• I had a German fiance for a brief time when I was  16 or 17 years old, a Displaced Person whom my parents disliked. He was tall, blond, and athletic. He moved like a cat. He had escaped from prison in Eastern Canada, I found out years later, where he had been jailed for armed robbery. He stole a car in Grande Prairie and went back to prison.

A child is born:

• By that time we were no longer engaged, but I gave birth to his son in Calgary, Alberta at the age of 17 and gave the child up for adoption. I couldn't go home again, had no job or money in Calgary, and eventually worked as a file clerk for an oil company after my son was born, and met my first husband there.

Happy baby

• My eldest son, the German man's child, was raised by Mormons in southern Alberta and found me in 2001 through an adoption finder's agency.

A husband and another family:

• In the meantime, I raised a wonderful son from my husband as my eldest, and my daughter, his sister, was the youngest child. For most of my life my friends thought I had two children.

Left with two living children once again:

• Now I have a third.

• My son who was closest to me has passed on. The German boyfriend's son and I remain close but never as though I had raised him.

• I sometimes feel I should have kept him, but I wanted him to have a better life, and he did.

Times were different then:

• Times were different back then. A child out of wedlock was a great disgrace. My parents would not let me go home again, and locked me out of their home when I was 16.

A second marriage:

• My first husband died at the age of 29 in a motorcycle crash, when the two children were infants. I married again, unhappily, ten years later, and divorced him within six years.

• Both husbands, my two children, and in-laws all knew about the boy born out of wedlock. It was a source of anguish to me at times that I had given him up.

Anguish and a not unexpected call:

• I wanted to find him again in 1990, but my mother advised me against it, and I was ill and weak. I wish now I had pursued it, as he was looking for me at that time.

• I received a phone call from the adoption finder's agency on February 13, 2001. It was a call I had been expecting for many years.

• We talked for the first time on February 14, 2001. He looks a lot like me. He is going to be 51 years old this year. I am so glad he is in my life.

On adopting a child:

• I would not recommend giving up a child for adoption, and abortion is out of the question. There remains but one option, what young single mothers almost universally choose now: to keep the child and raise her on their own.

Prejudice in all its nasty forms:

• To tie this story into the German newsreel: the young German fiance wanted to marry me when he returned to Grande Prairie, but I was under age and my parents would not allow it.
  
• Just as well, he was not a kind man. He married soon after, to another young woman with child.

• But if he had not been of German descent, my parents would have not disapproved to that extent.

Soldiers at war