24 Those Are Just Little Things
Annelies Höhle is the mother of Ursula Höhle Schlüter (see chapter 23). She lives with her grown son Winfried in the same apartment block and across the courtyard from her daughter and son-in-law. We interviewed Sister Höhle around her table as she leafed through her photograph albums and served us the fruit dumplings for which she is known throughout the ward.
Annelies: My father died when I was four years old. After the funeral, my mother wanted to take a bouquet of flowers to the cemetery. She went by a friend’s house to ask the friend if she would like to go to the cemetery with her. While she was at her friend’s house, the doorbell rang; it was the missionaries. On this particular day, the missionaries had invited my mother’s friend to a meeting, and after the missionaries had gone, it had become somewhat late, so my mother didn’t go to the cemetery at all. She went with her friend to this meeting instead. The hymns were so consoling to her that she continued going back, and it wasn’t long before she was baptized. Then I started going to church with her, and when I turned eight, I was baptized.
Robert Höhle, husband of Annelies Höhle, 1938 and father of Ursula Höhle Schlüter. Courtesy Robert Höhle.
I really don’t remember very much about my baptism. I was baptized at the mouth of the Briesnitz. That is a little stream that empties into the Elbe. The only thing that has stayed in my memory is that two sisters who had a garden gave me a little marmalade jar full of blackberries. I have never forgotten that. It was not long after my mother had been baptized that the missionaries came to live with us. That was a fun time for me. They always had time to pay attention to me. Well, those are just memories out of my childhood. Back then the branch meeting place was on Brücker Street.
Whenever I go in that store now, I can see our branch house. We built that little chapel in 1939, before the outbreak of the war. When we started, the missionaries were still here and helped with the construction and painting. Suddenly they were gone, and we thought, well, they will be returning soon. The branch house was dedicated in early September. My daughter was born on August 31, and on September 1, the war began. Then there were no longer many of the priesthood here. My husband and Brother Wöhe were about the only ones. There were, as I said, very few of us left. That was in 1945, and our branch house was still there. That was in the Altstadt [old part of the city].
G. Davis: And the Altstadt Branch was destroyed in 1945?
Annelies: It was destroyed, yes. Actually, in the entire bombing, as far as I know, we lost only one sister. That was Sister Giedemann, who lived in the center of the city, right downtown. The others all showed up after the bombing. Then, because the Neustadt Branch house was too small for both branches, we looked about for another place to meet. We had a choice between two places, one on the Marien Allee and the other on the Dr.-Kurt-Fischer Allee, and we decided on the one on the Dr.-Kurt-Fischer Allee.
The day we started [with the rebuilding] was splendid, marvelous. Right in the middle was a big hole where an antiaircraft battery had been. It would have been quite dangerous for the little children, so we just filled it in. There was no shortage of rubble. They brought a horse and wagon and hauled in the dirt and rubble, and we sisters leveled it off with all sorts of tools, whatever we had.
G. Davis: Were there many of the brothers there?
Annelies: Yes, some, but they had other things to do, and this grading was easy for us sisters. It was no problem.
In 1947 we had a missionary conference that lasted an entire week. I remember one day so clearly. The Church rented some tourist steamers, and we went up the Elbe as far as the “Saxon-Switzerland” [sächsische Schweiz, a mountainous tourist area upriver from Dresden]. There is a “Theater in the Rocks” there, an outdoor amphitheater, and it was reserved for us. The various branches put on a show.
G. Davis: Was it a large conference?
Annelies: Yes, it was very large. There were four large ships. It was really something. And when we came back, we went to the big city auditorium, the one that is now a military museum. It used to have a restaurant. So all of the members had the entire restaurant for our dinner. We had a wheat broth. We had gotten wheat from the welfare program, you see. After dinner we had a dance, if I remember correctly. At the end of the week, we had a special conference. The members all sat out in the park at the side of the chapel, and the chorus was on the terrace. The terrace wasn’t enclosed back then. It was open on all sides.
Ursula: You always told me that earlier, before the war, there was such a closeness among the young people of the Church.
Annelies: Yes, there was. This was just after 1945. We were very close at the time when we had nothing to eat. That was when one of your friends would come up and say, “I don’t know what we’re going to eat tomorrow.” And another would say, “I’ve got something. Send your children over to my house, and they can eat with us, OK?” That’s right. We were all like one family then. There weren’t so many of us. Those were nice times, and the young people did a lot of things together. It wasn’t just everyone for themselves. Those things stay in my memory. But that was in the old days, you see.
