Rose Brooks

Episode 692 – This Is Our German Family!

ARRIVAL DAY

Our German family is, frankly, awesome. They make us feel simultaneously like celebrities and right at home. Everyone wants to see us. Everyone wants to feed us. #2 thinks it’s amazing.

Helga and I in front of her house in Holtum Geest – the first photo #2 wanted to take when we arrived.

We were no sooner inside my cousin’s house and shown our rooms than cake and coffee appeared.

Helga’s famous meringue-topped cheesecake, and butter cake squares.

As we we enjoying Helga’s baking, the rest of her family arrived: Helga’s sons, daughter-in-law and 2 granddaughters, plus her sister with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren. Son #2 has met Helga and Doris before, because they visited Canada in 2004 to help celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, and were also in BC in June 2023, staying with us while we were living with son #2 in Coquitlam.(Episode 421), but the other faces were all new to him. As so often happens, the children were immediately drawn to him, and he ended up playing with balloons and soccer balls, and holding babies.

Beer and Aperol spritzes appeared as if by magic, and a flurry of activity in the kitchen ensued.

Once 13 of the 14 of us were seated (son #2 busy taking the photo), we dug into a fantastic meal: platters of white asparagus garnished with cubed cured ham and hollandaise sauce, boiled new potatoes with melted butter, and crispy schnitzel. Dessert was individual vanilla ice cream parfaits ribboned with strawberry coulis.

Helga, #2, and I took a short stroll around town in the fresh post-rain air before calling it a night really early; 8:00 p.m. local time (11:00 a.m. BC time) meant we’d been awake for 28 hours. Time to re-energize our bodies and minds for more family tomorrow.

The walk up the street approaching Helga’s house (the wooden barn on the left in the top 2 photos (just peeking out on the right in the bottom one) is now a garage for large vehicles.

DAY TWO

Manny’s garden shed in the back yard.

After a lovely long lie-in, this morning we headed to the village of Winkeldorf for brunch at Doris’ home, where her daughter, son-in-law, snd grandchildren have taken over the main part of the family home. Doris has “downsized” in place to a ground floor flat in the house. Many of the homes here (and in Holtum) date to the late 1800s, and most are sprawling multi-building complexes, having originally been small family farms with a large house and outbuildings for animals, and feed and equipment storage. Imagine a dozen cows, 40 pigs, a couple of dozen chickens, and 5 acres of land, with perhaps another 5-10 acre plot in another part of town. Most properties in the centre of the village now have only an acre or two, as additional homes were built and the post-war economy moved toward huge industrialized farm complexes, but as we drove toward Winkeldorf there were still lots of horse farms, dairy farms, and fields under cultivation.

Doris and Helga’s homes, like most not actively farming, now just boast lush kitchen gardens and beautiful flower beds.

When we were in Germany in 2022, Ted took some great photos of Helga and Manny’s house in Holtum, and Doris’ in Winkeldorf (Episode 297) – as well as a number of the other places I’ll be revisiting on this mother/son trip. Today we just took a couple of family groupings before breakfast.

Top: #2 and his second cousin Yvonne on the left, Yvonne’s mom (my first cousin) Doris on my right. Bottom: Me replaced by my cousin Helga.

Doris laid on an incredible breakfast spread. When I commented that in Canada we couldn’t get many of the German specialties on offer as “everyday” breakfast food here, Yvonne asked “Well then what do you eat for breakfast?” No self respecting German starts their day without a selection of meats, cheeses, eggs, irresistible breads, juice, fruit, and plentiful coffee!

Cold cuts (Lyoner veal sausage, Lyoner/ham with pistachios, roasted chicken), smoked salmon, grapes & strawberries, herbed cream cheeses, edam and havarti, Babybels, sliced cucumber, herring salad in sour cream and beets, homemade strawberry jam, basil/tomato/bocconcini skewers. Not shown: the incredible bread basket and homemade pickles, liverwurst, and teewurst, plus drinks and condiments.
Top : fresh “mett”, a regional specialty of freshly ground pork mixed with salt and pepper and eaten on (usually rye) bread topped with fresh chopped sweet onion. Bottom left: “”Fleischsalat” (literally meat salad, but a shredded ham and mayonnaise based chunky spread). Bottom right: Mettwurst – a sausage made from mett, cold smoked inside a casing to allow it to be sliced.

It was a breakfast feast.

After a leisurely visit, we all went together to pick up Yvonne’s 6 year old daughter from her Kindergarten, where she insisted on giving her Canadian relatives an enthusiastic tour of the facility. She had apparently told all her teachers and friends about us, and how strange it was that one of us spoke German and the other English!

After an afternoon rest break back at Helga’s (her energy level for entertaining is incredible), we enjoyed a restorative cake and coffee and then headed into the village.

