PROSE

Excerpt from my first book, Singing My Way Home: My Journey Through Fear

CHAPTER ONE: BEGINNINGS

WHEN THERE'S FEAR (CD track 1)

When there's fear you can't see clearly
Nothing is easy no matter what you do
And you don't know how it started
Life was quite simple when life was still new.

Now, the stars remind you even they grow old.
How to battle time when life and friends are cold?

When there's joy your heart is singing
All by itself you don't even have to try
And the rainbows circle 'round you
They get wet to keep you dry.

Now the skies remind you even darkness glows
In a world like this where pain and love run close.

When there's pain do try and listen
And hear exactly what it's wanting to say
It's the heart that hears itself
That can heal itself in a natural way.

Life is full of goodness even when we're blind
Time can bring us peace, it's always there to find.

It is early February, 1954. Wave after towering wave slaps the side of our ship, in a desperate attempt to awaken us to the dangers lurking ahead. No, they aren't warning us of the perils of the sea, or of this powerful storm that will delay our ocean liner on its journey from France to the USA. Rather, it's the relentless storm of fear, confusion, hatred, and rejection that my family will face after we have completed our intended journey from Paris, France to New York City, to Chicago, and finally to Joliet, Il, where we will begin our new lives in our new country.

My father is a German rocket scientist. He has just completed a 7-year contract with the French government, made shortly after the end of WW II. He has decided to rejoin the German company he worked for in Berlin during the war, a company that now is located in Chicago, Il, hence our journey there.

"Go back," the waves scream wordlessly at us. "Go back. You have no idea of what lays ahead of you."

I get the message. I understand. However, I am only 2 ½ years old and I am not in charge here. My parents are, and it is their misguided attempt to bring my sister and me to a better life that is tearing us away from the life we already have: the country where my sister and I were born, our loved ones, and yes, even our mother tongue.

My mother and father have already decided to speak only English to us once we arrive in the States, so that we can learn our new language quickly and easily, disguising ourselves in the process: " Let's pretend we're Americans, not Christian Germans, not the defeated enemy. " Who is lower than that in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of the Holocaust, a mere handful of years after the end of WWII?

***

My father's life began in Berlin, Germany in 1902 when he crawled out of the womb into the welcoming arms of his mother and father who named him Arran, after the Scottish isle. But there were arms that did not welcome him, the arms of his paternal grandfather who happened to be one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Germany, Graff Von Douglas, "Graff Von" being a title in German that is equivalent to "Count" or "Earl".

His eldest son, my father's father, was the heir to this title. However, as fate would have it, two things stood in the way of his actually inheriting it.

The first is that he fell in love with his little brother's governess and she fell in love with him. She was highly educated, artistic and musical. It was she who was entrusted with the upbringing of the Graff's children. However, as was the mindset in late 19th century in Europe, she was considered a "commoner" as she lacked the title that would have gained her entrance into the exclusive German aristocracy. This meant that she was "not worthy" of my grandfather, and therefore not eligible as a partner for marriage.

That did not stop the two lovers. Forbidden by the rules of class to marry her outright, my grandfather bought a paper marriage for her to someone whom she never met, and my grandfather changed his name to the name on the document.

If he had married her outright, he would have been disinherited. Instead, his actions left him disgraced but still eligible to inherit both his father's title and estate, the latter of which was rather considerable.

(include photo Daddie gave you with "map" of identifying everyone in the picture.)

In 1906, the pair left Berlin and moved to Bournemouth, England, where they bought a large mansion and estate, planning to raise their 3 sons there. My father was almost 4 at the time, the youngest of the three boys, with a grown sister already living on her own in Berlin.

This move, of course, left the pair severed from their families, becoming the unofficial black sheep of the family. The stress of all of this weighed heavily upon my grandfather, and probably was a factor in the alcoholism that killed him in his 40's. His father outlived him, thus the title and estate went to my grandfather's younger brother. My father was only 5 at the time.

His true identity was kept a secret from him. My father did not know of his actual lineage until when, in his mid-thirties, he stumbled across it in a book while visiting a wealthy friend of the family. The effect of that revelation must have been staggering.

His life while growing up in England was good at first. My father and his brothers had a privileged life, with tutors, housekeepers, governesses, a cook, and gardener rounding out the cast of characters in their early story. The boys received music lessons from the most outstanding instrumentalists in England. The boys formed a trio, one playing violin, one playing cello, with my father playing piano. Together they played the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and others, music that my father came to love. It was a love that he passed on to me.

