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The Rise of the Meritocracy

The Rise of the Meritocracy is a book by British sociologist and politician Michael Dunlop Young which was first published in 1958.[1] It describes a dystopian society in a future United Kingdom in which intelligence and merit have become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a merited power-holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less merited. The essay satirised the Tripartite System of education that was being practised at the time.[2] The book was rejected by the Fabian Society and then by 11 publishers before being accepted by Thames and Hudson.[3]

Meritocracy is the political philosophy in which political influence is assigned largely according to the intellectual talent and achievement of the individual. Michael Young coined the term,[1] formed by combining the Latin root “mereō” and Ancient Greek suffix “cracy”, in his essay to describe and ridicule such a society, the selective education system that was the Tripartite System, and the philosophy in general.[2]

The word was adopted into the English language with none of the negative connotations that Young intended it to have and was embraced by supporters of the philosophy. Young expressed his disappointment in the embrace of this word and philosophy by the Labour Party under Tony Blair in The Guardian in an article in 2001, where he states:It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.[2]

Journalist and writer Paul Barker points out that “irony is a dangerous freight to carry” and suggests that in the 1960s and ’70s it was read “as a simple attack on the rampant meritocrats”, whereas he suggests it should be read “as sociological analysis in the form of satire”.[4]

Michael Dunlop Young, Baron Young of Dartington

British lawyer, sociologist and reformer

WRITTEN BYThe Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopaedia Britannica’s editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree….See Article HistoryAlternative Title: Michael Young

Michael Dunlop Young, Baron Young of Dartington, British lawyer, sociologist, and social reformer (born Aug. 9, 1915, Manchester, Eng.—died Jan. 14, 2002, London, Eng.), was best known for having written the Labour Party’s 1945 social-welfare manifesto and for having coined the pejorative term meritocracy (in his 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033) to denounce the political and economic elite that he alleged used their own academic test-based success as justification for their treatment of the economic underclass, who did not have access to equivalent education. Young also founded (1956) the Consumers’ Association, established the forerunner of the Open University (launched in 1964), and wrote influential sociological treatises, notably Family and Kinship in East London (1957; with Peter Willmott). He was created a baron in 1978.

How a family cluster in Frankston spread to Chadstone and Kilmore.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-14/chadstone-kilmore-coronavirus-outbreak-lessons-for-victoria/12763042

What the handling of the Chadstone coronavirus cluster reveals about Victoria’s contact tracing

By Ben KnightPosted Yesterday at 6:12am, updated Yesterday at 7:53pmSpace to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. 02:3302:33

On September 21, Daniel Andrews told Victorians: “This is not just a good day. It’s a great day.”

Many agreed. The sun was out, and for the second day running, the state’s new case number had dropped to single figures.

What Victorians didn’t know was that an outbreak that would derail their hopes of emerging from lockdown was beginning its spread.

The outbreak now exceeds 40 cases, spreading from Chadstone to Kilmore and onto the northern Victorian city of Shepparton.

An ABC analysis of the contact tracing effort has identified potential missed opportunities to stop the spread, and a massive change in approach from the beginning of the outbreak to the end.

Four-day delay in discovering link between cleaner and Butcher’s Club

Health authorities say the Chadstone outbreak began in Frankston, with a cleaner who was living with family members who were sick.

After attending The Butcher Club at Chadstone for work between September 21-23, she called the business on Thursday, September 24 to tell them she’d been told by police to stay home.

Two days later on Saturday, she tested positive to coronavirus.LIVE UPDATES: Read our blog for the latest news on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contact tracers are trained to ask where people work, and are on particular alert for high-risk jobs like cleaning.

However, the cleaner did not tell contact tracers where she worked, so for four days The Butcher Club was not officially informed of the risk.

A staff member at the shop fell ill and returned a positive test on Monday, September 28.

Contact tracers only discovered the cleaner had worked at The Butcher Club while infectious after the staff member got sick and the shop shared their staffing information with DHHS.

Meat is on display in a butcher shop inside a shopping centre.
The outbreaks at Chadstone and Kilmore are now linked to more than 40 cases.(ABC News)

Kilmore traveller unaware they had become linked to outbreak

Two days after the manager of The Butcher Club tested positive, the virus spread from there to Kilmore, when a person sharing a house with another Butcher Club employee drove into country Victoria for work.

The person stopped at a cafe for breakfast, infecting a staff member, and sparking a new cluster that has now grown to at least six cases.

The day before, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) had listed The Butcher Club as a high risk location.

But for some reason, the person living with a Butcher Club employee didn’t get the message.

Read more about coronavirus:

‘Contacts of contacts’ approach phased in

The contact tracing and testing program in this outbreak has been markedly different from its beginnings in Chadstone to the current approach in Kilmore.

In Kilmore, the net has been cast far wider than usual. For the first time, everyone who was at the affected site has been told to isolate and get tested, along with their immediate close contacts.

