Hilda’s Story: The Evolution of Awareness
By: Jerry M Lawson, De Omnibus Dubitandum
Tags: Politics, Psychology, Holocaust, History, Culture

Bundesarchiv Koblenz/The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Poster proclaims Hitler will become President of Germany

Some years ago, I had a client, Hilda. This was not her real name. Hilda had a marvelous story to tell. She was German and had come to America with her G.I. husband and daughter after WWII, became an American citizen and lived a quiet and productive life in a small city of 16,000 in the Midwest.

I was attracted to her story because it presented me a point-of-view of history I knew well but from the perspective of the other side. We have been flooded with stories about World War II, the Nazi’s and the Holocaust throughout our lives, but rarely, if ever, have we been privy to a glimpse of the other side without seeing it through the lens of our own narrative and bias.

Hilda’s story began with her being the youngest of 11 children. She had five brothers and five sisters and lived a quiet rural existence about 50 miles from Dresden, Germany in the Sudetenland area of what was then Czechoslovakia. Hilda’s father was German and a World War I veteran. He was considerably older than his Czech wife.

By the time we meet Hilda in the mid to late 1930s, she is 11–12 years old and her father has died leaving her and her mother to share their large house with two older brothers and their families. The shop for the family carpentry business and another apartment that was rented to a Czech family filled all the space in the house. Hilda is only a few years from finishing her formal education.

One day their Czech renter stopped Hilda and engaged in a conversation in which he revealed to her horror stories about the Nazis and showed her a book with some vivid pictures. She was aghast and unbelieving that her people, the German people, could do such things. She remained in disbelief but said nothing to the rest of her family of this conversation and the Czech family soon left and migrated to Switzerland.

Hilda was witness to the German occupation of the Sudetenland in March 1938. Prior to that moment she experienced the withdrawal of contact from Czech friends and heard stories about the awful Germans and how the Czechs would fight, but when the time came there was no fighting and the German army came, set up camps, and began providing food to the local German population. To these people the Germans were heroes. They were there to help them. The stories Hilda had heard proved false.

Everything around her changed. The school had new teachers and new textbooks. Her mother received a pension for having eleven children. Hilda began to experience the meaning of being a youth growing up in the Third Reich. She took advantage of the offerings for social interaction and access to goods and services. She joined the Hitler Youth because everyone joined. They had fun. They did fun things and visited fun places. She went to movies, she had no reason not to soak up and accept the propaganda.

Her five brothers soon joined the German army. Hilda finished her formal education at 14 years-old (typical for Europe at the time for those not bound for higher education) and went to work in a factory. It was late 1940 and she worked in a former Zeiss optical factory where she inspected the gun sites for anti-aircraft cannons. There were imported French prisoners of war also working at this factory. Her best friend engaged in a relationship with one of the French prisoners and was caught. Hilda was shocked coming to work one day and discovered her friend, hair shaved off, in shackles, in the stocks at the factory entrance, wearing a sign that says, “I slept with the enemy.” People were encouraged to pick up and throw whatever was available at her. Both she and the French prisoner disappeared and were never seen again.

This was Hilda’s first wake up. Her second wake up incident came a bit later. Because she was the youngest and her father no longer there to make the decisions, her mother allowed her to learn Czech and develop friendships with them. After her friend had disappeared she fell into a relationship with a young Czech boy she knew. They met secretly. It would have been risky for both to do otherwise. They became close until one day he suddenly disappeared. She found out he was part of the Czech underground.

Hilda’s job at the optical factory came to an end and she was given the choice of either moving to work in a munitions factory close by or enter training to become a nurse. She realized the risks of working in a munitions factory and wisely chose to become a nurse. She was highly motivated to help people and being a nurse brought her closer to that goal than working in a munitions factory.

She went away to training and became a nurse earning high marks. She was assigned to work in a hospital where the wounded from the Eastern Front were being treated. One day she encountered a young soldier, a young man no older than her, suffering many severe wounds, but who was being provided the best care and given lots of extra attention on orders from higher up to ensure his survival. Over a period of weeks and months, Hilda helped care for the young man as he slowly regained his health and strength. One day Hilda asked what he thought the future held for him. He replied he thought he would be returned to his unit to resume his place on the Eastern Front.

When the day came the young man was ready for release, a group of soldiers appeared, and he was escorted outside where everyone had been instructed to assemble. He was then lined up along with others against a wall and shot as an example of what awaited deserters and warning to others. He had been a soldier on the Eastern Front and had fled his position in panic only to be shot by the SS who were always behind the lines with orders to shoot deserters. They preserved his life so he could be used as an example for others. Hilda thought of her five brothers, all on the Eastern Front, and wept. She was confronted with the reality of another harsh example of the system she served.

By now Hilda, although still in her mid-teens, was beginning to see through the propaganda and lies she has been indoctrinated with for most her life. She began to realize there was an insurmountable gulf between what she’s been told and what reality was. She also realized she was trapped in the storm with nowhere to go and no way out. All she could do was try to hang on and survive.

Her final epiphany came after she was put in detention for going beyond the limits of a weekend pass and going two extra miles to get home to see her mother. She was thrown in jail and threatened with death before being allowed to return to her unit. While in jail she was able to climb up to a high window where she could listen to conversations of other prisoners. There were lots of slave laborers incarcerated from Poland and other occupied East European countries. Since Hilda was half-Czech and spoke the language fluently she could understand much of what was being talked about and shared and thereby learned about prisoner treatment, slave labor, death camps and other details of things she previously knew nothing about. She was now aware of what she was part and had experienced its brutality.

The rest of Hilda’s story includes, among other things, surviving the bombing of her hospital, the firebombing of Dresden, nearly being executed by a zealous Nazi officer, and multiple miraculous escapes from death by Russian soldiers. At the end of the war, Hilda was 18-years-old.

Hilda grew up believing with absolute faith what she was told, that her people, the German people, were truly exceptional. They were special, they were superior, and were destined to lead mankind. Millions of human beings suffered and died because they believed this false narrative. We might do well to pause and reflect on where we are and question what we are hearing and being told.