Transcript of interview with Anna Sipl Meyers by Leita Kaldi Davis, February 12, 2012, February 29, 2012, March 27, 2012, April 6, 2012, April 24, 2012, May 3, 2012, May 9, 2012, May 16, 2012, October 19, 2012, November 16, 2012, & December 7, 2012

Queen of Hearts: The Story of Anna Sipl Meyers Edited by Leita Kaldi Davis The Queen of Hearts is the card of beauty, magnetism, affection and idealism. It represents the much-loved mother, the sweetheart, the indispensable sister, the beloved daughter. If she did not have that inevitable negative side to deal with, this would be the most desirable card. The Queen of Heart natives are talented in some artistic line, even if it's just in their appreciation of beauty and art. They are often intense and dramatic, and can be domineering in the family. They are also capable of deep devotion and loyalty. They have a strong streak of religion or spirituality, and are often influenced by strong-minded women. The Queen of Hearts has the ability to reach others through her innate leadership abilities, powerful communication skills and strong business sense. The level of success achieved is predicated on her ability to keep emotional reactions in check. She may find a simple home life only part of her personal expression. The Cards of Life For my granddaughter, Aspen and all the wonderful women in my life: Oma, Mami, my lovely girl, Bridgett, and my baby, Leah Contents Foreword Childhood: A Reverie 1 Surviving the War 7 Escape to Austria 18 Coming to America 29 Discovering the New World 35 Marriage, Motherhood and the Military 57 Love, Lies and Living Rooms 68 Fortune Tellers and Fortune Makers 76 Viva Las Vegas 82 The Casbah 86 Photographs 115 Ann S. Meyers, PHC 135 The Casbah Gets a Face Lift 139 The Queen of Hearts 144 Little Annie’s Nevada Hotel & Casino 168 Judgement Day 203 “The First Thing We Do Is We Kill All the Lawyers” 212 Disaster in the Desert 220 Miracles Still Happen 224 Lake Tahoe – New Dreams 232 Foreword When I met Anna Sipl Meyers in Las Vegas years ago, and mentioned that I had lived in Hungary, she told me that she spoke some Hungarian, that she had learned it as a child in a concentration camp on the border between what was then Yugoslavia and Hungary, during World War II. I did a double take, wondering if I had heard correctly. Then she said, “Egy kicsi kenyere” and laughed. “That’s actually all I know.” I knew that it meant “Please, a little bread.” I instantly wanted to know more about this lovely blonde woman with hazel eyes and an alluring figure, who was a multi-millionaire, proprietor of prime properties in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe. What had her journey been like, from surviving the hell of war to ruling a small empire. I got the opportunity to track the road of her life when Anna asked me to edit a series of autobiographical interviews conducted by the Oral History Research Center of the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Claytee White, who interviewed Anna, told me that most oral histories can be captured in a two-hour session, but because of Anna’s boundless life experiences, many sessions over almost a year had been required. The Research Center will catalogue her story and bind two copies for their archives. But Anna wanted a book. I agreed to take on the task, now knowing what a daunting literary endeavor it would be, organizing 300 pages of chronologically scattered notes. Nor did I know how much I would enjoy learning about Anna’s life – from dancing the polka to murder on the Strip. Idyllic stories of Anna’s childhood in the German village of Krindijia on the Danube River changed dramatically into horror stories of concentration camps, barely surviving years of extreme suffering, along with her mother, grandmother and older brother, Michael, who had been crippled by polio as a baby. As part of my research into Anna's past, I learned that in the early part of World War II, Marshal Josip Broz Tito formed “Tito's Partisans,” officially the Yugoslav National Liberation Army, a highly effective anti-Axis resistance movement. Following the collapse of the German occupation of Yugoslavia towards the end of the war, Tito took vengeance on German Swabians. He brutally eradicated most of the Danube Swabian population by expulsions, starvation and mass executions. Anna bitterly says that Tito was their Hitler. Between August 1945 and May 1946, in the village of Krindija in Slavonia, where Anna and her family lived, the German population there disappeared almost overnight. They were sent to the death camp in Gakowa. In the 1950s, Anna and her family escaped from the camp and joined the refugee exodus to Austria, desperately hoping to find her father there. Only in recent years have reports of the atrocities committed by Tito's Partisans during the postwar years been published. In Leidensweg der Donauschwaben min Konnunistischen Jugoslawien, (Passion of the Germans in Communist Yugoslavia: People's murder of the Donauschwaben. People's Loss – Names – Figures – Donauschwabisches Archiv – 1994), Anna came across a report by Anna Blechl, a midwife from Batschsentiwan near Apati on the Danube, known to Anna's people at the time of their expulsion. Blechl writes of helping a woman deliver her baby during her stay at Brestowatz. She also wrote of the women and teenage girls who came to her for help after Russian soldiers or Partisans had raped them. Recalling painful memories for the purpose