To date, nearly 1,000 people in Kilmore have been tested, and nearly 400 are in isolation. The current number of cases is six.

DHHS says the Kilmore approach is being “phased in”, and is also now being used for new cases related to the Chadstone cluster.

Active COVID-19 cases in Victorian postcodes

+−LeafletActive cases0≥100Last updated: Tuesday Oct 13th 2020.

When asked on Tuesday why the approach taken in Kilmore was not adopted for the Chadstone outbreak, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said the scale of asymptomatic testing required at Chadstone would not have represented “value for money”.

“We’re talking about a number of shops in Chadstone where people hadn’t gone anywhere near any of those exposure sites, and so to open it up to every single asymptomatic person [to be tested] would not necessarily have been proportionate,” he said.

Professor Sutton also highlighted the “burden” for contacts of contacts to enter 14 days of quarantine.

“We’ve got hundreds of people isolating in Kilmore,” he said. “I think they accept that as a legitimate and proportionate measure to control that outbreak.”

A laminated sign shows drivers where to go for drive through coronavirus testing.
Authorities offered asymptomatic testing to the regional community of Kilmore as part of their outbreak response.(ABC News: Gemma Hall)

Public health physician Nathan Grills, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Population and Global Health, agreed it was important the number of people being asked to enter quarantine was proportionate to the outbreak in question.

“I think the risk with broadening quarantine or home isolation measures is that you scare people away from identifying as contacts, or even getting tested,” he said.

“If people know that identifying as having visited an area may mean severe restrictions — such as mandatory testing, arbitrary home isolation and additional restrictions on their family — then they may hesitate to self identify as at risk and avoid testing.”

Questions remain over why workplace link wasn’t picked up

University of New South Wales epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws, who is an adviser to the World Health Organization, said questions remained around why a contact tracing interview with the cleaner as a close contact did not reveal a link to the Butcher Club earlier.

Professor McLaws said the most recent version of Victoria’s contact tracing questionnaire she had seen included questions on a person’s occupation and employer and should have revealed the recent shifts at the Butcher Club.

“Importantly, she should have been interviewed as a close contact of her family members who are unwell and therefore a potential risk to her workplace,” she said.https://www.abc.net.au/res/sites/news-projects/covid-victoria-roadmap/1.2.3/?abcnewsembedheight=570

Professor McLaws also questioned Professor Sutton’s position that asymptomatic testing of everyone who had visited Chadstone would not represent “value for money”.

“What’s the value of having a third wave compared to hundreds of extra tests?” she asked.

“And yes, you might not find a lot of cases, but if the cleaner was infectious you might find others before they become a source of infection.”

Professor McLaws welcomed the handling of the Kilmore outbreak as a “good thing”, and not dissimilar to the approach taken in Tasmania to prevent a hospital outbreak in Burnie from overwhelming the regional town earlier this year.

“That sort of true ring-fencing style, where you ask everybody to go into quarantine or isolation regardless of whether or not they’re testing positive,” she said.

“This is highly precautionary, and it’s something that outbreak managers do when they believe that there’s a big risk of people being highly interconnected and therefore a rapid transmission.”

She said there were lessons to be learnt from the outbreak.

“This case of the cleaner reminds me that cases are part of the community and unless you do a thorough and deep contact tracing, people will escape inadvertently,” she said. “And if they’re highly infectious, they have the opportunity to cause more clusters.”

2 thoughts on “In Memory of Charlotte, my Mother”

https://auntyuta.com/2014/02/17/in-memory-of-charlotte-my-mother/

  1. berlioz1935EditIt is interesting that she passed away on the night of our wedding anniversary. A wedding she had originally not liked taking place. In later years she changed her tune and we were good friends. When we saw her last before she suffered her stroke she suffered severely from dementia. She actually did not know who we were. But I must say she was at that stage a very easy going lovely old lady. I think, without her memory her real good self became dominant.She was immortalised in the film about the Olympic Games in 1936 when the camera, probably scanning the crowd, caught her image. I made this into a fictional story and published it in a blog of my own.http://berlioz1935.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/the-woman-who-jumped-up-for-jesse-owens/Reply
    1. auntyutaEditThanks for the comment and for the link, Berlioz.
      Actually I reblogged the Jesse Owens story. Maybe this way a few more people are becoming aware of it. If it is true – and we cannot be 100% sure about this – it would say a lot about my mother. Peter Uwe, as I remember, refused to believe that Charlotte jumped up for Jesse Owens, when we showed him the documentary. But who knows? It might very well be true. This picture from the Leni Riefenstahl documentary for sure shows a great likeness, This is what I think. 🙂

Above is a link to my blog from February 2014 where I mentioned how my mother died and where her ashes got buried.

https://catterel.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/saving-the-bacon/#comment-7279

Catterel wrote a story about dementia and this led me to make the following comment:

‘I actually saw my mum only for a few weeks at the end of 1994 just before she had a stroke and died within a few days after that. So I had esperienced her dementia only for a very short time during our Berlin visit in 1994. My mother was 83 at the time. I wrote about it here:

https://auntyuta.com/2014/02/17/in-memory-of-charlotte-my-mother/

In a comment to my blog from February 2014 Peter, my husband wrote:

“. . . When we saw her last before she suffered her stroke she suffered severely from dementia. She actually did not know who we were. But I must say she was at that stage a very easy going lovely old lady. I think, without her memory her real good self became dominant. . .”

