Erika Klotz

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Erika Klotz–our mumma, our Omi–passed away early Wednesday morning (July 30, 2025) peacefully in her sleep at the age of 90 from complications with dementia and bladder cancer. In many ways, I grieved for my mom five years ago when she was first diagnosed with this awful disease dementia, and we are grateful that she has passed peacefully. The entire family was able to pay their respects in their own way. As she wished, she will be cremated and there will be no service. But I wanted to share a sort of celebration of her life.

She was born Sara Witt on April 8, 1935 in a small farmhouse in Henryszew, Poland, an area near Warsaw that was formerly part of Prussia and therefore largely German-speaking. As a result, her family was considered German, and she had a German birth certificate. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, he cited the presence of ethnic Germans in her area as justification. Around that time, at just five years old, she was told by SS officers that her name sounded too Jewish and was instructed to change it. She selected Erika—probably one of the few people to choose their own name as a child—inspired by a popular German WWII marching song about a soldier’s love for a girl named Erika.

As the war raged on and Germany began to lose ground on the Russian front, Erika—then just a child—fled with her mother and baby brother after her father was killed in the war. They became some of the first German refugees, traveling mostly by night to avoid the Polish Underground, which was targeting German families in Poland. Their journey, by foot, train, and horse carriage throughout the long war, eventually led them to north-central Germany, all the while facing the hardships of a war-torn world. In the winter of 1945, the war quite literally arrived at their doorstep when British forces swept through the region. Days before, Erika’s mother, sensing the bombings were getting closer, had urged the children and another family to dig a trench for shelter. When the fighting began, they hid beneath their German blankets in the trench. Her mother’s instincts were right, after a night of gunfire the British soldiers eventually pulled back the blankets with guns, and the children emerged to find their home riddled with bullets and the bodies of Hitler Youth soldiers scattered nearby. She was just 10 years old.

After the war ended and reconstruction began, life in Germany was difficult. As a teenager, Erika attended some school but soon began working in secretarial and telephone office jobs. In 1956, at age 21, she made the bold decision to immigrate to the United States, joining an aunt and uncle living in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Her uncle sponsored her, and she obtained a green card, landing her first job as a nanny for the wealthy Hudson family, owners of the Dayton-Hudson retail empire. She cared for the baby who would eventually become the company’s CEO. Erika was just one of about 50,000 Germans who immigrated to Detroit during the 1950s—many men drawn by auto industry jobs, and many women, surprisingly, hired as nannies.

Still, life in America wasn’t easy. Erika was homesick, struggled with the language, and had to adjust to a new culture. She found community among other German immigrants, especially at a local bar called the White Horse, where she made friends and a bit of trouble. In one memorable incident, she and some friends were nearly deported after wearing bikinis at a local beach—something common in postwar Germany, but scandalous in 1950s Detroit. They were briefly jailed before her uncle, as her sponsor, stepped in to sort things out and keep her in the country.

Erika met Konrad Klotz (pappa) in 1958 at the White Horse, they dated and were married on October 3, 1960. After a few years in apartments around Detroit, they bought their first home in Warren, Michigan in 1961, the same year I was born. Steve, my brother, came along in 1964. Erika was a typical German housewife, raising us, keeping the household running, and making dinner promptly at 4:30 p.m. every day—usually meat and potatoes, in true German style. And like many moms of her generation, she let us roam freely, trusting us to find our way and be home by dinner.

She also worked part-time as an “Avon Lady” at this time, and often reminded us that it was her extra earnings that helped pay for a pool pappa installed in our yard. On weekends, she and pappa would often dress up and go dancing with friends at the German American House. And in 1968, they both became U.S. citizens.

In 1975, we moved to Shelby Township, where our parents fixed up a lakefront home that became the backdrop for our teenage years. She looked out for us in her own quiet ways, shielding us when we got into trouble and striking the occasional deal to keep us in the clear from pappa. She even had time to take night school classes and graduated high school with me in 1979. Later, after Steve married Kim, and I married Debbie, they both enjoyed spending time with their four grandchildren, Jessica, Mitchell, Callie, and Natalie. She lived the last 28 years of her life in Utah, following me out after pappa retired, and Erika came to love Utah’s dry heat and what she called its "mild" winters—compared to Michigan.

Erika wasn’t outwardly emotional or tender, classically German in that way, and it’s the one sadness of my life, but I think she showed her love in her own ways. She rarely cried, but I remember it when she dropped me off at college and again, more quietly, when pappa passed away in 2015. Perhaps the deepest expression of her tenderness came later in life, when she cared for pappa through the long and difficult years of his Parkinson’s diagnosis. She was steady and unwavering in her care, a side of her I hadn’t fully seen before.

Looking back, I’m grateful for all that she did for us. She was always there, keeping the house in order, cooking every meal, and keeping the family on track. Hers was a life shaped by resilience: surviving war, starting over in a new country, building a life with a good man, raising two sons, and creating a home for us. Not a bad 90 years. <3