The war was over; the occupation had begun.

Our arrival in Unterbernbach was in keeping with what Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had proclaimed at the end of the war: "We come as conquerors, not oppressors."

Unterbernbach—set in the flat farm country near Augsburg, Bavaria—was then a place of about 200 souls, augmented by an undetermined number of evacuees from the Ruhr, sent there to escape the bombing and the crossing of the Rhine, the last stage of World War II in Europe.

The imposition of an additional 200 men on the already overcrowded village must have done nothing to endear us to its inhabitants. Company L took over such public buildings as there were—the schoolhouse, Franz Wagner's Gasthaus and several large houses, ousting their inhabitants to whatever other shelter they could find.

There all of us stayed from June until September, getting acquainted. Getting to know one another was fairly easy—or perhaps I should say "unavoidable." Unterbernbach (there also is an Oberbernbach some miles away, but for some strange reason no Bernbach) had no grocery store—indeed, no stores of any kind.

It did have a sawmill and a flour mill, both powered by a mill race that cut off some of the water of the nearby Paar River. Both these establishments were owned by Anton Hagensteller, the village's leading citizen and also its Nazi-era burgomaster. Hagensteller was deposed by the American military government, and an ancient Social Democrat—perhaps the only one around, who also was the local blacksmith—took his place.

It was a sunny, pleasant place to stay after spending a winter and spring invading Germany, and we sprawled in the village when we could, savoring each hour of life, a life some of us thought we would never see.

But what I remember most of Unterbernbach is a single person.

Her name was Anna-Liese. She was about 12 years old. She had brown hair and eyes and a smile that at once captured your heart. She had a sister named Weintraub who was two years older, old enough to have become serious.

Anna-Liese was simply joy. She laughed where we had not seen laughter for a long time. Browned already from the summer sun, she danced about on bare feet in the dust of the village's two streets, oblivious of war, of the horror of what had happened to the world, reassuring us that there were good things left in life.

We gave her candy and gum, not so much because she wanted them but because they were the only tangible gifts we could give for a renewal of a chance at our own joy after months of chances at death. And in return she gave us her smile, her laughter and her talk.

And we did talk. Not many of us could speak German and she knew no English, yet we managed somehow to communicate and to make her the unofficial sweetheart of the Second Platoon.

Then in September of 1945 we moved out of the village—to its great relief, I am sure—farther south, toward the Austrian border to take up a new home.

I have never been back to Unterbernbach, although through the Internet I have discovered that it still exists and that Hagensteller's sawmill is still in operation. I can guess that the village is not much different than it was before we came and went and that the ground around it is still farmed, as it was and has been for centuries.

I am not so sure of what happened to Anna-Liese. Years afterward I heard indirectly that she and her sister and mother had moved back to their home in the Ruhr Valley, that she had married and was working. I don't know if she had children.

Perhaps it is not necessary to know. Perhaps it is not necessary to close the circle, to find out how life treated her after that summer. By now she would be at least in her 60s. Still, it is tempting to wonder how she fared after that long, sunny summer and if she remembers any of it.

In the end all I can really say is that I will never forget it or her. I will never forget that out of ugliness, terror, death and all those elements that make up war, there in that humble village she brought me the reassurance that there are good things left in life, no matter how much evil exists in the world.

For that gift I remain in her debt. For that gift, the pleasure of her smile, I will never forget that summer or Unterbernbach.

—Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Sun.