of recording her own history, Anna draws upon an outstanding publication by Hans Kopp, who shared her childhood experience in Batschentiwan: The Last Generation - Forgotten and Left to Die: The Postwar Memoirs of a Child: The History of the Danube Swabians in Word and Pictures (Die Letzte Generation Vergessen und dem Tod Überlassen), written in German and English, a volume of 400 pages, with more than 1,400 pictures, documents and maps, copyrighted in 1999 and published in 2003. Among the dozens of names listed in Kopp's acknowledgements, Anna is mentioned. By chance, Anna met Maria Kopp, Hans' niece, in Cleveland, Ohio, many years after both families emigrated to the United States. When she took Maria home with her, Anna's mother tearfully recalled braiding her hair when she was a little girl. They were grief-stricken to hear that Maria’s parents had been murdered. Anna later reunited with Hans Kopp and his brother. Among Kopp's illustrations in his book, Anna saw a sketch of his parents standing in front of a barred cellar window, now a prison, and felt her heart stop when she recognized that window as the one her mother had been flung through as punishment by the Partisans. After struggling for years in Austria, Anna’s father applied to emigrate to the United States. They were refused asylum twice, the first time because of Oma's age -- she was in her fifties -- and again because of Michael's infirmity. When the father used a Yugoslav instead of German spelling of their name, they were finally accepted. Their immigrant story describes the typical hurdles faced by refugees from all over the world. They battled prejudice and poverty, while the father worked beyond his strength to gain a foothold in the new world. Anna describes their unique personalities, marked by values of frugality and honesty, their generosity in extending a hand to relatives who came later, raising their children to be not only principled citizens, but to nurture some of their European culture through music and dancing, cooking and festivals. Anna struggled through many misfortunes as she grew up, but clung to family values to define her ambitious determination to prosper. In her twenties, she worked as a teller in a small bank in Kent, Ohio, where my husband, Robert Davis, met her. He couldn't believe her entrepreneurial genius when, years later, he went to Las Vegas to help her with cash control in her casino. Some of Anna’s dreams were dashed -- the white wedding dress, the higher education -- but many were realized, especially her rise to success in Las Vegas as the only woman to own a hotel/casino in a world ruled by men. She socialized with the noteworthy and the notorious, gentlemen and thugs. She cared for the homeless and the derelicts, bore the scorn of the Country Club set who ended up celebrating her. She'd be the first to admit that she can't spell, but she certainly can count, and repair an elevator, and tar a roof in the pouring rain in high heels and an elegant suit. Anna's story is extraordinary. She is an icon of womanly strength honed in hardship, who cultivated wisdom based on what she made of her experiences. Her philosophy has always been "Whether you call it work or play depends on your attitude." She rose from a child who begged for a bit of bread to a queen who built her own throne. Leita Kaldi Davis, Editor 2017 Recipient, Lillian Carter Award Bradenton, Florida 1 Childhood: A Reverie I was born Anna Sippl on April 26, 1943, in Krindija, Yugoslavia, now Croatia, near the Danube. My family was part of the ethnic German population that was persecuted, massacred or expelled by Tito’s Partisans to the neighboring village of Gakowa, which became a concentration camp. My godmother, Anna Wittman, would reminisce about our life when I was a child, before the war, and when I grew up and was in danger of forgetting. I was named after her. All girls took the names of their godmothers. They were the keepers of our oral history. What my mother, my brother and I wrote before they passed away is so beautifully put that, you know, I'm going to reveal it to you. * * * My mother, Magdalena, was a handsome woman with a crown of dark braids and dark eyes. My father, Josef, was a strong man, not so tall, with hazel eyes and large, capable hands. My brother, Michael, was three years older than me. He had had polio at eighteen months and walked with small crutches that my father had made for him, one leg dangling. But that didn't stop him from hopping around the farm or playing with his toddling sister. Krindija had 1500 German speaking people. Nobody learned Croatian until they went to school, but the war came before I was old enough to go to school, so I never learned it. One of my relatives, Matis Stoltz, wrote a book on Krindija that has maps of where everybody lived, along with a history of how our people came to settle there, and what life was like. I have a beautiful box about three inches deep that was hand carved by my Michael years later, when he was in Austria, and I put that big book in there for safe keeping. Krindija had been settled by Germans as long ago as 1689 from various parts of the Austrian Empire. They had cultivated the Danube River basin, and turned it into rich farmland. All the houses were made of clay and straw, similar to adobe. Michael and I would watch the men make molds of wood and press the material into them. After drying, they'd come out like bricks. Roofs were made of wooden beams