N. Davis: One story that I have not forgotten that you told us when we were here as missionaries is about the birth of your son Winfried.
Annelies: Yes. Winfried was born a month early. He was—how shall I say this? We knew about the persecution of the Jews. My husband had a cousin who was a Jew and who died at Auschwitz. So we knew about the persecution of the Jews and a lot of other terrible things that were going on. But that they were taking retarded children and putting them to death, I didn’t know. Well, they had this counseling service for new mothers, and we were supposed to attend, but I didn’t like it. The place wasn’t clean, and you had to wait around a long time with your undressed baby. I just didn’t go, and so they never saw Winfried.
It wasn’t too evident right at first that everything wasn’t just right with Winfried, but then I took him to a woman pediatrician; that must have been after about three months. She told me, very confidentially, that I was going to have to have a lot of patience with this child. She was right. I did have to have a lot of patience. He was a year old before he could sit, a year old. And when he was two, he still couldn’t walk.
N. Davis: But were you in danger of losing him?
Annelies: Yes, I had to be very careful that I never went anywhere with him where he might stand out. I didn’t take him to get shots. I just didn’t go.
Ursula: That may have been an act of providence.
Annelies: I just had to watch myself. I think still to this day that it was some sort of an inner voice telling me, “Don’t go out with him.” An inner feeling. And if I hadn’t followed this voice, I might not have had Winfried for long. They would probably have taken him away. So I never let him be seen in public. I think it was just an inner voice, some kind of a feeling—“Don’t do that, don’t go there.”
Ursula: Otherwise, you would have done everything that one normally does with children.
Annelies: You see, Winfried was born in 1942, when things were a little uncertain, when one never knew, so I just didn’t go out with the child. They were always out there checking.
Ursula: He was born at home.
Annelies: Yes, he was born at home. He was not born in a hospital. Actually, they were all born at home, even Ursula. If Winfried had been born in a hospital, it might have been bad for him.
Ursula: Well, didn’t you say anything about a ration card for food for him?
Annelies: He did get a ration card for food.
Ursula: But he was older then, wasn’t he.
Annelies: Yes, yes. I am happy that I have Winfried, especially since my husband is gone. Now I’m not alone. I have someone I can take care of. My sister is always telling me, “My husband would never have let me raise a child like that. He would have put him in a home.” I would never have let them take my Winfried, never. My daughter and my other son always said, “Sure, your Winfried. Your Winfried.” But now maybe they understand that I had to give him a little more love than the others. Well, he’s still with me, and he feels secure. He is never aware that there is anything he can’t do. Of course, he always wants to go somewhere; he wants to have a girl friend. Oh well.
G. Davis: I was pleased last Sunday to see that the bishop asked him to be an usher.
Annelies: Oh, he is so proud of that. Of course, you never know. When the bishop asks him, he might just say, “No, not today.” That happens sometimes. He has done that twice. Being an usher is his pride, but he is even more proud when he can sit up on the stand with me when I have to give the closing prayer or in the fast and testimony meeting when I take him up on the stand. Oh, then he is really proud.
G. Davis: On another subject. I have the feeling that the members in the United States who do not know a lot about this country are of the opinion that the people in the Church here were suppressed by the government or that they felt themselves isolated, cut off from contact with the Church. But many members here with whom we have spoken deny that. They tell us that they felt quite comfortable here. What is your opinion?
Annelies: I can confirm that opinion, that we have always felt comfortable here. Having said that, I would also like to say that we were isolated, cut off, as it were.
Ursula: Yes, we stuck together and helped one another, and in that way we were comfortable, but it was hard when we looked outward. In part it also depended on what sort of a profession one had.
Annelies: Lots of times the hard situations started with the children. It is sad to say, but our youngest son doesn’t come to church anymore. He was baptized, and as a child he always came to church, but in his last two years of school, he didn’t want to come anymore. He said, “I’m not going to be ridiculed anymore when my friends see me coming home from church and then the next day in school someone says, ‘Oh, you went to see the Holy Post on Sunday.’” That was a derisive term they used. And so he wouldn’t go anymore. And now when we talk to him about the Church, he just won’t take the necessary step to start coming again.
G. Davis: But that could happen with us, too. I mean, not only in this country, that could happen in Salt Lake City.
Annelies: Yes, but here it was more intense because no one wanted to know anything about religion.
