105-year-old Fremont woman who lived with Spanish flu receives vaccine, warns of difficult times ahead

FREMONT – Ursula Haeussler still remembers the frenzy of that day over a century ago.

She had just sat down for breakfast at the kitchen table as the maid began the morning chores at her home on a small farm in a rural, idyllic German town.

Suddenly, as the maid began to mend her apron, she collapsed on the floor. Haeussler’s uncle and father sprang into action, trying to revive the unconscious woman before carrying her on a cart and taking her to the nearest doctor. The girl’s mind swirled in confusion, wondering what had just happened.

A few days later, Haeussler – then just a toddler – learned that the maid had died of the Spanish flu. Weeks later, the disease claimed the lives of Haeussler’s uncle and godparents.

“That’s all I know personally,” she said of the 1918 epidemic, noting that she was too young to remember anything else. “But I know it was miserable. At the time, there were no vaccines; no one could help him, they had just died.

Today, at 105, she sees the parallels between the Spanish flu which changed her life and infected a third of the world’s population and the coronavirus pandemic which has already killed more than 2 million people worldwide.

But this time there is a difference. In a small room at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont, Haeussler received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. For the first time in a long time, she felt relief.

“We had no way to fight the pandemic back then,” she said of the Spanish flu. “They didn’t have a vaccine and all of the medical advancements we’ve made. We can be so thankful now. I am certainly grateful to the people who gave us the vaccine and who risked their own lives to do so.

The most serious pandemic in recent history, the Spanish flu is believed to have infected around 500 million people in the first outbreaks in 1918 and 1919. The death toll from this particular strain of the influenza virus was at least 50 million worldwide, including about 675,000 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Germany, it is estimated that around 287,000 people died from the Spanish flu from 1918 to 1920.

The coronavirus has infected more than 25 million people in the United States, with the death toll exceeding 440,000, according to the latest health figures.

From her home in Fremont, Haeussler recalled that the first pandemic of her life was only the start of 25 tumultuous years to come. And in many ways, she said, these days are just as turbulent and similar to those she grew up in – a pandemic, protests, economic anxiety and family disputes over politics.

She saw it all – the Roaring Twenties in Berlin during the Weimar era, the collapse of the world economy, hyperinflation, the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s in Dresden, and the loss of everything for which its family had worked at the end of the world. Second war.

“It was a constant uproar,” Haeussler said of his stay in Berlin in the late 1920s. “We lived on a main street connecting Potsdam to Berlin. There were always people passing by. Brown shirts walking down the street, singing their songs. Then came the Communists and the Anarchists. I was 15 at the time, so I probably didn’t understand what I was seeing.

In a warning about the potential far-reaching implications of the coronavirus pandemic, the New York Federal Reserve in 2020 published an article linking the 1918 flu pandemic to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and right-wing movements across the world.

It was in part the constant protests and civil unrest born of this right-wing fervor that prompted Haeussler and his family to move to Dresden in 1930, at the start of the Nazis’ rise to power.

The social unrest that followed the Spanish flu – and the economic concerns caused by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I and forced Germany to pay reparations for the war – frustrated everyone at the era, she said. Although his father did not support the Nazis, there was still a lot of social pressure to follow Adolf Hitler and his movement.

“For example, my brother – who is six years younger than me – loved the Nazis because they did all kinds of things for young people,” she says. “Young people loved Hitler. They all went to the bonfires at night. They all sang nationalist songs. We were sad for them not only because we lost them to him, but because we knew he needed it for cannon fodder.

Remnants of the kind of fanaticism Haeussler witnessed in the 1920s and 1930s have resurfaced over the past four years in America under the administration of former President Donald Trump, she said. For Haeussler, the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6 was like the Reichstag fire in February 1933 – the Nazi-staged fire of the German legislative building that brought the Nazis to power.

Despite the similarities between his time and ours, Haeussler said the world has learned to cope better with events like a pandemic and the economic collapse that followed.

“I feel very horrible that a lot of people are losing their businesses and their assets,” she said. “But today, it’s not to the point of losing everything. At that point, everything you had saved, everything you owned became worthless. Hope this time doesn’t end up being like the last time.

For Cora Assali, Haeussler’s daughter, the development of the Pfizer vaccine, in part by the Turkish-German team of husband and wife Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, testifies to how much things have changed and how much more acceptance of the world is now.

“I think people now understand the value of working together, of everyone working together,” Assali said.