The Rose Garden, Chapter 5 – World War II

Displaced Persons Camp (1945), Hamburg, Germany, Source/Author Imperial War Museum for UK Govt., (PD)

WARNING:  Graphic Images

“The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen. 6: 11).

It is difficult to reconstruct the chronology of World War II from my parents’ notebooks.  I can only cobble together bits and pieces.  The times were chaotic.  Territory repeatedly changed hands.  My mother’s narrative is particularly fragmented.

My father saw farms abandoned or destroyed by artillery.  Bridges that had stood for generations were demolished.

Food grew scarce.  Livestock were confiscated without pay by passing troops or slaughtered  outright.  My father took a beloved horse up into the hills, in the hope of finding him again someday.

Two of my father’s brothers and an uncle were forcibly conscripted.  A second uncle was arrested for transporting contraband.

One of the conscripted brothers was finally reunited with the rest of the family in Germany in 1949, having been captured on the Eastern Front and imprisoned by the Russians all that time.  He was a shadow of his former self.

My father, also, witnessed Jews being deported to concentration camps by the Nazis.  He wrote in his notebook:

“The curse was on.  We saw the Jews from Yugoslavia by the thousand[s] in barbed wire wagons, their tongues on the windows and yelling, ‘Water, water!  Please!’  They threw beautiful money, the Yugoslavian dinars, and we picked it up.  This is [the ugliness of] war.  We were children and did not know any better…

[There were] also, German army trains by the dozens going to Yugoslavia fighting partisans.  On their way, [the soldiers] were shining sitting on their tanks, autos, trucks, etc.  On their way home, [they were] filthy, ragged, and flea [bitten].”

My mother was eleven years old when in 1944 the Nazis occupied Hungary.  The war abruptly ended her schooling.

My mother had a personal connection to the Jewish deportation.  The kindhearted woman who ran the local grocery — a woman who had let my mother stand on the counter, when she was a toddler; the very woman who had inspired my mother to dream of working in a food store — was Jewish.

That woman came under cover of darkness to the house one night, and begged for help.  All my grandmother could do was give her some food, and a little money.  The woman was never heard from again.

My mother and her parents, themselves, had to flee to the nearby woods for safety as first Nazi forces, then Russian forces swept through their area.  For a brief time, they went into service in a neighboring village.  But they were never permitted to reclaim their property, so were left homeless.

Expulsion

When Russian forces came through, one of my grandfather’s sisters falsely accused my grandmother of collaborating with the Nazis.  This was the result of a long-simmering grudge related to my great-grandfather.  Promising the village a financial windfall, he had decades earlier left for America with the village’s funds and never made restitution.

It was in this connection, as I understand matters, that my grandmother’s retention of the family’s Hungarian passports saved them.

As Germany’s defeat neared, the USSR urged a plan to evacuate ethnic Germans from Eastern European countries, as an excuse for land redistribution [1A].   In Hungary, many refused to leave the only home they had ever known.

A series of expulsions began in 1946.  As a result, 170,000 German Hungarians were ultimately transported to the American Zone in West Germany; 50,000 to the Soviet Zone in East Germany; and 15,000 to Austria [1B].

Both my parents experienced being transported by cattle car.  The trauma affected my mother so deeply she was unable to speak for a full year afterwards.

A Feather Bed

At some point, my grandfather illegally crossed the frontier making his way to the Western sector.  Word eventually came back that he had arrived safely.  There remained the matter of payment to the guide for my mother and grandmother’s clandestine passage.

Paper money had become worthless and was not within the family’s means, in any case.  My grandmother, however, had retained a fine feather bed.  It was this she traded for my mother’s freedom and her own — shipping the feathers to the guide incrementally, over a period of months.

Ultimately, a small group fled under cover of darkness, across fields, through ditches, and beneath barbed wire fences to reunite with my grandfather.  My mother could still recall that a young boy in the group lost a shoe along the way, but was forced by his own desperate mother to hurry on despite his tears.

Emigration and a Wedding

In the end, the family reached one of several Allied displaced persons camps.  They spent three years in camp.  My grandmother worked as camp cook, managing to secure a few extra scraps of food for the family that would otherwise have been discarded.  My grandfather hired out as day labor.

It was in those difficult circumstances that my mother met my father (also, a refugee and the mainstay of his own widowed mother and younger siblings).

My mother and her parents obtained permission to emigrate to the states years before my father did.  Then just seventeen, Ma left for America promising my father she would return.

Within days of their arrival in the States, the family was employed — my mother in a handbag factory.  The couple wrote one another faithfully during the intervening two years, my mother sending the bulk of her wages to my father, so that he could obtain linens, silverware, and other household items for them.

My mother learned English only incidentally, after emigrating to this country — in the end fashioning a language of her own.  English, German, and occasional Hungarian phrases were commingled, often in the same sentence.  Any confusion was overcome with a smile.

When she  returned to Europe for the wedding my mother learned my father had turned most of her hard-earned wages over to his own mother.  Ma proceeded with the wedding, regardless.

I was conceived two weeks later.

…

As an adult, I took my mother to see the play Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein.  The musical (which we had been to years earlier with my father) takes place in a Russian village, on the eve of a pogram.

Against the backdrop of changing times, an impoverished Jewish peasant worries over the welfare of his daughters.  As the play ends, the villagers are deported, the hopeful implication being that some will make their way to America.

When the final curtain came down, the audience gave the play a standing ovation.  In the darkened theater, applause all around us, I held my mother as she wept.

 —

[1A and 1B]  Wikipedia, “Germans of Hungary”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_of_Hungary.

Copyright © 2008 – Present Anna Waldherr.  All rights reserved.
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