Anna's Story is the remarkable life story of Anna Burkardt McKay who was born in Germany before WWII and who moved to the United States as an American war bride in 1947 to raise a family on a small cattle ranch in Nevada. This is the story of her life as seen through her eyes.
Anna's Story begins with her experiences as a little girl being raised mostly by her grandmother (Oma) in the Frankfurt suburb of Hochst in the years leading up to WWII. She recalls wonderful Christmas celebrations and holiday traditions. She also clearly remembers the horrors of Kristallnacht and the beginning of WWII. Her father, Alois, was drafted into the Wehrmacht; the war years and bombing of Frankfurt are very vividly depicted. Anna was a young teenager when she ran away from the Hitler youth work camp and hid in a bomb shelter to avoid the bombing raids. She desperately tried to get home to her family in Frankfurt only to discover her dad had been killed in action in France.
Anna, as a teenager, met an American soldier Richard (Dick) McKay, fell in love, married and came with him to the United States where they began their life together. They lived in rural Nevada with Dick's family initially and soon moved to a small cattle ranch they purchased to start their family. Anna and Dick lived a modest life and raised three children on that ranch. The story talks about early life in Nevada and the history of the family and of Eureka.
The story concludes with Anna as a grandmother going back to Germany in 1980 to see her family for the first time in over thirty years. In 2014, Anna still lives independently in her own home in Eureka, Nevada, and has nine grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren.
Autorentext
Rich McKay is Anna McKay's son, her youngest child born and raised in Eureka, Nevada. His earliest childhood memories were always of his mom's stories of her life in Germany, of his grandfather who perished as a soldier in France, and of her struggles to learn English and fit in when she moved to the states with his father. Rich owed it to his mom to put all of these stories into print for her family to cherish and for others to read and enjoy. Rich has always been an avid history buff and genealogist. Part of his father's family has been in the United States since before the Revolutionary War, and the McKay family has been in Nevada since the early 1860s and in Eureka since soon after the town's birth in 1864. He wrote this book as a tribute to his mom as well as to his deceased father and to the past generations of his family so that their lives will not be soon forgotten.