“We have much for which to be grateful.”


Mary Sotomayor | November 21, 2011

Ingeborg Kepple -- then and now. Photo: Provided

Ingeborg Kepple — then and now. Photo: Provided

We called her Frau Kepple.  She was the substitute English teacher at my high school, but we knew her as “that German lady who was a refugee and told us to call her Frau.”

She was a short woman, only standing slightly above five feet, but had a commanding presence and a compelling story.

Frau Kepple —  while teaching us parts of speech, how to write a decent college essay and when to use whom versus who —  taught us something even more important:  Not everyone was as fortunate to live safely and freely in his or her home country.

More than anything, Frau Kepple planted the seed in our adolescent minds that refugees could be people we knew, even our own teachers.   We listened with awe as she told her story of escaping a concentration camp during World War II, living in overcrowded refugee barracks with her family and anxiously awaiting to rebuild her life in the United States.  Her experience was so far removed from anything we had heard before.

I never forgot about Frau Kepple.  In fact, some 15 years later when I heard Inge Kepple’s name come up regarding Church World Services’ 65th anniversary, I couldn’t help wondering, could that be my Frau Kepple?  Could that be that tiny woman who made such a huge impression on all of us high schoolers with her refugee story?

It was Frau Kepple, after all.  I arrived at Inge’s house and immediately recognized her.  Her voice, her hair, the twinkle in her eye, nothing had changed.   I told her that she had been my substitute English teacher in high school.  “Do you remember me?”  I asked.  “No,” she said, but she hugged me anyway.

Inge took us into her home warmly, sat down with us on her sofa and told her story.   We asked her what she’d like us to know most about her refugee experience.

“Well, I’d want you to know that my father washed cars.  My mother cooked in a kitchen.  My grandfather washed dishes.  It was my parents’ and grandparents’ hard work that put me here.  But I’ve done my part now that I’m here.  We refugees haven’t come here to take, take, take.  We’ve given back greatly to this country.”

In reading Inge’s story, I can only hope that you will feel her warmth, understand her courage and be inspired by her gratitude.

An article for Church World Service on its 65th anniversary from a grateful refugee of 60 years ago

By Ingeborg Kepple

On a misty, cold November morning in 1951, as our military transport ship filled with World War II refugees came into New York harbor after an 11-day voyage from Bremerhaven, everyone hurried on deck to get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.

Its inscription — “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” – certainly applied to all of us.  We were tired of air raids, bombings, destruction, killing, atrocities, hunger, fear, and concentration camps.  We were poor, homeless, stateless, displaced masses, and yes, we were yearning to breathe free again and to rebuild our lives in a new country, the USA, the land of opportunity.

Escaping Yugoslavia to Austria in ’47 from one of Tito’s many concentration camps for Germans, we and other refugees from various countries filled all the Lager Haid barracks – one room per family.  A year later we got another one.  I was already nine when I started school here.  My teachers were also refugees and the school a barrack.  Four years later we were eager to sign up with a Church World Service volunteer to come to America and leave our two-room “mansion” behind.

Upon arrival in New York, we were immediately taken to New Windsor, Md., and then to Mount Joy, Pa., where my father had a job washing new card in Mr. Herr’s Ford dealership.  A year later we moved to Lancaster where my father got a job at Armstrong Cork Co. and my mother did house cleaning.

Of all the places in the United States Church World Service could have brought us, none would have been more perfect than Lancaster County, the home of the Amish who eventually became my father’s paint customers because we had a common bond: Pensylvania Dutch, similar to the dialect we Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians) spoke in the Bahat in Yugoslavia.

When we became citizens in ’57, we were also interviewed on WGAL TV.  In ’61 my brother Helmar and I graduated from college – he, a petroleum engineer and I, a German teacher.

Within a couple years, Church World Service brought to Lancaster other families from my hometown in Yugoslavia and Haid.  All were sponsored by the Lancaster Church of the Brethren which in ’07 added an Iraqi family to that list.

When these refugees began buying their homes in the suburbs, I asked my father when we will move out of the city.  “Not yet,” he replied.  “First the business and that will buy a house.”  (He had a general store.)  He eventually acquired a mom and pop factory called Ditzler Paint.  We then not only got a suburban house, but a warehouse complex and even a condo in Pompano Beach, Fla., as well.

We have much for which to be grateful.  Nov. 24, Thanksgiving Day, is the 60th anniversary of our arrival in the USA.  It is also 65 years that Church World Service has been helping all over the world the oppressed, suffering, stateless people including my family.  Thank you.

I also want to pay tribute to my father, William Gueldner, who through determination and hard work with my mother Helena’s help achieved the American dream.  For us, America has truly been the land of opportunity.

By Mary Sotomayor, Employment Specialist
Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program
Lancaster, Pennsylvania