Marcelle (Koellsch) Stoltz

    I grew up in a town near Metz in Alsace-Lorraine, which in my childhood was part of France. It
    was an industrial area, and consequently was more prosperous than much of the rest of the
    country. There were coal mines and steel manufacturing plants. There were ten children in
    the family and our house was large enough so that we were comfortable there. We even had
    an indoor bathroom, which wasn't common in much of the country at that time. I was the
    seventh child. There were three boys born after me. Two of the rooms were divided among
    the five girls. The two older girls got one room, and then I went in there. I was not welcome. I
    was about five years younger, and they had a completely different view of things. "Why do we
    have to have her in our room??? Why?"

    There was also a large kitchen. My parents had a radio, which we were not allowed to touch.
    My father had been a soldier in the German Army in the First World War. He had been born
    in the town of Baerenthal in 1897. When I married, they wanted to know my father's
    nationality because they wanted to confirm my nationality. He had become a French soldier
    because of the Treaty of Versailles. With the treaty, Alsace-Lorraine went back to the French.
    I have a paper showing that I was a French citizen because of that.

    The countries didn't want to give up any of their population; especially males, because they
    could serve in the army. Even when I married an American, it was stated that I was a French
    citizen. We were raised with both languages. My mother was good at both. My father was
    more at ease with German. We spoke French all day with my mother, and when my father
    came home we spoke German.

    I was born in 1934. I don't know when I started to notice that some things were not right. We
    saw carriages drawn by horses and poor people loaded on them, leaving from somewhere. I
    didn't know where they came from. Then the Germans came in and claimed the land. They
    said, "You're not French. You're German." When I went to school we were taught German.
    They changed our first names to the German forms. Andre became Andreas; Paulette
    became Paula; Margaret became Margareta; Roger became Rudiger. And here I was,
    Marcelle. There wasn't really a German form of that, so they called me Marta. The note home
    said, "From this day forth, this child will be known as Marta." Parents were told not to speak
    French with their children. Under totalitarian governments like that, you'd better do what they
    tell you.

    I started school in 1940-41. We were indoctrinated there. A large picture of Hitler hung in
    each classroom, and we'd sing national songs. We had a Protestant church, which they
    called a Protestant temple. The Germans always had some sports event for the children on
    Sunday mornings. You couldn't go to church, Not that they forbid it, but you were pretty much
    expected to be at the sports events. They had a group for the young girls and group for the
    older girls. The older girls' group was called BDM for League of German Girls. We had
    uniforms, although they didn't have swastikas on them.

    Sometimes classes were interrupted because bombs would be falling. Not far from us there
    was a plant where the Germans were making bombs. They were called obuszerks. In the
    early years of the war, it must have been the English who would come to try to bomb that
    company. Earlier than that, one of my brothers and one of my sisters were wounded by
    shrapnel. Margaret got it in her arm and Andre's injury was near his eye, although it didn't
    damage his eye. It happened at a marketplace that had concrete walls and a slanted roof. It
    was like a farmers' market. There were soldiers there. One time I woke up and plaster was
    falling on my face. Bunkers were built in our backyard. They weren't just for us, but for
    everyone in the area. They were huge and had thick walls. I'd grab my mother's skirt and
    hang on for dear life when we went there. I was a very fearful child. I still get startled very
    easily. It's probably because I was raised during the war.

    The Germans had a lot of prisoners in our town. I don't know if they were Russians or where
    they were from. They used to make toys. They'd be given materials and they could sell them
    for Christmas.

    My parents had chickens and goats, because they had all these children. I can remember
    drinking milk warm from the goat. They also raised a lot of other food. During the war they
    had ration tickets that were needed to buy things. I'm amazed when I think of how much they
    had to do to raise all of us. My mother sewed, she knitted, and she made our clothes. She
    taught us how to knit and mend our clothes, and do all kinds of things. When the tomatoes
    were ripening, she would preserve bottles and bottles of them. She'd also preserve beans
    and make jams. She had a garden behind the house, and we'd have to weed it. We'd go with
    my father to the larger fields where he had planted potatoes, kohlrabi and carrots. We'd pick
    the bugs off of the potato plants. They'd make holes in the ground, line them with hay, and
    put the root vegetables in them to preserve them for the winter. My father would make
    sauerkraut.

