Ursula:
I’m not sure what is real memory and what is second
hand memory for me. I was very young
when the beginning of it happened...I was a little over a year old. My brother, Armin, had turned four on
October 28 of that year, so his recollection is probably more real than
mine. I do think that I remember my
mother standing by the big round oak dining table and crying. My brother remembers the two strangers in a
big black car driving into the farmyard while Dad, with Armin’s enthusiastic
“help”, was fixing a fence nearby. And
of course Armin remembers the scene by the table with the two strangers, by
then identified as F.B.I. agents,
removing pictures from a family album and taking them, along with my
father off to places unknown to us.
This happened late afternoon on December 9, 1941, two days after the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one day after the U.S. declared war on Japan
and two days before the U.S. declared war on Germany. The next really clear memory I have is of my dad coming home
sometime in August of 1943.
(1811 –1972)
Karl F. Vogt, my father, was born on February 18,
1906, the firstborn of Kasper and Anna Marie Vogt (nee Schlager) at Dunne near
Bunde in Westfalen, Germany. He was the
oldest of eight children: Karl, Marie, Wilhelm, Mina, Heinrich, Anna, Marta and
Lisbeth. Anna died soon after birth.
Kasper and Anna Marie owned a small farm, and in winter to
earn a little extra money and especially to be entitled to social security and
old age pension, they made cigars. This part of Westfalen, Ravensberg,
was noted for its cigar industry.
Both Kasper and Anna Marie made special hand-rolled cigars. This work was done at home and then
delivered to the factory. When the
children were small the parents usually hired a Kindermadchen (nursemaid) to
look after them, so that Kasper and Anna Marie could spend as much time as
possible at their cigar making. During
the growing season, the family
concentrated on the farm. They had a
few acres upon which they grew a big vegetable garden, rye, and sugar beets,
and they usually had a few animals. The
barn was actually the lower part of the house which was the custom then. It was kept scrupulously clean so that
animal odors would be kept to a minimum.
Kasper’s father was Carl Friedrich Vogt (born in
1846) who had a fair sized farm and was also a civil engineer. He and his brother Johann built many of the roads in and around Bunde and reclaimed swamps for farm use. For a number of years he was also the
administrator of the “Rittergut Bokel”.
This estate exists to this day and still has a moat around it. The owners
back then were the Konig family who came from Russia during the
revolution where they had been court officials of the Czar. When young, Carl Friedrich served in the guards of the Kaiser, which was quite an honor since only soldiers
of a certain height and stature could be a part of these troops. He
also took part in the war of 1870/71 against France and proudly wore a
row of medals on his uniform. According
to Dad and his siblings, their grandfather was a real Prussian who believed in
practicing discipline in his family, down to his grandchildren. He was a big,
powerful, stern man, unlike his wife, my dad’s grandmother, who was a petite, lively, fun loving woman named Anna Marie Elsabein nee
Schmidt. Together they produced five
children: Kasper, my grandfather, (born
in 1877), along with Heinrich, August and Karl and one daughter, Anna. Unlike his father, Kasper turned out to be a
small, fine boned man (only about 5’6”)
and so perhaps received his physical attributes from his petite mother.
The genetic combination of his two Vogt grandparents
was really evident in my dad. He was
physically quite robust, fairly tall, but with relatively small feet and hands.
However, it was his personality that really reflected these two ancestors. He
could be as stern and unbending as a Prussian general, and as funny and
outrageous as Laurel and Hardy. One
incident, when my younger brother,
Richard, was just a baby, sticks
out vividly in my mind. Dad had just
changed Richard’s diaper and came into the room holding a piece of tissue
covered with some yellow icky looking stuff.
“I wonder what this tastes like?”
he said in his loud booming voice.
Whereupon he sniffed it and then took a big lick of it! Yikes(!), I promptly gagged and lost my
breakfast all over the floor. Well, the
yellow stuff turned out to be mustard,
of course, and Dad thought the
whole thing was quite hilarious. Mom
was not amused, so guess who cleaned up the mess on the floor? Then again Dad could be stern and
scary. My older brother, Armin, who was quite a rascal in his day, can
attest to Dad’s sternness. His
gra