Heidi's Story

Heidi was born prematurely on 18th January 1924 at home in the bedroom at Horden Strasse 11, in her grandmother's 2 room flat, in Kuckelhausen, an area between Hagen and Haspe in Westphalia, Germany. The flat had one bedroom and one kitchen/living room and it was on the top (4th) floor with no lift. 

There were no electric lights in the passageways and stairs, only oil lamps that had to be lit and hung out in the night time on each floor by the occupants of that floor. There was no hot water in the building. There were no bathrooms. There was no running water in any of the flats, all water had to be brought in from shared taps on the landings. There were only shared toilets on the landings and no toilets in the flats. Each flat consisted of two rooms.

On the 21 April 2021 at the age of 97 Heidi was still able to remember the names of most of the occupants of the whole building.

On the ground and first floor of the building there was a pub, owned by Ferdinand von der Hohe. Ferdinand and his wife Caroline lived in a two room flat on the first floor and the rest of that floor was used as social and dining areas by the downstairs pub. "I liked that. I was very much involved with it and spent a lot of time down there. There was a very big hall with a stage in it." She called Ferdinand and Caroline Opa and Oma (trans: grandpa and grandma). Ferdinand also owned the building next door which he let as flats and where one of his two daughters lived.

On the second floor there were four flats including one with Emile Nulker, and his brother Eric, and their parents (Heidi was friend of Emile). One of the other three flats was occupied by Mr and Mrs Bachmann (no kids). Heidi can't remember the exact details about the other two flats but in one of them there were Mr and Mrs Anschutz and their two daughters called Ellie and Greta, and in the other was one single woman. "It was a good house with nice people. All the children played together and everyone got on. All the parents were friends and it was like one big family. No one was rich, they were all poor buggers. I had a good upbringing in that house".

On the third floor there were four flats including one with Heidi's friend Annie Rickmann, her brother Heinz, and their parents. Another flat on the third floor was occupied by Lisel Neuhaus, her twin sisters Toni and Wilma and their parents; another by Fritz Von der Hohe (son of the pub owners) and his wife and their two girls Greta and Adele; and another by Mr and Mrs Bonemann and their daughter Waltraud.

On Heidi's floor one of the rooms was occupied by Mr and Mrs Schroeder and their son Walter. Mr Shroeder's mother (Oma Schroeder) had another of the rooms. And Heidi, her Oma and her mother had their flat. Originally Oma had three rooms but after most of her children had left home she only had two (someone else moved into the vacated room but Heidi can't remember who they were and she didn't have much to do with them).

Heidi's Mother: Martha Medler. Age 19 when Heidi was born. Unmarried. Martha was living with her mother, Heidi's Oma (grandmother). Oma did not know Martha was pregnant as she strapped herself tight so no one could see. One day, Oma woke her to go to work and she started labour. Oma went down to the ground floor to the pub there and told Herr von der Hohe, the pub owner, who called his daughter, a midwife, who was living close by in Berliner Strasse. She arrived and Heidi was soon born as a tiny seven month baby. She was very small and delicate, and in the cold winter she was kept in the old traditional baking oven in the flat to keep warm. "They left the doors open".

Oma (Anna Medler) had nine living children at that time. She had lost two. They were (oldest first, in order): Emil, Otto, Wilhelm (Willie), Maria (Mariechen), Elsa, Anna (Enna), Martha, Hanna, Paula (Egon's mother). Martha was the seventh child and Heidi was the seven month baby. Heidi's name on the birth certificate is Gertrude Martha Edith Medler. She started using the name Heidemarie later after she left school and started work "because I didn't like my name". Heidemarie was a popular name at that time. Heidemarie is on her marriage certificate and passport in front the other names. She doesn't know/remember how she managed to get this on official documents without any official name change.

Oma used to have three rooms but this went down to two as the children grew up and left home. At the time of Heidi's birth only Martha and Paula, the youngest, remained at home. In later years it went down to only one room shared by Heidi and Oma.

There was no bathroom or toilet in the flat. Oma's rooms were on the top, the fourth, attic floor. Between each floor in the building was a landing. On the landing immediately below Oma's floor was an alcove with a large window. As a child Heidi used to climb out of that window and sit on a small open air roof area/ledge outside. There were no bars or railings for safety and she loved sitting there alone. Inside by the window there was a water tap and a sink - there was no water supply in the flat and all water had to be fetched from here.    

