{"id":25329,"date":"2020-01-28T14:35:33","date_gmt":"2020-01-28T21:35:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=25329"},"modified":"2020-01-28T20:59:21","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T03:59:21","slug":"bettie-pages-hips-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=25329","title":{"rendered":"Bettie Page’s Other Hip"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bettie<\/a>I periodically delete the pile of bullshit that builds up in this blog’s spam folder. Today, I noticed the first spammer in the queue had attempted to attach\u00a0his remora-like sucker\u00a0to a post titled “Bettie Page’s Hip.”<\/p>\n

What, I wrote a post and titled it Bettie Page’s Hip? Really? Looks like I did<\/a>. Wasn’t that long ago, either, and it’s still relevant and on point. Social media influencers beware, Paul’s Thing is on to you!<\/p>\n

Bettie was no Nazi, but there\u00a0are references to\u00a0them in that post. Which brings me to this post.<\/p>\n

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz<\/a>, the Nazi concentration and death camp in Poland. Over the weekend I posted something about\u00a0it to Facebook, along with a short comment about my\u00a0brief friendship\u00a0with a German Jew named Herr Kugelstadt who\u00a0survived the Nazis but was still afraid to tell the story decades later. A few friends wanted to know more.<\/p>\n

I thought I’d written about it here, so I searched the blog. The search function works, because it found the Bettie Page post right away, but it\u00a0turned up nothing about Herr Kugelstadt. So here’s the story:<\/p>\n

When we were first married, Donna and I lived in Wiesbaden, Germany, 1965-1967. We had jobs with the military exchange service. In 1966, the year we both turned 20, some friends in personnel let me know about a truck driving job that had just opened up at the exchange warehouse complex in neighboring Mainz-Kastel. They saw to it I was the only qualified applicant\u00a0(in spite of the fact that\u00a0I wasn’t, and that\u00a0before me they’d only hired German nationals for the position). I got the job, along with a nice pay raise.<\/p>\n

One day, the truck I was driving\u00a0home from the Army PX in Nuremberg began to run rough. I was able to nurse it back to Mainz-Kastel,\u00a0limping in around 11 PM. Everyone had gone home but the gate to the compound was still open and I was able to park the truck inside.\u00a0There was a procedure to follow\u00a0in the event\u00a0we\u00a0got in late:\u00a0take the recording strip from the truck’s speedometer, along with the keys,\u00a0and put them\u00a0through a\u00a0slot in the dispatch shack door.<\/p>\n

When I got to the shack, the lights were on and the door was cracked open an inch\u00a0or two. I poked my head in and didn’t see anyone. I went inside to leave\u00a0the recording strip and keys on the dispatch counter, and as I did I heard someone humming a melody. I looked over the counter and there was\u00a0my boss, Herr Kugelstadt, laying on the floor,\u00a0surrounded by empty beer bottles and singing to himself. He looked up, saw me, and struggled to his feet. I apologized, in my weak German, for disturbing him, told him what had happened, and started to leave. There was a late local bus that stopped near the gate, and I just had time to catch a ride\u00a0back to Wiesbaden, but Herr Kugelstadt grabbed my arm and started telling me a long drunken story.<\/p>\n

I understood German better than I could speak it and was able to follow most of his story about\u00a0living as a young teenager during the war, but also\u00a0knew I was missing something. He must have realized I was\u00a0confused, because he\u00a0suddenly put his head alongside mine and whispered “Herr Voodford, Ich bin Juden!” That’s when I got it. His father had talked a friendly Christian family into taking him in when the Nazis began rounding up Jews. With the help of that family and some phony paperwork, he survived the war, passing as an adopted Christian orphan. His own family died in the camps. And here we were,\u00a022 years after the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of the war, and he still felt he had to whisper the truth into a sympathetic ear.<\/p>\n

I remember how the hair on the back of my neck stood up when I realized what he\u00a0was telling me.\u00a0His tongue\u00a0was loosened by drink,\u00a0so I took his story as a confidence.\u00a0I didn’t ask if he’d shared\u00a0it with the German drivers he supervised. I doubted it, and certainly wasn’t going to blab about it. We’d been friendly before, and stayed friendly afterward, though neither of us ever brought it up again.\u00a0Just before Donna and I flew back to the States in 1967, we\u00a0bequeathed our pet hedgehog Sam to Herr Kugelstadt so he could give it a home in his garden.<\/p>\n

