A Family Memoir

This is the story of Lydia Marx Henricksen. Lydia was born in 1925 in Giessen, Germany, and came of age in the 1930s and 1940s. These were turbulent times in Germany as the nation suffered through revolution, hyperinflation, depression, political violence, and the catastrophe of World War II. While the family fortunes suffered, Lydia herself grew up secure and sheltered in a tight-knit traditional German family. She recalls her childhood and teenage years as full of fun. She was a strong, bright, happy-go-lucky girl with a thirst for learning and ambition to move beyond the secure confines of the family and the traditional role of a German woman as that of Kinder, Kueche, Kirche. Lydias comfortable life was changed when Germany began to mobilize for war. All teenagers had to spend a year in service. The family assets were seized. Fathers, uncles, and brothers were inducted into the military to serve in France, Russia, Africa, and other faraway places. Women and children had to rely upon themselves. At age fourteen, as the oldest child in the family, Lydia became the familys main breadwinner. By age eighteen, she was a single mother, and by age nineteen, she and her family began to experience the full force of the war as the battle was taken to the civilian population. Intense aerial bombings by the British and the Americans destroyed many of Germanys beautiful old cities, including Giessen, and brought Germany to its knees. Ever resilient, Lydia adapted to the new circumstances and found her way through tragedy and loss. Like so many other German women, Lydia became a war bride and, at age twenty-eight, began a new phase of her life in America. It was a difficult transition, but in America, Lydia found opportunities that would have been denied to her in Germany. She raised four children and had an exciting and successful career as a hospital administrator. At age ninety, she lives comfortably in her own home in Pacific Grove, California, a peaceful and quiet place on the beautiful central California coast