FARMINGTON — Elisabeth Kuhlmann Winter was born on July 25, 1919, in the twelfth century town of Rinteln, Lower Saxony, Germany. Located just west of Hannover, the Rinteln of Winter’s youth still boasted its medieval moat and narrow cobblestone streets. Her parents owned the Deutsches Haus Hotel, and it was there where Winter and her brother Willie grew up.

Winter recalls her family struggling during her younger years. “The twenties did not roar for us,” she said. “We were all still trying to recover from the first World War.” Her favorite pastimes weren’t much different than other children’s, however. She loved her dog and her dolls, her girlfriends at school, swimming in the Weser River, and playing games with Willie. And she was not above trying to blame her brother for her own misbehavior to stay out of trouble.

Living in a business operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, meant that Winter and her brother were expected to help out from an early age. Her father Willhelm Kuhlmann ran the business and bar, while mother Elise managed the kitchen and household, where she built a reputation for giving young ladies lessons in cooking and the finer points of household arts. Winter and brother Willie formed a very close bond during their teenage years, becoming best friends during the early period of the Third Reich. But it was a difficult time.

“When we were in high school, we would go and find that suddenly our friends were gone,” she said. “No warning or goodbye.” She remembered too when signs appeared on stores like the nearby shoe shop, warning people that it was owned by Jews and they were not to shop there anymore. As the Kuhlmann family was more fortunate than many, her parents would help others. One time they took in a disconsolate Russian woman who had fled her country, leaving her husband and child behind.

And while Rinteln was not a strategic city it did not escape air-raids and bombings, which Winter vividly remembers. “Once I was sewing by the window and the sirens went off. I waited just a little too long to act, and the window shattered in front of me,” Winter said. “Another time, I saw a neighbor shot down in the street. She was trying to run home with her groceries.”

Willie Kuhlmann was killed early in the War, while fighting on the Eastern Front.

“My mother never got over that loss,” said her older daughter, Bia Winter. “She went with him to the train station when he left to join the military. She was devastated, she already had the feeling that she would never see him again.”

Then the Kuhlmann’s hotel was occupied, first by German soldiers, than British and American troops. “That was when I feared my father would be executed, too,” Winter said. “Willie had left a pistol behind in a drawer, and none of us realized it was even there. At the end of the War the Americans came and found it when they searched the hotel. Luckily, my father spoke enough English that he was able to make them understand he had not hidden it.”

The years following the War were equally as difficult for Winter’s family. Wilhelm Kuhlmann had grown up in an area of eastern Germany that fell under the control of the Soviet Union, separating him from his parents for the rest of their lives.

But Winter found love during World War II, as well.

“I met my husband, Martin, who was a stowaway. He was a rocket scientist, being hidden in Rinteln from the Allies,” said Winter. “He was secretly staying with friends who introduced us, and he was immediately smitten with me. Engagements were quick during wartime, and we married before Germany surrendered, right in my parents’ hotel.”

“At the time, the hotel was still occupied by German soldiers,” she said. “And they were only too happy for any festivity. They helped Martin celebrate his bachelor party. The next day they attended our wedding at the hotel and afterward formed a tunnel with their bayonets for us to pass under.”

Martin and Elisabeth’s first daughter Bia was born in 1946. It was Martin Winter’s career in aeronautics that prompted the family to leave Germany.

“Martin could not work,” said Winter. “Germany was forbidden from building planes. At first he was hired by the Royal Air Force and we spent a year or so living in England. That was difficult for me, there was still rancor against Germans after the war.”

But then Winter’s husband was hired by Martin Marietta in 1950, and the family left England to immigrate to the United States. By this time, younger daughter Susan was born, just two weeks old when the family journeyed to their new home in Baltimore. Martin’s career took the family to St. Louis and Denver before they retired to Tryon, North Carolina. After her husband passed away in 1992, Winter first moved to Virginia to live near daughter Susan, and then finally settled in Maine with Bia.

One hundred years after her birth, Winter lives in Farmington, a resident at Orchard Park Rehabilitation and Living Center. Winter’s two daughters, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren gathered there to celebrate with her on July 21. And to what does her family credit such impressive longevity?

“Good genes and a feisty intellect, said Bia Winter. “And besides that? Well, she’s always eaten well, and not a lot. She quit smoking cigarettes in her early 50’s, and she was very active for her first ninety-eight, or so, years.”

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