There were two toilets on each of the lower landings between each floor (but not on this nearest landing as it was a basic one just before the attic floor - so there were three lots of stairs to go down for Heidi and Oma to reach the nearest toilets). None of the flats had toilets or water supplies in them. The lower floors with shared toilets also had a shared sink and tap placed near the toilet doors. Between the two toilet doors was a window.

In the basement cellar each resident had a space with a door and lock to store things. Oma kept coal and potatos down there and it was Heidi's job as a child to go down and bring these up the stairs from the cellar to the attic. Heidi didn't like the cellar "because there were rats down there". There was only gas lamp lighting in the stairways but in the rooms there were electric lights.

Heidi's grandad, Oma's husband, was Sebastian Medler. He died in 1918. Oma's maiden name was Anna Marr. She was born in 1868 in Fulda in Hessen and grew up on a farm. Oma left school at 12 years of age and she was 72 when she died in 1940, a few months after the war started when Heidi was 16 years old. Heidi said on 16th Jan 2018: "She was very religious. She took me to church every Sunday until the day she died. I was the one who fetched the doctor and got her into hospital. The next morning she was dead. We slept in the same bed in our one room and she always said "Don't be scared if anything happens to me". She didn't recognise me when I came to the hospital in the morning. The doctor gave her an injection and soon she was dead. I think they killed her. I folded her hands in the hospital after she died and put her socks on. She always said if anything happens to me put my socks on because I don't want to have cold feet. I think she had bowel cancer because she said once that she was bleeding a bit. The last thing she said to me when I took her to the hospital was "Look after my place for me".

In the morning she was still alive but apparently did not recognise me. The doctors sent me out of the room while they gave her an injection. I returned and she died very soon after. I went to Aunt Hanna and Aunt Paula (who lived in Haspe) and also to Tanta Mariechen (who lived in Corbacher Strasse 20, Haspe) to tell them, and the word went around." Heidi was crying as she finished telling me this. Heidi wanted to stay in the flat but the relatives made her leave. "I would have been able to stay. I was only 16, but I was working and the rent was not very expensive. It was only one bloomin room. That really hurt me because I promised Oma I would look after her place and they didn't let me. It has annoyed me ever since. It was my home. I knew everybody in the house, the mum's the dads and the kids. It was Uncle Emile, he was the oldest and he took over and made me leave and said I had to go and stay with my mum. Oma meant a lot to me. She was my mum".

She was sent to live with her mother who was living at that time in Tulpin Strasse in Hagen. After only a few months her mum got into trouble with the police and was sent to jail and Heidi was alone again. She then had to give up her place and moved in with Aunt Paula. She was still only 16. She arranged for all of her mum's furniture to go into storage.

Heidi said on 16th January 2018: "I was quite a happy kid and I never cared if I had a mum around or a dad. It never bothered me. I was quite happy and had a lot of friends and cousins and never even thought of asking my mum, "who was my dad?" until I was grown up and had kids. But she wouldn't tell me. She said I will take it to my grave and said it's not good to open old wounds. This is one thing I would like to know. I just always thought my dad was in heaven, and I took on God as my dad and prayed to God as my Father. I had a little alter and prayed to My Father in Heaven."

Kindergarten
At around four years of age Heidi started kindergarten in nearby Langen Strasse, off Horden Strasse, and only a couple of minutes walk away. She walked there on her own each day.

Primary School
Haspe Bruch Catholic school. In Berliner Strasse. Next to the Church and Hospital in Haspe. She started at six years old. Oma took her the first few days. After that she walked to school each day with Annie Rickmann who lived in the same building, in the floor below, and was a couple of years older and went to the same school. A long walk. Three bus stops, but they walked. School started at 8. Finished at 12. Then they walked back. She would have lunch with Oma. Do homework. "And then play with all the kids who lived in the house".

Oma was religious. "She never talked about it but she was a very Catholic person." She took Heidi to church every Sunday "for as long as I can remember. As soon as I could walk I suppose, or even earlier". This was always the same church, the one next to her school, Haspe Bruch, in Haspe. The school and church are part of a large complex of attractive old buildings and open land on the corner of Berliner Strasse in Haspe. Her school building had the primary school on the ground floor and the secondary school was upstairs on the first floor. Her school building, the church, the orphanage, the children's hospital, the main hospital, the kindergarten, the mortuary, and the priest's house were all the same large area, with buildings around a green common, and behind all this is a great big park. 

