FREMONT, Calif. — Ursula Haeussler still remembers the frenzy of that day more than a century ago.
She had just sat down for breakfast at the kitchen table as the maid began the morning chores at their home on a small farm in a rural, idyllic German town.
Suddenly, just as the maid began fixing her apron, she collapsed onto the floor. Haeussler’s uncle and father immediately sprung into action, attempting to revive the unconscious woman before carrying her onto a cart and taking her to the nearest doctor. The young girl’s mind whirled with confusion, wondering what had just happened.
Only days later did Haeussler — then just a toddler — learn that the maid had died from the Spanish flu. Weeks later, the same disease claimed the lives of Haeussler’s uncle and godparents.
“That is all I personally know,” she said of the 1918 outbreak, noting she was too young to more. “But I know it was miserable. Back then there were no vaccines; no one could help it, they just died.”
Today, at 105 years old, she sees the parallels of the Spanish flu that changed her life and infected one-third of the world’s population and the coronavirus pandemic that has already killed more than 2 million worldwide.
But this time, there’s a difference. In a small room at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont, Haeussler received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. For the first time in a long time, she felt relief.
“We had no way to fight the pandemic back then,” she said of the Spanish flu. “They had no vaccine and all the medical advancements we’ve made. We can be so thankful now. I am certainly thankful for the people who gave us the vaccine and risk their own life to do so.”
Then, the most severe pandemic in recent history, the Spanish flu was estimated to have infected about 500 million people after the first outbreaks in 1918 and 1919, and the number of deaths from that strain of the influenza virus tallied at least 50 million worldwide, including about 675,000 in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Germany, about 287,000 people died from the Spanish flu from 1918 to 1920.
The coronavirus, meanwhile, has infected more than 25 million in the U.S., a number that is climbing daily with the number of deaths exceeding 440,000, according to latest figures.
From her home, Haeussler recalled that the first pandemic of her life was just the start of a tumultuous 25 years to come. And in many ways, she said, these days are just as turbulent and similar to the one’s she grew up in — a pandemic, protests, economic anxiety and family strife over politics.
She saw it all — the Roaring Twenties in Weimar-era Berlin, the collapse of the world economy, hyperinflation, the rise of the Nazi Party in the ’20s in Dresden and the loss of everything her family had worked for at the end of World War II.
“It was a constant uproar,” Haeussler said of her time in Berlin in the late 1920s. “We lived on a big street that connected Potsdam to Berlin. There were always people coming by. Brownshirts marching down the street, singing their songs. Then came the communists and the anarchists. I was at the time 15 years old, so I didn’t probably understand what I was seeing.”
In a warning of the potential far reaching implications of the coronavirus pandemic, the New York Federal Reserve in 2020 published a paper linking the 1918 flu pandemic to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and right-wing movements across the world.
Despite the similarities between her time and ours, Haeussler said the world has learned to better deal with historical events like a pandemic and the economic collapse that followed.
“I feel very horrible that many people do lose their businesses and their possessions,” she said. “But today is not to the extent you lose completely everything. At that time, everything you had saved, everything owned became valueless. I hope that this time doesn’t end up being like last time.”
