Anna Tschoepe

Anna Tschoepe (97) passed away on December 4, 2009 at her home near Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Funeral Services will be held on December 9, 2009 at 11:00 am in the Bonners Ferry Funeral Home with interment in the Grandview Cemetery. My mother, Anna Tschoepe (born Piplack), was born on July 14, 1912 in Eberswalde a small city close to Berlin in Germany. She was baptized into the Catholic faith. Her Father was Catholic and her mother Lutheran. She was one of six children. Her parents were very poor; they had a small apartment with a kitchen used also as the living room and two bedrooms, one for the parents and the other for the six children. WW I broke out in 1914, her father was drafted into the army. After the war ended, he came home and was unemployed for seven years. He had to take various small jobs in order to survive. Since her father was good in wood carving he made various products to sell. He made kindling and firewood to get some income to support his family with six children. Around 1936 my mother met my father, George Tschoepe, who served in the German army under Hitler at that time. I was born in 1937. My father served in the military for about 10 years, so he was gone a lot during the war. Finally he ended up as a prisoner of war in Siberia where he spent 3 ½ years until 1948. During that time my mother had to go through a lot of hard ships, escaping from East Germany, raising me by herself. We lived in the city of Berlin while the allies were bombing that city on a daily basis. Many nights we were spending in a bomb shelter. Then my father arranged for my mother and me to move to Silesia to stay for several months with his uncle on a small farm, which was a saver place than the big city of Berlin. The battle was raging between the Russian and German army, shooting each other and we were right in the middle. My mother was praying the rosary all night asking the LORD for protection and He graciously protected us all during the war. Finally the day came when we had to leave that farm to head west. To make a long story short several months later we wound up in Bavaria, where we were assigned to a family with a small farm in a small village with 11 homes. In exchange for food and lodging my mother had to work on that farm until the end of the war, when finally my father came home out of prison camp in 1948. A couple years later we moved to Stuttgart to my father’s sister where we as a family accepted the Advent message and joined the SDA Church, one of the best decisions of our life. After I immigrated to the United States in 1959, my parents followed me in 1960 moving to California. We lived about 10 years in Los Angeles and Lodi. Because of the information we found in the Spirit of Prophecy through the LORD’s leading my parents moved to Bonners Ferry, Idaho in 1968, where they stayed and joined the local SDA Church and loved it. They were actively involved. Since my father passed away in 1996, my mother lived in a small home on their property. My mother was always in good health and very active, tending her garden, which was her hobby. She read her German Bible a lot and I used to copy many programs from ABN so she could watch them on her TV, she especially liked the children programs and some of the speakers. When she got weaker, she had more and more the desire to go to sleep for good and she wondered every day saying, why am I still here because she found no reason to life without being active in her garden? I am personally very thankful and was very privileged to have my mother for so many years. She was a very good mother to me personally at all times. She did accept Christ as her Savior and was looking forward to a new life on the earth made new. My father passed away on December 1 of 1996. Anna is survived by her son, Walter of Bonners Ferry, Idaho; two grand sons David Tschoepe of Spokane, Washington, Mark Tschoepe of Knoxville, Tennessee, a grand daughter Andrea Buechner of Anchorage, Alaska and by five great grand children. Family and friends are invited to sign Anna’s book at www.bonnersferryfuneralhome.com Arrangement are entrusted to the care of Bonners Ferry Funeral Home.