    My mother was a good cook. On Fridays she would bake. I don't know how she coped with it
    all. At Christmas she'd make a lot of cookies. We'd pick hazelnuts in the forest. We'd also pick
    raspberries, blackberries and little strawberries that grew wild. My mother was like a
    nutritionist. When the doctor would come to give us shots, he'd tell her that she had the
    healthiest and tightest children. I still wonder how she did it. She was the disciplinarian in the
    family. I don't think I ever got a spanking from my father.

    My sister Freda was a daredevil. What I didn't have in courage, she had. She was
    unbelievable. All the backyards then were fenced in because people had chickens, goats,
    rabbits, and sometimes pigs. We always had to prove our courage to Freda. One day she
    told me (since I was such a "fraidy cat) to go into one of the neighbor's chicken coops and get
    an egg. The kids opened the little gate and pushed me in. As soon as I was in there, before I
    even got to where the hens were laying, the rooster jumped on my back. I think I got an egg,
    but the rooster had ripped my sweater. One that my mother had knit. At the next meal, my
    mother said, "Mede (which they called me when I was young), what happened to your
    sweater?"

    I wasn't good at telling fibs, so I said, "The rooster did it."

    "What rooster?" she asked.

    I don't know where Freda was sitting, but if she had been in reach, she would have kicked me
    under the table to let me know not to tell. I said that Freda had told me to go into the
    neighbor's chicken coop and get an egg to prove my courage. Well...we both got spankings...
    with a rug beater. I told our daughter, Catherine this story, and later she found a rug beater
    for sale. She bought it and gave it to me. I have it hanging on the wall.

    In those days they didn't have vacuum cleaners. To clean rugs they were brought outside
    and hit again and again with the beater. When it snowed they'd take all the rugs outside and
    lay them face-down on the snow. They'd beat the dickens out of them. You should have seen
    all the dirt in the snow. It really didn't wet the rugs when the snow was cold and dry. They'd
    come back into the house looking like new.

    Freda could swim, dive and outrun anybody. If a boy dared to be naughty to her, oh, my God!

    We used to swim in the Moselle River. There was a pond, too. It had been dug for the stones,
    but it wasn't a quarry. Small stones and sand came out of it. There weren't any regular
    swimming lessons. You learned from your brothers and sisters. It was after the war that we'd
    swim in the Moselle River, because we lived in the city by then.

    In 1944, the front was moving close to us and we were told to get out of our house. We were
    evacuated. My parents had prepared for this time. My mother would cook the butter to brown
    it slightly. It kept better that way. She had tubs of that. They took blankets and a few other
    things. The soldiers said we would be in the woods for 24 hours. We were in the woods,
    camping with another family when a soldier came and told us we couldn't stay there because
    the front was moving that way. We walked about six miles to the nearest town where there
    was a train station. We kids had taken scooters and bicycles, but eventually they were left at
    the side of the road. You get tired of pushing them after a while. My father had a wagon that
    he had used for his garden, and we brought that along with food and blankets and things in it.

    At the station our family was crowded into a compartment on the train. I think we were on our
    way for three or four days. At one time the train was bombed. It stopped and people ran into
    the bushes nearby. I can remember seeing women holding babies. As young as I was, it didn't
    quite register with me how dangerous that situation was. They even shot machine guns from
    the train.

    At one time the train stopped when we were over a river. I don't remember what river. My
    mother said if they bombed us while we were there, if the bombs didn't kill us, we'd drown
    when the train went into the river.

    We traveled into the eastern part of Germany. The nearest city to where we were was
    Eisenach. We stayed there for a couple of days The Germans were fairly organized for this
    evacuation. Most of the stations where we stopped had hot food for us. Not big meals, but hot
    soup. Also, they would disinfect us to help us stay disease-free, and free of fleas. There were
    prisoners on the train too, and they were disinfected also.