covered with red clay tiles. Our house was on a narrow plot, maybe three acres. It had an entrance at the side and a small “mud room” where people took off their boots and shoes. That led into the kitchen where there was also a bed, though the second room was the bedroom. The main room, or family room, might have a bed in it, too. There was no electricity, so we had kerosene lamps and a 2 wrong iron coal stove. When a couple got married, they'd usually live with the bride's or the groom's parents for a while, depending on who had more room or who might need their help. Everybody had their own vegetable gardens, fruit trees and grapevines. They made their own wine and plum brandy called slivovitz, as well as cherry brandy, and men took great pride in them. We always had things like wine and brandy and cookies in the house for company. Drunkenness was rare, because so much work went into making brandy that the men would not waste it. The only smoking I ever saw was a pipe, a luxury that a man might smoke once in a while. Every farmer's life is dictated by four seasons. There was spring planting, and sometimes spring lettuce and radishes bloomed in June. Cherries and peaches started ripening at the beginning of July. By fall we had an abundance of everything. My father harvested wheat and took it to a miller in town to turn it into flour. The miller usually took a portion of the wheat as payment. There was a small general store in the town for staples, but my father rarely had cash to shop there. Dried beans were a staple throughout the winter and, of course, we had lots of pickles and sauerkraut. My mother buried carrots, root vegetables, cabbage, parsnips, rutabaga and potatoes on a bed of straw deep in the earth and them covered them with more straw and earth. They never froze in their warm beds, and we lived on them when nothing else was growing. We never threw away food. Scraps went to a compost pile or to the pigs. Slaughtering was usually done in the winter, because there was no refrigeration. Families would get together to slaughter a pig and then make sausage. Michael and I would watch in fascinated horror as one of the men slit the screaming pig's throat and the snow turned red all around them, though they'd catch as much blood as possible for blood sausages. Then they'd hang it from a tree and slice open the stomach, and we watched with wide eyes as its guts spilled out. Women would preserve meat by canning or smoking it in small smoke houses attached to the house, which also held an oven where women baked bread. We had a couple of pigs and one horse named Zoltan. Father made a wooden carriage with a metal band around the wooden wheel and a long pole to secure him. Michael and I loved to ride in the carriage, looking down upon Sultan's broad back, while my father coaxed him on in a gentle voice. We had cats to keep the mice away, and a dog that was really a pet. Mother raised a few chickens, duck and geese in the yard, so we didn't eat poultry very often. When we did, mother would cut the head off a chicken and it would run around the yard squirting blood everywhere. She'd throw this chicken into boiling water, and it stank like something I'll never forget. Then she'd let Michael and I help pick off all the feathers. She saved those feathers to make down pillows (duhood) and quilts that 3 were actually large pouches stuffed with feathers. No matter how cold it was outside, we'd stay warm as toast under those quilts. In the spring, Mother would take apart the pillows and quilts, wash and dry the feathers, and re-stuff them. She had to be careful not to do this on a windy day. People were very clean about their things. They may not have taken a bath but once a week, but they "washed up" every day. Every morning the women aired out all the bedding, taking it outside or to an open window. No matter how cold it might be, they would air out that bedding before making the bed again. Once a week, my mother would wash clothes in a big pot and a scrub board. She boiled white things, using the sun to bleach them. In winter time Michael and I found it hilarious to see frozen clothing flapping from the line like icy scarecrows, and bedding hanging like white boards. My grandmother, Oma, who was my mother's mother, taught me how to make lace. It was common for girls to learn these skills. I learned how to crochet and knit when I was five years old. Through the years, as our family was buffeted on the winds of war from shore to shore, I kept a bedspread made of little crocheted squares. I also have a pair of crocheted slippers that my mother made for me before she died. At Christmas she would make everybody a pair of crocheted slippers. They were wonderful! She would cut a footprint in a heavier fabric like leather or suede and sew it on the bottoms for soles, and add a tie that went around the slipper to make a little tassel. Men didn't get tassels; only women did. My mother always adamantly said, “Use a dark color, because you're going to be sorry; it's going to show all the stains if you make it light.” But I always wanted to have pink ones, and the last ones she made for me were pink, and I still have them. Shoes were custom made by a shoemaker like my cousin, Frank Wittman. He learned the trade by going outside of Krindija to one of the larger cities, instead of learning as an apprentice. He would draw an outline of our feet and create a pair of plain, solid shoes that children would be expected to wear until they couldn't fit their feet into them anymore. Tailors made men's clothing, not women's. There was only one tailor in town, Willy Wittman who made jackets and work pants, usually from hemp. Zippers were very expensive, so women made buttonholes on their sewing machines. Some women had a Pfaff, a German foot-pedaled sewing machine, and even Singer machines. They were considered a real luxury, almost the equivalent of having a car. My godmother told me that there were some Jewish people nearby who had a car and drove it into town. Nobody in Krindija had a car. If a car ever drove into town, it would cause a sensation. 