She’s no doubt fluent in her native German, but Helga Stubbs also speaks very good English with a lovely accent.

She also speaks with her expressive eyes, with her hands, with laughter — and occasionally with a bit of sorrow in her voice.

Born in 1932 in Erfurt, Germany — “the Martin Luther state” — she came to this country in 1956 as a war bride, and for most of those years she has been an American citizen. She married James Stubbs (she calls him Pete) in a ceremony performed by a German pastor; later a civil ceremony was conducted by a justice of the peace.

On her escape from East Germany when she was a teen, the first Americans she came upon were a group of MPs and, she said, “Pete may have been one of them,” for her future husband was an MP in the border town where she crossed into freedom.

The escape wasn’t her first attempt. Her parents had divorced, and Helga said she would never forsake her mother. Her mother, however, was the one who urged her to leave. With a family friend leading the way, Helga, who was carrying a small suitcase, said, “We walked and walked and walked, came to a little rise, and the friend said, ‘You see there. That is West Germany.’ Suddenly from behind the bushes came a Russian with a machine gun. ‘Stop!’ He motioned us behind some bushes.”

There Helga found other people who had been detained, and the guard took all of them to a small village near the border.

“That was before the wall (separating East and West Germany),” she said. “They took everything — my little yellow suitcase, my passport…” but they didn’t know about the West German currency she had concealed in her bra. The soldiers made her their secretary so she could record the names of all they had detained.

“We then walked a mile or two to another small town,” she said, and we were put in a dungeon, or cellar. They called my name and asked my purpose to go. I said ‘I have a relative'” in West Germany and she was going there on vacation.

The German Communists and Russians didn’t buy her story, so they fined her 250 marks and put her in jail for 24 hours and issued a warning: if she tried it again, she would be sentenced to hard labor.

“So I went home, got a job in a beautiful little town where my mother lived, and then one day she said, ‘I’ve got another way for you to go,'” Helga said. “I was petrified.”

James “Pete” Stubbs listens as his wife, Helga Stubbs, talks of seeing the Statue of Liberty upon entering the United States by ship. Suzanne Feliciano * The Vicksburg Post)

All the arrangements were made, and she took a train to the town where her father lived. The next day Helga got on a bus that was headed to the last village in West Germany on the other side of the border. The bus stopped in “no man’s land” and guards approached with guns.

“I still get goose pimples when I think about it,” she said. “They ordered ‘Out, out, out.’ There was a sweet little lady next to me, and she had a baby. I held it for a while, and they came closer and closer.”

When the guards asked for Helga’s passport, the lady touched her on the arm and told the soldiers, “Oh, that’s my cousin and she’s going to spend a week with me on vacation.” That’s the only way Helga got through.

The lady took her to another village where both of them got bicycles, and with her belongings in a small suitcase she started for West Germany. Helga still recalls the whistles and shouts of the soldiers, both German and Russian: “Oh, Fraulein, where are you going on ‘that bicycle?” At dark the lady took her to the border where she could see the gate to the old town.

“That’s West Germany,” the lady told her. “Now you’re going to have to go alone. Helga never knew the name of the lady, she said, “but in my prayers I thank God for her.”

Helga really expected to be caught, and she lay in a ditch until the opportunity came to make a move. She prayed, “God, you take my heart in your hands.” That’s when she heard the American GIs coming, and she knew she was safe. She caught a train to Stuttgart, and because she spoke “bloomin’ Oxford English,” she landed a job in the American PX.

Any socializing with the Americans at that time was strictly forbidden, but she recalls when she met Pete. “Oh, I was impressed. He was so good looking. There was a steadiness about him, such dependability. I felt safe around him.” Despite the rules, they dated and married. Not only was the government unhappy about the match, but so was her father who “practically disowned me because I was marrying an American, for he had been a POW in France. My mother gave her permission.

“Stubbs got into trouble for marrying the vivacious fraulein, but the sentence was lenient: every evening for several weeks he and Helga had to report to the officer’s home where the wives visited, talking of music and other mutual interests.

Ironically, Helga at one time thought she hated Americans because like all other German children she had been in the Hitler Youth Corps.

