had come to advise her that if the Russian. And this is about the time the Russians closed down Berlin. And he said it would be 16 hours before the tanks would reach where we were living. And so she needed to keep a suitcase packed for each person in the family so that we could leave immediately, because it would be 16 hours before the Russians would get to us. And I didn't know it at the time, but that's when Berlin was closed. Checkpoint Charlie was established. But I do remember hearing it talked about and the Berlin airlift started. I was not aware of that until I saw a documentary years ago and started putting that together with my age and the year and my memories. One thing I'd like to tell you about, too, that made an impression on me, that german boys would come to the house begging for coffee or cigarettes, and their story was that their mother was in the hospital, and the doctor had said that she needed coffee and cigarettes for a prescription. I remember my mother saying that a german woman had told her that smoking helped kill the hunger, and if they had a toothache, it helped diminish the pain. And I remember seeing young german men standing outside of the px of the post exchange where we shopped. And because the german currency was absolutely worthless, cigarettes and coffee and maybe sugar were the means of exchange then. And so the gis would come out and flick off maybe a half smoked cigarette, and the german men would try to grab it from each other, and they'd take the remaining tobacco and put it with some others and then roll cigarettes and probably either smoke it themselves or use it to buy something.

[30:37] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: So perhaps that's why some children were sent door to door to ask for cigarettes, because they could have been used.

[30:47] MARY AA.: To resell, maybe some buy some food.

[30:50] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Or some coal, make some extra money.

[30:52] MARY AA.: Yeah. You know, I remember my parents laughing that a doctor would prescribe to a woman in the hospital. They knew it was a con. They knew it wasn't true. And a lot of Germans that had something would come to the door selling things, silverware, paintings, furniture, all kinds of things. And I remember my parents talking about a man they knew who was there in 46, and he actually bought a baby grand piano for 25 cartons of cigarettes. And I think a lot of american soldiers during that time brought home to the US a lot of valuable things. In fact, my father was over there in 46, and he'd gotten in the px a little doll for me. I've seen a renaissance painting of a doll or an infant, and it just looks so much like the doll. I have it. I took it to Antiques Roadshow when we were here, and they verified that the underskirt of the doll was taken from a woman's cocktail dress. And the heavy fabric on the apron was probably from some drapery material because it had silver thread in it and then been trimmed around the half of the rectangle of the apron, sort of a gold like, heavy thread. And the person at Antique chose said that looked like it was maybe a german, northern german style.

[32:37] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: So many Americans were able to get some small treasures and beautiful things for very little.

[32:45] MARY AA.: Yes, yes. I don't know what 25 cartons of cigarettes were selling at that time, but. But I'm sure they weren't over ten or fifteen cents a carton.

[32:59] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: I wanted to go back to the main topic of your story that you've been telling us. Can you summarize the message of your story? And I.

[33:15] MARY AA.: Well, the first thing is to share with people a story about children being part of the occupational forces that seems to be relatively unknown. And the second reason is to help personalize an experience for people on both sides of the war in the first few years right after a war and how awful it is for everyone. Like when my mother said, oh, yes, the whole atmosphere was full of grief. The Germans had lost the war. You know, that is a strong statement, I think. But the third reason is that I want people to realize that children may be very resilient, but they're soaking up a lot that we don't know of things going on around them and may even be misinterpreting things because they're so young and don't know much yet. And that, according to my own experience, it surfaced in a couple of strange ways in my mid forties. So I find myself wondering if the children that are affected in, for instance, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, when they're in their adulthood, if they start getting these mystery things, will medicine understand what's going on? Will they know that there was a connection? I hear on public radio stories now more and more about people who suffered either severe physical abuse or sexual abuse when they were children and how it's impacting them during their adulthood. They, you know, and so I wonder if my experience could be another form of that, except that mine was so easy to heal. You know, it seemed like just recognizing a possible connection to experiences. My childhood got rid of it, and I had some unusual experiences that helped me figure it out. But at the time, I didn't know that that would do any good, except that after I did it, it did. It just went away.

[36:03] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Becoming aware of that connection and understanding that helped you release the physical pain that you were experiencing, apparently.

[36:13] MARY AA.: So it's hard for me to even understand or grasp it now.

[36:20] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: Well, thank you for your story, Mary.

[36:35] MARY AA.: I really appreciate your interview questions. Thank you, Frederick.

[36:40] FREDERICK STAGBROOK DE CLAREMONT: You're welcome.