In the fall of her twenty-second year, Inge sat down to rest. She felt the warmth of the rock beneath her, and lay back to let the sun shine down on her. She fell into a peaceful sleep.

Twenty minutes later, a friend with whom she had been hiking, came back and woke her up.

“Inge,” she said, “you must keep going. If you stay here, you will die.”

She, along with a small group of other nurses in the Nazi army, had just escaped from a Russian internment camp. They were walking through a mountain pass, making their way West.

On Saturday July 30th 2016 at 10pm, Ingeborg Francesca Jurkutat died in Memphis, Tennessee at the age of 93. In all but blood, she was my grandmother.

It is hard for me to tell Inge’s story without resorting to what seems gross hyperbole. My life, in comparison, spans such a narrow range of the human experience. Passed by the spectrum of her life, my saddest and most challenging moments do not even register.

And yet, my memories of her are filled with joy and love.

She was born in 1923 in Strausburg, Austria, not far from the Italian border.

Her mother was Italian. Her father was Swedish. He was an obstetrician, and when her mother had gone into labor while they were out for a drive, he had delivered Inge into the world in the backseat of a Mercedes.

She had brothers and sisters. We were never sure how many because by the time she came into our lives, she could not talk about her family without getting emotional. She would always come down on Christmas morning smiling and happy to watch me open the absurd number of presents I had received — then spent the rest of the afternoon in her room crying.

It was a day to be with family and hers, by that time, was all long since dead.

When my mom and dad went to comfort her, she would mumble a few words about “my sisters” and “my brothers” between the tears, but that was the closest we ever got to hearing about her family.

She was, by any measure, born into a fortunate situation. Her family was well-regarded in Strausburg. To even have a car in 1923 was no small thing.

Their standing would collapse under the Nazis. Particularly when it was discovered that they had been housing a Jewish couple, a colleague of her father’s, in their basement for the early years of the Nazi occupation.

She spent summers growing up at the beach in northern Italy, near where her mother grew up.

At one point she had stepped on a sea urchin, a memory she had not forgotten, as she would caution me a half century later anytime I went to the beach to “watch out for the prickly prick!”

Her grandfather loomed large in her childhood. He taught her his morality: a fierce loyalty to truth, honor, and family. She never forgot.

Though she lived with my family for twenty seven years, she talked little about her childhood. I think recounting warm memories of her family, when her present experience with them was so cold, tore at her too much to speak about them at length.

My image of it, seen through her eyes, was idyllic. Perhaps that was more because of the juxtaposition between her early years and what followed.

Regardless of your means, Austria was not the place to be born in the 1920s. As she grew up, it was trapped between two fascists states: Hitler’s resurgent Germany, and Mussolini’s Italy.

The Nazis marched into Austria in 1938. She was fifteen.

When the war escalated, everyone in Inge’s family was given the choice of being killed, relocated to a camp, or conscripted in the German army. Her mother was exempted, the rest chose conscription.

Her brothers were made pilots in the German air force. She had been studying nursing, so she was made a nurse in the German army. I’m not sure what happened to her sisters.

She got married to a young Austrian man, a friend in Strausburg. It was at least in part, and perhaps in whole, a marriage of convenience. It was thought that men with wives were less likely to be put on the front lines, so they wed quickly in the hopes he would receive a better assignment.

He gave her a simple wedding band.

Her marriage was short-lived and it’s aim unsuccessful. He was killed within six months of their marriage.

We think that they may have had a child together who was also killed. She hinted at it through long sobs, but could never bring herself to speak of it if they did.

She wore the wedding band until her death. Late in her life, my family worried that the band was cutting off her circulation but she refused to even consider taking it off. I don’t think she could have if she tried. It was grafted onto her finger, absorbed by her flesh as many a tree growing old in our backyard absorbed the nails from which she hung her birdhouses.

She spoke little of her time in the German army, I know of just two stories.

At some point her mother, the only member of her family who had not been conscripted into the Nazi army, sent her a basket of cherries.

Transportation was slow and cherries go bad quickly. By the time Inge received them, they were all rotten. A teenager sitting alone in her bunk, far from home, embroiled in a war not of her making, she looked at them and saw her mother’s love. She cried as she ate every last rotten cherry.

One night while she was sleeping, she had a dream that one of her brothers left her a good pair of leather boots. Shoes were hard to come by, good shoes in particular, and so to give someone a good pair of shoes was a real sign of love.

She was sure that the dream was real, that her brother had indeed come to visit her. When she awoke, she spent hours searching for the boots. She could not find them. The boots weren’t there.

Towards the end of the war, she was captured by the Russians. The Red Army, seeing her as a member of the German army, put her into an internment camp.

I’m not sure how long she spent in the camp, but she escaped with a group of other nurses with whom she had served in the German army.

