Life Story by Our Montessori School Co-founder Is American Dream

From Peenemunde to Cape Canaveral, and Beyond
by Werner Hengst
Hardcover, 430 pages (including rare archival photos)
Published by Christy Hengst
$37.20
Available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu.com

Imagine yourself a 7-year-old boy in Germany during World War II, emerging from your family’s underground bomb shelter to discover nothing left of your home but a lone cement stoop.

That is one of the many gripping first-person stories by longtime Somers resident Werner Hengst in his autobiography, which has just been published posthumously by daughter Christy.

Mr. Hengst, who with wife Betty founded Our Montessori School in northern Westchester, died in 2016 from kidney disease. Betty continues to run the thriving school, which the couple opened in 1972.

The book’s title, From Peenemünde to Cape Canaveral, and Beyond, reflects Werner Hengst’s journey from the tiny German town where his parents raised him, to the iconic American city where his father -- a rocket scientist who worked with the legendary Wernher von Braun -- landed a plum job after the war in the booming U.S. rocket and space program.

In what often reads like a young boy’s adventure story, the first third of the 430-page book chronicles young Werner’s extraordinary experiences – which are, by turns, harrowing and enlightening.

As a child of war, he saw his hometown of Peenemunde bombed clear off the map, and for months didn’t see his father. Gerhard Hengst, an officer in the Luftwaffe (German Air Force), was interred by the U.S. after the war at a camp housing military prisoners.

The rest of the book charts Werner’s remarkable path towards a career at IBM and then as private school administrator. In each of 49 meticulously crafted essays, his curiosity, sense of adventure, and intense love affair with nature as an avid outdoorsman jump off the page.

The reader is held in thrall each step of the way -- from Werner’s assimilating, as an immigrant high school student, into the alien culture of south Florida, to him and wife Betty, a native of Atlanta, starting Our Montessori School because they couldn’t find a suitable private education for Christy.

The family first settled in Peekskill before moving to Somers, finding their dream house, nestled on Plum Brook Lake.

Mr. Hengst’s eye for detail and his granular memory serve well both him and the reader, as does his talent for breezy storytelling.

Whether it’s discovering the valuable aluminum casing of a test rocket that lands near his house, or scavenging for unopened cans of food and cigarette stubs left by American GIs preparing to return home at war’s end, the book gives the reader rare, eye-opening insight through an extraordinarily observant, innocent eyewitness to history.

Selected Highlights from the Book

· Werner was a daring outdoorsman and naturalist who is among the very few since the Revolutionary War to locate the historic Bat Cave in Crow’s Nest Mountain (just north of West Point) that was used as a hideout by Tories.

· Werner was intrigued by the challenge of climbing to the top of Bear Mountain Bridge and standing on its uppermost cable. In 1996, he achieved that feat, and took a mind-boggling photo of what he saw that is in the book.

· Werner recounts that it was decades before his father was able to come to grips with the inhuman horrors of the Holocaust, which decades before his father had called “American propaganda.” Because of his heritage, Werner said he felt ashamed and a deep sense of “collective guilt.”

· As a 15-year-old, Werner and a friend spent a night in jail for crossing the border from Germany to Austria without a day pass during a 60-mile bicycle excursion. In adulthood, he always had to deal with the inevitable question on job applications and clearances: “Have you ever been arrested? Please explain.”

· From snakes and mushrooms to geese and blueberries, Werner was extremely knowledgeable about fauna and flora indigenous to the Hudson Valley, which he writes about extensively in the book.

· With the Peenemunde rocket research center not far from his home, young Werner one day found a misfired test rocket in the woods. Noticing that it contained valuable aluminum, he brought it to school for a scrap metal drive, figuring he would be rewarded for his discovery. That was not exactly the reaction he got.

· When U.S. soldiers gave Werner and his friends gum, the boys didn’t know what to do with it, so they mimicked how the soldiers put it in their mouth and chewed it, “more because we wanted to be like them than for the taste.” He also describes how friendly and generous American GIs were to German children.

· With post-war Germany on a severe food-rationing program (for example, one-eighth pound of meat per person per month), Werner scavenged the area where American GIs were unloading food and other supplies from their vehicles. “What was trash for an American GI about to go home was treasure to us and our families,” he writes.

· Before Werner and Betty opened Our Montessori School (in Yorktown and Carmel) in 1972, Christy Hengst attended a Montessori School in Briarcliff Manor. After that school doubled its tuition, many parents pulled out, forcing it to close its doors. Failing to find another Montessori school nearby, the Hengsts decided that they had to open their own Montessori school to ensure Christy the education they wanted her to have. Forty-seven years later, it still is going strong.

· Among the unique policies practiced at Our Montessori School are… teacher to student average ratio is 6:1; unused portion of tuition refunded if not satisfied; classes organized by students’ learning ability, not strictly by age (e.g. 5- to 7-year-olds may be in the same class); under 5 percent turnover in teachers each year, compared to more than 50% turnover in other childcare schools; students are taught to self-correct errors instead of being corrected by teacher; rolling admissions throughout school year.

· Werner Hengst was born in 1936 and grew up in Peenemünde, a town on an island in the Baltic Sea, in Northern Germany. In 1986, he began writing down memories and stories from his life. He soon joined a writer’s group that met regularly in the Hudson Valley for decades. His work has appeared in Smithsonian, Snowy Egret, and many other magazines, newspapers and anthologies, including Child of my Child, a collection of essays and poems by and for grandparents. Werner died in 2016, just as his daughter was beginning to pull together his best stories into the collection of essays titled From Peenemünde to Cape Canaveral, and Beyond.

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