My Early Childhood

I am guessing that we moved into 178- East 17th Avenue in the Spring of 1952.

One thing I learned from my Mother is that she asked my sister to look after me sometimes. My sister was about 7 years old at the time. Brigitte would take me in a stroller for walks in the neighborhood.

My sister went to live with my Aunt and Uncle back in Alberta when she was about nine years old. 

My father's mental health wasn't very good at that time.  A Pastor and some other family friends decided with my parents that it would be better if she was brought up by my aunt and uncle.

I remember going to the train station at Terminal Avenue in Vancouver to see her off.  Mr. Oesterreich, a family or church friend, went with her as her guardian. 

It was around this time when my father went into the Crease Clinic, a mental health clinic in Coquitlam. where he had electric shock therapy.  I am still bothered by memories of that time.  Everyone was doing the best they could.

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When I was about twelve years old I lived near 17th and Main in Vancouver. There was a Dad's Cookie factory about a kilometer NE of where I lived. One of my friends told me that the factory threw out or gave away irregular batches of cookies (i.e., that they couldn't sell) but you had to be there early in the morning. So, one summer about five of us kids went there at about 6AM to the back door of the large building at 468 Kingsway.  I knocked on the door but nobody answered, so Jim Povah and I climbed a tree together so we could look in a window to see what was going on. 

We saw two people pushing carts with trays, but we couldn't see much else. We slid down the tree and walked around the building and found a door that was open, and the five us went in. A woman wearing a dirty apron with a net covering her hair came over and asked, "What do you want?" We told her that we were hoping to get some cookies from a bad batch. She said she would get us some, and left. Fifteen minutes later she came back with five individual paper bags with a mixture of about two dozen cookies each. There were some butterscotch chip, chocolate chip, plain and some other varieties. We were thrilled. On the walk home we ate a bunch.

My mother was  inquisitive about how I came across the cookies, but said something like, "That's interesting."

 

 I think we may have gone back one other time, but I think it was no longer it cool to eat cookies.

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My Origins

My parents were born in what was then Germany.

My father, Theodor (Theo-- Tay-o) was born October 3, 1907 in Lodz, Prussia (now Poland). He had about fourteen siblings and was one of the youngest. 

My grandfather, Ludwig-David Zirkwitz, was a teacher. My grandmother, Emilie Lange.  My grandfather was likely killed during the Lodz riots in 1941.  My grandmother moved at sometime to Lahr, West Germany, where she passed away in her late 80s in the 1960s. 

My mother, Ruth Ritter, was born March 30, 1911. She had two older half-sisters. Her father, Karl-Artur Ritter, was an Evangelical Luthern Pastor, mostly in Silesia where my mother was born. My grandmother was called ______________and I do not know too much about her background. She passed away when my mother was young (15).  My mother has a book of information about her background, written in German script, that provides a lot of the information we know.

My parents lived during each World War in Germany. They married December 30, 1942, mid-War. My mother had trained as a kindergarten teacher. She was a sweet woman who enjoyed music and her family. They went in a sleigh for their honeymoon and then my father had to return to the War where he was a clerk. 

On February 26, 1944 my sister, Brigitte Karin, was born. There were bombs falling near the hospital, and at one point the door to the ward flew open and my father appeared briefly with a flowering plant, looked at the baby and then had to return to his War duties. This was a very stressful time for my mother.

On March 16, 1945, my brother, Udo Ludwig, was born in Fellhammer.  They were living with my paternal grandmother and family in East Germany after Udo's birth, and the Russians claimed that territory and expelled all the families, including my parents and their children. At some point, my father had gone AWOL from the German forces and had buried his weapons and uniforms. They seem to have lived in a refugee camp somewhere for a while.

My father had a slightly older sister, Elisabeth (born Zirkwitz) Klann who lived on a farm with her husband, Adolph Klann and their son-- their two daughters were young adults-- near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. My parents and their two small children were 'sponsored' by Tante Elisabeth and her husband to come to live on their farm. They took a ship and a train and arrived in Alberta in 1948. My mother remembers being put to work almost immediately as a helper in the house and to bringing the cattle in from the pasture. My father helped with the general farm work.

My sister and brother started school in the village near the farm, Legal (pronounced Lay-Gal', a French-Canadian village). 

I was born on November 20, 1949 at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton. I was the baby in the family and seem to have been treated with a lot of affection by my aunt and uncle and parents. As a little fellow a story was told about how I would get my Uncle Adolph's slippers for him when he came in from working in the fields.

In 1952 my father went to Vancouver and put some money down on the house 178 East 17 Avenue, near Main Street.  We moved there when I was under three.

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