The only story she ever told of her escape was that one, when she fell asleep as they were walking across the mountains. If her friend had not noticed, and come back to wake her up, Inge would have died.

The timeline immediately after the war isn’t clear. At some point she returned to her childhood home in Austria. I do not know what she saw there. The few times she tried to speak of it, she was overwhelmed with tears.

At best, she saw nothing but an empty house. After years living through hell, she returned to an empty home.

Her two brothers were both killed in combat during the war. I do not know how the rest of her family died, only that they did. As American and Russian soldiers triumphantly marched into Berlin, Inge was twenty-two years old and alone in the world.

At some point, she ended up in Berlin herself. Having been conscripted by the Nazis as a teenager, she was, in the eyes of the Allies, a Nazi herself.

She looked German, she spoke German, she must have been German. The American soldiers treated her poorly. She never revealed how, it was always lost in tears, though she said she understood. They had lost so much, and she looked so much like those who had taken it from them.

In Berlin, she would sneak in and sleep in the bathroom of the Berlin train station each night. Before going to bed, she always washed her clothes in the sink. This was not a trivial task. Soap was hard to come by in Germany in 1945, but the idea of going out into the world, even via a train station bathroom, without a clean pair of clothes was untenable to her.

She would never waste a bar of soap, or anything else, for the rest of her life . Each last square inch was put to work.

While she was in Berlin, she met a photographer for Time Life Magazine. Her name was Betty Knorr. She was American. At some point she offered Inge a job taking care of her children, and Inge accepted. Inge didn’t know it at the time, but taking care of children was the vocation she would have for the next 70 years.

Betty’s husband owned an import/export company that imported Argentinian beef to the U.S. After Betty finished covering the war, they decided to move to Puerto Rico. It was an easy midpoint for his business and it let her travel for assignments and leave the kids. They brought Inge with them.

Inge would never return to Austria. She would never see a family member again. We found out after almost two decades of knowing her that a portion of her family, aunts and uncles, had fled Austria for America in the lead up to the war. My parents immediately offered to hire someone to look for them. She refused. Her grandfather had forbidden the family to separate. After her aunts and uncles had fled to America, he forbade anyone from ever speaking with them again. She never did.

She traveled to Puerto Rico on a cargo boat. It took around two weeks to cross the Atlantic from Lisbon. She spent most of the two weeks hating the chickens clucking in the compartment next to her. She did not forget them. She came into my life four decades later and I can’t count the times she complained of “those chickens, cluck cluck cluck.”

In Puerto Rico she continued caring for Betty’s children. I believe they both left when they got old enough to go to boarding school, though it may have been college.

In either case, she got involved in social work in Puerto Rico caring for young children. She met a young boy named Justin and started taking care of him. She managed to contact Justin’s grandmother in Memphis, Tennessee. His grandmother offered them her home and she moved with Justin and his father to Memphis.

Inge continued taking care of children. She primarily looked after newborns. This was how my mom heard of her. She had looked after the Manugian’s son, a family my mom knew through church.

And so, when my mom got pregnant, she asked Inge to come into her office at the WKNO public radio station for an interview the next day at 2 pm.

Inge came early and took a seat in the waiting room. She entered the WKNO creative office at exactly 2pm.

My mom, stuck in a meeting running late, asked if she could wait. She could not. She had other commitments that day, and if this one started late she would be late for them. She was never late for anything she explained.

She started the interview by making a list of demands, all the items that a newborn needed. She laid down the rules and parameters under which she would work. If all of these were not followed, she would not be involved. She would not negotiate.

My mom went out and bought everything on the list the next day. She presented it to Inge asking if it was acceptable. Inge said that it was and agreed to help my mom for the first three months after I was born.

The morning I was born, my dad called Inge to let her know and told her they would be home in a day or two and he would call her to arrange for her to come to the house. She declined.

She was at the hospital within the hour.

She arrived at the room a few hours after I was born, and saw my dad and sister looking in on me through the glass. She took one look and barged into the nursery. The nurses, she explained, had done the swaddling all wrong. The blankets were the wrong material and not wrapped properly. She had brought her own blankets and quickly righted this wrong. She was no less caring or generous as I grew up.

I was born in February, and when I was two weeks old she started taking me on walks. It was cold, below freezing, and my mom asked whether that was such a good idea. She asked in that way people from the South ask a question when they really mean it as a statement but don’t want to be impolite. Inge being not-from-the-South, took it as a question and insisted that it was, indeed, a good idea.

When we got out to walk, we passed by a neighbor out for a walk. He asked how old I was and Inge told him: 2 weeks. He was horrified.

This was one of Inge’s favorite stories to tell me. In the last few years of her life when her memory faded, I heard it from her every time I visited, sometimes multiple times. I’m not sure why, but it was told with such love and kindness that I never cared or asked, just laughed and said thank you.

