My Grandmother, the spy

What happens to her between October of 1945 and December of 1953 I know very little of.  I must give my thanks at this point to the National Archives and what becomes the CIA.  I’ve spent a lot to time trying to research history surrounding her story on-line.  I was Googling trying to find any Armanski’s and trying to find any history on the name, other than the fact is seems to be another name for Armenian. I don’t understand.  There are very few Armanski’s, maybe 20 – 30 or so left worldwide. I have tried to contact some to them.  It is my guess that Oma’s father, Conrad, must have had brothers.  I am beginning to believe the name is made up.  That the family name is originally Arman and they added –ski to make it more Polish.  Maybe to work?  I don’t know and what’s worse is no one at this point can tell me. 

So one night I am just Googling away and I Google Oma’s name, “Ilse Armanski,” for shits and giggles because I know it is not there. I am shocked to find that a file exists on her in the National Archives.  That it is a file by an agent, in what is to eventually became the CIA.  Now there had been rumors in the family that Oma was a spy and that she was later blacklisted.  It made no sense.  How could she have become an American citizen then?  I sent away for the file.

What I received I did not expect.  There were over 200 pages of documents on my Grandmother, her family, her children, and the fathers of her children.  I was floored.   But I am ever grateful for that agent.  He presented me with a 6 month window of her life, during those mystery years, that I would have otherwise not have known.

The family is alive and intact, but life is very hard.  They have resettled in Bremen, Germany.  Why there I don’t know.  During these years Oma gives birth to two little boys, both with different American Servicemen fathers.  What these men promised her, I don’t know.  Both had families back in the states.  Soldiers having children with German women seems to have been a problem for the US government.  The Americans issue statements that tell these women that just because they have had children by Americans they have no rights to anything.  The agent reports Oma going on base frequently.  She goes to one of the fathers to beg for money to feed her child.  He slaps her and berates her. 

The agent reports that Conrad is a communist.  He does not work.  Now if that is because he is too old, hurt in some way or unable to find work I don’t know.  Conrad tells his girls one day, “Get back out there.”  I think, but as of yet cannot confirm, Conrad was pimping his girls out.  I asked Grandpa one time, what Oma did after the war to survive.  He simply said, “She did what she had to.”  It always made me wonder if she was a sex worker.  I can understand.  She had few skills and was a woman with kids to feed.  You do what you have to.  My other question is where did she learn English?  Did she learn it in school?  Did she just pick it up?  She had to have known enough to get on base and communicate with these men.  And my Grandfather’s German was rudimentary at best. 

It is during this time that she meets a man who turns out to be an agent of the Czechoslovakian government.  I don’t know what he says to her, but she ends up going with him for three days.  She later says she is taken into Czechoslovakia, and taken before a high ranking man.  He asks her to steal a Starscope, which is a precursor to our modern day Night Vision.  The then gives her money and sends her home.  She arrives home, spends the money and never, it seems, tries to acquire the Starscope.   She uses the money to buy coats for her family, shoes for her children, and I believe her first camera.  She begins to take pictures of her family, for the first time since the war.  The agent assigned to report on her states that she does not have the mental capacity or the necessary connections to steal the Starscope. 

At some point the plot is revealed and she is taken into custody.  She must write a full confession of all the events that occurred.  It even makes “Der Spiegel,” the local newspaper.  They make her sound like a fool.  I believe she did not have the connections, but she also didn’t have the heart.

Oma meets my Grandfather, James “Buddy” Parker, at a party in January of 1954.   He is a Merchant Marine.  They are married a few days later. My mother and her twin are born nine months later.  I asked my Grandfather one time where they were conceived.  He says, “On our honeymoon, cruising on a boat off the coast of Italy.”    They go back to Germany where he leaves her.  He arranges passage for her on a ship back to his home in Corpus Christi, Texas.  She arrives in America knowing no one but her husband.  It is probable one of the first times she is truly alone. 

At some point during all this they begin to understand that getting her two other boys out of Germany is going to be difficult.  So they remain with her family in Bremen.  It takes them almost a year.  They finally have to have the Lutheran Church step in and help them. 