Here’s another story:<\/p>\n

In 1990, when we were posted to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Donna and I rented an aero club Cessna for a short flight to Yoronjima<\/a>, the southernmost island in Kagoshima Prefecture, just twenty-two kilometers north of Okinawa. We were going to spend\u00a0a day or two\u00a0there doing the initial groundwork for an Okinawa Hash House Harriers off-island weekend of partying and running. Our mission was to find a cheap hotel, restaurant, and bar to serve as hash headquarters for the upcoming event, and do some initial trail scouting.<\/p>\n

We’d filed a VFR flight plan at Kadena, but\u00a0something\u00a0fell through the cracks\u00a0and we arrived unannounced at Yoron. A\u00a0spirited\u00a0discussion with airport authorities ensued, but\u00a0neither side could\u00a0crack the language barrier. They eventually called in the only English-speaking island resident to find out who we were and what we were up to. That person turned out to be a middle-aged Japanese woman named Kay Frazee. We told her why we were there and she thought it sounded like lots of fun. After patching things over with the airport people, she took us under her wing and drove us to a bed-and-breakfast farmhouse in the middle of the island, where she introduced us to the owner and helped us make arrangements for the hash weekend … which, by the way, turned out to be a great event, becoming an\u00a0annual Okinawa Hash\u00a0tradition for many years afterward.<\/p>\n

Back to Kay Frazee. I’m skipping over a lot. We had another hasher with us, and also our young teenaged daughter Polly, a blonde and blue-eyed rarity in that isolated part of the Japanese archipelago. Kay\u00a0took Polly\u00a0to the house of a Japanese family she knew who had a daughter Polly’s age. Polly became instant friends with the daughter and her parents, and wound up spending the\u00a0next two days\u00a0with them in Yoron Town, the island\u00a0village and port. Donna and I became fast friends with Kay, and remained so until her death many years, and many postings, later.<\/p>\n

Kay got her Anglicized name when she married an American sailor\u00a0several years after Japan surrendered to the Allies. They settled\u00a0on\u00a0Kay’s home island, Yoron,\u00a0and\u00a0opened an American-style hamburger diner\u00a0in town. Kay was a widow by the time we knew her, but still ran the diner.<\/p>\n

Kay visited us in Hawaii a few years later. One night, maybe thinking of my friendship with Herr Kugelstadt and his wartime secrets, I asked Kay if she was willing to talk about her experiences during the war, when she would have been\u2014as our daughter Polly had been when Kay first met her\u2014a young teenager. And Kay said the thing she remembered most vividly was the “husband burnings.” Yes, that’s what she called it.<\/p>\n

When the Allies, led by the American Army and Marines, landed on Okinawa in 1945, Imperial Army troops posted on Yoron rounded up military-aged men and boys, most of whom were sugarcane and pearl farmers, executed them,\u00a0then stacked and\u00a0burned the bodies\u00a0in town where\u00a0everyone could see. This was to\u00a0dissuade anyone from defecting or surrendering. Kay, who was 13 or 14 at the time, saw it all happen and knew many of the families who lost husbands, fathers, and sons.<\/p>\n

Imagine\u00a0experiencing what these people lived through as young teenagers,\u00a0a time of life when our own biggest worries are pimples, sex, and\u00a0trying to look cool. I realize now that survivors of horrors are all around us, not just older people but young people too, with stories that will help the rest of us put our lives\u00a0in perspective, if only we ask them to share those stories with us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I realize now that survivors of horrors are all around us, not just older people but young people too, with stories that will help the rest of us put our lives\u00a0in perspective, if only we ask them to share those stories with us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,2,9],"tags":[2981,2982,95,2272,730],"class_list":["post-25329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-personal","category-war","tag-auschwitz","tag-survivors","tag-japan","tag-nazis","tag-wwii"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25329"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25351,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25329\/revisions\/25351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}