While we were in Akron, my parents, together with Uncle Hugo and Aunt Martha, bought Oak Park Farm. It was near Brantford, Ontario, on the Grand River, and was exactly as large as Neuhof/Nový Dvůr. For my father that meant that he “had again made it.” Prior to this time, he had spent much time on his seed business, Greenlands Permanent Pasture. He would visit farms, analyze the soil and then recommend mixtures of seeds and offer advice on how to enhance the pastures and increase the milk production of the specific breed of cattle involved. He helped develop highly productive pastures in both Canada and the United States, and it became a very successful enterprise.
A short time after the two families moved to Oak Park Farm on May 1, 1949, fate struck three times in a row. Ten days after the move my father, who had always been so proud of his good health and his physical strength, suffered a massive heart attack. He recovered, but was absolutely not willing to change his active way of life. The second tragedy occurred in the summer of 1949, while Georg and I were spending a few weeks at the farm. During these weeks Georg and I worked on the second floor of the large, hundred year old house that without exaggeration could be called a mansion. The interior had been decorated by an architect, a member of a circle who had become friends, especially of my mother. While we were working we suddenly heard disturbing voices and learned that my cousin Karli, Uncle Hugo and Aunt Martha’s son, the only male descendant (and potential heir of the farm) had fallen into a combine harvester while loading fodder into the silo, and had died a horrible death.
Mother was next. She had never been one to complain, and thus we should have paid more attention when, in the late 1940s, she began to complain of severe stomach pains. In March 1950 she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the pancreas. What followed was worse than I could have imagined. During the summer Mother had a second operation, at the Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City. My conviction of the cynical greed of doctors—yes, I know that there are exceptions—has its roots there. It was almost impossible to speak to the doctors. What remained most vivid in my mind was a doctor’s reply when I asked him why my mother had a blister the size and color of a large egg yolk on her knee: “It isn’t worth a conversation.”
Although Mother had been pessimistic ever since she was first diagnosed with cancer, she was convinced at the end that she was getting better. In her words: “I have always known that when daddy decides on something, he can make it happen.” She died in the Brantford hospital on November 20th, 1950.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 61f