Brigitte Rodgers was born in January 1943 in Berlin, Germany. She and an older brother were the children of an engineer who was sent by Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolph Hitler] to France to build bunkers before she was born. To keep them safe while he was away, her father moved her pregnant mother and her brother to a small town outside of Berlin [Annotator's Note: Berlin, Germany]. In 1944, the Russians took him as a prisoner of war. When he was released, he attempted to move the family back to their former residence, but found the apartment building had been destroyed. The family started over in lodgings that had a badly damaged outer wall that he repaired. Rodgers remembers playing with her doll in a section of the building that was open to the sky. When the city was divided into separate sectors, the district where they lived fell into the hands of the Russians, and Rodgers recalled that food was scarce. Things were better in West Berlin because of the American Air Lift, and her father could bring supplies across the border. It was difficult for her, as a small child, to understand why conditions in the west were "slowly but surely" getting better. Rodgers and her brother were forbidden to mention family business outside the home, nor were they allowed to take treats bought in the west to school because the eastern government was already "spying" on its residents. She started school in East Berlin, and the family remained there until 1950 when her father, who worked in West Berlin on the subway system, moved the family to the French Sector.

When her family moved to the French Sector of West Berlin in 1950, Brigitte Rodgers noticed that she no longer had to worry about being watched all the time. She knew the distinctions between the French, American, British and Russian sectors only by the signposts, and the difference in the uniforms of the soldiers. But she distinctly remembers the American occupiers being kind, friendly, and encouraging. Those she had contact with appreciated her attempts to speak with them in English. Her parents made comments about all the United States was doing to help them, and Rodgers said she put the Americans on a "pedestal." The family lived across from a park in a new apartment that was much bigger than their former residence, and included an office for her father. There was very little talk about the war at home or at school. But she did mention that she had a Jewish uncle by marriage who disappeared at the end of the war, and his wife died shortly thereafter. She had friends whose fathers didn't come back. Rodgers said the war was a painful memory and they avoided discussing it. She credits the resiliency of youth for their ability to live in the present, although the question was in the back of her mind: "How could we have done what we've done?" [Annotator's Note: Rodgers shakes her head.] She said today it is a much more openly discussed, but then it was just too raw. The population was very busy cleaning and rebuilding, but she noted that if a person didn't learn something from those memories, there was something wrong with them.

On her 20th birthday, Brigitte Rodgers traveled by herself to New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] to get away from the disaster in Europe and a strict home life. She was impressed by the American soldiers, captivated by American life as depicted in movies and magazines, and she loved the music she heard on the American Forces Network. She sailed on the SS Bremen from Bremerhaven, Germany to New York, where she a became live-in babysitter until the papers were in order for her to get a paying job in hotel management, the occupation for which she had been trained in Germany. Her work permit came through in six months and she moved to California, where she had relatives, and got a job. She met a man in her San Francisco workplace and got married. She has never experienced discrimination on the basis of her German background, although she admits that Germans should [Annotator's Note: emphasis noted] have a bad reputation for starting two world wars. Five years after arriving in the United States she became an American citizen.

In 1961, when the Berlin Wall was established, Brigitte Rodgers said the free movement between the sectors was at an end. There was a mass exodus of people trying to get out of East Berlin, and one night, without warning, the subways no longer stopped at any platform in the Russian Sector. Rodgers left Germany when the physical wall was being built and a "no man's land" was put in force. It wasn't until after she was in America that the full meaning of what was happening hit her. As children, Rodgers and her friends used to call the Russians "the devils." Their reputation was bad and her mother told her that when they came through the tiny town where her fatherless family had taken refuge, women were raped and personal possessions were stolen. Rodgers doesn't feel that World War 2 affected her life very greatly, because peace came quickly to the western sector of Germany and she had many options. Her father was smart, and situated his family wisely. She feels she had a fairly normal young life, compared to people who were under Russian rule in the east. Today, Rodgers feels she is more American than most people who were born in this country.