Interview of a Lifetime

Over the course of my career as a freelance journalist for a couple of local newspapers, I've done hundreds of interviews. Out of those, I have a handful of truly memorable ones. Just recently though, I had the interview of a lifetime.

My hour and a half-long chat with a dainty and sweet 76-year-old will forever be imprinted in my mind. I heard about her story over a year ago from my sister in Oregon. I finally have the time to delve into such a fascinating story, so my sister asked permission from her friend to give me her phone number so I could chat with her mother, who just so happens to live in Utah of all places! Just an hour south of where I live!

Let me share with you my experience and a fraction of the enthralling interview:

As we sat down, we delved back into a time in history when I, as an American, was the enemy, while she, as a young school girl living in Eastern Germany during WWII, was fighting for her life.

Quite literally, she would run home from school screaming whenever a plane flew too low as she raced for a nearby bush to hide in. She even wondered why she bothered going to school since she knew she would probably end up dying during the war anyway. For someone experiencing air raids regularly at night, this doesn't sound surprising.

Sometimes the air raids would go off several times at night, which made it especially difficult for my interviewee's mom to get seven young kids dressed by herself and over to the bomb shelter in time, as her husband had been drafted by the Nazis. Eventually, they just started going to bed fully dressed with their shoes on so they could run out immediately to the bomb shelter located across the street when they heard the sirens.

Here was a woman who grew up in a communist life where a sole piece of bread was handed out in the morning, and she knew it was all she would receive for sustenance until the next morning.

She was quick to inform me that everyone's story is different - but for those who lived during the time of WWII in Eastern Germany and later those living in the oppression of the Russian rule in the aftermath, and then later when the Berlin Wall was erected, they all knew what it meant to live a life with no laughter. She told me that to this day, she doesn't laugh very often because for so much of her life, there wasn't anything to laugh about, so she grew into a woman who is very private about her life.

My interviewee was eventually able to escape from Eastern Germany with her family in a harrowing trip by train to some refugee camps before they eventually made their way to the United States.

Hers is a story of true and utter triumph. At the end of our chat, when I asked her what she has taken away from such a harrowing experience, she became teary for the first time in the interview and said this in her thick German accent:

"My surroundings have made my character. I would never want to trade my life because I learned to get by with little and I learned to just make do and to appreciate things in a way that no one else can ever understand, unless you've been there."

Here was a woman who is quiet, shy, and humble, as she told me repeatedly before we met that her story wasn't very interesting and that she didn't have much to share. As I sat dumbfounded listening to story after story of her experiences growing up, I knew she was not giving herself nearly enough credit.

In fact, she is intensely private about her story, and requested I not use her name. She has even turned down BYU, who has wanted to interview her countless times. I was honored she trusted me enough to share her priceless story, one I will most certainly never forget.

You are probably wondering what I am going to do now with my notes from such an incredible interview. Frankly, so am I. I am not a book-writer, nor have I ever wanted to write one. That is until now, when I have such an incredible story to share. I may do just that. Just not anytime soon. Ask me about it in a couple of years.

Until then, I will hold in my memory the interview of someone who suffered so much and came out on the other side a better person. May I learn from her example and remember her when I suffer my own trials.