4 When I was a child I never ever dreamed that I would have a car. That would be like a fairy tale. If I had ever told anyone I dreamed about a car, they'd think I was crazy. We were taught to be content and grateful with what we had. My Mother or Oma also made clothing for herself, me and my brother. Oma's husband, my grandfather, had died quite young of a malady I didn't understand, so she spent much of her time with us. Those who could afford it might buy fabric from the general store, but most people had a weaving loom for sheep's wool. They also spun hemp into yarn for men's clothing. Because they were so well made, clothes lasted for a long time. The most common way of cleaning was to hang them outdoors inside out to air. A woman never came into the house without putting on an apron that would have been made of remnants from discarded material. Some families were very large. My father had twelve siblings. There was no birth control, so people didn't have all those children by choice, but they were considered as assets, as they would grow up to help in the fields. There was a schoolhouse in the village where we were taught through four grades, with one teacher for each grade. After that, we helped our parents work the land. The schoolhouse had a wooden floor. Stone or brick floors were rare; the most common floors were made of mud treated with cow dung and earth. We wore outside shoes outside, slippers inside, and wooden clogs in the garden. If someone wanted to teach school, or learn another profession, they'd have to go to Oseiak or one of the larger towns to learn that skill. Another relative of mine, Tony Wittman, went off to school in one of the larger towns and became a doctor. Education was rarely thought about or encouraged. We accepted the fact that we were only going to get four years of education. The schoolhouse was also used as a church on Sundays until, later on, all the people in town got together and built a very nice church. My father helped build it and I have a picture of him way up high near the roof. The biggest festival we ever had was for the blessing of the church. Many people from other towns came for the celebration. Everybody was dressed in their Sunday best – women in white and men in black. All the women wore the same style -- long white skirts gathered at the waist and a shawl. People took good care of their possessions, even the plow used to till the soil. When that plow was put away, it was cleaned and dried to make sure it didn't rust, and protected and covered, even the leather bands that were put around the horse's bridle. In our small village everybody knew each other. If a kid stole cherries off someone's tree, the whole town would know about it. We all had cherry trees -- sour cherries, white cherries and black cherries. We also had apricots and peaches, apples and pears. 5 We had joyful festivals at harvest time to celebrate our abundance. Festivals began by going to church, to Catholic mass, after which there was a procession through town, carrying the cross with altar boys on each side of the priest, to the feast, following the aroma of lamb or a pig turning on a spit, fruit pies and bread fresh from the oven, tables laden with bounty of the harvest. Someone would be playing the accordion, a mouth organ or a guitar, a brass horn or clarinet. Musicians taught each other through the generations. People danced, women whirling around in long white skirts with aprons and blouses with puffy sleeves, with men dressed in black suits and hats. Kids would frolic around their mother's skirts or laugh together as they imitated their parents dance steps. Michael would stomp around on his crutches in time with the music, as I giggled and clapped for him. Beside the festivals, music was our best entertainment on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. People would stroll around, showing off their gardens, and women would sing. For one hour on Sunday we'd listen to music broadcast on the radio. We were happy. We were so happy we never thought of anything that might make us unhappy. And then the War came to our village. 6 Surviving the War Though I was only two years old, and didn’t fully understand what was happening to us, I’ve had vivid flashes of painful memories that would stay with me throughout my life. As I grew older, my mother, Oma and my godmother told me stories that formed a context around my childhood recollections of how the war devastated our lives. On March 1, 1945 Tito's military police, the Partisans, started to drive people out of their homes and confiscate their property. We were summoned to the town square at gun point, and everyone huddled together, anxiously watching the guards, wondering if they intended to kill us all. Hours passed as we waited, paralyzed with fear, until night fell. My brother, Michael, who was five, sat close to me. We were shivering with cold. Neither of us really understood what was going on around us, but I felt that Michael was struggling to uphold his role as my big brother, trying to protect and comfort me. As darkness fell, I tried to sleep, but couldn’t, fretting restlessly, terrified at what would happen to us. Next day, however, they sent us home! We were elated, deluding ourselves that the Partisans would not really force us out of our homes. Then the townsfolk heard that Germans in the Banat region had been driven from their homes and forced into concentration camps, and that the Partisans had selected some people for forced labor details, but we could not imagine that happening to us, clinging to a stubborn illusion. The town crier and the Partisans came numerous times, ordering us to leave our homes, until they finally threatened physical harm, and we had to prepare to go. My mother did not want to take a lot of belongings. She worried that, if we left our home, our father would not be able to find us. But Mami and Oma were forced to pack necessities that we might need, wherever we might be going, into pillow cases, as we had no suitcases, and load them into a wheelbarrow. I begged Mami to bring my doll, my Mama Pupen, that Oma had made especially for me, her engelkind, out of rags, with buttons for eyes, sheep wool for hair and miniscule crocheted slippers, but Mami refused, saying we didn’t have room for such trifles. We took overcoats, blankets and as much food as we could carry. She sewed some of our most precious photographs into the hem of her skirt, but she couldn’t take all of them, and still believed that we would return to our house. Our house that had been built by my father and relatives, that was meant to be passed on from one generation to the next, built with all the love that one can put into labor. More than a hundred years ago, my family had established themselves in Krindija. They settled on raw pieces of land, cut down trees into building lumber to construct their home. At first, a shelter was built from damp wood, just enough to keep out the elements. With only a hand saw and an axe, they steadfastly built a house that the wind would not penetrate. They hand dug a foundation and 7 cultivated the soil. They planted a cornucopia of fruit trees from seeds that were shared amongst neighbors and relatives. They tended those trees from season to season until finally, after half a dozen years, the fruit could be picked. Anticipation of the first bite spurred the Harvest Festival. Now, outside this hardy orchard and building so painstakingly built, a town crier was ordering us to abandon our home! Animals that my parents had helped birth would be left with strangers. All the chickens in the yard that had hatched on our watch, and roamed free, eating out of our hands, and we had names for all of them, including the cocky rooster. Mami fed Zoltan, our horse, for the last time, then she untied him and hoped he could find his own food and water. Clothes created from the spinning wheel, sweaters that took many hours to knit, were left behind. After Mami and Oma had loaded whatever we could carry into a wheelbarrow, as we walked away from our home, our dog started barking frantically, and strangers tried to hold him on a rope as he struggled to run after us. I’ll always remember the desperate look in his eyes as he watched us walk away. Michael was sobbing, with his face buried in Mami’s skirt and, as Oma dragged me away, I wailed. What would happen to Zoltan, our cats, chickens, pigs and ducks? Who would eat the fruit from the budding trees? Who would eat the mulberries from the tree that I had climbed so often to pick berries? When would we come back home? Oma told me to be quiet, fearing I would aggravate the Partisan guards around us. The final expulsion of our people happened on March 15, 1945. An estimated 3,500 citizens began their slow march out of town, as the Partisans herded them at gun point. Mami struggled to push the heavy wheelbarrow, as did many other women in our dismal procession. Babies were crying and toddlers like me were whining, but neighbors grouped together trying to help each other as we trudged slowly down the road, away from our town. My father’s father, a grandparent I scarcely remember, trailed along with us. He had been a widower for many years, was nearly blind, and had always been a very quiet man, a phantom in my memory. When we reached the neighboring town of Doroslo, a Hungarian town that had been settled by Germans, we discovered that everyone there with a German name had been forced out of their homes. We continued on to Stapar, where we had traded with the townspeople, buying their products in exchange for our produce. The townsfolk had always been friendly good neighbors, so we expected they would give us water and let us rest for a while. We were all shocked when, instead of finding a welcome, a gang of teen-agers met us, cursing us as Germans, and throwing stones at us. Surely, we 8 thought, their parents would punish the boys and make up for their abuse. As we hurried away from the young thugs, we came upon their parents, standing outside their houses or looking from their windows with the same hate-filled expressions. We recognized many of them, and were horrified at their betrayal. Long lines of people, exhausted and hot, with no water, crept along the dusty road, children crying, old people leaving