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- Description:
- In an oral history interview, Jessie Melis talks about her service as a teacher in occupied Germany from August 1950 to July 1953. She recalls the devastation in German cities, socializing with German citizens, German customs, her living quarters in Munich, taking meals in the officer's mess, her experiences with the black market and the depressed German economy. Melis also talks about meeting former Nazis, the differences between teaching in Germany and the U.S., the differences between American and German students and traveling to Berlin through the Russian Zone. Melis says that she traveled to Palestine and Jerusalem before finally returning to the U.S. to help her family and re-establish her career in East Lansing, MI. Melis is interviewed by Elsie Hornbacher.
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Grace Van Wert talks about her service as a school teacher in post-war Germany from September 1946 to August 1947. Van Wert says that she decided to take a leave absence from her teaching job in the Lansing, MI school district, was assigned to a one room school in the resort town of Bad Wildungen in Germany. Van Wert talks about the town, the post-war devastation, the children of U.S. dependents who were her students, the limited food supplies, and the poverty and destitution which the German people were experiencing. Van Wert says that she gave away soap to German civilians, exchanged coffee for original artwork, paid the man teaching her children German in cigarettes and that she could smell decaying corpses even a year after the war had ended. Van Wert is interviewed by Elsie Hornbacher.
- Date Issued:
- 1984-08-06T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Hazel Christenson recalls her childhood and youth in Minnesota, becoming a teacher in 1929, and coming to Lansing, MI in 1945 to teach in the Lansing school district. Christenson explains why she later accepted an overseas teaching position in Germany, saying that she wanted to see the places she had read about all of her life and her family's native Sweden. She describes her teaching duties at the U.S. Army base in Bremerhaven, her quarters, sanitary conditions, her pay, opportunities to socialize with U.S. Army officers and the devastation of post-war Germany. She also talks about coming back to the U.S. in 1952, the rough passage, and returning to her teaching position in Lansing. Christenson is interviewed by Elsie Hornbacher who shares some of her memories as she talks with Christenson.
- Date Issued:
- 1984-07-24T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project