Helga and Manny live in the town where my father’s family was relocated at the end of World War II. One of my priorities here was showing #2 exactly where his grandfather had been billeted, and the grist mill in which he’d worked.

The house in which my grandparents and my dad and his sisters Martha and Lidia were billeted.
A photo of the mill as it looked in the late 1940s when my dad worked there. The photo now hangs on a wall inside the mill, which has recently been bought and converted into an event space.
The mill as it looked in 2014, when Ted and I made our first visit to Holtum.
It was on private land, but in disrepair. One vane was missing, snd we were not allowed to get close enough to see the lower level.
Helga and Jeremy in front of the mill as it looks today. Its new owners live in the wooden house to the mill’s left, which was converted from a shed in which the two horse-drawn wagons in which my grandparents fled Poland were stored (and eventually sold, along with their horses)

Helga had arranged with the new owners, Stefan and his wife, to give us a tour of the mill. Stefan’s grandparents also fled East Prussia (now Poland, and not far from where my grandparents lived) after the war, but were resettled in another town. He definitely understood the significance the mill had to me, and was very gracious in sharing what he knew about its past.

Restored, and with new working blades, although since it is not a working mill they only get turned on for special occasions and when there are 3 men available to safely do the job and monitor them.
The ground floor of the mill as it looks now. So far in 2025 it has hosted 15 weddings, and was being set up for a birthday party today. Originally, it would have been filled with sacks of flour, sent down from the second floor grinding area on chutes.
Normally, no one is allowed to go up the steep stairs to the second and third floors, but Stefan took me and Jeremy up!
The gears that the windmill drives, and a grinding stone. These would not be original to my dad’s time, since working mills regularly replaced worn parts.
Stefan took us further up to the third floor, where on the wooden outside platform he showed us the controls for the vanes. The pulleys can rotate the entire top section of the windmill so that the blades can capture the wind direction. Additionally, the vanes of the blades can be angled, almost like ailerons on an airplane; open to allow some air to pass through, or closed for maximum resistance. My dad’s job may have been as part of the team working the vanes, or he may have been simply one of the strong young men carrying sacks of grain up to the second floor. I don’t really know.
Had the blades been turning, we could not have been standing on that platform!

Before our evening family reunion, we detoured past Holtum’s largest dairy farm – about 250 cows – to watch them being milked in the “carousel”.

Interestingly, no one needs to lead the cows into the milking machine. Once their udders feel uncomfortably full of milk, they simply head for the building housing the carousel and line up!

A second detour took us to the village cemetery where my grandparents are buried, and one of my uncles who died in Stalingrad is commemorated on the wall of German war dead. There is no glory here; only an acknowledgment that those who died gave their souls to God and their blood to their country.

Then it was time for more family, as we were invited to my cousin Ingrid’s home for dinner.

The menu was iconic June: white asparagus with cubed ham and hollandaise sauce, new potatoes with lots of butter, pork schnitzel, and eggs – followed by ice cream with an array of delicious toppings.

The tree below is just a very small portion of the huge tree on my Dad’s side of the family (he was the youngest of 16), but shows how the members of this particular reunion are related.

From our grandparents Wilhelm and Emilie, to we 4 first cousins Ingrid, Helga, Doris, and me.
Dinner table guests circled, colour coded by generation. There were also a couple of spouses, and 2 little ones: 21 in total.
No matter how I tried, I couldn’t step far enough away in the dining room to get everyone into a single frame.

We all talked much later into the evening than we had expected (a bonus being that the younger generation speak English).

Once back to Helga’s we said our goodnights.

Tomorrow we make an early start to Bremen.

5 comments

  1. hello, my name is Joshua Tengelitsch. I am researching my families history but have limited information. All we have are my great great grandparents ship records and stories my dad remembers. According to him, my great grandparents would tell stories and show pictures of their parents driving for a Wilhelm and was a cousin of them. Ship records show my great great grandmother’s name was Katherine and was from Germany and her husband with the name Tengelitsch was from Hungary. It is pronounced the same way as tengelic, a village in tolan Hungary. I found your story of the 3 Katherinas while searching. I am curious if you know more information of you ancestors relatives, or if it is possible we are of a separate branch. My family had moved to South bend Indiana (not far from Chicago) in 1921. Records show he was a machinist. But that is all I can find, the last name does not appear any earlier, so I believe it was changed when immigrating.

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  3. Rose! Wonderful blog post today!

    So happy to read all about your German family and see the wonderful photos from your visit. We miss you but do not hurry back – where you are is so much more charming than Marpole!!

    Catriona

    PS what a handsome son! And Ted seems fine, a bit lonely but not starving yet 😊

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