I think Peter is right, for all the difficult times that she had experienced during her life, probably did not bother her anymore, and she probably forgot about people that she felt did offend her and that she did hold a grudge against. I had the impression she did not hold a grudge against anyone anymore. And she was even able to retrieve some beautiful memories about her travels that she had been able to do before she retired. She showed me Photos about these travels. I am sure these travels she was still able to remember!!’🙂

Twenty-Seven Years ago

These are pictures from 1993!

auntyuta's avatarAuntyUta

Peter with Caroline, Uta, Troy and Ryan in September 1993 in the park at Moss Vale Station Peter with Caroline, Troy,  Uta,  and Ryan in September 1993 in the park at Moss Vale Station

Troy and Ryan are the twin sons of Monika.

The three sisters: Gaby, Caroline and Monika, as well as Monika's daughters, Tashi and baby Roxy. August 1993 The three sisters: Gaby, Caroline and Monika, as well as Monika’s daughters, Tashi and baby Roxy.
1993

This picture was taken in front of Gaby’s house, probably on Gaby’s birthday

which was on the 28th of  August.

View original post

EAST TURKISTAN

Brief History

https://www.uyghurcongress.org/en/east-turkestan-2/

East Turkistan, also known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, lies in the very heart of Asia. Situated along the fabled ancient Silk Road, it has been a prominent centertur of commerce for more than 2,000 years. The land of East Turkistan gave birth to many great civilizations and at various points in history has been a cradle of scholarship, culture and power.

The current territorial size of East Turkistan is 1.82 million square kilometers. The neighboring Chinese province annexed part of the territory as a result of the Chinese communist invasion of 1949.

East Turkistan borders China and Mongolia to the east, Russia to the north, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the west, and Tibet to the south.

East Turkistan has a rich history and a diverse geography. It has grand deserts, magnificent mountains, and beautiful rivers, grasslands and forests.

The Manchu Invasion

The independent Uyghur Kingdom in East Turkistan — the Seyyid Kingdom, also known as Yarkent Kingdom — was invaded by the Manchu rulers of China in 1759 who annexed East Turkistan into their empire. The Manchus ruled East Turkistan as a military colony from 1759 to 1862. During this period, the Uyghurs and other peoples of East Turkistan valiantly opposed the foreign rule in their land. They revolted 42 times against Manchu rule with the purpose of regaining their independence. The Manchu were finally expelled in 1864 and Uyghurs established Yetteshahar State. However, the independence was short lived, Manchus invaded East Turkistan again in 1876. After eight years of bloody war, the Manchu Empire formally annexed East Turkistan into its territories and renamed it “Xinjiang” (meaning “New Territory”) on November 18, 1884.

Chinese Rule in East Turkistan

After the Chinese Nationalists overthrew the Manchu Empire in 1911, East Turkistan fell under the rule of warlords of Chinese ethnicity who came to dominate provincial administration in the later years of the Manchu Empire. The Chinese central government had little control over East Turkistan during this period. The Uyghurs, who wanted to free themselves from foreign domination, staged numerous uprisings against Chinese rule, and twice (in 1933 and in 1944) succeeded in setting up an independent East Turkistan Republic (ETR). However, these independent republics were overthrown by the military intervention and political intrigue of the Soviet Union.

In October of 1949, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops marched into East Turkistan, effectively ending the ETR. The Chinese communists established the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the territory of East Turkistan.

The Chinese communist reign in East Turkistan can be considered the darkest chapter in the history of the Uyghurs and East Turkistan. Under the current conditions, the very existence of the Uyghur nation is under threat. The Chinese communist government has been carrying out a vicious campaign against Uyghurs and other indigenous people of East Turkistan in order to permanently annex the lands of East Turkistan.

Despite all the brutal and destructive campaigns by the Chinese government against their identity and existence, the Uyghurs and other indigenous peoples of East Turkistan refuse to be subjugated by China and keep carrying the torch of resistance against Chinese occupation, handed down to them by their ancestors.

People

East Turkistan is the homeland of the Turkic speaking Uyghurs and other Central Asian peoples such as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tatars and Tajiks.