    They didn't want to leave us in the large towns. They put us in small villages. The villagers
    were called into the plaza in the center of town and told that if they had any rooms available
    they had to take some of us in. They were parceling us out, and I was hanging on to my
    mother's skirt. Two of my older sisters had to go to one house, and two others to another, on
    the same street. My brother Roger, my three younger brothers, and I stayed with my parents.
    My oldest brother had been drafted into the German Army.

    An engineer with his wife and children were living on the first floor of the house we were
    assigned to. He worked at the salt mine that was in that town. On the second floor there was
    a politician and his wife, who was a singer. They had a dog. We had the attic, which had two
    small rooms and a large landing. There was a kitchen with table, chairs and a couch. My
    father used to sleep in the kitchen. We'd have to squeeze into the beds. We lived there for a
    year. The people in the village had to give up dishes, cutlery, whatever little they had to set
    us up. Then there was what the Germans called winter help. That included things like
    blankets. It was cold in that region.

    Like all of the Germans, we had tickets for food. They had very good bread there. Sometimes
    supper was a baked potato and a piece of liver sausage. Everything was rationed, of course.
    You had to have tickets for everything. Sometimes my parents would have the money, but
    couldn't find what they wanted to buy on the market.

    The Germans also gave out a monthly payment that was called kindergeld. (child benefit)
    Often women don't want to have babies during wartime, and this was a payment to encourage
    them to. After the war, the French did something like that, too. It was called les allocations
    familiales. World War I had killed so many young men, and World War II killed even more of
    the next "crop." They were trying to rebuild the population. Women would get allocations
    during each trimester of pregnancy, and then another payment when the child was born.
    They did something like that in Canada also. One of my sisters lived there and she got
    money for her children.

    My father had to work in the salt mine, and my sisters had to work also. One worked serving
    customers in a butcher shop. The others had to work in the fields. There were no younger
    men available for work like that during the war. I don't remember how my sisters got paid.
    They might have gotten wages, or maybe they were given food. I just don't remember.

    The people were overwhelmed with refugees like us, but they were very nice to us. The
    Germans have always been very well organized people. They're hard-working and frugal.
    They had very little, but they even gave us gifts for Christmas. They gave food to my parents,
    including huge cans of vegetables. The engineer downstairs brought cans of vegetables to
    my parents. Food was hard to come by, so to give it to refugees was very generous. We
    didn't go to school all that year. They didn't have room for all the refugees in the area.

    When the American front was getting close to us, we'd see the fires and hear the booms. My
    mother told Freda and me to go down to the village and get some milk. There wasn't any
    because it hadn't come in from the farms that were by that time under American control. As
    we were going up the hill to return home, we could see the Americans coming out of the
    woods. The day before there had been a train that had a large amount of ammunition on it. It
    couldn't go forward and it couldn't go backwards. Everyone in the village, including us kids,
    had to go down to the train to help get all of the ammunition off of it and throw it into the river.
    We had to empty the whole train! First they had wanted to explode it, but they decided not to
    because that would have destroyed many of the houses and probably killed some people.

    There was a civilian group in town that was sort of considered to be "the last resort." They
    dug a hole in the road and filled it with ammunition. They were going to set it off and blow up
    the first American tank that came into town. The engineer who lived in our house reasoned
    with everybody, saying it would only destroy one tank, and after that they would come in
    shooting. He talked for a long time before he got the others to agree not to do that. They
    finally decided to put a white flag on the church.

    The Americans came in peacefully. They went around from house to house, and took knives
    and looked for guns. They never roughed anybody up or anything like that. They just looked
    around. Then the whole army came through. We saw tanks, trucks, cannons. The Russians
    were later given control of that part of Germany, but it was the Americans who were there first.

