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The Story of the Woman I Call Grandma Written By: Andrew
“Hurry! Hurry!” said Sonja’s mother “ We need to get to the bomb shelter, the alarm is going off.” These words were familiar to my grandmother Sonja Hilda Dullien. She was born on March 26, 1936 in Berlin Germany. Sonja grew up during World War II. I now know her as Grandma Brown.
Her parents were Hans Dullien and Hilda Dullien. She used to have one brother named Hans Dullien, after her dad, but he was killed during World War II. Her school was just around the corner. It only went to 8th grade and she completed that. She had learned all the algebra in only the third grade. In third grade she had a teacher that was 84 years old. They didn't have many men left after the war so they had to make due with what they had.
After she went to school she went to work. There weren't to many jobs so at first she worked at a laundry business. She would clean people's clothes like we have laundry mats today. Then after she was done with that job she worked at a knitting factory. There, she would knit clothes for people. Her wage was not very high even for Germany prices. After she did knitting she stated to make surgery needles. Grandma worked there the longest. She said “And then they fired me because I got married.” When she got fired from there she went back to the knitting factory.
She lived in Germany for a long while but she finally moved to the United States. Grandma moved here in 1955. She couldn't speak much English so she had to learn how. Grandma Brown went to work and couldn't understand English so they had to show her. She had a very unique way of learning English… she read comic books. She read the little boxes in the pictures. It took her a little while but it worked. When she came to the US she found that a lot of things were different to her. For on thing their customs were different. They didn't have Thanksgiving in Germany. And for Christmas the children would put their shoes out on the porch and hope that St. Nick would come and give them some fruit or candy but only if they had been good. Since children in Germany rarely ever got any treats, they were always very good.
During the war, in Germany, she said that she remembered the Russians coming in and bombing their town. She also said, “We would have to get up in the middle of the night and go to the basement of our apartment building. She said that her father and her brother were in the war. Her father didn't see to much of the war, no where near as much as grandma. She said her brother was on the way home on a train and he was wounded but doing fine. He had been shot in the stomach with a dumb-dumb bullet, which is a bullet that goes in and explodes. The war was catching up to them though. For some reason the train had to stop. They took everyone who could walk and everyone else they had to shoot. So they suppose he got shot. Meanwhile her father, Hans, was in a prisoner camp of England. He was one of the lucky ones because when they were being shipped to another state him and a few other people escaped. He ran back to the apartment and stayed. Grandma got a letter from the town her brother was supposed to arrive in. She got a note back saying that Hans Dullien was dead. They weren't sure which one. Once they met up with her father she knew it was her brother that was dead.
My personal memory is just going over her house and talking to her or having dinner at her house. My dad said that “It was strict house rules and everybody did their share.” As you can see my grandmother has an interesting background.