82 and going strong

Angie's father Sepp's birthday today - 82. I have mentioned some of his early life before but worth repeating. In 1944, aged 10, he was the oldest male in the family who fled the village he was born in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire but then Serbia. Around 4000 of the 5000 residents of the town were German "Danube Swabians" recruited by the Austrian emperors in 18th and 19th centuries to develop the fertile but very wet lands along the Danube. Sepps father was on the Russian front in a medical unit and wasn't to return from Russian imprisonment until long after wars end. His grandfather stayed as he didn't want to leave the animals untended but then a week or two later did make the trek to Austria.

Sepp with younger brother, mother, grandmother together with horse and cart made the two week long journey to Austria, were taken in by a farmer and eventually moved in the 50's to Germany. Many of the relatives opted for the USA.

The first black face Sepp ever saw was a GI who gave him his first bar of chocolate from a passing Jeep. In the late 60's Sepp took in a black African homeless couple, the wife pregnant. Angie and her sisters were to become very proud of pushing the pram around the village with a black baby. Sepp like most have concerns about immigration but he knows what it means to be fleeing in fear of one's life.

PS Sepp has for all his 60+ years in Bavaria been an Augustiner Beer man.