    My sister, my older brother and I went to see what we could find near where the Americans
    were. I found the first Life Savers I had ever seen. There was stuff everywhere. Stuff, stuff,
    stuff! You couldn't believe it! We found a large can of peanut butter, but we didn't know what
    it was. We knew what peanuts were, but we had never seen peanut butter. We tasted it and
    decided that it was good so we took it home. We found all kinds of cookies that we took home
    also.

    At that time the coloreds were still segregated from the whites. They came into town later.
    When I first saw them, I ran home. For a few days we kids were allowed to roam around and
    scrounge around for food or whatever we could find. There was a field kitchen that we would
    go to. They would feed us refugees, but they wouldn't feed the Germans. The older kids were
    ashamed to go to the camp looking for food, but that didn't bother us younger ones. I
    remember that they give us pea soup. When they had food that hadn't been eaten, they'd put
    it in a ditch and cover it with dirt. The Germans would dig it up and eat it.

    A week before the Americans got to us, my sister Caroline had been looking out the window
    one night. She called to our parents and told them to look out the window. The whole sky was
    lit up. It appeared that things were hanging in the sky. The whole village was lit. I don't know
    how they did that. We thought we were going to be bombed, but actually it was to tell the
    flyers not to bomb this area. They knew the treasures were there. In the film it says they didn't
    know about it until some people on the street told them. Maybe they knew because someone
    in the family had been working there. My father never said anything. They had airplanes
    flying overhead continuously until they had taken everything out.

    Before long, there was martial law. Nobody could go out of their houses from nine in the
    morning until three in the afternoon. The reason for this is that they had found out that the
    salt mine was loaded with gold, and all kinds of treasures that had been buried there. The
    movie, "The Monument Men," was about that and the little village where we were living. My
    father never said anything about that. Maybe he didn't know. The way they show it is that
    there were big doors in one section of the mine. Behind the doors was an area as big as a
    football field, with a huge amount of gold, and paintings and stained glass windows from
    cathedrals. The American Army had huge, long trucks that they used to carry it all off. I don't
    know how long; maybe a week it took to do it. When you see the film, you see that they
    wanted to get everything out quickly because they wanted to beat the Russians.

    When they were finished taking everything out of the salt mine, the Americans took all of the
    refugees and put us in the camps where the prisoners were. They were going to repatriate us
    back to our home countries. They put us in trucks with two benches in the back, but they put
    way more people in them than would fit on the benches. With three little boys, my parents had
    a great deal of difficulty, and almost lost one of them at that time. You'd see in the
    newspapers for years after that people who were still looking for their children who had gotten
    lost at that time, or when they were relocated when the front was moving toward their location.

    The period after the war was a hard time, especially for my parents and my older sisters. With
    so many young soldiers around, who were enthusiastically interested in the girls, parents felt
    that they had to be very protective of their daughters. After a time, we were repatriated back
    to Alsace-Lorraine. There was lawlessness there for some time after the war. People were
    being beat up; they'd spit in people's faces. Even people that had been your neighbors would
    treat you like that. They'd shave people's heads, especially women, and make a design of a
    swastika on it.

    Getting home was not nice. When we got back to France, we weren't allowed to go back to
    our house. Someone else was living there. We lived in the streets for three days. My parents
    were cooking on bricks. Then they found a place for us. It wasn't an apartment; it was an old
    gendarmerie. We never got to go back to our house. I don't think my parents even got their
    furniture back. If they got any, it was very little. They had money that they had saved during
    the war. They had saved because even though there were things they could have used and
    would have liked to have bought, they often didn't have ration tickets for such items. The
    French government took the money and said they would be given francs in return. They
    never got anything.

    My father was accused of collaborating with the Germans because he had worked in the salt
    mine during the time we were there. My older sister had worked too. When you live in a
    totalitarian country like Hitler had, you do what you're told. You just don't say no. You do what
    you have to do. If my father hadn't worked, he wouldn't have gotten ration tickets. He wouldn't
    have been able to get anything. It was a matter of survival.