In the beginning, when they had three rooms, and later two, entering the bedroom from the living room on the right side was a clothes stand to hang coats etc, after that was a sideboard and after that was Heidi's bed against the wall, followed by the far wall. On the other side of the room to Heidi's bed was Oma's bed, a double bed, also longways against the wall, and between the two beds down the middle of the room was a runner carpet and a table with a large statue of Mother Mary. Next to Oma's bed was a window, and after the window a large wardrobe, and between the wardrobe and the door was a gap where from around the age of four or five Heidi always had a small religious area that she made. This had small statue of Jesus, a couple of angels, one on either side of Jesus, and a flower bowl which Heidi kept full of real flowers, which she always picked herself outside in the nearby allotments and brought indoors to place in her shrine. She continued doing this until she was 16 years old and removed from the flat when Oma died.  She says of Jesus: "He was the only Dad I knew and he looked after me all my life". Not knowing her own father, and hearing about the father in heaven from a very early age, this was something that became very important for her and it was an integral part of her whole life. She says that Oma often stood and looked out of the window in that room. As a child she never thought about it but she realised later in life that the window looked out at the cemetery where Oma's husband was buried.

She would sometimes go to the Licht Luft Bad Schwimbad in the summer, a very big open air swimming pool over the railway line and up the hills behind Horden Strasse, in the afternoons with friends. "It was quite a way." In the winter she would play outside in the snow and loved going up the hills and coming down on her sled in the snow. From the age of four she went to the kindergarten and back on her own and she enjoyed her childhood. "They were good times. I had a different childhood than the children today. I was free to run around and play wherever I wanted. I brought myself up. Totally different. We went blackberry picking up in the hills in the summer. I made my own kites from wood and paper and flew them up in the hills. My childhood was fantastic. But at sixteen, overnight, just as the war was beginning, my life changed when Oma died. I watched the bombs dropping, they came anytime, day and night. The sirens went and you could see them coming. Lots of them, always in packs of nine, split into three groups of three (each group of three had one in front and two behind). I didn't go to take shelter. I stayed outside and watched. I didnt care any more after Oma died. I just watched. My good friend Annaliesa was killed by the bombs in a day time raid". 

On 3rd April 2021, recounting the above in Olhao, Heidi cried a lot when remembering her room and Oma's death. "I miss it. And I didn't get one thing from Oma to remember her by and keep close. Nothing. Oma asked me to take care of everything for her, but Uncle Emil took control". He gave nothing to Heidi and she was not even given one small personal item to keep. "I would buy those two rooms if I could. And I would live there even. We were so happy there. We were poor, but there was love."

"We were issued with gas masks and I think I used one a few times when they dropped things. Later, when I was in the Red Cross Military units, I saw the effects of them dropping phosphorus, which burned and shrivelled people up. I saw people shrunk and shrivelled up by this."  
  
In the flat in Kuchelhausen there was a long narrow rug between the two beds in the bedroom (when they had two rooms). Hanging on the wall was carpet beater which she used to clean the rug, which they called a Klupper, and this was also used by Heidi' s Oma for spanking the kids if they were very naughty. The only time Heidi remembers it being used on her was when around eight. She had taken her little cousin Helga, who was around three and a half and was visiting with her parents, Tanta Hanna and her husband, out on her scooter. Heidi was scooting down the hill in Horden Strasse with Helga standing in front of her on the platform when she suddenly lost control and it went over. Helga went over the handle bars and ended up with a cut chin which needed stitches. Heidi picked her up and took her home to Oma's but was worried to go in. She sat in the toilet on the landing with Helga for a while because she didn't want to go up because she knew she had done wrong and would be told off by Oma and by Helga's parents. Helga was also scared to go in. ("She was a lovely kid. Very pretty. She had a funny life as well poor thing. After she lost her father and mother, she then had a still birth and started to drink. She would call on Egon, drunk, to pick her up"). Oma went to get the Klupper from the wall and Heidi ran and hid under the bed. But Oma got her out and she had a couple of smacks on the backsides with the Klupper.  

Heidi Hardman 18 January 1924 - 25 July 2024

Visit the Hardman Institute for Science and Consciousness Studies - a venture inspired by Heidi's unwavering faith in there being  "much more than we know" and launched in her memory.