One Woman’s Sign of Spirit a Sentiment Widely Shared

“GOD BLESS AMERICA” is all the handwritten sign says in its black marker on confiscated white poster board. It is held aloft by a right arm fatigued from the sign’s weight and a lifetime shaped by war.

The woman who holds it is a striking demonstrator, a former banker elegantly dressed in white, wearing diamond earrings and carrying a leather purse with her initials monogrammed on one side.

She is a lonely demonstrator, standing four hours a day--Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday so far--in front of the Federal Building in West Los Angeles, keeping her distance from the FBI agents with their rifles, the commuters with their bus schedules, even her husband with his camera.

She is an unlikely patriot, unabashedly declaring her love for the same country that, an ocean and a world war ago, aimed its bombs at her.

“I came here after watching television Tuesday morning,” she says. “I’m not sure why. I couldn’t think of any other way to express how I feel about all these people who died. And I wanted to offer a little bit of encouragement to people that this is a great country and we will come together.”

She stares into the eastbound traffic that flows off the San Diego Freeway. It’s clear that some commuters, the folks with UCLA flags, the Big Blue bus drivers, recognize her after three days. The honks pour over her--the beep! beep! and bing! bing! of strangers’ approval--and she blushes. She speaks again, though it is hard to hear.

“I believe in reincarnation. And for me, the TV pictures trigger terrible memories from a long time ago.”

Her name is Silvia B. Nickel. She was born Silvia Mitterhauber on Dec. 20, 1932, in Germany, just as it was becoming Hitler’s. Her stepfather, a signalman in the German army, left the family’s Munich apartment to make war. Her parents told her that Germany and the war were wrong, she says now, but to resist was death.

In 1943, Allied bombs destroyed the family’s apartment building. They lived in bunkers for a while, before fleeing south to the town of Oberammergau in the shadow of the Alps, where the bombs fell less often. After the Americans took the area and set up a base, she worked as a waitress there in the years after the war. Her stepfather, by then a Russian prisoner of war, did not find his way back to the family until 1949.

They tried to leave Germany. Brazil and South Africa were considered before they made the boat trip to Canada in 1953. In Toronto, she found work as a bookkeeper in a bank; she liked the steadiness of the work, the frequent but almost always pleasant dealings with the public. She was no rabble-rouser.

In 1958, she married, the first of many marriages. The new couple decided to see the U.S. in their Buick. Arriving in Santa Monica and seeing the ocean, she decided she wanted to stay and spend the rest of her life in peace.

She found an apartment and walked into the Bank of America branch in Beverly Hills, where she was hired on the spot. Her marriage broke up, and a few marriages after that. She supported herself for the next four decades with a steady series of bank jobs. She retired as bank manager of the Coast Federal branch in Santa Monica four years ago.

Twelve years ago, worried about trash and traffic, she joined a neighborhood group, the Westside Residents Assn. She is the president now. She volunteers with the community police advisory board and with a neighborhood surveillance group.

She is a Republican who last year posted a copy of the Ten Commandments outside her home. For the last six Fourth of Julys, she has joined other demonstrators waving flags at the Federal Building, her perch this week.

Nickel, who wakes up at 6, learned of the attack Tuesday morning after turning on the radio at three minutes past the hour. After watching TV throughout the morning, she found two signs she confiscated from a nearby telephone pole last month. One said: “I Lost 40 Pounds in 30 Days.” The other: “Work From Home for Big $.”

The backs of each side were blank. So she flipped the signs over, taped them together and mounted them on a stick from her garage. After a few minutes of thought, she settled for “GOD BLESS AMERICA” on both sides. She says she was too confused and stunned by the situation to think of anything more specific.

Her new husband, retired engineer Roy Brown, didn’t want her to go. It wasn’t safe. The Federal Building might be a target. And who knows what emotions such attacks might produce? When she found a spot on Wilshire Boulevard, Brown hung about 20 yards away. Whenever someone approached his wife, he would stop them and ask their business.

“I’m the bodyguard,” he explained.

Nickel’s choice of message proved to be a wise one. One hundred yards farther west on Wilshire, a succession of small demonstrations have sprung up with more targeted messages. Bob Zirgulis, an importer from Culver City, and his two sons held signs reading “Bomb the Taliban” and “No Haven for Terrorists.” Drivers moved past without a noise.

The response to Nickel was overwhelming. In a single hour, The Times counted 172 cars sounding their horns as they passed her. There were too many flashed “thumbs-up” signs to count.

Several stopped and opened their windows. “Thank you! Thank you!” yelled one driver out of a moving bus. One man opened the door of his sport utility vehicle and yelled, “This is time well spent!” A pair of motorcyclists, from different lanes of traffic, were the loudest.