their belongings by the side of the road, because they could no longer carry them. Whoever stopped was brutally beaten by the Partisans. We had to sleep in a roadside ditch that night. The next day we trailed into Filipowa, a Roman Catholic town whose citizens had fled or were forced from their homes. The Partisans crowded us into empty rooms where we slept on the floor. We children snooped through other houses that still had furnishings, but Oma warned us not to touch anything and to stay far away from the guards. Several days later, we were marched to the town of Gakowa, one of the main internment camps that Germans people had been herded into, as they had been in Krindija, Filipowa Miletitsch and Brestowatz. The communist government of Yugoslavia turned the towns of Jarek, Gakowa and Kruschiwl, among several others, into extermination camps. Gakowa was a typical donauschwaben (Danube Schwabian) town located northeast of Krindija near the Hungarian border. It had been a beautiful town until it was turned into a concentration camp where 17,000 inmates died of starvation, typhus, dysentery and malaria. They were buried in mass graves on the outskirts of town, including hundreds from our beloved Krindijia. Though many guards patrolled the Gakowa camp, we were usually allowed to move about during the day. Children sneaked away in search of food they might find in nearby orchards. Even I, small as I was, would steal away with Mami to a nearby Hungarian settlement to beg for food. Whenever we met a Hungarian farmer, she would have me hold out my tiny hand and plead in Hungarian, “Egy kicsi kenyere,” -- a little bread, please. Tito, in his delirious hatred for the Germans, came up with another way of getting rid of us. He loaded us into cattle cars, packed like sardines and shipped us off to Germany. Some people tried looking through the cracks in the seams of the cars, but could not see enough to guess where we were. We waited anxiously to be released from the suffocating car. Hours passed with no activity except for people elbowing their way to the hole they carved in the bottom of the car to relieve themselves. Hours turned into days, as we stopped at several stations only to be turned away by Germans who did not 9 want any more refugees and wouldn't open the train doors. Europe was awash with refugees fleeing war ruins that had been their homes. The locomotive would fire up and cars banged into each other as we slowly moved on. We had no idea where we were headed. One day, the train slowed down and finally stopped. The car doors opened and we were permitted to go outside. Fresh air! People stretched their legs, lifted their arms to the sky, breathed deeply, rejoicing in this moment of grace. Fields of grass stretched out on both sides of the train, and people saw a house far in the distance that filled them with melancholy. All too soon, we were beckoned back to the cars, the doors closed and we started to chug off again. Mami shouted that my grandfather wasn't there! Did he get on the wrong car? After the train’s slow start, it stopped again. Guards opened the doors and asked if anyone knew an old man who might be missing. We got off the train and Oma saw my grandfather lying by the side of the tracks. He had been run over by the train. Women grabbed Michael and me and buried our faces in their skirts before we could catch a glimpse of grandfather. They buried him in a shallow grave nearby. Oma and Mami sobbed, wondering if he had chosen to end his life. We returned to the train and resumed our journey for several more hours, huddled together in shock and grief. When the train finally stopped, we were back at the same place in Yugoslavia where we had started. We ended up back in the Gakowa camp, starving, exhausted, returning to our one cup of einbrennsuppe a day. Ordinarily, it would be made with brown flour, fat, vegetables and noodles. But the Gakowa soup was more or less empty boiled water, with a few occasional wormy peas floating on top. Years later, Michael, would not eat einbrennsuppe no matter how good it was, because it reminded him of those horrible years in Gakowa. During the summer, children, old men and women were forced to work in the fields at gun point, and were promised an extra ration of bread. One day, when my mother was sent to work, she took my brother and me with her, but she became so tired that she stopped on the wayside to rest. A Partisan approached her and told her to get up. She told him she couldn't walk anymore. He replied, “Well, then I'm going to shoot you and your kids.” My mother responded, “Shoot me first so I don't see my children die.” The Partisan took pity on her. My mother was twenty-four years old, with jet black hair in a braided bun that she had never cut. However, malnutrition made her beautiful hair fall out, and so did ours. We all had lice, and had to have our hair shorn. Bald, we all looked the same, which was very humiliating for women, especially for teenage girls. My grandmother worked in the fields, too, hoping for an extra crumb of bread for us, her children and grandchildren. She was relatively young, in her late forties, but the deprivations of war 10 had taken their toll on her. Still, she struggled every day to take care of us in every way possible, if only by holding us in her arms or giving us a bit of food that she pretended she didn’t want. Grandmothers were the unsung heroines of our ordeal. Hans Kopp, whose experiences in Kr