Ursula: It is no accident that less than 40 percent of the people in our area, in the former GDR, are religious at all. The large majority of the people are atheists, and this is a direct result of forty years of education. Whether a child in school was Protestant, Catholic, or whatever, the others were always of the opinion that she was a little strange. Someone who could believe in religion must not be all there. That’s the way it was, and it was very hard on the children. It was not so easy on the parents either to be hearing these remarks all the time and that “those people who go to church have something wrong with them.” That was the opinion. And in my profession [elementary school teacher], it was made very clear to me that I was not to talk about religion if I wanted to keep my job.
G. Davis: Yes, I wanted to ask you about that. You became a teacher. That is a little unusual for someone who belongs to a church, isn’t it?
Ursula: Yes, but I became a teacher back at a time when things were not so strict. When I was a student, I put my religion on the application. They asked about your religion then, but later, in the 1960s, it started to get even harder. There was a girl who had been in my class at the university, for example, who made a little mistake. She sat down in the school cafeteria and prayed over her food, in full view of everyone. We usually did that very privately without drawing any attention to ourselves. She was told that she would have to give up her profession. This state, which was raising the children to be atheists, could not tolerate someone doing something like that in public. That’s the way it was, and I must say I was always a little uneasy when I met a colleague in the streetcar on Sunday morning when I was on my way to church. Because, as I have said, we were always under a little pressure.
Annelies: Yes, my husband had problems. After the war, he was released from prison in 1945 just before Christmas, and he got his old job back. Then a little later they told him that if he wanted to keep it, he would have to join the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (German Unity Party), i.e., Communist Party]. So he joined the SED. But he never denied his membership in the Church. He always said that he belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And after a few years, that finally began to sink in, and they called him in and told him he had to decide: church or party. They gave him a few days to think it over before he told them his decision. So he went to them and said that he had decided for his church. Then he came home and told me, “At last, I am out of the party.” But he was mistaken. He didn’t get out of the party. They told him that someone had come down from the party leadership and said, “Are you people crazy? Do you want to start a religious war? Do you want the word to get out that we are suppressing religion?” But that was quite late. Anyway, he didn’t get out of the party.
G. Davis: What do you mean, “quite late?”
Annelies: Well, that was in the ’70s. Then he did leave the party. But by then they had already taken up the problem of the Church, you see. This party leader had told them not to make a big fuss about the fact that he belonged to a church. So then he was stuck with the conflict between the party and the Church. There was no getting around it then.
G. Davis: Do you think the fact that the members had these problems brought them closer together, that the problems made them stronger in the faith?
Ursula: Each individual will have to answer this question for himself or herself. I was actually quite uncertain about my faith for a long time, and it didn’t have anything to do with pressure from the outside. I was just young.
Annelies: When you were in Bischofswerda in the Pedagogical Institute you came to me once and said, “Yes, that’s all well and good, but my teachers say thus and thus.” I told you that someday when you became a teacher you would have to say a lot of things you don’t believe yourself. You would just have to say what you are instructed to say. And that’s probably what was happening to those teachers back then. They had to say what was prescribed in their lesson manuals. They weren’t allowed to express their own opinions.
Ursula: Yes, but I would still like to maintain that my testimony, as it has grown over the years, has not been influenced by this external pressure. Maybe this pressure has influenced the way we talked about our testimony with others. Of course, we were afraid to talk about it in certain places.
For example, I remember well the day when a student asked me, “Mrs. Schlüter, is there a God?” Right in front of the class. It took some courage on my part to answer: “Yes, I believe there is a God.” Yes. But I couldn’t discuss it any further. Today, the little children are not inhibited, and they talk freely about religion. They ask me what I think about life after death, and I talk openly about it. But there is still a barrier. There are some who say, “Oh, that can’t be.” Atheism is deeply rooted because their parents were raised that way and have taught it to their children. It will be very hard to change that in this country.
You also hear frequently the opinion of the older people who are quite convinced that there cannot be any religious instruction in the schools, that it’s all nonsense. They don’t want anything to change. Many students’ parents are hesitant about it. I once sent around a questionnaire in the school asking how many would like to see religious instruction introduced into the school. Two persons wanted Catholic instruction, and all the others were strongly against it. That is all very deeply rooted, but I don’t think it has had any influence on my own testimony because we in the Church strengthened one another and we went to church regularly.
Annelies: I remember when Brother Karl Wöhe died. We lived in the same apartment building. Sister Wöhe wanted the casket painted white. That came from Brother Fritz Lehnig from Cottbus, who also wanted to have a white casket. So Sister Wöhe had the casket painted white. The entire apartment building, and it is a big one, ridiculed her for that. They all knew what church we went to, you see. They ridiculed her about painting the casket white. That was so strange. [Typically, white caskets were reserved for children. Adults had natural wood or black caskets. The people apparently believed the white casket was part of the beliefs of the Church.]
