Oral History Telling Evening with Frieda Gordon Dilloo
January 23, 2010

“I was born in 1939 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in southern Germany. For the first 7 years of my life my family lived in Namlos, a small, remote village high in the Tyrolean Alps. 13 houses, a dangerous road, not a single motorized vehicle in the village. By age six, I knew all about avalanches and haying, but little about life in the big city. Food was scarce anyway, but especially at the end of the War. But at least I didn’t have to run into bomb shelters every night like so many of my age-mates had to do if they lived in the cities.

In 1946 I moved with my mother and 2 younger brothers to Munich, which had been heavily bombed. There I lived until I was a young adult. In the Fifties I was an exchange student in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I graduated from a Catholic high school there. My fate was sealed – I was focused on America, like so many young people in that era and in 1963 I returned to the US and worked as a teaching assistant at the German Department at UCLA, where I got an MA. I married an American and became an American citizen. I have had various and varied careers, most recently I have been working as a freelance technical translator from English to German and vice versa. Currently I am focusing more on providing German lessons to adults at all levels.”