Karin Harten Schramm, who was brought to the United States with her German Ecuadorian family 1944, has generously allowed us to post her family’s WWII experiences, largely compiled from contemporaneous letters and diaries Gertrud Harten, her mother, kept. There are descriptions of her father, Wolfgang’s, March 1944 transport to the U.S. on the S.S. Cuba, after three months of hard labor at a military base in Panama. Gertrud and her three children arrived in New Orleans on the USAT Col. F. C. Johnson in November 1944 and her diaries confirm reports of poor conditions on shipboard. Karin, who now resides in Hamburg, Germany, wrote a book about their time as “enemy aliens,” and also translated the “Ecuadorian part” of her mother’s writings into Spanish, published in Ecuador in 2014, as GERTRUDIS – Diaries of a German woman in Ecuador: 1937 to 1956.
