Together with her parents Michel Klemmer and Elis Kerschten, her brother Michel and her sister Madeleine, Anna Klemmer lived her whole life in Bourscheid.
As an adult, she lived alone in the last house in the village on the way to the castle. During the Second World War, Anna hides young draft dodgers. One winter morning in 1943, Bourscheid experiences a horrible awakening. A disdainful betrayal leads the Gestapo on the trail of the two Luxembourg draft dodgers Anna had hidden. One of the two boys is shot while trying to escape, the second is arrested together with Anna, who faces a harsh ordeal in several German prisons.
At the end of May 1945, Anna Klemmer returns to the destroyed Bourscheid. From Hamburg, the last stage of her ordeal, a British plane took her back to Brussels. She was the first woman from Bourscheid to fly. This devout and ascetic woman did not even have electric light in her house at that time. What does she think of her first flight? "I would love to fly again," she says.
In Bourscheid, Anna Klemmer finds her home, which has not been too badly affected by the events of the war. The people of the village have already temporarily repaired it. Unfortunately, her large sheepdog, a faithful companion, was shot by the Gestapo. Her cow, which formed the basis of her small farm with a few small fields and strips of meadow near the castle, has also disappeared.
The people of Bourscheid still remember that Anna got a new cow.
The devout resistance fighter died on 4 October 1964 in Ettelbruck.
Sources:
● http://www.ons-jongen-a-meedercher.lu/uploads/media/document/0001/92/ef111bc681b5df862094a9671a0e47988946daf7.pdf
● https://viewer.eluxemburgensia.lu/ark:70795/3nsgwdqx8/pages/12/articles/DIVL1169?search=klemmer
● Commune de Bourscheid