According to latest Chinese census of 2010, the current population of East Turkistan is 21.81 million, including 8.75 million ethnic Han Chinese (40,1%), who illegally settled in East Turkistan after 1949 (the ethnic Han Chinese numbered 200,000 in 1949). The Uyghurs make up at least 11 million of the population, although the 2002 census listed their number as around 10.2 million and still constitute the majority of East Turkistan. However, the composition of the population shifts more and more in favor of the Han Chinese, turning the Uyghurs into strangers in their own land. However, Uyghur sources put the real population of Uyghurs around 20 million.

East Turkistan is located beyond the logical boundary of China, the Great Wall. Historically and culturally, East Turkistan is part of Central Asia, not of China. The people of East Turkistan are not Chinese; they are Turks of Central Asia.

Records show that the Uyghurs have a history of more than 4,000 years in East Turkistan.

Throughout the history, independent states established by the ancestors of the Uyghurs and other indigenous peoples thrived and prospered in the lands of East tTurkistan. Situated along a section of the legendary Silk Road, Uyghurs played an important role in cultural exchanges between East and West and developed a unique culture and civilization of their own.

In their early history, the Uyghurs, like most of the other Turkic peoples of Central Asia, believed in Shamanism, Manichaeism and Buddhism. Starting from the 1st century AD and until the arrival of Islam, East Turkistan became one of the great centers of Buddhist civilization.

The conversion to Islam began when contacts between Uyghurs and Muslims started at the beginning of the 9th century. During the reign of the Karahanidin kings, the Islamization of Uyghur society accelerated. Kashgar, the capital of the Karahadin Kingdom, quickly became one of the major learning centers of Islam. The arts, sciences, music and literature flourished as Islamic religious institutions nurtured the pursuit of an advanced culture. In this period, hundreds of world-renowned Uyghur scholars emerged. Thousands of valuable books were written. Among these works, the Uyghur scholar Yusup Has Hajip’s book, Kutadku Bilig (The knowledge for Happiness, 1069-1070) and Mahmud Kashgar’s Divan-I Lugat-it Turk (a dictionary of Turk language) are most influential.

Geography

East Turkistan covers an area of 1.82 million square kilometers, which is twice as large as the Republic of Turkey or four times as large as the American state of California. More than 43 percent of this area is covered by deserts and another 40 percent is covered by mountain ranges.

This huge land is charcterized mainly by two basins bounded by three mountain ranges. The two basins are the Tarim Basin in the south, which measures 530,000 square kilometers, and the Junggar Basin in the north, which covers an area of 304,200 square kilometers. The Tarim Basin contains one of the largest deserts in the world — the Taklamakan desert. The Junggar basin contains the Kurbantunggut desert.

Tengritagh mountain range (Heavenly mountain) crosses the central part of East Turkistan, dividing the country into south and north. Within East Turkistan, the Tengritagh mountain range is 1,700 kilometers long and 250-300 kilometers wide. Altay mountain range in the north forms the border of East Turkistan with Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan. Its section within East Turkistan is 400 kilometers long. The Kunlun mountain in the south forms the the border between East Turkistan and Tibet.

The most important rivers are the Tarim River (2,137 km long), traversing almost the whole length of the southern part of East Turkistan and emptzing into the desert; the Ili River flows west to Kazakhstan and into Lake Balqash; the Irtish River flows northwest out of East Turkistan and into the Arctic Ocean; the Karashaar River flows east from central Tengritagh into Lake Baghrash; the Konche River, starting from the Baghrash lake, originally flowed into Lopnur Lake, but now disappears in the desert long before reaching the lake.

. . . . . .

Memories from September 1943 to Beginning of 1945

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

Towards the end of September 1943 we left Berlin to live in the country. We moved to a place called the ‘Ausbau’, which meant that eventually ‘more’ was to be added to the building.. It was a simple rectangular red brick complex with several entrances around the building. There was no plumbing or electricity. The entrance for us ‘Berliners’ was on the left side at the front of the building. We had a cellar, a groundfloor and two upper floors.

  Mum, my two younger brothers and I, shared a bedroom on the first upper floor. We also had a small kitchen and a living-room. I would sleep in the living-room when my dad came home on leave. Two maids, one Polish, the other Russian, shared two rooms on the top floor. All the rooms on the top floor had sloping ceilings. Our Polish maid was in her early twenties. Her name was Maria. She was very efficient and always rather serious.. The Todtenhausen Family, who lived on the groundfloor, employed Katja, the Russian maid, who was only eighteen and extremely fun loving.

   My mum’s sister, Tante Ilse, also had her rooms on the first upper floor. She had a bedroom and a living-room. On the groundfloor, right underneath her upper rooms, she had a kitchen and a dining-room. She hardly ever used those downstairs rooms. Our friends from Berlin, the Todtenhausen Family, occupied three rooms downstairs, namely a kitchen, a living-room and a bedroom, the same arrangement of rooms that we had on the upper floor.