The first American she ever saw was a pilot who often flew over their town. They became so used to it they quit fleeing to the cellar, but then one day — Feb. 6, 1944, the American plane engaged a German one in battle. They were so close Helga could see their faces. She and her three younger siblings wanted to run, but her mother told her, “You cannot run.”

“I can feel that minute to this day,” Helga said. Suddenly the American was shot down, his plane spiraling “down, down, down” toward the village church, but the pilot managed to turn the plane toward some nearby mountains. When captured, “He said he did that because there were so many women and children in the town.”

It was almost a decade later when, in 1956, she and Pete and their three girls — Christine, Lucy Ann, and Katherine —left Europe on a troop ship for New York. The girls were like stair steps, Helga said. A son, Jamie, was born in this country.

“I really did not want to come to America,” Helga said, but she had said her marital vows to follow her husband, yet when they boarded the ship at Bremenhaven and she thought of how beautiful her homeland was and when she heard the music playing — “They always play music — I knew I was leaving part of me in Germany.”

Helga, top right, with her sisters and brother in their German home in Friedrichroda.

The trip was her first sea voyage, and with little girls in diapers (that had to be washed by hand) she hardly had time to get sick. She had learned Emma Lazarus’ poem, “Give me your tired, your poor, yearning to be free” as a girl, so “seeing the Statue of Liberty was overwhelming,” she said. As they approached Ellis Island, the sight was grand — “bands playing, and people shouting and praying, full of joy,” yet Helga felt all alone and prayed to God, “Please help me, and to his praise I’ve never been alone since.”

“You would not believe the trip to Mississippi,” she said. They bought a used Nash car for the five-day trip to Vicksburg. Pete’s folks lived in the country, but she said, “I had never experienced country living like this,” no running water, no screens, no indoor plumbing.

It wasn’t the kind of lifestyle she was used to, and Pete teased, “She wouldn’t go to the toilet unless she was wearing high heels.”

And though memories of World War II were still fresh in the minds of many, Helga found Pete’s family “to be such kind people. They had an inner kindness. They welcomed me so dearly.”

Soon Pete and his family moved into a tiny one-bedroom house and Helga thought they were pretty well settled when he came home one day and said they were moving to California. With a trailer filled with their belongings, they began the journey in their old Nash — through tornadoes in Texas and sand storms on the desert — but they made it. Pete rented a little house in a not-so-good section, but in typical German housewife fashion, Helga soon had it spotless and decorated with pretty curtains. They were close to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm and other attractions, and she took the children to everything and became active in the school’s PTA.

Then one day Pete came home and announced that they were moving back to Mississippi because the California smog was causing Helga severe lung problems. Helga didn’t like it — she’s typical German, a planner, and Pete, she says, is spontaneous, but “he can wear me down, or talk me into anything,” so it was homeward bound.

At first, she said, life in Mississippi was “not so good,” but they found a little house “way out jonder” on Dillon Ridge. She tackled the job of improving it, and one of Pete’s relatives, a Mrs. Pettway, taught her quilting and many ways of country living.

“I learned so much,” Helga said. “I’m an active person, but my activity is not running after pigs. But we survived.”

Pete went to work as a welder for the Corps of Engineers, and after a while they moved into a nice house next door to Adolph and Lois Bowers. Helga went to work in the Culkin School cafeteria, where she stayed for 20 years, earning her manager’s license. At 59, she completed work for her high school diploma, and for nine years she worked as a teacher’s assistant in the kindergarten.

Today, she serves as a volunteer with the Pink Ladies at River Region Medical Center, and though she’s a Baptist now, she’s “still half-Lutheran.” She has been back to Germany several times and talks to her family there each week.

“When I get to Frankfurt, I feel like kissing the ground,” she said, “but nobody cares! I look at the abundance of beauty in the country. The air smells good, and I look around and see the culture. Everywhere flowers are blooming, music is playing and you hear the bells ringing. I am overwhelmed.

“But you give me a week or two and I’m ready to go back to America,” she said. “So here I am. That’s it. But if I go home again, my heart and my soul will feel fulfilled.”

*

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.