Your Ernst Who Is Always Faithful to You

<p>When she was growing up in Nazi Germany Liselotte Peschel was fascinated with music literature and all things scientific and technical. Her bookkeeping job at a local telephone company brought her into contact with Ernst Roesch a young apprentice eager to master the elements of his trade and bursting with his own ideas about the machines that he wanted to design and build.</p><p>Their budding friendship seemed to be over when an official letter demanded that Ernst a half-Jew report to Gestapo headquarters in Munich early in 1945. Ernst's mother had already been sent away to the camp in Theresienstadt. Now he was shipped off to Wolmirsleben a slave labor camp in northern Germany-where early on he decided that he'd do whatever he could to stay alive and to keep in touch with the young woman he cared for.</p><p>At first when he was still at Wolmirsleben he sent her a postcard to wish her a Happy Easter. Later-after the camp was liberated and after he was reunited with his mother and emigrated to America-he began writing letters to her regularly sharing his thoughts and hopes for his future-one that he hoped would include her.</p><p>Their long-distance friendship took an unexpected turn when Ernst was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and then sent to Berlin to work in military intelligence. Now after a five-year hiatus he had the chance to meet with her again face to face.</p><p>In these pages Steven Roesch uses his parents' correspondence from the 1940s and 1950s to tell the story of their early years.</p>