Irmi's maternal grandparents

Großenstein, Germany  (February 2, 1912)

Left:  Johanna Christiane Henny (Winter) Schulze  (1892-1970)

Right:  Walter Schulze  (1886-1959)

Walter and Henny were married only two years before the outbreak of World War I

clouded their plans for the future.  Conscripted into the army, Walter left his young

wife behind and served on the front lines for the duration of the war, from 1914 to

1918.  He did receive at least one furlough, however, as evidenced by the birth of a

son, Ernst Walter, in 1916.  After the war, Walter returned home and entered into an

apprenticeship through which he eventually earned the professional designation of

"master meat cutter."  In the early 1920's, Walter and Henny opened a small butcher

shop in the town of Gera, in the German state of Thüringen.  The two worked hard, he

toiling in the back room preparing the meats, and she manning the front counter.  For

deliveries, they acquired a small horse-drawn wooden wagon.  In 1928, a second child

was born, a daughter, Rosemarie Henny.  The 1930's brought modest prosperity.  In

1936, Walter purchased a new car, an "Adler Trump Junior," which the family picked

up at the showroom in Berlin and drove home to Gera.  In May 1938, on the occasion

of her tenth birthday, Rosemarie received a new bicycle, a shiny black "Wanderer."

Throughout World War II, Walter and Henny remained at home, laboring in their

butcher shop.  In 1949, four years after the war ended, Germany was divided in half,

resulting in two separate countries: the Federal Republic of Germany (Western half)

and the German Democratic Republic (Eastern half).  The state of Thüringen, where

the Schulze's lived, fell under the jurisdiction of the eastern zone.  Soon thereafter,

communist authorities confiscated Walter and Henny's butcher shop, declaring that

the Schulze's were "capitalists."  Stripped of their life's work, Walter and Henny

entered into quiet retirement.  Walter died within a few years, but Henny lived long

enough to see both her children escape from the East and establish prosperous new

lives in free West Germany.