From Gitte, with Love

To the freight-handlers at Frankfurt Rhein-Main airport, it was just another box--a little on the heavy side, to be sure, but nothing out of the ordinary. They heaved it onto a hand-truck and dumped it in the storeroom. Shortly after midnight, strange things began to happen. A freight-handler saw the box move. Its lid lifted slowly and startled eyes glinted in the gloom. American Overseas Airlines Official William Waring investigated. "I opened the box," he told reporters later, "and saw a pair of eyes and some hair. Then she stepped out--no shirt."

So Beautiful. This shirtless "she" was Doris Brigitte von Knobloch, a Darmstadt dental assistant. Frauelein von Knobloch was one of the hundreds of thousands of Europe's little people whose lives have been disrupted by war and thwarted by frontiers. One day during World War II, she had met Rolf Berndt on a Berlin street corner. Gitte was then a police clerk and Rolf a trusty from Sachsenhausen internment camp. "He looked so humiliated in his prison uniform," she explained, "that I said a nice word. He looked so beautiful when he answered, I guess I fell in love right there."

When peace came, Rolf went to the U.S., where he got a job as a truck driver in Manhattan. Gitte longed for Rolf and Rolf longed for Gitte. Rolf filed affidavits for her support, but for two years official red tape held her fast in Frankfurt. At last Gitte decided to ship herself by air freight to the U.S.

With the help of a girl friend named Sigrid Kraft, who also had a fiance in the U.S., Gitte procured a packing box 29 inches long by 21 inches deep. She bored some air holes in it, equipped it with inside latches, stocked it with sleeping pills, four slices of black bread, a jar of tea and some razor blades (to slash her wrists in case the worst came to the worst). Then Sigrid sent for Private Robert Siedentopf, a friendly G.I. who worked in the same Army dispensary as Gitte.

Be an Angel. Gitte, Sigrid told Robert, was very anxious to ship a crate full of "fragile personal belongings" to her fiance in Manhattan. Would Robert be an angel and take it to the airport for her? Carefully Robert set the box on a jeep and pocketed a cablegram written out by Sigrid: "Send $150 immediately and you will see me soon. Gitte." But the cable office would not send it unless Siedentopf signed it with his own name.

In his Manhattan hall bedroom, Rolf Berndt puzzled over the strange cable: "Send $150. See Gitte soon, (signed) Siedentopf." Rolf was a cautious man. Says he: "I wasn't going to send money to someone I never heard of." So in the air freight office at Frankfurt, Private, Siedentopf and his fragile burden waited in vain while airport officials waved a bill for $130 freight charges. "Can't I send it C.O.D.?" asked the G.I. The answer was no. "Oh, well, then just store it. I'll be back." Into the storeroom went the box. After an uncomfortable 24 hours, restless Gitte, clad in bra and pants, found herself face to face with the dumbfounded airline official. "It was hot in there," she said simply.

"Thank God she's alive," said Rolf Berndt when someone told him that Gitte would almost certainly have frozen to death in the unheated freight compartment of a Stratoliner. Sighed an airline official in Frankfurt: "Just say that I'd like to have some woman love me enough to fly to New York in that little box."

Next day, a U.S. Military Government court fined Gitte 100 marks (about $10), warned her not to try it again.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.