POND CREEK — To younger Americans, Germany always has been an ally, a friend and trading partner from the days of the west-east split until reunification in 1990, to today.

But older Americans remember when Germany was an enemy, one of the Axis powers fighting for world domination.

For Helga Hardin, however, Germany during World War II was her home.

No longer. The retired Pond Creek school cafeteria manager has been a United States citizen since 1982.

Born in 1939, Helga was a child in the southwest German city of Mannheim during the war years, but remembers the hardships.

“I remember the siren blowing and my mother trying to get us ready for the cellar,” said Hardin. “Most of the time we kept some clothes on, to make sure we were all ready to run to the cellar when we had to.”

Food was scarce for Hardin’s mother and her five children. Powdered milk, dry bread, dried sweet potatoes, turnips and carrots made up their diet. To this day she will not eat a turnip.

“We were always short of food,” she said. “We had to try to find a way to get something from somebody.”

Her mother did laundry for German soldiers for a little extra money.

Hardin’s father was away fighting the war. He would return occasionally for short visits, but one day Hardin’s mother was notified her husband was missing in action.

“They never brought her any papers, any belongings, nothing,” said Hardin.

The bombing was constant in the industrial city, a popular target for Allied attacks. During one raid, an Allied bomb struck the family’s third floor apartment, but didn’t explode. It wound up in the building’s basement and had to be defused.

During one headlong dash to the cellar during one bombing raid, one of Hardin’s youngest brother was lost. Her mother had wrapped him up in a large feather pillow for the run to the cellar.

“She just had him in the middle and kind of folded it over,” said Hardin. “Everybody was pushing and shoving and my mother was trying to keep up with the rest of the smaller kids. That’s how he got lost, and they never did find him.”

On their way home from school, the children defied the law and gathered pieces of coal that had fallen from trains.

“Since we were children, we always got away with it,” she said.

Soldiers were always around, Hardin said, and she remembers them as kind.

“The soldiers were good to us,” said Hardin. “They were caring and giving.”

One day Helga and her sister Rosemarie were taken from their mother by government officials, because of their living conditions. She and Rosemarie were separated and sent to live with different families in safe areas of France. The foster family who kept her changed her name to Bernadette, and since the only language she heard was French, she forgot her native German.

After a time the girls were allowed to return home. All the children were assigned numbers, and lined up at the train station so their mothers could claim them.

“When my mother spotted me, I didn’t recognize her,” said Hardin. “I spoke to her in French. She started to cry.”

Helga got a surprise when she returned home. Her mother had remarried, so she had a new stepfather.

“He was a good stepfather, but he was a mean stepfather when he was drinking,” said Hardin.

The state kept taking Helga and Rosemarie away from their mother and stepfather and putting them in foster homes.

“After the war we just went from one home to the next,” said Hardin.

She returned home at 18 and worked in chocolate, tobacco and paper factories. The money went to her stepfather.

“Our dad took all of our payday,” she said.

She met her first husband, Andrew Ray Crow, when the Oklahoma native was in the Army stationed in Mannheim. She used to walk past the back door of the mess sergeant’s barracks.

“We just kind of made a little connection,” she said, despite the fact she spoke no English and he spoke no German. The couple was married in September 1959 and came to the United States in January 1960.

The young military bride still spoke little English when the couple’s oldest daughter, Patty, was born in March 1960.

“I didn’t know the word push, I didn’t know the word pain, I didn’t know anything,” said Helga. “When we were spending so much time in different homes, we didn’t get educated on some of the things young girls need to be educated on. It was a disaster, because I just didn’t know how to respond to anything. It was all, let mother nature take its course. It was terrifying.”

She never had an English class, picking up the language on her own.

“I did everything on my own,” she said. “It was quite a struggle. You might pick up a can and you think it’s tomato and it might be applesauce.”

She has mastered the language well enough to begin writing poetry. She has not forgotten her German, however, since she converses with Rosemarie by phone from Hanover, Germany, once a week or so. Of Helga’s three children, only Patty speaks German.

After stints in Lawton, Louisiana and back in Germany, Andrew left the Army and moved to Pond Creek in 1969 to work as a carpenter with his brother. The couple had three children. He died of a heart attack in 1975.

In 1980 she married Bill Hardin.

“That was one of the best times of my life,” she said.

Two years later, at Hardin’s urging, Helga became a U.S. citizen.

“This is home to me,” said Helga.

The hard, guttural consonants of German are still evident in Hardin’s English, even after she has lived in this country for more than 40 years.

“Some people can tell that I have an accent, and some people think I’m just from a different state,” she said.

Besides writing poetry these days, Helga keeps up with her five grandchildren.

“I have a good family and I’m proud of my kids and grandkids,” she said.