Rough times came with the outbreak of WW I. Even though my father and his family were by now English citizens, the English government treated them as foreign enemies, confiscating all of their property: their mansion, lands, and money. Because the family was well-connected socially, they were permitted to leave England, narrowly escaping being sent to a concentration camp for Germans.

His family faced another dilemma. They could not stay in England, nor could they return to Germany, as they were now English citizens. My grandmother chose to relocate her family to Switzerland. During the school-year, the family resided in Zuoz, a tiny village in the mountains that boasted one of the best boarding schools in the world. A prestigious academy, its pupils included many children of ambassadors from all over the world.

Years later, when I was almost 11 years old, my father and I walked the halls of that school together, hand in hand. I remember marveling at the elegance of the black and white tiled marble floors, at the indoor swimming pool built in the 19th century. There was a sense of unbounded privilege and exquisite taste in all of the surroundings.

The family's last reserve of money was in Berlin, meaning that their trust fund evaporated with the massive inflation that followed WW I. After the war's end, they returned to Berlin, my father living with his mother in a modest apartment, while he studied aeronautical engineering earning the equivalent of a Phd.. After his graduation, he joined a company specializing in aviation and space research.

Unlike his 2 older brothers, he remained single throughout his thirties and early forties, still living at home with his mother.

When he was 16 years old, he and one of his brothers talked about the women that they would marry someday. "Hah!", his brother scoffed. "How do you know that the woman you're going to marry is even born yet?"

She wasn't. That conversation took place in the Spring of 1918, only months before her birth the following October.

In addition to playing piano, my father also loved to paint. One day he painted a beautiful pen and ink and watercolor rendering of a small vase with flowers. He signed and dated it:
June 5, 1918. Years later he would come to realize that he had painted it on the day that would later become his anniversary, in the same year that my mother was born, in the same village where they married.

That painting now hangs in my bedroom, and I consider it one of my great treasures.

***

My mother's beginnings were not as privileged as my father's, but they would have been, had not her father given all of his money to the German government to help with the WW I war effort. He was an artisan, the most acclaimed engraver in Berlin. He had done so well with his business that he was able to retire to the countryside in a lovely home. But two things disturbed his peace. The first is that his wife died, and the second is that relatives came to visit and refused to leave. So, he finally evicted them by selling his house, giving the money to the government, returning to central Berlin, and going back to work.

By now he had remarried, his bride being many years his junior. They had 2 children, the elder a boy, Wilhelm, and the younger, my mother, Johanna.

As food was rationed in post-WWI Germany, expectant mothers often did not get enough to eat, consequently babies were sometimes severely underweight, as was my mother, weighing only1 ½ lbs at birth . She was not expected to live, in fact my grandfather's friends placed wagers on whether or not she would indeed survive.

As a child, she was sickly, actually pronounced dead at one point, having the terrifying experience of hearing that death pronouncement and having a sheet pulled up over her head. That taught her to have expectations of a rather short life. No one was more surprised than her when her 75th birthday arrived, then her 80th, 85th, and 90th!

Whereas my father's upbringing had been genteel, and liberal, my mother's was austere and emotionally severe. Whereas he had been raised in a mansion in England, she grew up in a small apartment in inner-city Berlin, above her father's storefront for his engraving business. The family didn't even have their own bathroom. They shared one down the hall with several other families. My mother's bedroom was the living room which she shared with her mother at night, while her brother and father slept in the bedroom. She grew up with tales of her father's former wealth and unfulfilled promises of a return to such circumstances. She owned 2 dresses, one for school, and one for church.

Her parents, devout Christians, belonged to an extremely strict fundamental sect that worshipped a fierce and punishing God. As a result, my mother was raised with notions such as "Children should be seen and not heard" and "Duty first." Laughter was considered a sin. Indeed, it seemed that enjoyment of any sort was frowned upon.

When my mother was only 4 years old, her mother, Concordia, contracted tuberculosis, dooming her to months at a far-away sanitarium. She took her young daughter to Gross Monra, the German village where she herself had been born and raised, and left the sobbing Johanna in the care of Concordia's mother, Johanna's grandmother.

Her mother eventually did recover, with both her and her daughter returning to Berlin, but not before my mother had developed a strong love and connection to her relations in Gross Monra, and to the village itself.

Every summer of her youth, she journeyed from the city back to her beloved rural second home, delighting in the company of her relatives, and in the beauty of the surrounding countryside. It was during one of those visits that she met a boy named Hans.

