Letters From the Lost (13 page)

For her, the Swiss mountains were a Sound-of-Music dream, as they had been for me. She loved to hear of my daily alpine walks, each culminating at a different local farm offering coffee and guest services along with unique cheeses made from the milk of their own cows or goats. She loved to hear how I would go out first thing each morning to buy fresh rolls at the local bakery and bring them back, still redolent of yeast and butter. Meanwhile, my friends would brew the coffee and set out the cups and plates on the deck where we would enjoy breakfast with a view of the Eiger and the Jungfrau.

Das arme
Hilderl (poor little Hilda)

Repeatedly I tried to talk about my time in Linz. My mother was not interested. Invariably, she either left the room or changed the subject.

However, she was happy to talk about growing up in Cham, a small town in Bavaria. After coming to live with me, my mother often regaled my friends with stories that I had heard before. Much to her delight, my friends listened to these stories with fresh ears. They smiled at her tales of getting dressed for Sunday afternoon walks along the river to meet and greet the passing parade of similarly attired townsfolk and their captive children. They showed interest in tales of her long hair and how hard it was to sit still while my grandmother combed it. They laughed at my grandfather’s outrage the day my Aunt Anny came home with bobbed hair.

My mother never talked about leaving Europe. Not to others and not to me. The closer the conversation got to 1939, the more visible her upset. I tried to push, but only so far. My questions brought about heart palpitations and a frightening level of agitation.

Whenever I asked her how she was doing with the letters, she would sigh and say,
“It’s all so sad.”
Several times, I offered to find someone else, perhaps someone at the university to finish the task. Each time, my mother declined. I believe she intended the transcription of the letters to be her last gift to me, as indeed it was.

————

IT WAS WHILE WE WERE
working on the letters that my mother first spoke of a phone call from Germany. She had heard from Tini. I remembered the name, if not the person. Tini had been our
Dienstmädel,
a word that it is impossible to translate into the English “maidservant” without its veneer of Victorian class distinction but would be closer to the North American “hired girl,” which does not have the same class connotations, as it was often the daughter of a neighbour. Tini was a young girl who helped my mother do things like hand wash the sheets and prepare all meals from scratch in a large household that included my grandparents and me.

“
Tini called last night
.”

From long experience, I had learned to moderate my reaction.

“
Really? She’s still alive?”

“
Hmm. I answered the phone and it was a strange man whose voice I didn’t recognize. He said that he was Tini’s grandson, and then he said ‘Just a minute’ and then she came on the line.”

“And?”

“She said that it was her grandson’s idea. He said that there can’t be that many people with the name Waldstein in Canada, and that he could find me through the phone company, and he did.”

My frustration level was climbing sharply and I longed to blurt out some of the questions that would have resulted in clamped lips and the faraway look that I knew all too well.

“So what did she say?”
I queried, keeping my voice deliberately neutral.

“She’s fine. She’s in good health. She lives near her children in Germany.”

“In Germany? Where in Germany?”

Already it was too much. The pursed lips warned me that I had been too eager.

“I don’t know. Some small town in Germany. I forget the name. It doesn’t matter.”

Immediately, my mother changed the subject. I knew the routine. Further questions would get me nowhere. Perhaps in a few weeks I could try again.

Finally, one day my mother said,
“Tini called again. We talked for a long time, until I said ‘Tini, this is costing you a fortune.’”

This time, I asked no questions and simply listened, my thoughts darting about amongst the tangled details that my mother chose to recount. As she wound down, I heard my mother say,
“She gave me her address so I could write to her. And her phone number.”

At that instant, the idea was born. I would visit Tini. I would ask her all the questions that had welled up inside me for so long. She would know. Perhaps she would tell me.

————

TIME PASSED
, but in the spring of 1998, I was able to plan my visit. I wrote to Tini and gave her the date of my arrival but no specific time. Indeed, I had no sense of distance from the airport or of how long it would take me to get to the little town of Ehningen that I had located in my old school atlas.

Frankfurt airport was large, bustling, and international. Rollaway suitcase in tow, I headed for the information desk where I was directed to the elevator, which emptied directly onto a platform where a train whisked me to the central station to make my next connection. One hour later, I sat back contentedly to watch the countryside fly past. Gardens and neatly cultivated fields alternated with picturesque red-roofed towns. Heavily wooded areas yielded to industrial buildings old and new. Town and country, past and present, all seamlessly interwoven.

Soon it was time to gather my belongings. Across the aisle, I noted a woman also preparing to dismount. I nodded and asked whether she knew Ehningen and could recommend a small hotel. She laughed at my request, and replied that above the butcher shop was the only public accommodation in town. Glancing at my lightweight summer jacket and then at the heavy rain that awaited beyond the open platform, she kindly offered me a ride. Gratefully I followed as she headed for a Mercedes parked in the nearby lot.

