How the parachute got into the communion dress
Created: 04/26/2022, 11:00 am
By: Bastian Amann
Special dress: Erika at communion in 1948. © Private
Erika Schneller from Moosinning explains why she wore a very special communion dress in 1948.
Moosinning
– The communion dress that Erika Schneller wore in the late 1940s was actually an exclusive production.
It was made of parachute silk - an unusual gift from an American soldier.
At the confirmation, the native of Hallbergmooser, who has lived in Moosinning for a long time, got dressed again.
Here the whole story.
"The planes fought in the sky," Erika Schneller, née Ziegltrum, remembers of this special day in 1944. The now 81-year-old lived at the time in the Mariabrunn district of Hallbergmoos.
Together with her mother, she - just four years old - looked up spellbound.
"And then it hit the American plane," says Schneller.
He crashed and fell on the roof of a farm in the neighboring Attaching.
Has lived in Moosinning for a long time: Erika Schneller and her husband Gerhard.
© Faltermaier
What happened next has never been forgotten: Little Erika watched the US pilot, who had just managed to save himself, land with a parachute in an adjacent field overgrown with bushes and trees.
Faster: "He knew that it was going to be dangerous for him and hid himself in a ditch." Shortly thereafter, an all-terrain vehicle of the Wehrmacht appeared.
The soldiers saw the mother and daughter and spoke to them: "They asked us if we had seen a crashed pilot," reports the 81-year-old.
"But my mother just said: We didn't see anything." A sentence that probably saved the American's life.
When the German soldiers had gone, the US pilot crawled out of the trench and approached Erika and her mother to say thank you.
"We didn't speak any English, but we somehow understood each other with hands and feet," she recalls.
In any case, the pilot gave them the parachute silk.
They took the bricks home and hid them in the attic.
At her confirmation, Erika Schneller wore her communion dress again, here in the picture with her godmother.
© Private
At some point, the mother had the idea that a beautiful communion dress could be tailored from it.
So she turned to the then Hallbergmoos tailor Nanni Scherr.
"And she made not just one, but even two dresses from the silk," reports Erika Schneller.
After all, one of her sisters soon celebrated her first communion.
In 1948, when the war was long over, she proudly wore the parachute fabric at her communion.
"Because I hardly grew in the next few years," she says, so Erika put on the same dress again for her confirmation.
And where is it now?
"I have no idea," she says.
At least not at her home in Moosinning.
"Maybe my mother gave it away." Hopefully in a less dramatic setting.
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