   There was an additional larger room for storage under the sloping roof. The Todtenhausen Family and my Family stored in that room additional larger furniture which we wanted to save from the bombs in Berlin. — In that room Mum stored a lot of Boskop-apples during the cold season. They were neatly spread out on some straw. Come Christmas-time, other delicious food was also hidden somewhere amongst our stored furniture. It was very tempting for me to go exploring in that room! Mum noticed sometimes, that some food was missing. And I admitted, when questioned, that I had helped myself to some of the goodies. However I was never punished for doing such a thing. That shows, that Mum must have been quite tolerant. —

   On the same upper floor right under the roof was a playroom, which my brothers and I shared with eight year old Eva Todtenhausen. There was another room next to the playroom where Frau Todtenhausen’s parents had stored some bedroom furniture. The parents were Herr und Frau Braun. They had a business in Berlin. (They sometimes stayed at the ‘Ausbau’ in that bedroom in order to be with their family away from the bombs in Berlin.)

   Our toilets were “plumps-closets” some distance away from the house. Water for cooking and washing had to be fetched from a pump in the backyard. Fetching water from the pump kept both maids very busy indeed. For lights we had kerosine-lamps, for heating there were coal-fired stoves which could also be used for cooking. Everything was very basic.

   Gradually some changes were being made. The first big change was that our landlord had electricity laid on. All the workers who lived with their families in the other part of the building, received the benefit of electricity at the same time. This certainly was a very welcome improvement for them.

   The ‘Ausbau’ was built close to a dirt-track which meandered through wide open barley-, oat- and potato-fields. On the track it was a good half hour to walk to the next village. Bike-riding however made it a bit quicker.

   Werner Mann, the owner of all those fields that went on for miles and miles, was an acquaintance of Tante Ilse. He was apparently quite rich and also owned extensive brick-works (Ziegeleien). It was said of him that he was a millionaire. He was our landlord, and he liked to spoil us. With no strings attached! Tante Ilse only had to voice a wish, and Werner Mann immediately did whatever he could to fulfill her wish. He spoilt us by constantly getting produce delivered to us: Potatoes, cabbage for making sauerkraut, wonderful treacle made of sweet-beets, and coal for our stoves.

   Even I, as a nine year old, could see that sixty year old Werner Mann was hopelessly in love with Ilse. I also was quite aware, that she always kept him at a distance. He was happy to just be invited for ”Kaffee und Kuchen’ on weekends and to spend some time with all of us. He always came to visit on his bike. On his daily inspection tours of the workers in the fields he also went around on his bike. He owned coaches with horses, but hardly ever used those to go anywhere.

   When we were invited to his place (which people called ‘Schloss’), he would send the coach with a coachman to pick us up. Once in winter when there was plenty of snow, Werner Mann sent a ‘Pferde-Schlitten’ (horse-drawn sledge). On this sledge we were wrapped up in blankets under a clear night-sky with the moon and lots of stars shining on us. It was unforgettable and one of the rare highlights in our otherwise pretty dreary country-life existence.

   The place, where Werner Mann lived, did not look like a castle at all, even though people called it ‘Schloss’. It was not even a mansion but a rather large, but fairly plain house. There was a huge, fenced in veggie garden next to the house. I have seen the veggie garden only once. However I was very impressed by it, because it seemed to be so very large.

   When we moved to the ‘Ausbau’, Ilse had already been divorced from Adolf Schlinke. It was obvious that Werner M. would have liked to marry Ilse. However, it never came to that. Ilse married Helmut Lorenz on July 20th, 1944.

                     CHILDHOOD MEMORIES CONTINUED

It was a big thrill for me to go exploring amongst the furniture in that big storage-room: and especially in the weeks before Christmas!

Mum used to store lot of goodies for the Christmas season. It was very exciting for me to find out what new things had been stored in that big room. I remember seeing huge chunks of nougat (a yummy hazelnut-paste) as well as heart-shaped marzipan-pieces. There was a pot with sweetened thick milk. Sometimes I dipped my finger into it to lick this wonderful sweet stuff! I also liked to eat a few of the stored raisins and prunes! Smells of ginger bread and apples: It made me feel that Christmas was something to be looking forward to.

Where on earth did Mum get all those things from? It was war-time, wasn’t it? We were in the midst of war! I knew very well where all this came from. The parents of Frau Todtenhausen had a distributing business. It was called ‘Backbedarf en Gros’. That meant they delivered goods to bakeries and cake-shops. Even in the midst of war deliveries of the above mentioned goods still took place! Of course there were shortages, but basically most things were still available.

