From the Bauer family archives: 1920s-1940s

I have a motley assortment of photos for you tonight. This is one of my grandfather Otto's photos from the late 20s. My father tells me that people of his region (near Stuttgart) often visited these caves during their early adulthood. Supposedly, my grandfather and his future wife (Luise) are in this photo, but I sure can't spot 'em.

My father, Gunther, and his sister, Ruth, in about 1940. Don't know who the kid in the wagon is. It is likely that Otto (my father's father) made the wagon; he was a model maker (working with wood) for an aeronautics company named "Klemm." Otto's friend Herr Klemm's dream was to manufacture a kind of Volkswagen of the air, a people's plane. His (and Otto's) hatred for Naziism got them into a lot of trouble. It destroyed Klemm. Otto was quietly drafted into the Wehrmacht.

My mother's mother died in 1935, when mom was about a year old (the family lived in Stettin). At that point, mom's Tanta (aunt) Martha and her husband, Otto Haenfler, took her in and so she went to live in Barwalde, in the country, well to the east. 

Haenfler, who seemed to hail from Berlin, was a well-educated and wealthy Marxist, who had worked as a potter for the famous manufacturer of porcelain, Meissen, until the late twenties. Mom tells me that he was part of the group that designed and produced the famous Danish royal china of that period.

Mom's father, who owned a trucking business in Stettin, died in a work accident in 1939 (owing to a miscommunication between him and his Polish POW workers, a log rolled over him and crushed him). Herr Haenfler, who had been wounded during the Great War, died of TB in 1941.

Mom had been very close to him. She always refers to Martha and Otto as her "parents."

This is my father's father, also Otto—and also a Marxist!—in his uniform in about 1943. He had been wounded by shrapnel and pinned down in a skirmish with the British. A tank crew came by and pulled him to safety. At the end of his recuperation, he was able to visit his family briefly, and this photo was taken.

Otto was captured by the British in 1944 and was held in various POW camps until May of 1947. This is a picture of Otto and his colleagues in the miserable Egyptian POW camp, perhaps 1946.

My parents met on the boat that sailed from Germany to Canada. It was a leaky and dodgy old Liberty ship. My dad managed to get a job on the ship during the passage. He spent all of his free time with mom.

This is a photo of my father filming a fire in British Columbia in 1957.