Apprenticeship
I did not have much choice in becoming a joiner; I signed a three-year apprenticeship contract with Josef Brast, and started work with his firm on the 1 February 1946. The firm operated under the business name Schroeder and Soene.
I had an opportunity to become a motor mechanic. I did not want the mechanic position because the person running that business had a hearse. At that time it was the only hearse in town and I would be the only boy employed there.
Therefore I had to clean the vehicle all the time in my three-year apprenticeship period.
The old tradition in our district was still alive that every joinery shop made coffins. And every businessperson naturally was looking for easy money, and keen to carry out the funeral procedures. There were seven joinery shops in Wipperfuerth alone, besides some one-man joinery shops in the surrounding district. Josef Brast was one of a few joinery businesses holding a funeral director’s license. It meant that his employees not only made the coffins, but they had to pick up the corpse regardless of condition and put it into the coffin.
It was common practice that a senior joiner and an apprentice had to carry out the task of delivering the coffin and picking up and laying the corpse into the coffin. From there on the business owner took over for the rest of the funeral procedures.
Wipperfuerth itself, including its region, was very much overcrowded in 1946.
Food was distributed only to people with allotted tokens, which were obtained from the local government office. Money had lost its value in buying power for food or clothes to wear.
Under the directions of Josef Brast we made at least one coffin every other week and on many occasions I had to go with a senior employee to deliver the coffin, assist in picking up the corpse and laying the body into the coffin. I tried to escape that type of work but I had no choice. During the time from February 1946 till June 1949 I had to assist in picking up people who had hanged them-selves and one person who had shot himself. On a number of occasions we picked up bodies of people who had ended their lives by jumping in front of the train and therefore were cut into several pieces. I reached the stage when I wanted my apprenticeship cancelled. I did not experience many funerals where people had died naturally. In my second year of apprenticeship as I had come home from work, the local Catholic church leader called me to help them in removing three bodies out of a concrete silo. I responded to the call, went to the farm and found a few people standing around the silo crying. I became suspicious of who it could be in the silo. Slowly I walked to the edge and looked down. I did not know what to say, to cry or to pass out, from shock. Because they were my school friends some three to four years younger than me, blown to pieces by a bomb left behind from the War. They had been in the silo where nobody had known about it. I started crying and had to go home. I had to go to work the next day and started to cry again at work because I had to ask Josef Brast for a day off so I could fulfil their families request in being a pallbearer for my friends. Late that afternoon I managed to get the words out that I had to ask. Josef Brast could not refuse my request in front of his other teen employees, but he made fun of me. They knew me as the boy from the farm, the boy with no father. That became another reason why I did not want to have anything to do with a joinery shop connected to making coffins.
Due to my father being a forest worker, I had a fair knowledge of timbers and was able to sharpen saws at the age of six years. Despite the advice given by the trade school teachers, apprentices in becoming a tradesman must be willing
in learning the trade and the boss’s wife should not use apprentices as floor cleaners. But the old practices from way back of years ago where an apprentice was used as a lad for anything. Business operators in the 1940-50 periods did not want to drop that old habit.
My mother had to step in on several occasions to talk to Mrs. and Mr. Brast, but she finished up handing over butter, eggs and meat products from our farm to make life a bit easier for me at the workplace.
Mr. and Mrs. Brast took advantage of me, because I came from a farm and I had no father. They made me dig their patch of vegetable garden and made me supply them with brooms for their workshop to sweep the floors. The brooms I had to make at home in my own time, collecting the reeds from the bushes at the farm.
I received my examination certificate papers from the Apprenticeship Board Authority on the 28 of May 1949. Then Josef Brast told me that he would not hand over my monthly third year rate apprentices pay of 40 Marks or the test piece sideboard, unless I paid him for the material I had used for my test piece which I had to make for my exam. I worked and waited a fortnight and on a Friday afternoon, I stormed out of the workshop saying that I don’t want to work there any more and that I never would come back.
I realised that it was not the right way of resigning from any employment. But I resented the way I was used and very unfairly treated. I felt that I had no need to show any respect for them.
Schroeder and Soene was an old establishment in Wipperfuerth. It was a fairly large up to date joinery workshop making doors, windows and furniture, employing between 10 to 20 people at various times. During the War they became involved in making prefab buildings. But my family had never any dealing with the firm. Nor did my Mum have any information on Josef Brast until I had started to work there. Josef Brast kept the old company system afloat.
We were surprised to find that the Brast family was living in a very small timber hut built alongside the workshop on the river Gaul. But at that time many people were living in cramped conditions. We felt sorry for them. In front of the workshop was a very large two storey very modern house, which was occupied by American United Nation Forces. The United Nation Forces had taken most of the best houses in town for accommodation. It had taken me more than two years after the military forces had left to understand why the Brast house was taken in town. We assumed the Commander made the assessments on request from the Military Forces and someone in town had to give information of people living in top class buildings. It cannot be denied that Josef Brast was a member of the NAZI Party because all business people had to join the NAZI Party. But any ex party member kept their strengths of loyalty regarding the NAZI a secret after the War.