They do a little state hoping, going back to Grandpa’s home in Louisiana, then Washington state, and then finally back to North Western Louisiana to stay. 

Ilsa

 

Meet Oma

Oma is the German word for grandmother.  My Oma was born Ilse “Ushie” Irmgard Armanski in the Free City of Danzig, Prussia, on April 24^th, 1926.  Her parents were Conrad and Anna Wichert Armanski.  Danzig today is known as Gdansk, Poland.

I am named in honor of her, however in my 30’s I changed the spelling of my name, to separate myself a bit from her and because it is easier for Americans to spell.  I think in order to really know me; you have to understand a bit about her.  I have spent most of my life compared to her, as her namesake.  In fact she begged mom not to name me Ilsa.  She said, “They will never say it right and never spell it right.”  A prophecy that became true, but you learn to deal with it.  The movie Frozen has done wonders for people being able to understand how to pronounce my name and remember it, because now the they have something to associate it with. 

Oma seems to have had a fairly normal upbringing.  She was raised Lutheran in a German speaking household. She attended school and had friends.  She is the middle child, with a younger brother and a older sister.  Her life was steady and constant.  Her father worked in the local ship yards and her mother kept house.  Then there was Hitler and the war starts. The family is of German heritage and it seems because of that they are hated.  They are seen the way many see Mexicans or Blacks in this country, lesser than. Her brother goes to join the German army, and becomes an officer.  She does not see him again for many years. Oma, her sister, and their parents are left in what has become a decreasingly unstable situation, and Hitler’s rule.

In the 1960’s she set down some of her memories of those times.  She states that, “We no longer were permitted to talk to them [Jews] even though day’s before we kids played together. “  They were all given ration cards and soon became malnourished.  She tells us by the age of 16 (in 1942) she had already been a shoe sales girl and an electric welder.  She learns welding in a labor camp outside of Danzig.   She then begins to work in the shipyards.  She talks about the bombings and how after a while they don’t care what happens to them anymore.  In January of 1945 a dud hits her home, but only damages a balcony.

In February of 1945, she is 19, and begins to drive a street car.  She talks about soldiers being hung from trees and mutilated by the Germans.  She does not say if they are Allied or German.  The Russians began dropping pamphlets on the city telling them they will soon liberate them.  In April of 1945, “shortly before my 19^th birthday,” the Russians invade.  She describes them as wild looking and some of them as “Mongolic.”  The rapes begin then.  All women are raped regardless of age or condition.  Small groups of women would lie on the floor while men took turns at them.  Parents were held at bayonets point, so they could not help their children.  Her mother is raped 30 to 40 times, and she no less than 50.  She says it becomes the sport of the day.  Girls that resisted we torched and put on public display.  She learned to not fight back. 

Soldiers, some say the Poles, begin to burn the city.  They start at the corners of the German section of town and light fires.  They are erasing the German people. This was a way to round up all those left and still in hiding in the city.  Many people jumped to their deaths.  Oma says, “by the middle of April 1945 my hometown was 85% burned out.”  They are homeless and she says, “we begin to live like animals.”  They stay alive by eatting green potatoes, meat from dead horses and out of the garbage.  She sleeps in ruins and tree stumps. She says, “We learned only to do as we are told.”  She steals the clothes off the dead and sells them on the black market for bread.  Malnutrition takes over her, she begins to swell like a balloon, and she loses her hair and all of her teeth.  She refuses to give up repeating to herself day and night, “I will not, I cannot and I must not get weak.”  It becomes her mantra in life.  She repeats it agan to herself while dying of cancer 40 years later.  It is even written on her headstone.

In August of 1945 they finally catch a break.  They begin to repair the railroad tracks and road going towards Berlin.  It takes them two months to get there.  It is here they get their first help.  They are sprayed with DDT to kill the lice covering them.  She talks of the elations of being free of the lice, clean clothes and her first warm meal.  It took them only 6 months to get in this condition.  Somehow they make it to my Great Uncle, her brothers’ home. (I still don’t know where that was).  She is unrecognizable accept for her voice, but alive.

Ilsa