BEAR CREEK, Wis. (WBAY) - In Germany in the 1920′s, Waltraud was a common female name. It means strength.
Over the last decade, a New London author captured her mother’s stories of strength growing up in Nazi Germany and witnessing indescribable horrors.
This week in Small Towns, we travel to Bear Creek to learn more about this amazing woman.
As a young girl, Tammy Borden never truly appreciated her mom’s incredible life story.
“Heard her stories all my life growing up, but when you’re a kid you just kind of like, ‘Yeah, that’s nice mom,’ you know,” says Tammy.
Ten years ago, though, while preparing to speak at a Christmas program, Tammy decided to gather Christmas memories from family and friends.
“And then I thought, well I’m going to ask my mom, and I asked her while we were driving along and I was secretly recording her, and she told me this story about a Christmas when she was 10 years old in Germany and her father was already off at training for the army, and it was just the most endearing, beautiful story, and I thought this is a novel.”
Tammy learned her mom, Waltraud, received a little sewing machine that Christmas from her father, who had returned home to surprise the family.
Tammy then realized she needed to interview her mom as often as she could.
“I started off asking questions about events -- What was it like to experience your first air raid? What was school like? -- but eventually I got to the questions that asked more of the emotive response questions, like, tell me about the time you were most terrified, tell me about the time you were most happy,” explains Tammy.
Tammy learned her mother was just 12 years old when war broke out in Germany.
With her father forced to serve in the Nazi army, and eventually killed, she was left alone to struggle with her mom and brother.
“The father being gone, there wasn’t enough money coming in. They had to live off of rations. A lot of people don’t realize that while the Nazis, yes, inflicted horrible, horrible atrocities on the Jewish people and the minorities and gypsies and the handicapped, that they also oppressed their own people,” says Tammy.
Tammy says every time she sat with her mom the stories would flow, like how she helped feed English airmen hiding in a barn after their plane crashed until the war was over.
“And some stories that we would sit there and talk, and she’s like, ‘I’ve never told anybody this before,’ ‘I’ve never said this out loud, but here’s what happened,’ and I was just, I couldn’t believe some of the stuff a teenager had to witness. I think she knew as time went on how important those stories were and how important that side of the story is,” says Tammy.
After the war, Tammy’s father fled from Ukraine to Germany, which is where he met Waltraud and they got married.
Thanks to the Displaced Persons Act, they were allowed to come to the United States in 1951.
It was only then that her parents learned about the true horrors of Nazi Germany.
“In a small village they had no idea of the atrocities that were committed, and they honestly didn’t know until they came to America, and they were horrified, they were absolutely horrified,” explains Tammy.
After living in Milwaukee for a few years, Tammy’s parents eventually settled on a farm in Bear Creek, where they found a new, happier life.
“I don’t know how she was so resilient, but she was always carefree and funny and witty, and she had a little biting sense of humor, she just had spunk,” says Tammy.
Before starting her book, Tammy and her mom traveled back to Germany.
And a few years before she passed away in 2020 at the age of 93, another Christmas surprise.
“Oh, how did you get that? Oh my goodness, I can’t believe it,” says Waltraud in a phone video Tammy recorded.
Tammy found the same tiny sewing machine her mom had as a child and presented it to her.
Before her mom’s death, Tammy started writing her book in the third person as a narrator telling her mom’s story.
After taking a few years off to grieve her mother’s passing, she started to write again last Christmas and had a revelation.
“I had to change it to first person. I had to change it to tell the story from her eyes and her perspective, because I realized that’s how I learned the stories. And so I rewrote everything I had and had it from her, and I had to think through her eyes and I wrote the whole thing, published in July,” says Tammy with a smile.
Since publishing, Tammy’s book, “Waltraud: A True Story of Growing Up in Nazi Germany,” has received a 4.9 star rating on Amazon.
Unfortunately, the one review that would mean the most isn’t possible.
“I’m sorry, I do, I wish she were here to read it,” says Tammy, holding back tears.
Even though her mom never got to read her life story, Tammy takes great solace in knowing her stories will never be forgotten.
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