MARIETTA, Georgia — In her living room, lined with photos of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Gisela Wood showed me a book she bought on a recent trip to Germany. The title of the book emphasized an important year in German history, world history, and its own history: 1945.

It was the year that World War II ended. And it’s the year 79-year-old Gisela was born.

He flipped through the pages and paused over a few bleak images of what Germany was like at the time. There were more than 350 bombings in Berlin that year, he said. “I remember these scenes,” he said in his gentle German accent, even though he did not grow up in Berlin. “I grew up with war”

With the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, I remembered my visit to Wood last year, his memories of growing up in post-World War II Germany, his conversion to the Latter-day Church of Jesus Christ. Saints and his legacy of faith.

Wood, a member of the Marietta Georgia Stake, was born in Pommern, Germany, while his father was away at war. Soldiers had killed her maternal grandparents earlier that year, and her mother had been shot multiple times while she was pregnant with him.

After the war ended, when the Pommern region was handed over to Poland, young Gisela and her mother became refugees. They stayed with their families in East Germany and later spent time in a refugee camp before escaping to West Germany.

Wood told me harrowing stories about family members crossing a border minefield and soldiers separating him from his family at a train station when he was 4 years old.

“It was a very different life. … I didn’t realize how bad things were,” he said of his childhood.

His first encounter with the church came when missionaries visited his family’s home in West Germany. He hoped they would return, but as far as he knew, they didn’t.

Years later – after moving to the United States; married her late husband, Fitzhugh Wood; and gave birth to two of her three children — when two young men wearing white shirts and name tags knocked on her door in Marietta, Georgia. Gisela Wood knew immediately who they were and what church they were from.

After several visits, the missionaries invited them to be baptized. Fitzhugh Wood and his sons agreed immediately, but Gisela Wood was hesitant. He was comfortable in the Methodist church they attended.

The missionaries had invited him to read the Book of Mormon and pray, but he did neither. One day he decided to try it.

“They were telling me from the beginning: ‘Pray about it yourself. You will get an answer.’ … So I read and prayed. And it didn’t take that long – maybe a week later – we were pulling down I-75, my husband and I were in the car, and I felt that burning sensation in my chest. I knew. It was incredible,” Wood recalled.

She was baptized along with her husband and sons and confirmed as a member of the Church in 1978. Gisela and Fitzhugh Wood were sealed in the church. Washington D.C. Temple In 1979. He died in 2020.

About six months after he was baptized, Gisela Wood received him patriarchal blessing — an experience he says “unraveled” his testimony and helped him see divine intervention in his life. The stake patriarch was ill, so he received confirmation from a patriarch at a nearby stake.

“He didn’t know anything about me, and the things he said about me (about my childhood) I had never told anyone,” Wood said. “’I thought he must be a servant of God because no one knew.’

“Just hearing my blessing really gave me a much stronger testimony. … It made me think about all that Heavenly Father has done for me.”

Wood admits that when he first heard the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, he was doubtful that reunification would actually happen. But as his hometown and family members were reunited, his testimony was strengthened again as he saw the prophetic words fulfilled.

The late President Thomas S. Monson as a young Apostle in 1968 Promised members who suffered from the war in East Germany: “If you abide and remain faithful to the commandments of God, every blessing that any member of the Church enjoys in another land will be yours.”

“I am grateful to have the church,” Wood said. “The church became my rock, my family.”

Reflecting on the first missionaries to come to his family’s home in West Germany, he added: “My Heavenly Father sowed the seeds, and I knew it was right.”