Oma: Growing Up and Family
Birthplace
Elly Anni Bendig was born June 19, 1928, in Alt Heidlauken, a village on the Wiepe river. The map below – probably from the 1930s – shows the town name as Wiepenheide; many Prussian towns were renamed in the 1930s to “Germanize” them.
Although the area had large plots of land, these didn’t seem to be actual farms. See the image below as an example.
Oma always said she grew up in a village, not a farm.
She was the youngest of four: sister Grete (1913?-?); sister Charlotte (1918-2000) and twin brother Fritz (1918-1943). Fritz was killed in combat during World War II.
Parents
Elly was the youngest child, born when her mother was in her early 40s. While her two sisters had married prior to the war, Elly was much younger and ended up staying with them during their time in the refugee camps and their relocation to West Germany, below.
Wiepenheide was only 40 km from Lithuania; her mother, Koyus, had a Lithuanian name, and could speak Lithuanian. Her father, 47 years old when she was born, was from Benkleim, about 100 km south-east of Wiepenheide. Julius is listed as being a casualty of the First World War, even though he would have been 33 years old when it began. In records from West Germany in the late 1940s, he is listed as being “invalid”.
After her father Julius (1881-1958) passed away, Koyus (1885-1971) lived alone until her mid-80s, although always close to her daughter Charlotte, in Bünde, West Germany.
Charlotte Conrad (Bendig)
Elly had two sisters and a brother: Charlotte was ten years older, along with her twin, Fritz.
Elly’s sister Charlotte married Hans Conrad before the war, and they had three children: Helmut (1939-), Dora (1940-1975), and Gerda (1941-2024).
Dora passed away from cancer in her 30s. She was an active outdoors person, and worked in Bonn (then the capital of West Germany).
Grete Rentel (Bendig)
Oma’s oldest sister was fifteen years older than her. She was married before the war and living with her husband, Kurt, when they had to flee from the Red Army in 1945. Grete and her husband made their way to West Germany separately and eventually settled in Nuremberg. They did not have any children.
There was a falling out between Grete and the rest of her family in the 1970s. Oma and I visited Germany in the 1968, and the Rentels came to Bünde to see us. However, it seems some things were said around Dora’s passing that caused an inseparable rift within the family, and they lost touch with each other. Charlotte’s children, Gerda and Helmut, do not know what happened, nor have many memories of her.
Growing Up
Growing up in Wiepenheide, Elly’s family had no running water nor flush toilets: they had to get their water from a nearby stream, and had an outhouse 50 meters from the house between two haystacks.
East Prussia was not affected by the war, and life went on fairly normally.
Like Horst, Elly went to a one room school.
The first photographs from Oma and Opa that were not from a photo studio are from the time Opa had a military leave in 1944. This suggests that Opa bought a camera when on this leave, as there are several photos dated from the summer of 1944. This also suggests that the above photos of Oma were taken by Opa when he visited in April 1944 when he was 20 and she was 15.
Our German Family 