Year of birth: 1945
Parents‘ place of origin: Heiligenwalde near to Königsberg
In January 1945 my mother, heavily pregnant, left her home village with my sister and brother. A little later I was born on the flight.
Initially we managed to get to Danzig and then further on a ship. When the Navy attacked our ship we were taken to Denmark that at that time was still occupied by Germany. The people were distributed further from there.
We came to Unna in 1947. I was really small at the time and I remember nothing about the flight. From the very beginning Unna was my home, my nest. „A nest of dirt“ my mother always called it, but it was dirty all over the place in the Ruhr Region with all the industry and collieries.
Of course Unna is my homeland. Since 1991 though it’s now possible to go to Kaliningrad and also Heiligenwalde (‚Uschakowo‘ in Russian), so that’s also my homeland again. When I worked I always went there in the holidays, and now I go there every few weeks. I’ve got a lot of acquaintances and friends there, and I’m always very pleased to be there. It’s certainly something special to have two places you can call home.
By the way, I’ve got many favourite places in Unna, for example the Westfriedhof [West Graveyard]. Our first flat in Unna was close to there. I had homesickness when we moved away. We moved to the Friedrich-Ebert-Straße in Königsborn, into a house built in 1902, and it still had that old spa town atmosphere. I loved it there, looking at those beautiful old houses, and I was often in the spa gardens with our landlord’s dog. At that time the spa building still stood. The Bornekampbad is also typical for my childhood. I still remember how the Unna residents were committed to stopping the closing down of those swimming baths at the beginning of the 1980s. We’d all spent our childhoods there – it couldn’t simply close!
I also liked to visit the fairground. Looking out from my old school, we could always watch when they set up the carousels. It was something we could really look forward to.
Mrs. Beutner used to live near to the western cemetery.
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