Boo Boo

It seems to me there’s so much coming to mind, I will never get to Boo Boo, but I have to, because he is another one of these angels with no wings who saved my life.

Thus I will ignore all and everything that’s pressuring me to talk about it, I will skip all and everything in favor of my Boo Boo experience. I can only hope that God blessed this awesome man and gave him a beautiful life. He had a fiancee then.. I hope they got married and lived happily ever after.

You see, it was Boo Boo who restored my faith in mankind..  I was only 10, and I had so many bad experiences with mankind, I could no longer trust anyone. Well.. except mom, Thea, Mut and Schnippe of course, Oh.. yes of course DAD. But dad died so early, that I felt deserted.. I know, he didn’t do it on purpose, but being a child.. I can explain those feelings of being deserted, am pretty sure many people can understand this.

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Boo Boo it’s your turn now for sure !

That farmhouse next door was now occupied by American soldiers.. Boo Boo was on the second floor. Of course after the cookie story, I had lost some of my fear. The cookies weren’t poisoned after all, I didn’t die. And the cookies were good on top of it. Who would do such a nice thing to kids they didn’t know.. or trust. Out of this second story window was a head sticking out a lot.

It was a real sort of friendly face and there seemed to be a huge smile painted on it. A bit on the chubby side.. He always seemed to look out of that window when I was outside. Very slowly I had lost my fear of “American soldiers” who had overtaken our village during those last days of this terrible war, and “they surely would kill us “.. we were told. Would anyone who plans to kill you give you a box of cookies first? It just made no sense to me at all. If that guy, who kept sticking his face out of the second story window was half as sweet as those cookies were (I assumed he was the cookie-guy) well then, I thought, he could not be a kid-killer.. could he? I decided to give him another chance, and boy, was that ever one of the best decisions I ever made in my whole life. This burly, smiling American soldier was actually trying to make us children feel safer.. and show us, that the stories about them that we had been told.. were lies. Within a few days I mustered up the guts to stay outside long enough to maybe make contact with this friendly looking soldier. Sure enough, as I was playing “Voelkerball” with my friends.. this soldier appeared, standing next to me and he said:”Hello Pigtails!” I said “Hallo!” this wasn’t too hard to understand and translate. I had a bit of English in school.. and was able to say a few sentences. Next, I decided to very carefully smile back at him, yes, I did. He called down from the second story:”Hello little Pigtails, don’t be afraid, OK?”” The soldier then said: “My name is Boo Boo, can I call you Pigtails?” I did understand this and replied “yes”.

From here on things went smoothly. I didn’t understand his language.. but I somehow got the gist of what he said. Maybe it was this smile? Who knows, whatever it was.. I trusted this man. We slowly developed something like a friendship and he was very aware of my fear of him.. and all of his buddies. Of course he knew we were scared to death.. but at the same time starved almost to death.. and for real, these American soldiers had a big heart for us children.

It was hard to trust.. trust anyone you didn’t know, especially soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms. But since the cookie story I was determined to give it all another try.
He then told me that his real name was Robert, that he was 24 years old, and out of a pocket he pulled a reddish lock and said:”This is my fiance'” I didn’t know what to do with the word Fiancé’.. so I figured, this was his girlfriend’s or wife’s lock. How pretty she must be.. I thought to myself. Boo Boo was the friendliest soldier I ever met, and he obviously loved children. Also, he got the biggest kick out of me speaking some English.

Slowly we became friends.. real friends. To this day I get tears in my eyes thinking about him and his incredible kindness. Later on when I came to America, I searched for him.. yet never found him. I bet that he remembered me as much as I did him. It was because of Boo Boo that from then on I thought to myself that if I would ever get married.. I would marry an American. Little did I know that I actually would. Much much later of course.

But back to Boo Boo. Our family had so many needs.. especially for anything edible.. and he knew this.

So.. we had a secret way of communicating. I would stand below this second story window and call out his name. His friendly face would appear. Now, I wore an apron, and held it open.. like an open little bag.. he knew I needed something. I then would call out the item I needed. Once it was matches. I had looked up the word in an old dictionary.. and sure enough, a handful of matches dropped into my apron. At other times I would ask him for food.. anything to eat.. anything, and usually he would drop cookies and chocolate into my eagerly held open apron. Now I found out, it was Boo Boo who had set that box of cookies on the big rock.. our way of communicating had become very good. I would talk with hands and feet.. and somehow we understood each other just fine. Meanwhile.. I became the best English student in my class……haha, how come? Self explanatory, and I was so proud of every new word and sentence I learned. Then I would run it by Boo Boo.. and he would teach me how to pronounce it in American. Quickly my English teacher noticed that I was developing an American accent. No one in my class could pronounce English words as good as I could. The “th” “r” “l” and the “y”s were big challenges.. but not for me. I had private lessons.. you know!

And so, day by day.. ever so slowly I began to trust him more and more, and my few English words I had learned in school helped this whole situation along a lot, because he got the biggest kick out of this skinny little German kid.. trying to speak English!

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  1. Unbeschreiblich schön!

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