From East To West (a re-share)

the decision that is part of how I came to be

The longer I have lived in America, the more connected I feel to my European roots. Maybe this happens when your own kids get older, or it is because I am getting older. Or, maybe, it is because my parents’ generation is slowly passing away, one after another. My father was one of seven kids and only three (including him) are now still alive. The most recent passing of my aunt Ruth whom I personally felt closest to my whole life, and who is several years younger than my dad, has made me reflect on the past even more.

And then I find myself wanting to talk to my grandmother. She passed away when I was a kid, but my memories of her are strong. I want to hear the stories, everything she experienced during the war and afterwards. I want to hear more about how she grew up. I want to write it all down. I want to remember and never forget. I want my kids to know who she was.

I never met my grandfather. He passed away when my father was in his early twenties from complications after a surgery.

There are so many stories. Stories that should be told. Stories that I love to read when others tell them or have written them down.

I have shared the post you are about to read before, but I feel like I want to share it again. It is in my archives and some of you have read, but many of you haven’t. I have changed the images from the original post. This is an ongoing project for me. Creating images and researching stories. I hope to share more. It’s all inside of me and somehow it wants to come out. Someday it will come out. This story is only a small part of it, but it is a very important part, because if the event I describe below would not have happened, I would have never been born.

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My grandmother with her oldest daughter and superimposed with my own image and old German writing.

After dinner we settled down in the living room. The early Fall German weather was mild and sunny, but the days were getting shorter, and it was slowly getting dark. My father turned on some lamps that created a warm, inviting, and calming light. He walked out of the room only to come back after a couple of minutes with a glass of wine for me and him. I pulled the soft, cream-colored wool blanket towards me and wrapped it around my upper body. It was warm, cozy, and quiet. It was always very quiet. 

It seems that when people get older, they love their routine. My parents go through their days which are structured by three meals a day, a nap after lunch, a walk or bike ride in the afternoon, and the evening news on the TV. Mixed in re the occasional errands, the daily chores, and sometimes visits by friends. 

This was the first time in a very long time that I had come to visit my parents for a week by myself. I had been a bit nervous about being here - without my family, back in a city I never loved, packed with memories I partially wanted to forget, and into the role of the insecure child I once was. So I thought. But the visit had been going well without any tension or tough conversations. I was trying to simply enjoy being with them and enjoy the rare occasion to rest and converse without any distractions or obligations while my husband and two sons were thousands of miles away, across the big ocean, on another continent, in a different time zone. 

It was the first time since before the pandemic that I had last seen them, and many more years since I had last visited them in Germany. They were getting to an age that made me think a lot about how many more opportunities there would be for me to be here, and how many more times I could see them while they were still relatively healthy and strong.

While taking my second sip of wine, my father asked:” What do you want to know?” 

I quickly answered: “I want to know everything - all the crazy stories that happened during the War and after the War. I would love to hear the story of your escape from East to West again. I mean, imagine if that hadn’t happened, I would not be here right now. I would have never been born.”

The whole family (my aunt who passed away recently is the most visible in the middle left, my father is on the right.)

I happen to have a pretty old dad. He was born in the early 1930s, and by the time I came along, the youngest of three siblings, he was already in his forties. While I was growing up, it was not very common to have a father who had memories of World War II and living through the early post-war years; most of my friends' parents were born after the war. As a child I knew very little about that time in his life. I had heard some stories from my grandmother, but the full story of everything my father went through I didn’t get to hear until I was already an adult, and I would take any opportunity and hear him tell me more stories. So I asked him. 

While we were all getting comfortable, my father began to tell me once again the story of the escape. It’s a story of how a family all made it out of the Soviet-occupied East Germany and came to the West to start a new life, a story that I will pass on to my children in hopes that they will pass it on to theirs. I never want to forget.

To give you a brief summary of the historic context, after WWII ended, Germany was divided into different zones, occupied by the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and eventually France. Berlin was right in the middle of the Eastern zone, thus geographically being part of the Soviet occupation; however, since it had been the capital, the Allied powers agreed to split Berlin into sectors, with the Eastern part of the city going to the Soviets and the Western part to the United States.

My grandparents owned a farm about an hour’s drive northeast from Berlin, in a small village in what became East Germany. Life had been difficult during the War (stories for another time) and the end of the War brought little relief. Throughout the decade following the occupation, many people had successfully attempted to emigrate from East Germany to West Germany and from East Berlin to West Berlin. Before the wall was built, residents of Berlin on both sides were able to move around the different parts fairly easily, so it was still possible for people to get to the West without too much risk. However, because of the continuous and steady stream of people moving from the East to the West, the East German government decided to close the border and to build the famous Berlin Wall so that those in the East would have to remain there.

During World War II, my grandfather had been in Russian captivity for a while and also had to live in hiding from the Russian soldiers for many years. All this had affected his physical and mental health, and the work of caring for the farm and the family increasingly became the responsibility of his growing children. The older children in particular came to an awareness of what was happening to their country and knew of the imminent threat of being closed off from the rest of Germany and the Western world.

My father, the third oldest child and the oldest male, came to realize that life in the East would only get harder and that any opportunities to leave would soon be over. He tried to tell my grandfather that it was time to leave the farm and get to the West before it was too late, but my grandfather refused to listen. Eventually my father declared, “We are leaving, and we are going to the West. I am planning everything and we are all going.” My grandfather relented. 

He came up with the plan to take a train to Berlin and get off at a specific train station in the West. Such travel was getting riskier every day, and my father knew it would be impossible as a large family traveling together with luggage. So he made the decision that they would leave everything behind, and that each person in the family could only bring one small bag with absolute necessities. At the established time and date, everyone would get on the same train, but separately, and they would pretend to be strangers - no talking, no interacting. Nothing that could attract attention or suspicion that there was a bigger plan beyond a short, ordinary train ride.

As they said goodbye to each other, my father told his family the final part of the plan: ”When the train arrives in the West, we will meet again at the station. But If one of us is missing, we will all go back.”

There have been many times when I tried to imagine how they must have felt on that day, riding that train - the anxiety about what might happen, the looming question of whether or not they would all make it, and the sadness of leaving everything behind: the home, the heirlooms, the cows, sheep, and chickens, and the beloved family dog. 

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Whenever my father talks about the war, I see images in my head, not still images but entire movie scenes, because that‘s what I think when I listen to him: It‘s like one of the scenes from all the movies I watched about WWII. 

Except, these stories were real life for him. This story happened to the person who raised me. This story is part of my personal story, it‘s a part of how I came to be. 

When my father tells me these stories, it‘s as if he opens a window. With each story, with each detail within a story, the window opens up a little more. By looking through, I get glimpses from the past that have become like puzzle pieces to me. Puzzle pieces that I have been slowly putting together and have helped me gain a deeper understanding of who my father was and is and a deeper understanding who I was and have become. 

Isn’t that what stories are all about? To help us learn about the world and about who we are in this world? 

That’s why stories have been told for centuries. That’s why stories get passed down from one generation to the next. That’s why we need all the stories we can get.

I have wanted to share these stories for a while. I started to process and tell them visually through photography projects, one in particular called I introduced you to in a previous post (The images I shared here are part of it). But I have felt for a long time that I need to also retell these stories in writing. Maybe this is the beginning. Maybe this is part one of many. We will see how it all unfolds. 

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