Remembering WWII 80 Years Later: Heidi Posnien Shares Her Gripping Story of Survival

WASHINGTON – This year marks 80 years since the end of World War II and with that important milestone comes many reflections. 

A Child in Berlin shares the gripping true story of a young girl and her mother during the fall of Nazi Germany. Today at 88 years old, that young girl still recalls it all in vivid detail, including the final days of the war, and surviving on her own in a bombed-out apartment building. 

Rhonda Lauritzen is the author behind the book. 

"So I thought we'd do just a little family history and then I got into it and felt like this is a really important story and it needs to be a book," she explained, sitting next to Posnien in an interview with CBN News. "And we spent five years collecting Heidi's oral history and letting her tell the story in bits and getting to know one another." 

Today Posnien lives in rural Utah but her story begins in 1939 rural Germany, near the Polish border. Posnien was just three-years-old and living with her beloved grandmother. 

"I remember more of my grandmother because I stayed with my grandmother first and the old country and the snow and going over to the neighbors," Posnien explained. "Those were good times."

Posnien's mother, Käthe, was a rising opera star in Berlin. 

"She sang a lot and she practiced a lot," Posnien recalled.  

Dating a Nazi officer, Käthe found herself at a dinner party hosted by the Fuhrer himself. 

"When Heidi told me that, we were pretty well into it," said Lauritzen. "Wait, your mother met Adolf Hitler!? And of course, at the time, she was young and Berlin was such an exciting place and she was in the middle of everything. But then she started to see what was happening."

Some 80 years later, the memories remain clear for Posnien. 

"I remember when the trucks would come down other streets and I looked out the window and they were hauling people out of the houses and putting them in trucks and I asked my mother, 'Where are they all going? What's going on?' And my mom said, 'Oh, they're just taking them to the workhouses,'" said  Posnien. "And so that's the end of it, she wouldn't tell me anything more."

Refusing to join the Nazi communist party, Käthe felt she had no choice but to step down from the opera, rolling up her sleeves to work in a factory, and as so many did to survive, trading in the black market. 

"Those were usually dried beans, dried lentils," said Heidi, remembering what she and her mother had to trade. "Anything you could store in sacks. We just pushed them underneath the bed. And then we made them into little small packages and we traded them with other people that had other things."

And that, like so many things, was risky. 

"When I was little, my mom would always drill me and say,  'Now if anybody asks you your name, what do you say?' And I say, 'Heidi,' And she would say, 'No. You say I don't know,'" said Posnien. 

Rhonda explains that as the war dragged on, Berlin became a city of mainly women and children. And as the war turned, it became a bombed-out hellscape, making life treacherous for anyone trying to survive. 

Without giving away too much of the book, Posnien finds herself alone in the final weeks of the war, living in a bombed-out apartment building. She was just nine years old. 

"When I came home after a bombing one time, everything was bombed out on both sides of our building, our apartment house," she explained. "But ours was still standing, a little bit crooked but it was still standing and so I went up the stairs and doors were off the hinges and windows were all out and the great big oven that we had was all caved in and all the glass was in my mom's bed and yeah, I curled up on that." 

Posnien eventually married an American soldier and found her way to the United States, where she made a life for herself in Utah. 

She now lives in Huntsville, Utah and tends to all of her animals like she did so many years ago with her grandmother. 

After surviving Nazi Germany and escaping the communist sector of East Berlin, Posnien describes herself as a freedom-loving patriot. 

"Every time I listen to the national anthem at a ball game or something I still get choked up and it brings tears to my eyes that I'm so lucky that I'm here now," said Posnien. 

And through it all, she's not jaded. She says there's a saying she chooses to live by. 

"I always say, 'Eat life, don't let life eat you.'"