Theirs is a love story begun in post-World War II Germany and told too late, bookended by their deaths this year, one last January, one in November.
Manfred Marschewski, who had stepped down as a Durham Township supervisor after three decades, died from a heart attack on Jan. 3; his widow, Elfriede, confined to a nursing home, died Nov. 11. She was a COVID-19 victim.
They had been married for 64 years, had three children, six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. She had worked in home care for the Northampton Visiting Nurses Association.
He was a silver-haired giant of a man, full of energy and words and constantly stressing his love and admiration for his adopted country. She was a small woman, content to be an old-fashioned wife and to live in her husband’s towering shadow. “He was my life,” she insisted after his death.
It was apparently love at first sight when they first met in Hamburg in their native Germany at a social on Christmas Eve. Their elder daughter, Helena Wolfe, said, “We understood he made it clear to her at the very beginning that he was planning to go to America.”
He did, and he went back to marry her. Because of immigration restrictions he left his pregnant wife behind and returned to America alone until he could send for her. Meanwhile Elfriede and her newborn daughter stayed with Elfrieda’s mother.
“Then began her journey with her first-born,” Wolfe said. “I still can’t imagine it. She spoke no English. She spent 10 days on a ship crossing the Atlantic with a seven-month old infant.” That infant was Helena, now a nurse in the Lehigh Valley.
The Marschewskis settled in Staten Island, N.Y., Helena said, where her brother, Manfred Jr., and sister, Mary were born.
Helena said her parents never talked about growing up in war-torn Germany. Hamburg was an industrial hub crowded with shipyards, U-boat pens and oil refineries, and the Allies bombed it relentlessly in 1943, killing 58,000 civilians and wounding 180,000 more, destroying most of the city, when Manfred was only nine years old. He lived in the city, she in the suburbs, where her family lost all their possessions twice.
“My mother was very social,” Helena said, “and my father was always working. She made friends with the neighbors and taught herself English with their help. She also went to night school. I recall helping her with her homework.”
Manfred worked for 35 years as a machinist for Anheuser-Busch in Newark. When he bought his Double M Farm in 1969, Elfrieda came to Durham Township, not quite screaming, but not overjoyed either. She was lonely, cast adrift in the country, missing her friends in the suburbs. But that soon changed as the couple embraced their new community.
They joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Durham and later celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary there. Both Elfriede and Manfred were active in the Durham Historical Society and served on its board of directors for years. He was a Mason and she a member of the Order of the Eastern Star. She also was a constant at the polls in Durham, working every November and May.
Kathleen Connally, a neighbor of the Marschewskis, recalls a kindly woman she called Friede, who was a fabulous cook. Connally’s son Isaac’s bus stop was at the Marschewski farm and Elfriede was “like a grandmother to Isaac, pulling up chairs on the back porch so they could visit and have cookies together.”
“Friede’s locally famous sausage sandwiches sold out at Durham Community Day every year,” Connally, said, “She gave me a list of ingredients, I worked with nearby markets to get the ingredients donated and Friede worked her magic turning all of it into a gustatory delight for her neighbors.
“Unfortunately for the neighbors, word got out and people from other communities started coming to Durham Community Day for her sandwiches. Working alongside her at the sales table, I heard more than a few Durham residents express their dismay when the sandwiches were sold out.”
Manfred’s and Elfriede’s deaths leave a void in Durham.
kathrynfclark@verizon.net
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