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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:
- Edna Miller talks about her work as a teacher in the city of Baguio, Philippines beginning in August 1941 and being interned as a prisoner of war in a camp in the mountains outside of Manila after the Japanese invasion. Miller discusses the conditions in the camp, the prisoner's diet, holding makeshift church services, the behavior of the Japanese guards and her fellow prisoners. After the camp was liberated in 1944, Miller says that she decided to stay in the Philippines and joined the American Red Cross and then after the war ended, took a job with the U.S. Army teaching soldiers until 1947 when she left Manila for the states. Miller, who later taught in Army schools in occupied Japan, says that she has no regrets about her overseas experiences, despite the hardships and that her greatest thrill was meeting General Douglas MacArthur when her POW camp was liberated. Miller is interviewed by Evelyn McHiggins.
- Date Issued:
- 1984-06-30T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project