St. Albertan Aline Schwabe will mark her 100th birthday on Jan. 28. After nearly a century of life, she's reflecting back on the journeys which have taken her across Europe and over to Canada.
Schwabe was born in 1925 in Romania in the city of Sibiu, also known by its German name Hermannstadt. After moving to Berlin, she got a scholarship to study to be a medical assistant and lived there during the Second World War. When the Soviets came, she had to flee the ensuing bombings.
"We knew exactly when the planes came over and they opened the slots with the bombs," Schwabe recounted. "It was a scary time."
She fled and ended up in Aschaffenburg, a town in Germany and worked for a short time in the mayor's office. Schwabe immigrated to Canada in 1951 with her husband at the time. They lived in Barrhead briefly before deciding it was time for a change.
"There was no future there. So, we went to Edmonton and at that time immigration let us stay in an immigration hall. It was a place with bunk beds and people came and asked if people wanted work, and things like that," she said.
She started life in Edmonton working at the Great Western Garment Company, manufacturing jeans.
"It was a huge room and there were hundreds of people there and sewing machines," she said. "We would go and sit in our places. And there was a big clock and when it was 8:00 the bell rang and everybody started." She sewed on the zippers, a job she didn't enjoy and found the metal zippers difficult to work with.
"It's not as easy as putting on a pocket, which is straight. You have to really manage it properly. So it was not the easiest," she said. She still knits to this day, her apartment adorned with different knit clothes and place settings. It was a habit she took after her grandmother.
"She really took care of us in a good way," she said, admiring her grandmother's insistence that she mend something as small as a hole in her stockings by herself. "We had to do things ourselves and that's what she was teaching us." She continues to be self-reliant, even going on 100 years.
"I still cook for myself and I still clean for myself," she said. "I always took care of myself. Nobody ever gave me one thing."
She said she started working as a lab technician in 1967 at the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton while taking evening courses at NAIT. Schwabe remembered taking blood from patients.
"In the morning we had to start and everybody got which floor we had to go to to take blood from people," she said. "And the head of the lab gave those to me because I was really good taking blood from people, even young children. You talked to them and looked at them, and they looked at you. And they didn't even know I was working with them."
While she was working at the hospital, she also enjoyed travelling. She recalled a trip to Hungary with her sister, Gerde, where they visited a spa. Gerde lived to be 101. Schwabe said Gerde passed away within the last couple of years, but couldn't recall the exact date.
"I travelled quite a bit. I was in India, and I was in Indonesia," Schwabe said. She also visited her mother's grave in Brașov, which she referenced by its German name Kronstadt.
Nowadays, Schwabe enjoys knitting and crocheting, and occasionally reading.
"I still have my sewing machine when I fix something, and then I have old magazines which I took along from when I retired ... There's Reader's Digest, there's a German magazine which my sister used to send me," she said. "So I keep busy all day.
