On my second day in Dresden, I met Sister Hildegard. She is 84 and has lived in Dresden all of her long life. During that life her world has changed dramatically again and again.
She was born in 1937, one of four children of German parents. Her father was a member of the Nazi party. Her mother had left the Church so there was no religion in her early life. The war began in 1939 when Hildegard was two and soon her father left to serve in the army. At the beginning of 1943 her father was reported "missing presumed dead" in the Battle of Stalingrad.
Also in 1943, Allied bombing of Germany began in earnest. Hildegard and her siblings went to the country for school. In February 1945 the beautiful city of Dresden was smashed and burned in consecutive nights of Royal Air Force fire bombing raids.
The war ended in May of 1945, with more trouble ahead. Dresden was in the Soviet occupation zone so the communist East German government was in charge. When Hildegard turned 14 years old in 1953 she had to find a job. She could not continue her education. The problem was not that her father was a Nazi, it was that her parents were educated. Preference for education under the communists went to the children of workers.
Hildegard found work at a Catholic hospital in Dresden. At first she cleaned bricks to help in rebuilding the hospital which was nearly completely destroyed in the fire bombing of 1945. She eventually trained as a nurse and decided to become a sister in the order of nuns that work in the hospital. Her mother returned to faith in 1947 and would become part of the Land of Kanaan sisterhood in Darmstadt.
Until 1961, Hildegard and her family could cross back and forth between East and West Germany with little difficulty. But the Berlin Crisis in 1961 led to a fully closed border. Hildegard was in Dresden. Her mother was in Darmstadt and it would be many years before they were reunited.
With the communists in full control, Hildegard took charge of the OB GYN section of the hospital from 1967 to 1997. She worked under increasingly harsh control by the communists then suddenly in 1990 they were gone. One of the things that made life bearable under the communists was everyone in her community and in other faith communities were clear that the danger was the communists. The communists had spies everywhere. As devout Catholics the nuns were always under suspicion.
But believers were all united in opposition to the communists. When communism fell, the freedom that followed led to competition and the end of opposition to a single enemy and the unity that went with it.
Sisters who had lived through the Nazi era said life then was very different. During that time, some of the sisters were devoted Nazis and some were ardently against the Nazis. The challenge was to keep the community together when the worst strife was within. Hildegard said after the war, the sisters who were devoted Nazis either repented or left the order. The purge was rapid.
My friend Cliff and I visited Sister Hildegard in her room in the hospital residential area for nuns and women in long-term care. She speaks no English. I speak no German. Cliff and Hildegard talked and every ten minutes of so, Cliff would give me a summary of what he learned. I asked questions in these intervals.
Part of her story was in a speech she gave in 2015 explaining the many radical changes she lived through. She and Cliff reviewed the speech which was written in neat handwriting while I watched and wished I had learned German. She does not have a computer or a phone--except the phone with a wire on her desk.
Sister Hildegard has retired from nursing but still a leader in her community. We ate lunch in the hospital cafeteria and sat at her table. As the guest, I got to sit in her chair and eat some very good goulash and mashed potatoes. On the walk to and from the cafeteria she greeted everyone we met with a smile. She is in every way a gracious host.
