The Stamp Magazine (Ken Forster): November 2000

Ralph Waldo Emmerson, who had a way with words, put nine of them to good account in the phrase: 'The years teach much which the days never know'. Here, from real life is an instance of that truism.
If the then nine-year-old Jutta Schweighofer's father Ernst, at that time an unteroffizier in the Wehrmacht, had caught sight of me in uniform in central Italy in 1944 he'd have been duty bound to shoot me. If I had seen him first I'd have been obliged to react in a similar way. Our respective countries were at war. Had destiny so decreed our lethal point of convergence would have been a coastal resort south of Rome known to historians as Anzio.

It was a near miss but fate had a different scenario in mind. We both survived the war though Ernst died peacefully in his homeland in 1981 aged 77. On a social occasion in England in 1989 I was introduced to his daughter - now Mrs. Jutta Marshall - and found we had a lot in common. Although her father and I narrowly avoided  an earlier encounter we discovered we shared an interest in writing and postal history. Jutta intended to put into print in features, and a book, some highlights of her own remarkable life - strangely linked with postal matters.

From our introductory chat I learned she'd been born in Austria and spent her formative years there, so  at a later meeting  I took a selection  of Austrian postmarks including those of Christkindl, Rastenfeld and Zwettl. From this I learned that among other links with the postal scene her paternal grandmother Maria Schweighofer had been the first postmistress at Friedersbach near Zwettl, for many years. Her family ran a farm, a butcher's shop, and a hostelry in the village, close to Grandma presiding at the post office
Another relative, Uncle Joschi, had served for many years as head forester  in the service of Count Thurn  of Rastenberg, a name not unknown in Europe' postal history. By a strange spin of events in later years, Jutta, by then a well-qualified teacher, was offered and accepted the role of private tutor to 10-year-old Marina, the Count's high spirited daughter.

Jutta's own story 'reads like a book' in which form it has been published. Born in Vienna in 1934 she spent her wartime childhood and teenage years in the Ostmark of Hitler's Third Reich and, in the turbulent times following 1945, in the Soviet controlled sector  of the new Austria. Her account of those interludes is intensively moving. Then, fairytale fashion, on a tutorial visit to England in 1961 to attend a London language school, she was introduced to a likeable young Yorkshireman called Brian Marshall. After a series of mishaps and misunderstandings they were married in Zwettl in 1964, settled in England, and now have two grown up sons.

That's the frame within which Jutta's gentle, often humorous and highly readable account of her life thus far is set. Her story begins on a September morning in 1940 with her first day at school in her home village of Rastenfeld, an era symbolised by the swastika. It ends  in 1992 at the Rastenfeld ('Rest in the Field') graveside of close members of her family on whose memorial, with Brian at her side, she has placed a bush of white roses - the floral emblem of the English county which is now her home. When Jutta completed her book and was casting around for a possible publisher the suggestion upon which she acted came from best selling author Bill Spence. Coincidentally he,
like Jutta's grandmother, is in charge of a village post office sited less than 40 miles from Jutta's Yorkshire home.

It may be thought the resultant book, 'THE WHITE ROSE AND THE SWASTIKA' (published in August by Highgate Publications, Beverley, HU17 8EG, price £11.50) has minimal relevance to the study of postal matters and postal history. However many of its best elements provide evidence to the contrary. It is one of many true life volumes in which the telling relies heavily on the provision and preservation of essential documents, photographs, printed ephemera, letters and memory pictures. In recording a life such components can be vital.

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'The White Rose and the Swastika'. This is a moving story about a young Austrian girl growing up in the Second World War and the dangers she faces when the Russians invade her country.
On the one hand, it shows how alike we all are in our basic desires and needs, on the other it shows how we can be manipulated by power mad despots. Apart from showing us what life was like under Nazi oppression, the book might remind those who still retain prejudice against our one-time enemy that some of them did not want the war either.

But like so many before them, they were manipulated by those twin imposters patriotism and nationalism.
I recommend this warm book.

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.... Yorkshire and Nazi Germany, Jutta Marshall experienced them both.
In fact she still lives in Yorkshire, Scarborough to be exact. Born in Vienna, she was under Nazi domination throughout the war and then for ten years under Soviet rule. She tells of these times as they affected her and her family.
Though times were trying, they always had a determination to carry on a normal life as far as possible and keep humour in their outlook.

This is something which Jutta carried over into her life in Yorkshire after she married Brian.
She has a pleasant way of making us see her life and easily transports us to share it with her.

The author was born in an Austrian village in the mid 1930s, a short distance from Adolf Hitler's home town. Her memoir starts in 1939 when she was five, and Austria had fallen under the Nazi jackboot. Her father joined the German army that conquered Europe and then attacked Russia in 1941. Jutta Marshall records these victories which started to go sour in Stalingrad in 1943.
By 1944 Germany was facing defeat on all fronts and she recalls hearing Hitler's voice, shaking but unmistakable in its rhetoric, telling of the failed attempt on his life on July 20. Then on April 30 1945 she heard Admiral Doenitz announcing "our beloved Fuhrer is dead". So ended the first 10 years of her life with her father a prisoner of war.

The rest of the book is about her education, training and qualification as a teacher and the events that led her to Scarborough and meeting her husband Brian Marshall whom she married in Austria in 1964. She has lived here ever since but Jutta has maintained close links between her native and adoptive countries.
Her remarkable story, told from the heart, is a fascinating account of what it was liked to be on the other side in Hitler's war.

 

'The White Rose and the Swastika' © Highgate Publications (Beverley) Limited/Jutta Marshall 2000/2001.