Ilse "Omi" Conrad, 1917-2012

After a long illness, my grandmother Omi died last week.  She was 94.

Born in East Prussia in 1917, she managed to survive World War II with her family intact.  This included a harrowing escape from Konigsberg in early 1945 with her three young daughters in tow, just barely ahead of the advancing Red Army.

Eventually settling in the quiet town of Annweiler in the Rheinland-Pfalz, she and her husband Walter (my grandfather) rebuilt their lives and raised the three children.  My grandfather was a businessman who owned and operated a metal fabrication plant in town -- water tanks, cookware, etc.  By the early 1960s the three daughters had grown up and started their lives.  The eldest (Gisela) married a local lawyer and settled in the nearby city of Mainz; the other two daughters (twins) moved on to new homes farther afield, my aunt (Renate) settling in Munich and my mother emigrating to the USA.

My mom met my dad and they started a family.  I was part of the first wave of children to hit the three German sisters, and more children soon followed.  In the picture to the right you see me in her arms (I'm about 3 months old) and that's my cousin Stefan, 3 years old and impossibly cute.  Every year or two we would pull up and travel over to Germany for some big family get-together, or would host a visit from some of them coming over to the US.  Germans get a lot of vacation time from work and so they're always traveling somewhere!

In 1980, we started a small "exchange program" within our extended family, where an American kid would head over to Germany for a year to live and go to school with the cousins, and conversely a German kid would come to the US for a year.  We toggled back and forth like this for something like 15 years.  For the 1980-1981 school year, I got to be the first one to do it, and so at the age of 14 I headed to Annweiler to live with Omi (a German term for grandmother similar to "Granny").  She was raising my cousin Stefan, a couple years older than me, so I attended his high school on the top of the hill on the edge of Annweiler.

So I spent the year in Annweiler with Omi and Stefan, exploring the town and utterly immersed in German culture.  I knew a tiny bit of German before I arrived, but once there I absorbed the language rapidly -- it is truly amazing how quickly a child brain can absorb language.  I was essentially fluent within months. Well, verbally fluent, where I could slur my way through the conjugations.  Masculine, feminine, neuter ...

Grandfather Walter ("Opa") had passed several years prior, so it was the three of us in the house (Omi, Stefan and me).  Already 60+ years old by then, Omi was a dynamo, running the household and keep us two boys in line.  Well, mostly me, I think Stefan could do no wrong.  She had some incredible gardens all around the house and a big cherry tree in the back that you could climb and gorge on (Julienne and Teresa have a great story about those cherries).  At night after dinner we'd entertain ourselves with a board game or just TV, and I remember a few thrilling evening outings with Stefan -- thrilling because he was a good 2-3 years older and so all his friends and activities were sooooo exciting for this awkward, dorky teen.

To the left is a picture of Omi with Julienne, my little sister, circa 1978.

After my year was up I returned to the US to start regular high school (having spent my freshman year overseas).  Entering as a sophomore was a little jarring, and ended up somewhat disrupting my curriculum (and grades).  So we all learned from that experience, and while my two younger sisters also eventually went to Germany for a year, they waited until finishing US high school and basically spent a "gap year" in Germany, a 13th year of high school.  Further, by then Stefan had completed his studies at the Annweiler school, and had moved on to college, so while my two sisters followed my example in going to Germany for a year, they did so in Mainz with my aunt's family and our cousins there.

So I was really the only one (of the US kids) to live with Omi and live in Annweiler.  She ran a tight ship (and didn't necessarily suffer uppity teenagers well) but also created a warm and loving household for us to grow up in.  And when it was time for family reunions, they were held in Annweiler.

Eventually she sold the Annweiler house (after some 50 years of residence) and moved to Mainz to be close to the family there.  As she aged she moved into assisted living but always with the extended family extremely close by and visiting frequently, if not daily!

We had a big family reunion in Mainz in 2008 and I got to see her one last time then (and Sharon got to meet her).  I also had a chance to get out to Annweiler and see the old house (now owned by someone else) and meet up with old family friends there.

In June the family will gather in Annweiler and we'll lay Omi to rest next to her husband.  I'll be proud to be there, representing the Monika / US branch of the family.

Rest in peace, Omi.

 

Comments

[Bine]

Thanks for sharing. I love the pictures, my favorite one is the one with Omi and the grandchildren in the backyard. So sweet!

[Teresa]

Thanks for writing this and sharing the pictures. Maybe you could bring copies of the pictures in June?
I´m happy to have a US branch of the family in our tree! :-)

[Chris C.]

Thanks Sabrina and Teresa! I only scanned a few pictures from the photo albums. I don't think I can bring the photo albums with me in June, but I might (ha ha) have time to scan some more in before then. The picture scans in this entry were done by me last week just by taking a photo with a camera. And you can tell -- the lighting is rotten, and I actually tried to light them well! Oh well. I have an old scanner that I need to set up.