Ursula: Yes, and I can remember what they said about her. They said she was a hoarder. “Guess what? She has sugar and flour in her apartment. Hoarding things.” They talked about her behind her back. She was just doing what the General Authorities have told us to do, trying to keep a supply of food on hand.
Annelies: Those people were quite spiteful, I must say.
Ursula: Yes, and if we want to be honest, we were also a bit cowardly. We were afraid that if we spoke openly about something that was not approved of, there might be consequences.
I know a Sister Ziegler, who is dead now. In every store where she had to stand in line—she was always telling me about this because we were both teachers in the Sunday School—she always took a Book of Mormon with her, and she always taught the person standing in front of her in the line, even during those times when they were so strict. That didn’t make any difference to her. But she didn’t have a job to worry about. They couldn’t do anything to her. But, oh well. Maybe we were a little lacking in faith in those situations. We knew very well that one person couldn’t feed the family. We wanted to keep our jobs. That’s the way it was.
Annelies: Feed the family. After 1945, when we got the meeting place up there on the Dr.-Kurt-Fischer Allee, we planted all sorts of vegetables way at the back of the park. The park was much larger then than it is now. They took half of it away from us. But way in the back, we planted vegetables, tomatoes, and parsley, all sorts of kitchen herbs, and they were divided among the Relief Society sisters so that we would have something to cook. At least we could have a taste of something, and some tomatoes, even if there weren’t many. But it was a supplement.
When the first welfare goods started coming in, that was fantastic. And I must say that they helped us survive. Many families were completely out of bread. I didn’t have so many problems because my daughter was always saying, “Oh, I ate yesterday.” But many people were having real problems with their nourishment, and when the wheat and the peaches and the salted herrings or whatever arrived, that helped so many people. And then, how our membership grew. The word went around, and members showed up we hadn’t seen in years. Then they never came back.
Ursula: Oh well. That’s understandable. Everyone wants to survive, and I think in those situations there’s nothing wrong with that.
Annelies: It was similar during the bombing on February 13. I was down in the cellar, and I heard people praying who had never prayed before in their lives. They didn’t believe in anything, and suddenly they started to pray.
G. Davis: How was it with your family? Did you live in the old part of the city?
Annelies: No, we lived in Neustadt, not so far away from the Dr.-Kurt-Fischer Allee, up there where the streetcar line runs. I was there with my daughter and with Winfried. We were alone then. And my daughter even to this day gets a strange feeling when she hears a siren. It was strange squatting down in the cellar and listening to the bombs whistling overhead. And then we heard the explosion and tried to make ourselves smaller and hoped that it didn’t hit us. We were spared. The last bomb hit just two houses down from us. Only a fire bomb hit our house. Anyway, I don’t ever want to experience anything like that again.
Ursula: Yes, an experience like that gets right down inside of you. You never forget it.
N. Davis: How old were you then?
Ursula: I was five years old. Winfried was two. I can still remember that we had a long kitchen and that my grandma lived right in the next apartment. That was fortunate, because Mom was quite young then. She was just twenty-five, and after the second attack, she just sat in the kitchen crying and saying over and over, “I’m not staying here anymore, I’m not staying here anymore.” When I looked out the window, everything around was red, and there were sparks flying up from the fire across from us, at a hat factory. It was terrible. I couldn’t tell if it was day or night because of the smoke.
Annelies: And this fire storm howled. It sounded just like an organ. It was really terrible.
Ursula: It was a powerful storm. She put me and Winfried in his baby buggy. We were both lying in there, and I couldn’t see out because the top was up. I guess my legs were hanging out, I don’t know. She grabbed up a few things plus my grandma and both of us and left Dresden.
Annelies: We had three attacks. The first was around 10:00 or 10:30. Then came the second one and then another around noon the next day, and I said, “I’m leaving. I’m leaving.” I bundled up my children, and my mother said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m going to Hof” (my hometown, not far from Dresden). I loaded up my children, and my mother said, “Well, then I’m going with you.” She pulled my little wagon with two suitcases.
Some things happened that really strengthened my testimony. We started out, and we had heard that the trains were leaving from Radebeul. And on the way to Radebeul, actually not far from our house, in the garden area, a group of soldiers came toward us. They were trying to get into the city. When they had almost all gone by, a soldier stepped out of the last row and said, “Young lady, where are you going?” I said, “I want to get away. I’m going to Radebeul” [a suburb northwest of Dresden]. He said, “You’ll never make it that far. We were sent to help, and it doesn’t matter to me whom I help.”
