A mother’s life, a daughter’s tale

Two stories begin in Germany on Christmas Eve in 1937.

A 10-year old girl misses her father who was drafted into Hitler’s army. She goes to church services and returns home. She opens the parlor door and there is a Christmas tree lit with candles. Standing next to it is her father.

“She adored her father. It was the best Christmas,” said Tammy Borden who grew up hearing her mother’s stories of growing up in Nazi Germany. She found them so fascinating she started recording them on her phone.

At a Christmas church gathering, Borden told the story of her mother’s surprise when her father returned home for Christmas. It was a catalyst for using the recorded conversations to write a book about her mother’s experiences. One story begets another story.

In 2014, Borden, her mother, sister and niece visited Ampleben, Germany where her mother grew up. Borden got to walk the cobblestone streets her mother walked as a girl.

“I really wanted to go with my mom to all the places where she shared these stories and gather the stories in their actual settings. I would hit record and take video. She would walk and say, ‘This is the pond where they dumped all the guns after the war,’” recalled Borden.

Borden started writing the book two years after the trip to Germany. Her goal was to preserve her memories in a narrative of her mother’s life.

Her mother died in 2020 at the age of 93. She lived outside of Bear Creek a few minutes from Borden’s home who lives outside of New London. Borden couldn’t look at the book. Progress stalled. She couldn’t bear to listen to the recordings and hear her mother’s voice.

In late 2022, she decided she could not keep putting off writing the book. She wrote it in third person. It did not ring true to her mother’s voice so she went back and rewrote the book in first person. She made it sound as if her mother was telling her story to the reader.

Borden finished it in six months and it was published in July 2023. It is titled, “Waltraud,” which is her mother’s given name. It means strength and was a popular girls name at the time in Germany.

The book can be found on Amazon and locally at the Book Cellar and Koinonia Makers Market in Waupaca. Since publication, Borden has been contacted by readers from around the world and has been asked to speak at book clubs and libraries. The feedback leaves her bewildered.

“I don’t know what’s going on but I love it. I’m flabbergasted,” she said.

Borden plans to produce an audiobook with her mother’s recordings at the end as bonus content. On her website (www.tammyborden.com) are videos of her mother, including a telling of the Christmas story.

Not everything in the book heartwarming. It follows the life of Waltraud Tomtschik, née Michaelis from when she was 10 years old until she arrives in America at the age of 24 in 1951 with her husband and two of Borden’s siblings. During that time, Hitler comes to power and her family refused to join the Nazi Party. Her father was drafted into the army.

Waltraud was forced into Hitler Youth. If she did not attend, she would have been sent to a labor camp. The nearby city of Braunschweig was bombed heavily to destroy its munitions factories. Air raids were a part of life.

“The children are the ones that became the war machine. They were the ones that were cleaning bricks and burying bodies. The things that my mother had to do were unfathomable – that you would make a child do those things,” said Borden.

Later, Waltraud defied the Nazis in her own way by helping English pilots crashed behind enemy lines.

“There is a stigma that I get sometimes from people, that all Germans were supportive of Hitler. They all turned a blind eye and put their head in the sand. And that is not the case. We put labels on entire people, groups not understanding there are people oppressed by those regimes who are powerless to speak out and if you do speak out, you disappear. It’s so hard for us to fathom that in our country. It was a real fear back then,” said Borden.

There were food rations and livestock ownership was limited. “Listening ears are everywhere,” said her grandfather referring to neighbors spying on neighbors. He raised rabbits for extra food in the basement but also because they were quiet.