Author Anneliese Heider Tisdale of Cedar Rapids made new friends and renewed old acquaintances when she spoke and read from her memoirs, “Christmas Trees Lit the Sky: Growing Up in World War II Germany,” Saturday at the Presbyterian Church in Jefferson. She was hosted by the Jefferson Public Library. About 60 persons attended.
Tisdale emigrated from Munich to Paton in 1947 as a war bride. She lived in Paton and then in Jefferson until attending the University of Iowa in 1959. She taught German in the Cedar Rapids school district for nearly 30 years before retiring. She began her memoirs first as a collection of recipes for her children, and then added the stories she had never told them of her growing up.
Jefferson librarian Jane Millard said during her introduction of Tisdale, “We all gain from hearing each other’s stories.”
Tisdale read the chapter in which she describes the surrender of Munich on April 30, 1945. She was 17 years old. The war had started in Germany when she was 11. “It seemed that even the birds forgot to sing. It was quiet, a silence so strange, unnatural, and menacing, it sent a chill down my spine,” she wrote of that spring morning. “We are now a conquered people. But for me, on April 30, with the surrender of Munich, I feel only a sense of unreality and relief,” she wrote of the evening.
After reading, she spent about 30 minutes fielding questions on many subjects. To a question about whether changes in Munich were gradual in the 1930s, she said it was “astonishing how fast Hitler gained power” after the Reichstag fire (February 1933). When asked if Germans knew of the Holocaust at the time, she said she knew of Dachau as a prison for political prisoners. She talked of the extreme fear created by known examples of Hitler’s imprisonment or execution of anyone who opposed him. “If you investigated why your neighbor disappeared, you could disappear, too,” she said.
She said that she did not feel unwelcome or discriminated against in Iowa because she was German. “Actually, people were very nice to me, especially the people whose roots were in Germany,” she said.
She was asked how Paton compared to Munich. “It was quite a shock for a city girl to come to the farm. We had no electricity, no plumbing. It wasn’t until two years later that the REA came with electricity,” she said.
Tisdale is working on a second volume which includes her experiences as a war bride in Greene County. The first volume took 10 to 12 years to write; the second volume will not take that long. Librarian Millard extracted a promise from her that she will return to Greene County when it is published.
With Tisdale on Saturday was Carol “Billie” Hannah Preston, who grew up in Scranton and moved to Cedar Rapids shortly after high school graduation and the death of her father, who was a veterinarian. Tisdale and Preston have become good friends, partly due to a random circumstance in which Preston named her daughter Anneliese at the suggestion of her husband, who encountered Tisdale’s name while he worked as a meter reader for the Cedar Rapids water department. Preston also enjoyed renewing acquaintances.
