Senior fights injustice by opening her door
Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Apr 04/01) - At 80 years old Dorothy Hinze refuses to let the world just happen around her.
In her small corner of the world in Furteswalde, Germany, a town about 20 miles from Berlin, Hinze fights injustice by opening the doors of her house to perfect strangers, most not even from her continent. And for her work the German government awarded her the equivalent of the Order of Canada last year.
Hinze was in Yellowknife this week visiting an old childhood friend, Kirt Lehniger.
Hinze received the Verdiensimedaille des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublic, which translated means the "medal of the order of the German Republic" for housing refugees from around the world.
Sitting in Lehniger's livingroom, the silver haired Hinze says she imagines her grandchildren in a foreign country trying to survive and the image compels her to help.
"We have to help others who have no one to help them," she says through Lehniger's translation.
Hinze opened her house to refugees when the Berlin Wall came down in 1991. She remembers candlelight vigils before unification. She remembers the role her church, Martin Luther Lutheran Church, played during those heady days and through the same church she brings in people from Vietnam, Thailand, Libya, Ethiopia, Palestine into her home, to eat at her table.
"If you give happiness to other people it comes back as happiness in your own heart," she says.
One family stands out in her mind. Ha Nguyen, a single mother with an 11-year-old son named Thach walked into her life 10 years ago.
Nguyen, a teacher, fled Vietnam because she didn't support the communism government.
"They were homesick," says Hinze. "I remember tears rolling down their cheeks."
Now Thach is studying economics at a German university.
"Dorothy protects immigrants and refugees from neo-Nazis and people who would hunt them down," says Lehniger.
"She has an open house," he says.
Hinze, who understands a little English smiles and nods.
"They call me the German mother and the German grandmother," she says.
