FORT SILL, Okla., April 12, 2018 -- Editor's note: This is part two of a three-part feature on a retired Army spouse who lived through the horrors of World War II. The second part is about her life leading up to D-Day.
Zitta Wilkinson spent two years in Starsperg Displaced Persons Camp in Bavaria before relocating to Poland in 1940. Her family were neither Germans, nor had they live Germany. They considered themselves Romanian citizens.
However, they were of Pennsylvania-Dutch ancestry. Zitta said, growing up in Romania they learned and communicated in Romanian, but at home she and her family spoke German.
Richard Wilkinson, retired Chief Warrant Officer 3, WWII history buff and Zitta's husband of 68 years; helps Zitta align her childhood memories in parallel to his familiarity of the period.
"I am extremely well versed in the history of World War II -- I lived it," he said.
According to Richard, the reason Zitta's family was granted a Kennkarte, a German basic identification used during the Third Reich era, in Bavaria was because of her father's ability to speak German and because of his expertise in training horses. Richard added, the SS were looking to "make Germans," so they went into different countries and demanded each male of the household bring in documentation to clerks of the Einsatzgruppen, the SS paramilitary death squad. From the gathered documentation they determined what skills the families had that would be useful to the German forces. After they sorted the people out, they typed up new German birth certificates for the people they deemed German or useful to the German forces. The birth certificates then allowed them to be issued a Kennkarte.
"My dad, since he had horses (back in Romania) (the Schutzstaffel) found out that he was a farmer they were very careful to screen him so that they had a job for him," Zitta said. "But there was no explanation. They didn't tell my mother; they just took him."
Days turned into months and Zitta's family had no idea where and when her father would ever return while they were in the Polish refugee camp.
"He has a skills (the Germans) could use," Richard said . "Eighty percent of the German artillery was horse drawn."
During her father's absence, the Polish refugee camp they were housed in was in an old hospital in Nikoli.
"There was just one big concrete floor and a big drain in the center of the room," Zitta said.
She said the living situation was still the same as it was in Bavaria; they were not allowed to ask questions and they were given just enough to not starve to death. But she vividly remembers the acrid stench of the room.
"The smell was just unbearable," she said. "There were no lights there. No pillow. You just covered yourself up with the jacket you were wearing."
One day during meal time, Zitta confronted a server in the food line.
The woman refused to speak to her but after pleading, she reluctantly told Zitta the room her family was living in used to be a morgue.
"She said when people die, but sometimes they cut them up and do stuff with them," Zitta said. "She tried to explain it to me in a way that I could understand (as a 11-year-old)."
Though they were moved to Czechoslovakia in 1942, their living conditions didn't improve.
"We were there just one year, and the nightmare was not any better than some of the other camps," she said. "We just were put in camps and the same system that they had for us. It was just enough food for you to survive."
SENT TO FRANCE
In 1943, Zitta's family was shuffled to Strasbourg, France, where the SS ordered Zitta's father to manage a farm.
"It was a huge farm," she said. "We worked at that farm, and we were asked to donate so much out of the crops and all this, I guess it was supposed to support the army and our food for people to live on. We were working because we were told that's what you do and my dad didn't ask questions."
Zitta said her father was troubled with guilt when he took over the farm. They had two people on staff at the farm. She said they could not help but think about the people who lived on the property before them.
"Whoever owned that farm, we never knew who it was," she said. "It was somebody who was taken out their farm the same way we were taken out of ours in Romania, could've been Jewish people. If they were not Jewish, they were French people. Hitler had the power, and he had pit bulls working for him who could make people disappear ...
"Hitler had a vision that he was going to rule the world, and he took one country after the other and just possessed it, moved in, did exactly what we witnessed he was doing," said Zitta. "Then he mixed us in with it. We were innocent people."
D-Day was fast approaching and Zitta said her family lived in fear. Every day and night, all they heard were bombs going off around them.
Author's note: Next week read about Zitta's family leaving France, life after the WWII, and how she met her husband, who was then a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in Germany after the war.
Social Sharing