Herr and Frau Todtenhausen, as well as Tante Ilse and Mum, all of them were good friends. Every Saturday night they came together for some card games. Eight year old daughter Eva and I were allowed to stay up late on those nights. For hours we were watching the adults playing cards, and at the same time we were entertaining ourselves with doodling on bits of paper. At around ten o’clock some cake and hot chocolate as well as coffee would be served. But the maids did not have to do the serving, They were already in their rooms at this hour. The cake was usually freshly baked, very fluffy yeast cake topped with delicious butter-crumbs and filled with a thick custard. Hmm yummy!

Herr Todtenhausen would stay in Berlin during the week, where he was employed by his parents-in-law. Being over forty, he was not required to join the German army. Herr Todtenhauyseb always brought some sweet goodies along when he came home from Berlin for the weekend.

During the summer of 1944 Herr Todtenhausen and Mum liked to go on their bikes to a neighbouring Nursery where they were able to trade sweets for fresh produce. Eva and I were often allowed to go along with them on our bikes. The sweets were traded for strawberries or cherries or gooseberries as well as peaches and apricots, and later on in the year for pears and apples. I remember the Boskop apples were still in season in late autumn. The owner of the nursery was a well-off looking middle-aged woman who was very fond of sweets and loved to trade her produce. At one time we found out that she thought Herr Todtenhausen and Mum were a couple and we girls were sisters. Laughing joyfully, Mum and Herr Todtenhausen explained, that this was not so.

Only once as far as I remember were we shown into the lady’s home. Herr Todtenhausen  made complimentary remarks about the interior of the house. He said it showed off the owner’s good taste. I liked the lady’s house a real lot too. Our families used to have well furnished apartments in Berlin. But this modern looking villa in the midst of the nursery really was something else. My feelings were, I would very much like to live in a place like that. However we had to be happy with our accomodation in the Ausbau. To us children it was always pointed out, to be happy that we did not have to live amongst the bomb raids in Berlin. I’m pretty sure that by myself I felt that I’d rather live in Berlin, bomb-raids or not. I think to children bomb-raids usually didn’t seem as scary as to the adults. At the time we children had had no experience yet how absolutely horrible those bomb-raids could become.

In 1990, soon after the Fall of the Wall, I went with my family to have a look at the area where we used to be hidden away from the bomb-raids. We discovered that the nursery as well as the lady’s house had completely vanished. There was nothing left of the ‘Ausbau’ either!

In 1943, when we had lived at he ‘Ausbau’ only for a couple of months, Frau Todtenhausen delivered a healthy daughter in a regional hospital. The day after the baby was born, it may perhaps have been a Saturday or Sunday, Herr Todtenhausen and Eva went for the forty-five minute bike-ride to the Hospital. I was thrilled that I was allowed to go with them! The baby was on the tiny side and soon called Krümel (tiny crumb). Edith had a pet-name too. She was often called Honkepong.

As soon as Frau Todtenhausen came home from hospital, there was a nurse waiting for her to take charge of the baby. Herr Todtenhausen said something like: “Katja is a very nice girl, but I would not trust her with our new born baby. I am glad that Nurse is here to help my wife to look after our Krümel.”

Nurse used for herself the bedroom next to our playroom. Sometimes she sat with us children in the playroom. Since Christmas was approaching, she taught us how to make some Christmas decorations. I was very impressed, because I was nine years old and nobody had ever taught me anything like it! Nurse also made sure, we learned our Christmas poems. We had to be prepared to recite them to Santa on Christmas Eve!

 Maria, our Polish maid, had been with us since before my little brother Peter was born. He regarded Maria as his ‘Dah-dah’, that is he always called her ‘Dah-dah’. By the end of January 1945 we had to flee from the ‘Ausbau’ as the Russians were approaching fast. We went to Berlin first and then by train to Leipzig to stay at Grandmother’s place. Maria remained in Berlin with her Polish fiancee, who was a butcher.

 When we parted from Maria, little Peter had just turned three. Yet he must have missed his Dah-Dah for quite a while since she had always looked after him, and I am sure, he loved her very much and she loved him. Mum always trusted Maria, who was in every way caring and efficient at the same time. Mum was always impressed how quickly Maria did all the housework. Any dirty dishes were washed immediately. She was indeed capable of doing all the housework, and Mum was happy to let her do just about everything. An exception was the baking of a large cake on Saturdays, which Mum loved to do herself.

Maria always made some potato-salad for the weekend. I watched how she did it. To the peeled and sliced potatoes she added finely cut onion, some oil, pepper and salt. Then she poured hot vinegar-water over the potatoes as a finishing touch. The huge salad-bowl was placed outside on a shelf near the stairway so the salad could cool down. I often helped myself to some of the warm salad when nobody was looking, because I loved to eat the salad when it was still a little bit warm. It was the same every Saturday. I watched Maria preparing the salad and placing it on the shelf outside. Then it did not take long before I had a good taste of it!

