Facade portrait: Helga Siegmund

Helga Siegmund

née Wanninger

* 1940 in Stettin/Pomerania (now: Poland)

Immigration to Bremerhaven: 1945

“My parents said we were the first refugees in Bremerhaven.”

“My parents said we were the first refugees in Bremerhaven.”

This is how Helga Siegmund remembers fleeing from Stettin, the former capital of Pomerania, to Bremerhaven in 1945 with her mother and younger sister when she was five years old.

As the attacks on the port city of Stettin increased in 1944 during World War II, Helga Siegmund’s mother decided to flee with her two daughters. Initially, they went to relatives in the small nearby village of Siegelkow, but as the war situation escalated there as well, they had to flee once again. Helga Siegmund’s mother actually wanted to leave Pomerania on the “Wilhelm Gustloff,” but could no longer secure a passage – the ship was later sunk. “My grandfather was a railway worker and made sure that we could still flee by train” – heading west, towards Bremerhaven, where Helga’s father was stationed with the Navy. “I don’t know how long we were on the road, only that it was very cold. We had to travel in a freight car.”

Helga Siegmund

A garden in Spaden

On February 19, 1945, Helga Siegmund finally arrives in Bremerhaven. Her father, a lieutenant, initially accommodates the family in his room at the barracks, “but that was not a permanent state,” and “since Bremerhaven was also heavily destroyed, my father looked for us accommodation in Spaden.” To this day, Helga Siegmund lives with her husband in Spaden. The two met while working at the magistrate’s office in Bremerhaven, where Helga Siegmund began her career as a city employee at the age of 18 – “I worked in the same building where we were first accommodated in Bremerhaven.” Later, she works for 21 years at Lebenshilfe Wesermünde. “As enthusiastic hobby gardeners, my husband and I have visited many beautiful gardens and parks with the cactus club from Bremerhaven, even in England.” Now Helga Siegmund prefers to take it easy: “We are now over 80 years old and only garden in our beautiful garden.”

Bremerhaven and Stettin have been partner cities for 30 years now. However, Helga Siegmund has never returned to her birthplace but says: “I sometimes wonder how my life would have turned out if we could have stayed there.”