The two immediately were smitten with each other, and began a long and secret correspondence, with a trusted cousin acting as courier for them until one day my mother's mother discovered their passion for each other.

Hans had managed to get a chocolate rabbit smuggled to my mother, who treasured it above all things. She hid it behind a cabinet, where it remained safe until one day my grandmother decided to do clean away the cobwebs behind the cabinet. She stumbled across not only the rabbit but also the relationship between Hans and my mother, and did her best to destroy both. She angrily broke the rabbit into bits, throwing it away while forebidding my mother to have any more contact with Hans.

Church and state were what mattered to my maternal grandparents, and that is what they wanted my mother to be concerned with as well. They gave her organ lessons not for her own enjoyment but in the hopes that she would play hymns at church someday. She did not like the hymns, and eventually quit the lessons.

My mother expressed her independence in other ways as well.
She had worn her hair in long braids for her entire life, largely because that is what her father expected her to do. Sometimes she wore two braids, sometimes just one going down her back, but it was always braids. When she was 16 years old, she wanted to be like other girls and sport a more modern hair style.

Without her father's permission, she went to the beauty parlor, having her hair cut and styled. She spent the entire next week facing her father, never once showing him her back, in the hopes that he wouldn't notice what she had done.

Soon my mother grew into a young woman, graduating with a degree from a secretarial school. She found employment with the German government, working there until she learned of an available position in Spain. Against her parent's wishes, she applied for and was granted the job.

At the age of 19, she moved to Madrid where she worked as a secretary, rooming with a co-worker, Lisa Lotte who became her best friend. The two young ladies both fell in love with Spain, and my mother was happier than she had ever been.

Unfortunately, news came that my mother's mother was ill with cancer. Communications were sporadic, as WW II was brewing, and it became increasingly difficult for my mother to be in touch with her family.

Reluctantly, after 2 years in Spain, she returned to her homeland because of her mother's declining health. Lisa Lotte, however, stayed behind in Spain, where she remained for the rest of her life, a loyal and devoted friend to my mother until she died over half a century later.

My grandmother passed on, but not before cursing my mother on her deathbed. "May your children make you as unhappy as you have made me!"

Meanwhile, Hans had grown up, attended college, and earned advanced degrees in botany. His aspiration was to become a botany professor at the University, a goal he would have achieved easily had it not been for the war. Instead, he was recruited into the army, becoming an officer.

He and my mother were still in love with each other and finally married, in spite of my grandfather's objections: Hans wasn't devoutly religious, and wartime was no time to be thinking of marriage. The two married anyway, spending a total of 6 weeks together in their year and a half marriage before Hans stepped on a landmine in Russia, blowing off his leg, and dying in the hospital shortly there after.

My mother had inherited a certain psychic ability from her mother. She recalled the day that her mother was standing in the kitchen, stirring a large kettle of soup, when she suddenly cried out, "My sister is dead!" Sure enough, her sister had passed on at that moment, hundreds of miles away.

When Hans died, my mother's clock stopped ticking. When it did, she knew he was dead. When she received the official word days later, the clock resumed ticking.

My mother was devastated and was granted a leave of absence from work to grieve, to recover from her emotional wound. She moved back in with her father, both of them now widowed.

She also spent many evenings in the company of a dear friend, Klimmer, a renowned psychiatrist who shared a deep platonic love with my mother. She did needlework, embroidering table cloths, table runners and more with beautiful, colorful floral designs, while he studied, and wrote his scholarly papers.

Eventually my mother returned to work, but as she did, something new and devastating threatened her world now: American air raids.

Planes bombarded Berlin day and night for 2 ½ years, buildings and lives exploding in flames. My mother recounted helping a friend retrieve pieces of her friends' parents' bodies from the bombed out ruins of their home. She eventually found a finger with a wedding ring on it.

My mother's father became another victim of the bombs, shrapnel ripping way the back of his skull. He died with my mother kneeling by his side, cradling his head.

More wartime horrors visited my mother before the war ended, but not before romance danced into her life again, in the fine form of my father. Both lived in the same apartment building, my father serving as the volunteer air raid warden. It was his duty to make sure that all of the tenants were safely in the bomb shelter during air raids. My mother was living alone with two small dogs who were not allowed in the shelter. She refused to leave these innocents in the apartment by themselves while bombs shrieked by. As a result my father was often found outside her apartment, exasperatedly pounding on her door, in a futile attempt to persuade her to retreat to the basement.