    There was a couple who were friends of my parents. They had three daughters and a son.  
    During the war, the son became missing. He'd never been declared dead. His mother hoped
    until the day she died that she'd hear from him. The husband had worked in city hall. After
    the war he wasn't allowed to work in Moselle. They beat him so hard, that poor man. He found
    a job far away. They couldn't find an apartment together. They were separated for years. He
    was a gentle soul. He had been badly mistreated. He died from loneliness, from being away
    from his wife and his children.

    Those of us who had been in Germany during the war were called "busch." It was a
    derogatory term meaning pro-German. I had started to hate the French because they were
    so mean to the people. In Germany, people had been nice to us. When we returned to our
    own people, they were mistreating us. People were nearly beaten to death. When the
    authorities came to school, or when the principal came into our classroom, we were supposed
    to stand up to show respect. After the war when we were back in Alsace-Lorraine, when the
    authorities came to our room they'd say the busch have to remain seated. They didn't want
    our respect. In that way, even we young kids were mistreated. I felt awful about things like that.

    As I learned later, the Germans certainly had an agenda, but to a child, it seemed that we
    were treated well. If the people living in the village even had an extra spoon, they had to give
    it up so that the refugees could have it. A fork, a bowl, whatever they had extra, they had to
    give it up so that the refugee families could function in almost a normal manner.

    When we got back to France, they took everything away. As a kid, I didn't know about the
    politics. I just knew that people weren't nice to us. We hadn't been allowed to return to our
    house. Now instead of Hitler on the classroom wall, there was DeGaulle. I'd think, "What good
    have you ever done for me?" I was resentful about what had happened to us. Neighbors
    against neighbors. If you had a neighbor who owed money to you, he might beat you up and
    say that you had made extra money while the Germans were there, and he didn't. People
    were afraid to go out of their houses. I don't remember how long it lasted.

    It was at that time that my older brother went to Australia. He said he wasn't French, he wasn't
    German; he didn't know what he was, but he knew that if a war broke out, he could be
    drafted. He went to Australia and became an Australian citizen.  My three younger brothers
    became French soldiers in the Algerian war.

    I had a good number of young men at that time who liked to court me. I met Charles because
    he was a friend of the cook. I remember that when my father was in the army, he had said
    that it was good to be a friend of the cook. When we decided to get married, Charles had to
    get permission. The Army had to have Charles checked on because he had a security
    clearance. FBI agents went to the town he came from in south Jersey and talked to the
    neighbors. Charles's mother heard about that and wrote to him to ask what kind of trouble he
    was in. He told her that he wasn't in any trouble.

    Charles and I were married in 1957. They had to publish the banns of marriage at city hall.
    "This person is marrying that person," goes behind glass. It had to be posted there for six
    weeks, or maybe more, so the public would know in case anyone has an objection. Charles
    was 28 at the time, but he was told that he had to go see the chaplain. He said, "You're six
    years younger than me. You're 22 and I'm 28. What are you going to tell me?" You had to get
    married at city hall. If you wanted to get married in church too, you could, but the legal part of
    marriage was the ceremony by the mayor at city hall. The mayor was a Communist and didn't
    want to marry us. He didn't say so, but he wasn't there. He didn't want to marry an American
    to a French woman. We were married by the vice-mayor.

    The base was on a main street in downtown Metz. If we were driving through when the flag
    was going up in the morning, or coming down in the evening, any GI would stop and salute,
    and that would stop traffic. The residents there found that rather annoying. NCOs and
    officers had been told that they had to take two hours of French classes each day.

    The cook I (Marcelle) mentioned and his wife came with one child and left with three. I used to
    take the little boy, Bradley, to my parents. There was an Irish girl living upstairs who took the
    other two.  One day Carl, the cook, said to me, "I'm going to bring a GI over here who just
    arrived from America. He's a little shy." Carl wasn't as tall as me, and I thought he was going
    to bring a guy shorter than me. I told him not to do that. He said it would be okay. That's how
    we got introduced.