“
I work at the Mercedes plant,”
she explained as I hesitated to place my well-travelled bag on the leather seat.
“We get to purchase a car at a reduced price.
”

Moments later, the luxurious sedan pulled up under a sign that read
Fleischer-Metzger-Bierstube-Gäste.
As I struggled to lift out the suitcase, my nameless companion disappeared and returned with a heavy key. Up the stairs and down the hall she marched. Key in hand, she opened the door to a large room dominated by a huge bed buried under a white feather quilt.
“You will be very comfortable here, ”
she assured me as she opened a window overlooking the garden.

Though I scarcely knew where to begin, I felt compelled to respond to
her kindness. Haltingly I explained how I had come to be so far from the standard tourist haunts.

“
I am from Canada and I am looking for a woman whom I do not know but who knows me. Or rather, a woman who knew me. It was long time ago, when I was small. Sixty years ago. Before the war.”

Clearly intrigued, my new acquaintance looked at the address I had pulled out.

“Königsbergerstrasse. Not far at all. Please, let me drive you there. I must be sure that you find this woman
.”

She remained in the car as I walked up the few steps of the small apartment block. Her name was listed by the intercom. Frau Christine Fuchs. I pushed the buzzer, listened to the electric crackle and then a cautious
“Ja?”

“Tini, es ist die Helen. Ich bin hier.”

“Moment bitte.”

Moments later, the door opened and strong arms flung themselves about me. German words burned into my memory.

“Helly! What have I done to deserve this day? Dear God in Heaven! I thank You, dear Father, for allowing me to live so long! I thank You for allowing me to see my Helly-girl again.”

Now we wept, both of us, as Tini repeated her words and brought balm to my heart.

“Sixty years ago, they tore you from my arms. Never did I think to see you again. God’s Grace has brought you back to me.”

My Mercedes woman, whose name I never learned, walked quietly to where we stood. Beaming, she shook hands with Frau Fuchs, but declined the opportunity to linger. She spoke with tact and understanding:
“These moments are for you alone. I leave you to enjoy this special reunion.”

I followed Tini up the stairs to the fourth floor, marvelling at the erect back and powerful legs of this woman in her eighties. Although she barely came up to my shoulder, she gave the impression of strength. She was well built. Not fat, but buxom, her breasts proudly pointing the way. A sheaf of naturally grey hair enveloped a wrinkled face that to me was beautiful.

Words tumbled out of us. She spoke, I spoke, we both spoke, sometimes at once. A thousand questions, each answer leading in turn to fresh questions.
“Tell me about… how come… why… when… where… what did you do…?”
My questions continued, not just for hours, but for days. We took time out for other things without interrupting the long conversations about a past that I could not remember, yet that seemed etched into my being.

Helen in the arms of Tini, 1937

Tini confided that immediately after our departure, she had approached her boyfriend and announced that she wanted to be married. She had told him that her arms felt unbearably empty. Despite the financial and political uncertainties that swirled about them, he agreed to a hasty wedding. Their son and their daughter Erni were born shortly thereafter.

“It was as if I had to replace the child that had been stolen from my arms, ”
Tini said.
“When they took you away, they tore out a piece of my heart.”

The sound of Tini’s voice awoke wordless memories. Her accent itself is a strange clone of my own way of speaking. People used to comment that my accent was different from that of my parents who spoke
Hochdeutsch,
the cultivated German considered to be “classic.” It was strange that I spoke more of a dialect than my own family. Now I understood. My first intense exposure to language was through Tini who had spent her days keeping an eye on me as she prepared meals and did all the housework in a pre-electric era.

Tini spoke
“Böhmisch,”
the local dialect of the former kingdom of Bohemia that had become the cornerstone of Czechoslovakia. She was born not far from Strobnitz, the small village near the Austrian border where my father’s parents had long owned the town’s only store.

Tini told me that she was sure we left Strobnitz in September of 1938 and that we had gone to Prague. I replied that this was impossible because we did not come to Canada until the spring of 1939. Besides, my mother had repeatedly regretted that she had never been to Prague. Tini was unshakable in her version of the story:

It was right after Hitler made his speech about the Sudeten -land. Usually your parents didn’t need me in the evening, but that night they asked me to stay with you because they wanted to hear the speech. The whole family gathered around the radio. There had already been rumours about a place called Dachau and I heard them say that some Jews had just disappeared overnight. You left for Prague the next day, and I helped your grandmother close up the house in Strobnitz. Your grandparents moved to Budweis two or three days after you left, and they gave me a key to the house in Strobnitz. This is not a trust I could forget.

Only when Tini produced a postcard in my mother’s handwriting mailed from Prague in November 1938 did I believe her. My mother had
sent it to the address of Tini’s parents. Tini had kept that postcard through the war and all its attendant dispersals.

My visit was an emotional time for Tini as well as for me. In Germany, the topic of the war had been off-limits both for the millions who had voted for and supported Hitler and for those who were simply victims of the times. Tini described a day when she had been scheduled to take the train on an urgent errand. Some inexplicable premonition had kept her from doing so. At the very moment she would have been there, the railway station had received a direct hit from a bomb and many people had been killed or wounded.

Repeatedly, we returned to the subject of the war, each time from a different angle. There was much that Tini had not told her own children, preferring to put the war years behind her. Tini’s daughter Erni had come to meet me the first evening of my arrival. We bonded immediately.