Inge was initially supposed to stay and help my mom for three months. But after three months everyone talked and thought it would be a good idea for her to stay a few more months. After a few more months, they had the same conversation and reached the same conclusion.

At some point, the conversation was no longer necessary.

She would live with my family for the next twenty seven years. Occasionally, she would go off for a few months at a time to take care of other kids, but she always came back. Eventually, she just moved in and, for all intents and purposes, became my grandmother.

Her teeth were rotten. She’d had no access to dental care for most of my life. When Dr. Priester eventually fixed all her teeth by installing dentures, she was all smiles. She loved to cook and eat and now had a fresh set of teeth to do it with.

She had learned to cook from her Italian mother, so we were never short an Italian dish growing up. She’d also invent new recipes throughout the year, most famously, her coca-cola chicken.

The recipe was simple and wonderful. Sauté onions in a large pan, add a can of coca cola (real coke, no diet!) and a cup of ketchup. Simmer the chicken until it’s fall of the bone tender. The best was when she made it with “the little red potatoes.” They were just small red potatoes chopped in half and baked in the hoven. The secret was that she used McCormick’s French Onion Dip mix (the dry mix, not the actual dip) to cover them so they tasted zesty.

She often cooked with food she grew herself, a gift of her prodigious green thumb. She would garden nearly every day until it got too dangerous for her to walk up and down the steps at my parents’ house. She had a small hand spade that she would use and a yellow, foam gardening mat to kneel on.

She grew a lot of different things. The ones I remember were snow peas, blueberries, and tomatoes. The snow peas I remember because I would go with her to the garden and “help” harvest them, mostly sitting next to her and eating them fresh off the plant.

The blueberries I remember because we stored them in big ziplock bags in the freezer. She would break off a chunk of frozen blueberries and put them in a bowl. We would sit together in the kitchen and visit and eat the cold blueberries in the summer.

The tomatoes I remember because I did not like them. She tried cooking them a dozen different ways, and I refused to eat them. She found this utterly confusing because I loved ketchup which she insisted, hundreds of times, was “exactly the same thing.”

She was, until the day she died, the least wasteful person I’ve ever met. Not just the last nubs of soap were used but she would save every last scrap of food, wear her shoes until they were pockmarked with holes, and wear her trademark floral jumpers until they were threadbare.

When we would open presents on Christmas morning, she insisted that everyone use a knife to cut the scotch tape instead of tearing the wrapping paper so she could use it again the following year. Over years, we eventually had to have a closet dedicated solely to wrapping paper because she would save the wrapping paper for any gift that came into the house. The biggest smile I saw on her face every Christmas was while she carefully folded and stored the stack of wrapping paper.

She loved to go on walks. I’m not sure anyone else around me growing up would just go out for a walk, a habit I’ve had ever since. They weren’t usually to anywhere or for any particular reason, they were just walks, practiced as a dying art form.

When I was seven, she got her green card. I’m not sure how she had been in the country before then. It took her a half decade to get her papers from the time the process began. It was in part because the process is complex, difficult and expensive for anyone, but the difficulty was increased by her unwillingness to lie about anything.

My parents, who had hired a lawyer to get her through the process, face palmed when she straightforwardly explained to the interviewer that she had been in the Nazi army.

She became a U.S. Citizen at 73 and I’ve never met someone so proud to vote. It was not a privilege she had when the Nazis came to Austria. “One day another man will come, like Mussolini or Hitler or Franco. Don’t listen.”

She got her first house at around the same age and was equally proud. It was small, with a wonderful garden, of course. She had come a long way from the Berlin train station bathroom.

She got colon cancer when I was young as well. I don’t remember much about it. In part because I was young, but in part, I think, because of how she approached it. I think she saw colon cancer much as she saw a cold. It was a nuisance but she would not be complaining about it and would deal with it promptly so that she could get back to work. She did. It never returned. One is almost inclined to feel bad for the cancer. It was an unfair fight.

The room she lived in when I was in college shared a bathroom with the guest room I stayed in when I came home to visit.

The summer after I graduated, I came home. I’d just broken up with my first serious girlfriend and she heard me crying through the wall the first night I was back.

She walked in and sat down on the bed and asked what was wrong. I told her and she hugged me and started telling me stories of her life. Many of the stories I’ve recorded here she told me that night: stories of heartbreak and loss and love. She sat on my bed telling stories until I fell asleep. I was twenty-two.

I remember coming home to visit a few years ago and seeing her with my nephew on the back porch. He had some construction toys he was playing with in a small sandbox. Inge was sitting in the rocking chair, in her bright blue jumper, with her all white shoes, watching him with a smile.

That moment, her in the rocking chair, watching over a child with her garden around her — that symbolizes her life to me.

Last Updated on July 30, 2019 by Taylor Pearson