"A Village of Our Own"

Pastor Herbert Reich had never seen the two 15-year-old girls before, but when they clambered down from the crowded third-class coach at the Delmenhorst station one day last week, he recognized them at once. Their clothes were clean but more patched and ragged than is usual in Western Germany, they carried tiny battered satchels instead of suitcases, and their eyes were bright with anticipation. Thirty-five-year-old Pastor Reich, who lost one leg to a Russian mortar shell, hobbled forward on his cane to introduce himself. "Guten Tag," said Else Hartmann and Irma Mueller shyly.

During the mile drive in his little car, they lost some of their shyness and began pelting him with excited questions. And as they rounded a curve and saw the red brick houses set in wide surrounding fields, one of them exclaimed: "Just think --a village of our own!"

Christliches Jugenddorf Adelheide--the Christian Youth Village of Adelheide--is the name lettered on the big roadside sign outside the cluster of 20-odd two-story buildings near Bremen, in Germany's British zone. Adelheide was built to be one of the biggest Luftwaffe bases in northern Germany. At war's end it became first a D.P. camp, then (with the addition of barbed wire) an internment center for Gestapo-men and Nazis awaiting trial.

Two months ago Adelheide was organized as a Christian Youth Village. The British military government was faced with alarming numbers of children who crossed from the Russian zone to wander, begging and black-marketeering, from town to town. Germany's Protestant and Catholic churches were called on for help. Both faiths agreed to make Adelheide over into a kind of coeducational Boys Town* and run it jointly. Today it houses 796 children--590 Catholic and 206 Protestant. On the Catholic side (a 22-year-old German law enforces rigid segregation in all joint Protestant-Catholic welfare enterprises) there are 272 girls. Else and Irma are the village's first Protestant girls.

The two girls are typical of Adelheide's population. Nervous, dark-haired Irma was working in a textile mill in the Russian zone when the millowners and technicians suddenly decamped to set up another mill under Allied occupation. Jobless and starving, Irma wound up at a refugee camp. From there she was rescued and sent to the Christliches Jugenddorf. Plump, blonde Else had been working as a cook when told that she had been requisitioned by the Soviet military government. She was so terrified that she fled across the border without waiting to find out what the Russians wanted her to do.

Restless Sophisticates. Adelheide's population ranges in age from 9 to 20. To make as homelike an atmosphere as possible, the children are divided into groups of 25 or 30, each known as a "family" and supervised by a trained young man or woman proctor. All go to school from 8 to 12:30 every weekday. Afternoons are spent in games or chores. Meals are as good as the average German fare--two light meals a day and one "big" dinner (such as broth, goulash, sauerkraut, potatoes, plum pudding).

Most of the children look upon Adelheide as the next thing to heaven. With almost no urging, they have organized an orchestra, a fortnightly Mimeographed paper, a system of student government. But sometimes there are problems. The Catholic director, cheery, pink-faced Alfons Loebbert, a layman, has more of these than Protestant Pastor Reich, since some 400 of the Catholic children are neither orphans nor wanderers: they are children of Berliners, flown out of the city by the R.A.F. at the beginning of winter, to ease the burden of the blockade.

The city boys are more sophisticated than the rest, but they are also more prone to homesickness and restlessness. Director Loebbert, who trained for the priesthood, relies on such Boys Town institutions as a juvenile supreme court to cope with minor rule breakers.

Lucky Girls. The chief worry of Joint Directors Reich and Loebbert is providing the tough, worldly-wise adolescents who come to Adelheide with some skill or trade with which to make their way in postwar Germany. Every week, from 20 to 30 young wanderers turn up there--boys like 17-year-old, shock-haired Karl Waldhauser, who had been drafted to work in a Russian-zone uranium mine. After three days on a pneumatic drill, Karl escaped and crossed the border at night. Says he: "I never get homesick. Maybe that's because my father and mother are dead. Now I want to be a farmer."

The directors plan to install nine other handicraft shops besides their present carpentry shop. When their charges have attained the ability and maturity to fend for themselves, the directors will help them through the red tape needed to get working papers and a job. Both churches have ambitious plans for Adelheide. By May the Protestants expect to open a hospital that will accommodate 90 paralyzed children; the Catholics are planning to turn the Luftwaffe airport behind the village into a truck farm. The total population will eventually be 2,800, divided equally between the churches.

Last week Else and Irma were busy making Adelheide their home. They brought in evergreen branches to decorate their room. With a saw borrowed from the carpentry shop, they made little frames for the pictures of their relatives. Else could hardly get over their good fortune.

"Oh, how marvelous," she exclaimed. "A real bed, and a hot bath once a week--and what food! We are the luckiest girls in the world!"

* Famed community for homeless boys, established in Nebraska by Irish-born Father Edward J. Flanagan, who died last spring in Germany, where he was consulting with military government officials on the rehabilitation of German youth.

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