He pulled my baby buggy, I helped my mother, and we started out, but he said, “We’ll never get to Radebeul.” In the meantime, the strap with which I was pulling the baby buggy had broken because of the double load. I had an uncle who lived on the way to Radebeul. I hadn’t seen him for years, but the soldier said, “If he has a handcart, I could make it to Radebeul.” My uncle lived right on the way, so we went to his house and asked him if he could lend us a handcart. He said, “Yes, but I need it back.” So we loaded everything in it and walked to Radebeul, and there was a train.
The soldier said, “I’ll go find out where it is going,” and he came back and said, “It’s going to Leipzig. Come on. I’ll get you on, and then I’ll take the wagon back to your uncle.” He loaded us onto the train. The train stood there for a long time, and the soldier went back. Why did a soldier out of the last row step out and say, “Can I help you?” There must have been something that spoke to the man and said, “You should help that lady.”
G. Davis: Did you make it to Leipzig?
Annelies: No. We got only as far as Riesa. We arrived at Riesa at midnight, and then the sirens went off. The bombers were coming back again, so the train stayed in the station train shelter.
Ursula: Right in the station?
Annelies: Yes, right in the station. There we waited until morning, until the first train started off in the direction of Chemnitz. We rode to the second stop, where we had to get out and walk to the next village. But in the train, there was a man who knew us. He was a neighbor of my aunt, and he said, “You must be coming from Dresden.” We must have been covered with smoke and soot. Anyway, he offered us some of his bread, what he had, and then he said, “I’ll ride on ahead on my bicycle and tell your aunt to come to meet you, o.k?” We lived in that village until June of 1945.
Then my mother walked back to Dresden. She said she was going to inquire around and find out what was going on. After about a week, she came back and told us that there were no trains running, nothing, but that there was a ship running from Riesa to Dresden. She told us we had to get back or we would lose our apartment. It was still there, but we would lose it.
The next morning, very early, we started out for Dresden by way of Riesa. It was actually still curfew time. I had a handcart with Ursula sitting on top of my bedding and a wagon with Winfried and whatever we could carry. At the edge of Riesa, there stood a Russian guard. We just wished him a good morning, and he didn’t say anything. He let us go into the village even though it was still curfew.
When we got down to the Elbe River in Riesa, we saw the ship leaving. It was already gone. You see, they had different times. In the village where we had been staying, it was normal time, but in Riesa, they went by Russian time. There was a two-hour difference. That’s why the ship was already gone. We sat down there on the Elbe, and I began to cry because there wouldn’t be another ship for two days. It went up to Dresden on one day and back to Riesa on the next.
Now what were we supposed to do in Riesa? We couldn’t walk back. My mother said, “You know what? Let’s go to the city hall. The parents of the neighbors of my aunt live in Riesa. I know the Birners, and maybe they will take us in for two nights.” She went into the city hall and asked, but they told her, “We’re sorry. The documents are all mixed up. We don’t know anything.” But a man standing there said to my mother, “You know, I know a family by the name of Birner. If you want to come with me, I’ll show you where they live. Maybe they’re the ones.”
We went with him, and when we came around the corner and down a few houses, there was a lady poking her head out of the window, and my mother said, “That’s Mrs. Birner.” They did take us in for two nights and helped us get down to the ship very early so that we could get back to Dresden.
Those were all things we had prayed for before we set out. Why was a man standing there just at that time to say, “I know a Birner family”? Those are things that one doesn’t think much about at the time when one is so upset, but later when thinking back on them, one realizes that help came as an answer to prayers. And those are things that strengthen testimonies.
Once there was a Danish dance group who came to Dresden, and I put up three sisters in my apartment. That night they didn’t come home. They couldn’t come home from the program with us because they had to get their costumes in order because they were leaving the next morning. These sisters didn’t come, and they didn’t come. I stood at the window and thought, “My goodness, are they lost? They went that way once.” I went to my room, and I prayed. Not long after that, I stood at the window, and there came the three sisters. They said they had gotten lost. They had gone down the wrong street. Suddenly they had this feeling, “Wait a minute. What did that sister tell us when we left? One street left, then right, then straight ahead. Now let’s think about how we came.” So they found their way back.
These are just little things that strengthen my testimony. I said to myself, “You prayed for them, and just at that time, one of the sisters had this feeling, ‘wait a minute.’” Well, those are just little things.
N. Davis: Those are wonderful things.
