Ingeborg M. Balendat's German youth was dramatically changed because of World War II. During the war she served as a teenage nurse in war-torn Berlin, administering to wounded German officers while planning to escape with her mother to the American front. In this heroic and compelling story, readers learn how Ingeborg M. Johnston, eighty-five and the last survivor of her immediate German family, escaped into and out of East Berlin, took on the president of Daimler-Benz to save her father's life, carried to America a Nobel laureate's scientific discoveries, won the first Mrs. Philadelphia contest, survived Hurricane David aboard her sailboat, and bec!, ame a valuable member of the U.S. educational community. In Unbelievable Adventures of a WWII German War Bride, we are reminded of the generosity of strangers, the need to live every day to its fullest, and how one young woman lived to share her extraordinary story of survival, love, and American patriotism.
About the Author: Ingeborg M. Johnston was born in Berlin in 1924 and survived the rise of the Nazi Party, Hitler's War and East Berlin's brutal Communist government behind the Iron Curtain. She sneaked through the Berlin Wall both ways in a shovel locker on a train for a loved one, and smuggled drugs into East Berlin through "Check Point Charlie" for a sick father. She was in constant danger from 1939 to 1945. She moved to America with her new GI husband. She entered and won the first Mrs Philadelphia contest but had to pass on the finals because she was not a USA citizen. Her careers and interests ranged from being a home-maker and devoted mother of two bright daughters to nursing, literary translating for Nobel Prize Nominees, sky diving, motor cycling, sailing, scuba diving, volunteer Red Cross swimming and adoptive aquatics instructor for twenty-five years, taught the blind and deaf/blind swimming for seven years, received an "American by Choice Distinguished Service Award"" from the City and County of Denver, CO for her lifelong endeavors to make life easier for the less fortunate, took Arial Combat Training in a T-34 Navy training plane at the age of 79 and finally providing leadership providing health knowledge in the alternative health field in thirty years of being president of a small distance-education university providing credentialing programs to alternative health professionals.