Friday night was the night for our bath. Maria placed a small tin-tub on the kitchen-floor. She carried several buckets of water from the outside pump to the kitchen. Some of the water she heated on the kitchen-stove in an especially huge pot. I was always the first one to use the bath-water, then it was brother Bodo’s turn. Little brother Peter was always the last one. Some hot water was added for everyone, but still the water must have been quite dirty for little Peter after Bodo and I had had our baths!

When Maria first came to live with us, she knew very little German. However she was determined to learn German quickly. She liked to ask Bodo and me how to pronounce certain words. She also asked me how to write those words in German. Mum often praised Maria, that she was willing and able to learn quickly. This applied to everything she did. She was an amazingly efficient person. A ‘pearl of a maid’ people would say of her. Maria was a city girl. She came from Lodz, which was called ‘Litzmannstadt’ at the time. We had spent the summer-months of 1941 at Zokolniki (near Lodz) and that was when Maria was assigned to us as a help. Mum liked Maria and wanted her to come with us when we went back to Berlin. Maria told me later that she did not want to leave Poland. But she had not been given the choice to stay in her own country.

When Katja arrived, we could see that she was very different from Maria. She was a country-girl from Russia. She never learned German as well as Maria did. She could never be trusted to do all the house-work by herself. Frau Todtenhausen always had to supervise her and do certain things herself because Katja took too long to learn to do it properly. But we all loved Katja. She was always cheerful and full of beans. As a country-girl she did not know certain things that a city-girl had been brought up with. Maria took to instructing Kartja about certain things. I think they communicated in German. After they finished work in the evening, they had plenty of time to stay in their rooms together and keep each other company. Both girls always had to get up early. During summer, school-classes in the village started as early as seven o’clock. That meant, I had to get up at six o’clock to get ready for school. Mum never got up that early. But Maria always came down at six o’clock to start working for us. She often had to do Peter’s linen early in the morning, which I am sure was not one of her favourite tasks.

Childhood Memories continued

Since Tante Ilse was a single person, she was supposed to have a regular job. Everyone who was capable to work, had to work for the war effort! That meant Ilse had to prove that she had a proper job. Naturally Werner M came to the rescue again. ‘You can work for me in the office,’ he said. And office work she did, however not in the office, but at home. She did not even have to collect the work!

One of the workers, who lived in our complex, was given the task of handing over the sheets of paper to Frau Ilse Schlinke on his way home from work. When the paper-work was finished by Tante Ilse, he took the sheets of paper back to the office on the way to his work-place. How did he transport the papers? He simply fastened the bundles unto the back of his bike. This worker was Herr Fritz. He was a smith and worked for Werner Mann. A smith was always needed in a huge estate with lots of horses and farm equipment. Even though Herr Fritz was a qualified trades-man, he and his family lived extremely simple lives; indeed, he did not seem to live any better than an unqualified worker.

Herr und Frau Fritz had two sons; one was ten, the other one fourteen. The older one was quite talented. He built complicated mechanical things out of odd bits and pieces. I admired him very much. The younger son told Eva and me stories about the ‘Lamp Angel’ (Lampen-Engel) who was supposed to have kerosine-lamps in a straight line out in the country away from any built-up areas to distract bombers, who might accidentally have come to our countryside.

A few times I went with Eva and Bodo in search of those lamps. Yet we never could find any of them. Unfortunately the neighbour’s son, who had told us the story, was not willing to come along with us to show us where the lamps were. To this day, I really do not know, whether there ever had been any lamps!

Both sons of the neighbours went to Lichtenow village primary school, the same school that Eva and I went to. There was only one teacher for the whole school. The school had eight school-years. After year eight you had to leave and start work or learn a trade. Students who wanted to go to high-school, were supposed to enroll at high-school after finishing year four of primary school. By September 1944 I should have started high-school. However I had no chance to travel to high-school from where we lived. Mum said: ‘Since you skipped year three, it does not matter, if you repeat year four. Next year the war will be over anyway, and then we do not have to live here anymore and you can be enrolled in high-school. But I want you to go to a different village-school now and start again with year four. I made enquiries in Herzfelde. The primary school in Herzfelde is much larger then the one in Lichtenow. So this is why I’ve enrolled you in Herzfelde.’

I went to Herzfelde Primary for three months only. By the end of January 1945 we had moved to Leipzig to stay with Grandma. All schooling had stopped by then. We felt more and more, that it was very close to the end of the war.

During the warmer months of 1944 we did a lot of athletics at the Lichtenow school. There was running, high-jump and long-jump. There was also an athletics’ carnival in which only students who were ten years or older were allowed to participate. I was not quite ten yet, but they let me join anyway. I was good at running for my age. In all the jumps I was just average.

I had plenty of opportunity to practise high-jump at home. Herr Todtenhausen and his brother, who was at the Ausbau for a visit, set up two poles with a line to jump over. The line could be set higher or lower. It was set very low for Eva Todtenhausen and for my brother Bodo. The Todtenhausen brothers were both quite good sportsmen and could still jump astonishingly high, even though they were both well over forty.