My parents fell in love with each other, a wartime romance that was to last a lifetime. By this time, my father was already employed as an aeronautical engineer, a fact that was rather dangerous for him, as Russian soldiers were streaming into Berlin. If they learned of what he did, chances were very good that he would be kidnapped and sent to Russia to work for the government, as happened to a colleague of his.

They also arrested anyone connected to the German military, or the local police. A neighbor in my mother's apartment building was desperate to hide the fact that her son was a policeman, and was quite relieved to dispose of his uniform by giving it to my mother who then passed it on to my father, successfully disguising the fact that he was a German rocket scientist.

As a result, he was rounded up with other German "authorities", and packed off to a Russian concentration camp, where he spent 6 months.
He spoke of it intermittently in years to come, how he spent the time musing about how to recreate technology should nothing mechanical survive. Where would one start? He came up with the answer.

He also spoke of life in the camp, showing us a small metal cup that he used 3 times a day at the camp to scoop out his allowed ration of "soup." He would form a small circle with his thumb and index finger, saying ,"If we were lucky, we would get this much meat once a week."

The most poignant story, though, occurred after the end of the war. The Russians released their captives, including my father, sending them back to Germany on a train. During the trip, my emaciated father and a friend were sitting across from a Russian soldier, who happened to be carrying a sack lunch. The soldier gazed at the 2 starved individuals in front of him, and silently handed them his lunch, not keeping any of it for himself.

That is the goodness of the human spirit. The war had not been able to destroy that.

My mother, meanwhile, had had her own struggles. Food was scarce in Berlin, my mother often telling me later that there was not one fat person in Germany after the war. When the Russians invaded Berlin, they brought with them their horses, which sometimes became injured. Russians shot and killed such a horse in the street near my mother's apartment, and she did something none of her neighbors had the nerve to do.

She slaughtered it.

As she cut open the horse, harvesting precious nourishment for herself and others, her neighbors lined up with bowls, begging for meat. She filled those bowls without complaint.

During the course of the war, my mother was bombed out of at least two apartments, pulling family heirlooms out of the flames. Sometimes people helped her. Sometimes they simply helped themselves. She lost many precious possessions by putting them in the hands of others who then disappeared into fiery streets of Berlin.

Something else unspeakable happened to her that was horrific enough for her to finally flee Berlin on foot, walking all the way from Berlin to Gross Monra, a distance of roughly 175 miles, depending on the route. It took her a week to make this journey, accompanied for part of it by a wandering band of Romanian Gypsies. By this time, she was both a widow and an orphan, with no idea if her only brother was still alive. She was all of 25 years old.

She finally reached Gross Monra, and her beloved extended family including aunts, uncles, and cousins, spending the remainder of the war with them.

Rumors of upcoming occupations shifted as rapidly as the winds themselves. The first was that Gross Monra was to become English and American territory. But then another alarming piece of information reached my mother's ears, news that Russia wanted that territory for itself, as it included rich farmland. Rumor was that Russian takeover was imminent.

My mother fled again, this time back to Berlin, 2 days before Gross Monra was swallowed up as Soviet territory. Berlin became a divided city, with West Berlin becoming an island of freedom in a sea of oppression known as East Germany.

Once more, USA and British planes flew over Berlin, this time not to destroy the city, but to help it survive. The silver vessels of flight brought precious cargoes of food and other necessary supplies to Berlin in a life-sustaining airlift that would last for years.

My parents were reunited with each other in Berlin, after my father's release from the concentration camp in Russia, and my mother's return from Gross Monra. They married each other a few months later on June 5, 1946, in a small country church with only 2 witnesses, the pastor and his wife. That much of their future my parents were able to determine for themselves; the rest, though, fell in the hands of the conquering nations. The USA promised my father work, but a contract did not come, and his funds were dwindling into nothing.

Finally it was his turn to flee, to the French camp, where he signed a 7-year contract with the French government. He was then taken to Paris where he began work. His former colleagues all stayed behind in Germany, eventually being granted work in the USA. They moved to America while their families languished behind. The US government took two years to grant visas to the scientists' wives and children. By contrast, French government was much more efficient, taking only 9 months to give my mother the papers she needed to be able to join her husband in Paris.

Poverty was my parents' constant companion during their first years in Paris. They spent their first 5 years living in a one-room apartment that was part of a large uninhabited mansion, with the abstentee owner renting only one room and a hall to my parents. The room had a pot-bellied stove that doubled as a heater and as a stove.

In addition to their austere living conditions, my parents also had to contend with the hatred of the French, understandable, but still unfortunate.

