Small Town News

Woman seeks her childhood benefactors

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Couple had helped her after World War

A German woman who received dozens of supportive packages after World War II from a Coulee Dam couple is seeking out their family to thank them.

A journalist contacted The Star last week to relate the tale of Barbara Mathes, who remembers the kind gifts of support to her and her mother, arranged through a church in the small town where they lived, says Katja Rietze, a journalist and online editor with the Rhein Main Presse newspaper group.

The Protestant Church of Syke arranged for such donations after World War II by working with sponsoring churches in the United States, including one in the Grand Coulee Dam area.

Mathes' father had died in Stalingrad and she never met him. In great need after the war, the church found the mother and daughter a sponsor.

Mathes, who was about 3 when the packages started coming, remembers that she and her mother came to call their kind benefactors "Aunt" Marie and "Uncle" Ben. The sponsorship began in 1946 and continued until the 1950s.

Rietze now believes Ben may have been C.E. Benjamin, inspector of building construction on the project and a vice president of the "Coulee Dam Club."

Over several years, the couple sent more than 70 parcels of food, clothing, chocolate, shoes, books and "stories about Native Americans." And Ben also sent postcards, telling the child about his work on the dam, on roads and on the state capitol building in Olympia.

She and her mother, Erna Wagner, eventually lost touch with the couple.

Last year, Erna Wagner died, and Mathes, now 67, came across old postcards and letters from the couple, some written in German, but none with an address. One postcard points to a spot in west Coulee Dam and declares, in German, "Uncle Ben lives here," with an arrow pointing to the spot.

Mathes is flying into Seattle on about Aug. 27 and hopes to find the family of Uncle Ben and Aunt Marie, who she thinks may have had two daughters, Jackie and Marylyn born about 1953.

"Barbara really wants to find the family to say thank you," Rietze writes. "As she told me, this is very important to her, now that she is getting older."

Anyone with knowledge, or clues, as to the whereabouts of the family of Barbara Mathes' Uncle Ben and Aunt Marie can contact The Star at 509-633-1350 or star@grandcoulee.com, or by mail at P.O. Box 150, Grand Coulee, WA, 99133.



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© 2011 The Star Grand Coulee, Washington. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

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