Best friends Ejanga Egiomue (left) and Magdalene Garber (right) on an outing in Berlin, Germany during World War II (likely 1941-1942). Magdalene stayed in Germany, but Ejanga fled to Denmark in 1944. Both women survived the war and stayed in contact with each other, exchanging letters and correspondence well into the 1990s.
Magdalene (“Leni”) Garber was born in January, 1919 in Germany. Her parents were Joseph Garber, a Togolese man, and Johanna Maychrzak, a white German woman. Magdalene grew up in Berlin-Neukölln and worked as a performer from an early age. She was part of several ethnographic shows, including a variety of Mohamed ben Ahmed’s Afrika-Schau during the late 1920s through the early 1930s, and the German Africa Show (Deutsche Afrika-Schau) during the Nazi period. After the war, she married Jack Goodwin, who was an African American GI. She moved to the United States with her husband in 1946.
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