Annaliese was a girl of about 10 who lived temporarily in the village of Unterbernbach, Bavaria, in Germany with her mother and two sisters at the end of World War II.

I also was a temporary resident of Unterbernbach that year. I was one of 200 soldiers who moved into the village after the war ended.

We were a part of the U.S. Army of Occupation, at least until the war in the Pacific ended and we were redeployed homeward to take up the lives we had abandoned.

Unterbernbach may have seemed to some of my fellow GIs as kind of a bucolic backwater. The village's permanent residents did not number more than 200. Most were farmers, and most of the men were gone to war.

Annaliese was there because she was an evacuee. Her real home was in Bottrop in the Ruhr Valley, a place far different than the village. Annaliese used to come and sit on the front steps of the inn in which we were billeted to talk, laugh and otherwise brighten our days. Sometimes her sisters came, too, but mostly I remember Annaliese.

After I came home, her memory stuck with me and I tried to find out what had happened to her without success. I did discover that she and her mother and sisters had come to live with Unterbernbach friends until the war was over. Then they went back home. Not long after I left for the United States.

There the story might have ended. But somehow I could never get Annaliese out of my memory. And, although I tried several times, I was never able to get in touch with her. I don't know why this seemed important, but it did. Like Paul Harvey, I wanted to know "the rest of the story."

Once I wrote a piece, translated in German, which appeared in the nearest daily newspaper published in Ingolstadt on the Danube. Annaliese apparently read it or at least heard about it, but we still never made contact. Then I wrote the column that appeared in the Silicon Valley Community Newspapers group's papers.

Fortunately for me, Franz Heggenstellar, who operates a sawmill in Unterbernbach, came across this story while looking on the Internet and passed it on to others in the village. Annaliese's friend, Magdalena (called Lena), sent it on to Annaliese, but it did not include my address.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, for a variety of reasons I sent an email message as a kind of last resort to the Heggenstellar Mill, and Franz replied with Annaliese's address.

Today, through the wonders of email and the Internet, Annaliese and I have finally made contact, exchanged pictures and life stories and rejoined a friendship begun over 60 years ago.

So what happened to Annaliese?

Well, actually, not a great deal. After Annaliese went back to her hometown, she married Willi Foizik and had a son and daughter and grandchildren. She has spent the rest of her life there. Now 67, she still has some parts of the little girl I remember in Unterbernbach.

Annaliese can't read or write English, so we are dependent on her son to translate messages. My German, learned in school, is pretty rusty, but I am going to try to write her in her own language.

So the circle has been closed, we have found one another and I have, for some reason, a great feeling of contentment, as if I have accomplished some monumental task. I also have to think, however, that were it not for the wonders of the Internet and email, it never would have happened.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident.