MARIETTA, Georgia — In her living room against a backdrop of photos of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Gisela Wood showed me a book she purchased on a recent trip to Germany. The title of the book highlighted a prominent year in German history, world history and her own history — 1945.
It was the year World War II ended. And the year 79-year-old Gisela was born.
She thumbed through the pages, pausing on a few somber images of what Germany looked like at the time. There were more than 350 bombings in Berlin that year, she told me. Though she didn’t grow up in Berlin, “I remember these scenes,” she said in her gentle German accent. “I grew up with war.”
With the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, I am reminded of my visit with Wood last year, her memories of growing up in post-WWII Germany, her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and her legacy of faith.
Wood — a member of the Marietta Georgia Stake — was born in Pommern, Germany, while her father was at war. Earlier that year, soldiers had killed her maternal grandparents, and her mother had been shot multiple times while pregnant with her.
When the Pommern region was assigned to Poland after the war ended, the young Gisela and her mother became refugees. They spent time at a refugee camp before staying with family in East Germany and later fleeing to West Germany.
Wood told me harrowing stories of family members crossing the minefield at the border and soldiers separating her from her parents at a train station when she was 4 years old.
“It was just a very different life. … I didn’t realize how bad things were,” she said of her childhood.
Her first encounter with the Church was when missionaries visited her family’s home in West Germany. She hoped they would return, but to her knowledge, they did not.
Years later — after she moved to the United States; married her late husband, Fitzhugh Wood; and had two of her three children — two young men in white shirts and name tags knocked on her door in Marietta, Georgia. Gisela Wood immediately knew who they were and what church they were from.
After several visits, the missionaries invited them to be baptized. Fitzhugh Wood and their sons readily agreed, but Gisela Wood was hesitant. She was comfortable in the Methodist church they attended.
The missionaries had invited her to read the Book of Mormon and pray, but she hadn’t done either. One day she decided to try.
“All along they were telling me, ‘You pray about it yourself. You will get an answer.’ … So I read, and I prayed. And it wasn’t that long — maybe a week later — we were coming down I-75, there’s my husband and I in the car, and I felt that burning in the bosom. I knew. It was incredible,” Wood recalled.
With her husband and sons, she was baptized and confirmed a member of the Church in 1978. Gisela and Fitzhugh Wood were sealed in the Washington D.C. Temple in 1979. He died in 2020.
About six months after she was baptized, Gisela Wood received her patriarchal blessing — an experience she said that “cinched” her testimony and helped her see divine intervention in her life. Her stake patriarch was ill, so she received her blessing from a patriarch in a nearby stake.
“He knew nothing about me, and what he said in my blessing [about my childhood] I had never even told anybody,” Wood said. “I thought, ‘That had to be a servant of the Lord because nobody knows.’
“It really gave me a much stronger testimony just to hear my blessing. … It made me think about what Heavenly Father did for me.”
When Wood first heard the news that the Berlin Wall had fallen in November 1989, she admits, she was doubtful reunification would really happen. But as her homeland and family members were reunited, her testimony was again strengthened as she saw prophetic promises fulfilled.
As a young Apostle in 1968, the late President Thomas S. Monson promised war-torn members in East Germany: “If you will remain true and faithful to the commandments of God, every blessing any member of the Church enjoys in any other country will be yours.”
“I’m grateful that I have the Church,” Wood said. “The Church has just been my rock, my family.”
Thinking back to the missionaries who first came to her family’s home in West Germany, she added: “Heavenly Father planted the seeds, and I knew it was true.”
