Stuttgart

We left our nest in Bitche, which was sad. It had become home! We took the long bus ride to Stuttgart. It was exciting to cross the Rhine--but a bit anticlimactic considering what it meant 60 years ago. We just suddenly realized that we must be looking at the Rhine. The Rhine was enormous and filled with locks and canals.

I didn't have a sense of direction, so I don't know where we crossed and whether it had any relationship at all to where the pontoon bridge that appeared in Dad's pictures was.

We arrived in Stuttgart after some traffic trouble and brilliant driving by Maurice. We pulled up at the hotel opposite the train station. I hadn't realized at first that that's what it was since it has a giant Mercedes Benz symbol on top. I'd assumed it was their offices at first.

The Graf-Zeppelin Hotel, a railroad hotel, is a step up from Bitche's Hotel de la Gare! In fact, it was hard to distinguish it from an upscale Chicago hotel. The city as a whole was very American in flavor and the people would have blended right into Chicago in appearance.

The cars however had one distinct difference--no gas-guzzling SUVs and a preponderance of these cars--two narrow seats and room for a purse and a bag of groceries.

We went on to a reception at the temporary town hall with the person in charge of protocol for the city. The mayor was out campaigning for EU elections. Unfortunately, not enough time had been allotted for the reception--and in fact he told me that he'd planned on giving us a tour, which would have been interesting. The names around Stuttgart have a lot of interest since they show up in Dad's letters and in the photos. I'll just have to come back and explore on my own.

We received a lot of literature--I'll have to tackle it with my even shakier German.

The welcome we received was interesting. But my feelings being there and trying to talk to the city official were more complicated. I wanted to ask him about some of the place names and where the bridge that Dad built across the Neckar might have been, but asking about conquest and destruction is much harder when talking to the conquered rather than the liberated. He did say that the city had made a conscious decision to not rebuild the old buildings and reconstrct the past but rather to rebuild in a new style. It was also the first German city to rebuild.

A view of the Stuttgart in 1945.

Ellwangen

They are Hans and Inge Grozinger, teachers in the local high school. They had developed a project for their students of tracing the citizens of Ellwangen before the war who were Jewish and what happened to them. One of them was a boy whose parents had reached the U.S. He'd become a member of the Century Division and was instrumental in saving the town from destruction during the war. He'd used his command of the local dialect to find out whether there were troops stationed there. When assured that there weren't, the Century Division simply took over without an artillery barrage.

The Grozingers have created a memorial, which they had wanted to show us and give us a tour of the town, so I was really sad that we ran out of the time to see the work that they'd been doing. They had also arranged to have each of us receive the special beer made at our restaurant, which was really very good beer.

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