December 9, 2024
Eva Thelka Eisenhut was born in 1928 in Apolda, a small town that later became part of Communist East Germany. She was the oldest of four girls living with their parents in a four-room upstairs apartment.
Poor but happy, they were a close family. They walked to the nearby Catholic church every Sunday. They enjoyed family time together and always had plenty to eat.
But then Adolph Hitler took over as Germany’s leader, and World War II broke out in 1939.
“My mom told us one day to say a prayer,” Eva said in a brief memoir handwritten on notebook paper. “It won’t be long and we will not have much to eat. She was right.”
Her father was drafted into Hitler’s army, but before he left to fight in Russia, he put Eva, then 11 years old, in charge of searching for food. She did what she could, scavenging from trash cans, standing in line for a share of horse meat, swapping clothing for vegetables with a farmer. Once coal for cooking was gone, the family cut up their wooden chairs to burn.
All the while, Hitler’s men were killing German Jews in a concentration camp not far away.
When Allies began bombing German towns, Eva wrote, “We would go to our cellar waiting. … I had a little white Bible. I would read to my mom and sisters by candlelight. Thank God, my hometown did not get bombed.”
The war finally ended in 1945, and her father came back home, shortly afterward losing his family’s apartment to occupying Russians who moved in for a while, made a mess of the place, and eventually moved out.
As a young adult, Eva became a maid for a woman in free West Germany who took in laundry from American soldiers. One of them was a career Army soldier named John Broadus Couch from Gainesville, Ga.
“When he saw me,” Eva wrote, “he would say hello to me. I could not talk. One day, in 1952, John had a little box. Open it up. There was a wedding ring. Ask me if I would marry him and come to America.”
Eva and John were married on May 7, 1952, and their boat from Europe arrived in New York in October of that year. Eva marveled at the Statue of Liberty the tall buildings and the busyness of people talking freely.
They took a Greyhound bus to Gainesville.
“My mother was resilient,” said her daughter, Gilda Walsh, who lives in Boston. She moved a lot with her Army husband and adapted well, though she knew little English at first. “She loved America.”
This column does not tell the whole story of courage of Eva Eisenhut Couch, who died June 17. But after reading this brief version, please remember three things:
War is also hell for innocent people in an enemy country.
Freedom is more appreciated by people who lost it.
Next Monday, Nov. 11, is Veterans Day in America.
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Phil Hudgins is a retired newspaper editor and author from Gainesville, Ga.. Reach him at phudgins@cninewspapers.com.