I often thought that the afternoons at the Ausbau were boring. What was there to do for me? Not much. When the weather was fine, I liked to go for walks, always wishing, that the landscape were not as dreary. I longed for a variety of trees and the view of a lake or a river.

During the colder season we had sometimes real terrible winds. On the way to the outside toilets we had to turn around the corner of the house to walk to the shedlike building at the back. You had to be quite brave to turn the corner, when that gusty wind was blowing, blowing, blowing. Winds like that were unknown to us in the city. Well, the Ausbau was in open country area after all.

We had a warm lunch when I came home from school at about one. And after that in the afternoon there was nothing to do! Maybe a bit of home-work here and there. But this certainly did not take all afternoon. When we had to stay in the playroom because of bad weather, I usually read a book. I loved reading. I was glad I could borrow books from Frau Todtenhausen. She had dozens of books for girls, which she had kept from her own childhood and which eight year old Eva was not able to read yet.

Naturally my two younger brothers and Eva and I sometimes played together as well as talking to each other. Still I missed all my friends from Berlin. In Berlin I was always surrounded by many different children. We all lived in the same street; it was easy to see each other on a daily basis.

One Thursday during the summer school-holidays Mum came home from Berlin with excellent news. ‘Guess what?’ she said ‘I saw Rosemarie today! She is going to stay in Berlin for a few weeks, and I asked her, would she like to come and stay with you at the Ausbau for one week. I could pick her up next Thursday and take her back to Berlin the following Thursday.’

I cried with delight: ‘Oh, Mum, that’s excellent! I love to have Rosemarie here for a visit!’

The visit took place as Mum had planned. Rosemarie and I went for lots of walks . We had so much to talk about that we hardly noticed, how dreary the landscape looked. Once we went into the direction where the lamps of the ‘Lampen-Engel’ were supposed to be. However we never saw any lamps.

I felt a bit jealous, that Rosemarie was allowed to stay in Berlin for a little while during school-holidays. I could never talk Mum into letting me stay in Berlin, not even for a day. Mum always said, that it was too dangerous since there could be bomb raids day-time or night-time. I was not to be put into danger. And that was it.

During that summer of 1944 I learned to swim. We had summer holidays. On a hot day Bodo and I went on our bikes some distance past the Lichtenow school to an artificial lake, which people called ‘Bruch’. It was possible to swim in it. Dozens of people were stretched out on some grass near the lake or frolicked in the water. I went in up to where the water reached my chest. Then I tried to lie on my tummy reaching out my hands to touch the ground. After a while, I noticed my hands had left the ground and I was swimming in the water! What a thrill that was! Being nearly ten I was finally able to swim. What an achievement! Bodo had stayed obediently in shallow water. I could not wait to go to him to share the great news with him.

I remember I had to wear an old two-piece swimsuit of my mother’s which she had sewn together for me. Later on in the year Mum found in a shop in Berlin a proper swimming costume for me which she was able to buy with some coupons. I was given that swimsuit for Christmas. It looked lovely. There were some little orange pictures of girls with bath-caps all over the costume.

The swimming costume was a perfect fit and I was fantasising how I would wear it the following summer. Unfortunately I was never able to wear it since it got lost during the upheaval of moving to Leipzig. —

Towards the end of January 1945, when we were about to leave the Ausbau, Mum, Tante Ilse, Frau Todtenhausen, as well as Katja and Maria were busy all night killing all our rabbits and chooks and preserving the whole lot in glasses. We ended up taking quite a few of those glasses to Leipzig, where miraculously they survived the total distruction of our house during a bomb raid in the pantry next to a very strong wall. Not one glass was shattered! I myself though was not able to eat any of the rabbit- or chicken-meat, since from early childhood on I’ve never been able to eat this kind of meat. …

Before we left the Ausbau, all the furniture in the house was pushed together as much as possible. Some beds had been dismantled already. But we children were meant to get some sleep in spite of all the commotion. I was put with Eva in one room. The two of us were much too excited to sleep. We kept ourselves awake for hours singing all the songs we knew. Eva taught me a few new songs which I had not known until then. Yet I still know them now. One song was a song from Tirol about some young men who go looking over the fence to see a girl, the one who looks after the cows.

Ja wenn wir schaun, schaun, schaun

übern Zaun, Zaun, Zaun,

in das schöne Land Tirol –

Ja dann freuet sich die Sennerin,

ja wenn wir schaun, schaun, schaun übern Zaun.

Ja wenn wir gucken, gucken, gucken

durch die Lucken, Lucken, Lucken,

in das schöne Land Tirol –

Ja dann freuet sich die Sennerin,

ja wenn wir gucken, gucken, durch die Lucken, Lucken, Lucken …