One of their friends, Marceline, had given a German soldier a cigarette. An angry mob seized her and shaved her head, publicly shaming her for consorting with the enemy.

Eventually Marceline confided in my mother that she preferred Germans to the French, feeling that the former were loyal and steadfast friends. Indeed she became a close friend of my mother's, the two of them spending many evenings together, quietly knitting, while my father either played piano or listened to his beloved recordings of classical music.

My parents actually made many friends in Paris, but most of them would wait until after dark to visit, so that others wouldn't know they had befriended Germans.
Hatred certainly leaves its mark. Someone spray-painted a derogatory name for Germans on the wall surrounding my parent's first home in Paris. Years later, when my mother and I visited there, the cuss word was still screaming from the wall.

That is what hatred does. It shouts. It accuses. It points the finger elsewhere and does not listen. It does not want to hear. It simply wants to be heard.

***

Having a child seemed to be an unattainable dream for my parents, my mother seeming unable to conceive, despite countless visits to fertility doctors. Finally my parents decided to adopt, and were already fully in the process of filling out the necessary forms, when my mother unexpectedly conceived a child of her own.

My parents were thrilled at first, but as the pregnancy advanced, my mother grew more and more ill. Finally, when she gave birth at the hospital, both she and my sister almost died. My sister was a breech baby, born with the umbilical cord around her neck, strangling her. This would become an uncanny metaphor for both my sister and myself.

Concordia emerged from the womb blue, and without breath. The doctors scrambled to save her life. They did.

My mother was bleeding badly from the birth. The French nurses scoffed at her, calling her a German pig, and throwing rubbing alcohol on her vaginal area.

She lost so much blood that the doctors decided to give her a transfusion, unknowingly giving her one tainted with hepatitis. . She immediately went into shock, so the doctors decided to put her on oxygen. In those days, that meant placing her in a large coffin-like box, with a plastic lid on it. The doctors didn't realize that the oxygen hose wasn't connected, and that my mother was suffocating. Thanks to my alarmed father, who saw my mother gasping for breath, they finally connected the hose to the box, giving her air, giving her life.

The birth was so traumatic for my parents that they decided not to have any more children. One such experience was more than enough, thank you very much. However, I had other ideas, and 14 months later, I showed up, an unexpected child.

As the pregnancy advanced, my mother regained her health which she had lost during her pregnancy with my sister. She viewed me as being responsible for her return to health, and to fulfillment.

Whereas her relationship with my sister was difficult, her relationship with me was easy, peaceful. She began to associate me with "good" and my sister with "bad," dividing the realms of possibilities between us. My sister was the "disobedient" child, the "difficult" one, and I was the "good" girl, the "obedient" child.

Added to this was the extreme disparity of our physical appearances:
My sister was skinny, gangly, with blonde hair and blue eyes. I was a chubby, fat-cheeked child with dark hair, large dark eyes, resembling my parents. My sister did not.

Which position was the worst to be in, to be the one favored or the one scorned? My sister truly suffered from hers during her childhood, but I suffered from mine as well, crippled by my mother's beliefs about me that I had unconsciously absorbed while growing up. Much of my adult life would be spent learning to discern for myself who and what I was.

***

The storm at sea has passed.

We arrive in the welcoming harbor of New York City, 1 ½ days late. Our ship, La Liberte, has always arrived on schedule. Not this time, as it sheepishly slinks into the harbor with chunks of its deck-side railing torn away by the angry hands of the storm that had been willing itself to be understood.

On some level, I do understand and I know that our journey across the ocean is not complete even after we are settled in our new home. It is merely the beginning of a long odyssey. Yes, the roughness of the waters we have just plodded through is the perfect metaphor for the roughness of the days that lay ahead of us.

But the calm that follows a storm also proclaims that days of peace are on the horizon. Even during the worst of the tempest, the sun has always been shining. Light is ever present even if we can't see it.

So, in spite of the struggles we face as a family, we also have joys and gifts. We have the gift of freedom, the gift of courage, perseverance, determination. We have the gift of each other, and we have the gift of music.

I possess a gift that I know nothing of yet, the ability to take whatever is in my life, be it fear, confusion or joy, and to transform it into a song of inspiration, such as the one at the beginning of this chapter. It is this gift that will not only give me hope and guidance in the years to come, but that will allow me to "Sing My Way Home", to sing my way back to the core of my being, where truths will give me strength and courage, with fears gradually evaporating into nothingness.

©2011, Evelyne B. Barton

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