One day Friedel told me she was pregnant. We had no place to live, no money, we came from completely different social backgrounds, we had different goals in life. My priority was to get away, to go abroad, preferably to the USA. She really wanted to go home to her family in Upper Silesia. But there were two things we had in common: our love and our Prussian principles. We would just have to give up our personal ambitions and build a family together.

In those days it was a matter of honor that you got married when a child was on the way. But normally you wouldn't think of starting a family until the economic foundations had been laid. And in our case they hadn't been. Friedel had refugee status and her profession as a nurse, and that was all. I had even less. We were both poor as the proverbial church mice. But we were young and hopeful and faced this new challenge with optimism, without really understanding what awaited us.

It wasn't so hard for me to give up my hopes of a future in the USA, once I had learned something about the way black people were treated there. And I certainly couldn't picture a so-called mixed-race couple like us coping with the problems that we would face in the USA of the 1940s.

It was better to face up to the familiar problems at home, in a country that was difficult, but which we still loved. I shelved my plans for emigration, though for years I kept what you might call a symbolic packed suitcase in the corner. And Friedel abandoned her plan to return to Silesia. Her home was now Polish, and the political situation alone made it impossible.

We looked forward to the “Jör”, as we jokingly called the baby – from Göre, the Berlin dialect word for child. We hoped it would be a boy. On June 17, 1947, we married at the registry office in Bad Arolsen, where I was on a short course for auto mechanics organized by the UNRRA. Friedel wanted to be married in church. She was Catholic. But it didn't happen.