    Carl had a car, and with his wife and children, he brought Charles over and introduced us.
    We went to Luxemburg. The GIs based there went to Luxemburg often. They were paid in
    script, and they got a better exchange rate for francs there than they did in France. I
    gradually learned English by conversing with Carl's wife, Ginger. (Ginger Rogers her name
    was; can you believe it? That was her name.) It's helpful to know German when learning
    English. There are a lot of words in German that are close to English words. Speaking both
    French and German was a big help to me in learning English. Anyway, with the little French
    he knew, and the little English I knew, we got by.

    When we got back to Alsace-Lorraine, I had a hard time speaking French. That had been
    forbidden by the Germans. It was hard for the kids to get back to school. We had missed two
    or three years. In my generation, at 14 you would go to an apprenticeship. Even if you were
    going to be a saleslady, there was a period of apprenticeship. You wouldn't be paid as a
    saleslady. You'd be paid at an apprentice rate. People who were better off would send their
    kids to some school for higher learning.

    My background is more German than French. Like most Germans, I'm orderly, I'm frugal; I try
    to make things work. When Charles and I came to America in 1959, he made approximately
    $75 a week. That was about the cost for a month's rent. Gas was 17 cents a gallon. Bread
    was about 35 cents a loaf. So $75 a week wasn't too bad. I could always save money. It's
    natural to me to save money. I don't know why. I think things over before I buy anything, I say,
    Not now, maybe later.

    We moved to the United States in 1959. I was very nervous about that. Charles came over
    first. When you're in the military and you get the orders, you have to go right away. It took a
    bit longer for me. I had to do a lot of paperwork. I had to go to the embassy in Paris. I had to
    get a blood test and a lung X-ray. They had to check to see if I had a criminal record. They
    had to know of the background of my parents. They wanted to know if I was going to the U.S.
    to become a prostitute! I was married. What a strange question, but it was on the
    questionnaire. You had to have a sponsor. Of course Charles was my sponsor.

    Charles was stationed at Fort Devens. I stayed with my sister and her husband for a couple
    of days before the trip. I crossed the Atlantic in a propeller driven military plane. It was a long,
    cold flight. We had to stop in the Azores to refuel. We landed at McGuire Air Force Base in
    New Jersey. When I got off of the plane, Charles wasn't there. I sat on a bench and thought,
    "Now what?" If he didn't come, then what? What would I do?

    After a while Charles arrived. He took me to Philadelphia, and showed me the sights. We went
    to the historical sites and to several museums. We went to New York for a couple of days,
    and then back to Philadelphia to meet his family. They were all gathered - the whole clan.
    The house was full of people, and my English was very poor. I was terrified. I couldn't leave
    sight of Charles. His mother had made a big dinner, and had tables stretching from the
    kitchen through the dining room and living room. Everybody was...looking at me.

    I was very well dressed, with an off-white skirt and a blue top. I always had long hair. In those
    days it was auburn and I had it in a long braid that went almost to my waist. I wore very little
    makeup. The family was very lovely. Everybody hugged me. At home there had been no such
    thing as hugging all the time. Charles's mother said she never thought he would bring me to
    meet the family.

    When we got to Fort Devens, we began to look for an apartment. First we looked in Ayer. I
    didn't know much about Ayer, but I decided that I didn't want to live there. Next we looked in
    Fitchburg. The first place we looked at, I said no. It was a mess. We ended up renting an
    apartment on Rollstone Street. The couple we rented from, Thelma and Howard, didn't have
    children, and they rented the upstairs. It was a furnished apartment so we didn't need
    furniture or appliances, but we went down to Aubuchon's and bought dishes and sheets.
    Charles already had some pots and pans, and a coffee pot.

    Thelma and Howard were very nice. I was such a lucky girl. They almost adopted me like a
    daughter. Thelma's mother lived with them, but she was in a hospital when we were first living
    there. They wanted me to go to meet her, but I said, no, I didn't want to meet her while she
    was in the hospital. I'd meet her when she got home.

