What belongs to a fulfilling life?
Maria Rost thinks for a while, then she says: "Satisfaction, health, joy and inner peace are good companions", oh, and gratitude is also part of it.
Today the oldest Baierbrunner turns 100 years old.
Baierbrunn – The fact that she would also pass as a mid-seventy is anything but flattery.
Maria Rost is mentally very fit, there is no question she cannot answer.
She grew up in Augsburg, her father was a teacher and later a singing teacher at the very progressive Augsburg Singing School.
Music has always played an important role in her life, as a student in post-war Munich she sang French and English songs in a choir, and she was also in a singing ensemble in Baierbrunn.
She has two siblings.
As a conductor on the tram
In 1942, in the middle of the war, she did her Abitur - after having had to change schools because the Nazis had closed her school branch with the English Misses.
She first had to do her labor service on a farm in the country, then she was also drafted into the military auxiliary service and worked for seven months as a conductor on various Munich trams.
"That's when I got to know and love Munich," she says, sometimes people would have hung in bunches outside on the platform.
She remembers that the trip to Grünwald cost a special surcharge of five pfennigs.
Many soldiers also rode the tram, “I was really annoyed by their comments”, which were often suggestive.
Then she began an internship in a pharmacy in order to later be able to study pharmacy.
But for now the war went on and didn't stop at Augsburg.
She and her family survived the terrible night of bombing in February 1944, in which half the city was reduced to rubble, in the air raid shelter. The next day, the parents packed the most important things on a sled - and moved to the weekend cottage in the country that they thank god owned.
“It was winter, the snow was full of ash, and the sled hardly slid on it.” Later, the house where Maria Rost grew up was also destroyed.
Not a happy student life
In 1945/46, the young woman was one of the first students to be able to study in peace in Munich again.
One actually expects Maria Rost to tell of the exuberant joie de vivre that she felt during this time of regained freedom, of a feeling of departure that flowed through her.
But it was not like that.
In her room on Schellingstraße she froze a lot, "I lay in bed with my coat on", she tried to study like this during the day as well.
evening fun?
Hardly ever existed.
"I remember more troubles and unpleasant things."
After four semesters she changed subjects and was now learning the languages of her former enemies, French and English.
Enjoyed French and English literature.
Went to the choir.
Liked it all - and then left her place at university to her brother when he came home from captivity.
Moved back to Augsburg, worked in a pharmacy and met Adalbert, her husband, whose family was friends with her parents.
family, music, books and religion
The two married in 1951 and moved to Baierbrunn in 1960.
Books, literature, music also made up the world of her husband, who got a job at Don Bosco Verlag.
Soon he was also a member of the municipal council in Baierbrunn for the ÜWG.
Maria and Adalbert Rost had four children and raised them.
"My children are the wealth of my life," says Maria Rost.
One of them is daughter Hedwig Rost, who is known as a musician and artist in the region and founded the "smallest stage in the world" with her husband Jörg Baesecke.
Maria Rost says she always felt connected to the church in the village, religion was part of her life.
Otherwise: “I'm not a person who wants to make a big deal of myself.
I'm rather withdrawn.” However, there shouldn't be any neighbors who won't congratulate her on her birthday today.
