Consuela (Nebel) Mendoza

Connie was born Gudrun Nebel in a small town in Saxony, eastern Germany in July, 1924. She lived in a beautiful 200 year old home in the main street of the old medieval town of Mockern. Her parents had a ¼ acre in the back and grew vegetables and raised animals. Her father was a Mercedes mechanic and had a gas station in the front of the house with one pump. She had one older sister and a younger brother. When Hitler gained power in the early 1930’s, most young children were pushed into the Hitler Youth for brainwashing. Connie joined the BDM or Hitler youth group for girls. They were given uniforms and spent time doing activities similar to what the girl scouts do along with a lot of political education. In 1936 they marched in the opening ceremonies at the Berlin Olympics. When the war began in 1939 all older children were required to work in the fields bringing in crops like potatoes and beets both before and after school as part of the war effort. Connie remembered spending endless hours working in the fields between studying.

In 1942 she was designated for a special language school in Magdeburg and would ride the train six days a week there to school. This was probably part of the “Hohenfrau” program designed to take blond, pure, Nordic type German women and teach them foreign languages so they could become future wives for the SS officers who would serve in foreign countries during and after the war. The school was very rigorous and required each student to learn at least 20 phrases every day in each language they were studying or they would be flunked out. My mother did very well in her classes and could speak and write fluently in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, as well as German, by the end of the war. Having these language skills would save her time after time after the war. About that time one of my mother’s cousins decided to join the SS. In order to qualify he had to show that he had pure German blood or a “clean” genealogy for 7 generations back. The family still has the genealogy record that was created, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. He died later on the Russian front. Of the 19 boys in Connie’s high school class, 18 died in the war.

At the end of the war the Red Army inevitably came to the small town where Connie lived and laid waste to it. On May 5, 1945, the day the Red Army entered the town, 42 townspeople were killed and almost all the women were raped repeatedly. Connie’s best friend was raped by over 25 Russian soldiers then committed suicide, as did many other people in the town. There is still a memorial marker in the small town for those who died that day. Everything of value in every home was also taken in revenge for what German soldiers had done in Russia. Connie pretended to be dying with cholera and then slipped away from her home at night and made it across the Elbe River to the western zone. She tried to get to Hamburg, where her older sister lived, but the city was completely bombed out and it was impossible to find her sister. She then got on a train headed toward France after being befriended by a woman who offered to help her. However, in the middle of the night the woman stole all her papers and vanished leaving my mother with no identification at a time when ID’s were vital since the American, French and British authorities rarely allow anyone to move without proper ID.

Connie then decided to pretend to be one of the millions of displaced European peoples who were trying to get to their home county after the war. She changed her name to Consuela Bernard, joined the legion of dispossessed, and claimed she was an Italian trying to get back to her home town of Florence. It greatly helped, of course, that she spoke fluent Italian and that many northern Italians looked like Germans. This was very risky since at that time any German women caught in France were killed or had their heads completely shaved and were sent back to Germany in cattle cars. “Consuela” or Connie now somehow made it to Paris by train in June 1945. The French authorities still suspected she might be German and laughingly told her she had one day to find a place to live and prove to them she had a job. Otherwise they would ship her back to Germany to let the authorities there deal with her. At that time there was no housing or jobs since so much had been destroyed by the war and the economy was dead. The only currency in use was American cigarettes.

Connie started asking desperately all around the city for anyone needing language skills and heard that the American military hospital was looking for English speakers to help with the wounded American soldiers. After demonstrating her superb English skills they immediately hired her. Connie would tell the French doctors what each soldier complained about then translate back to the soldier what the doctor’s treatment or questions would be. She also was able to find housing with a French couple who had a room open up and were willing to take her because she had a job with the U.S. military. Connie had lots of close scrapes, including being invited to have dinner with an Italian couple from Florence so they could talk about “their hometown.” Somehow she survived each challenge.

After a month in the hospital she met my father, Arthur, and they hit it off immediately. Arthur was an M.P. in the American army and had broken an arm after a vehicle accident. A month later they were married in Chalons Sur Marne, just outside Paris. At that time, of course, American soldiers were not allowed to marry German women. They supplemented their income by selling American cigarettes on the black market (each American soldier was given a carton of cigarettes free every month) and Arthur did not smoke. Arthur had been ordered to head for Asia to serve in the still on-going war against Japan, but his orders were cancelled at the last minute when the war ended suddenly with the dropping of the atomic bomb. He and Connie then continued to live in Paris until April 1946 as he served in the American army and she worked at the hospital.

They assumed he would be headed home after serving his turn then so she got passage on a war bride boat back to New York City. At the last minute Arthur’s discharge orders were delayed, so he would not be able to join her until several months later. By this time Connie was 7 months pregnant and again had to carefully maintain her assumed identity, but with the name Consuela Mendoza no one would suspect she was German. The war bride boat passenger list archives (SS Brazil) show her name and arrival at Ellis Island on April 24, 1946. She then traveled alone across the U.S. by train and made her way to Arthur’s Mexican-American family. His family was very poor, so she had to travel by bus from Los Angeles and walk to his home in Anaheim. The family house didn’t have a visible number on it, so she was instructed by her husband to walk down the right street and look for his distinctive German Shepard dog in the yard. Arthur lived in the small house with his mother and four younger siblings who spoke predominately Spanish. In spite of the vast cultural differences, Connie hit it off well with his family since she spoke and wrote better Spanish then they did and eventually helped some of them find jobs. Nevertheless, whenever they thought she was being too pushy they would give her the swastika salute and yell “Heil Hitler.” A month later in mid-June, 1946 Connie went into labor and barely made it to the hospital in nearby Orange traveling by bus and walking (there was no one available to give her a ride) and gave birth to her daughter Lindred. The birth certificates for her two children still show their mother as being born in Florence, Italy.

Connie became an American citizen, still as a presumed Italian immigrant. She got work immediately as a translator/foreign correspondent after her first child was born and continued to work in that field for various private companies until she retired. In 1955 Connie decided to risk trying to return to East Germany with her new family to see her parents. Her father had been used as a slave laborer for years in Russia, like most East German men, after the war. He had recently arrived back home after being left for dead in Russia weighing only 90 pounds but her mother had nursed him back to health and Connie was anxious to see him and her mother. The East German government gave her an emphatic no telling her they had never allowed a U S citizen a visa to enter East Germany since the countries had no diplomatic relationship. However, she refused to take that no for an answer and went to Germany anyway. She flew from Hamburg, where her sister lived, to West Berlin. Connie then proceeded to harass the commandant in the Russian embassy in Berlin and threatened to go to the American press for several days until he finally relented and gave her a visa to go into East Germany (when she returned to the U.S. the FBI immediately showed up at her door to find out why she had spent so much time in the Russian Embassy during the height of the cold war). A few days later in December 1955 Connie and her family made it across the border by train (after the astonished East German border guards had held up the train for 3 hours investigating them upon seeing the American passports) and finally made it back to Mockern and tearfully reunited with her family. The whole town came out to join her at a Christmas day mass in the old Lutheran church. These were the first Americans most of townspeople had ever seen and they were thrilled that their native daughter had somehow made it all the way back home. Connie worked for many years as a foreign correspondent for several private companies before retiring in 1989. She and Arthur stayed happily married for over 50 years until they passed away in the early 2000’s.