    When they went to bring her home, I was really curious. When they arrived, I looked down
    from upstairs. I saw an elderly lady getting out of the car, and I said to myself, "Oh my God,
    here comes trouble." She looked a bit like Queen Mary, Elizabeth's grandmother. She wasn't
    in the house thirty minutes when she said, "You go get that girl up there!" They had been
    praising me, telling her of this beautiful French girl with beautiful hair.

    Thelma called to me, "Marcelle, could you come down? My mother wants to meet you." I was
    very polite, and very shy, but I wanted to go back upstairs. I was a bit awed and a bit afraid of
    her because she looked so authoritarian. Before long, though, she became very friendly with
    me. "Marcelle, come down. I've baked cookies," Mrs. Welch would say, and I'd go down and
    have cookies with her.

    Mrs. Welch was from German stock. Her husband was from Kansas. They had come to
    Massachusetts when he was diagnosed with leukemia because he could get better care here.

    Thelma and Howard introduced me to Halloween. We didn't really have that in France. They
    told me how to prepare for it. They also advised Charles on how to buy a car, and they came
    with us when we bought our first one. They'd have us for Thanksgiving. Mrs. Welch just loved
    me.

    Next door there was an Italian family named Cassinari. They would compete with our landlord
    and landlady and her mother to be nice to me. They had three daughters and three sons.
    They'd invite us to spaghetti dinners. In the summers Charles would be spending a lot of time
    at Camp Drum in New York, training National Guard troops. I'd be alone a lot, and Mrs.
    Cassinari would take me to the Cape. They wanted me to take part in all sorts of things. In
    addition to dinners, they'd invite me to showers; baby showers and wedding showers.

    Mr. Cassineri would sit in the yard a lot. I'd sit with him, and we'd talk, as well as I could talk.
    He had been a barber. When my trunks came from Europe, he helped me open them. He told
    his wife that I had all kinds of riches. I wondered what he had seen to make him say that. She
    told me that he had seen my silver set. My family had bought that for me because I was going
    far away.

    The first time I went to a funeral home was when Mr. Cassineri died. I couldn't believe it. He
    was all made up and had beautiful clothes on, and was in a silky casket, half closed. To me,
    this was just amazing. At home, when they waked people, for three days I think, there wouldn't
    be any makeup. When you saw someone in a casket, you'd see the wood. There wouldn't be
    any lining. At first I thought it was sacrilegious. I didn't say anything of course, but he was a
    simple man who wore simple clothes.

    Both of the families in Fitchburg were so nice to me! I remained friends with them until most of
    them died. We'd been friends and had gone to weddings, christenings and funerals. We also
    knew some people from Fort Devens.

    Charles was eventually reassigned and we went to Texas. Later we were in Europe. Before
    we left for Europe, we went back to Fitchburg for a visit. I said to Mrs. Welch that I'd be seeing
    her when we got back in four years. "Marcelle," she said, "I'll be pushing up daisies by then."
    We crossed the Atlantic from New York to Bremerhaven on the Navy ship, the Geiger. Mrs.
    Welch wrote to me once after we got there. The next letter I got was from Thelma, saying she
    had passed away.

    I had arrived here such a "scaredy cat," not knowing anything about the country, and it was
    like God put these two families here for me. They'd call me down from the porch. "You come
    down!" They'd share food with me. Things I wasn't familiar with. Watermelon. I'd never seen
    watermelon before. They'd sometimes laugh about my accent. They loved my hair.

    I didn't go to work until our daughter, Catherine, was almost twelve. I could bring her to school
    and Charles, who had flex hours, could pick her up. He did almost all the shopping. He'd do
    the banking, too. I worked for one company as a shipping clerk for nine years. I never cashed
    a check for years. Once when Mobil bought the company I was working for, they laid off all of
    the older employees, including me. When I went to the credit union in Fitchburg to cash a
    check, the teller said, "Oh, now we have a face to go with that name."

    We had lived in Fitchburg for about forty years, but when our daughter moved to Medway a
    few years ago, we decided we'd like to be closer to her and her family, so that's why we're
    here on Northrop Street.

               
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