Vati's Parents

This is the only picture of grandfather Franz Wawrzyniak and grandmother Wawrzyniak I've ever seen. Can you make out the back of the circus tent behind them?

The little I know about my Polish grandparents came from Mutti. Vati almost never talked about them, and seldom talked about his brothers and sister.

I know that my grandfather’s name was Franz, since my brother was named after him. Franz Wawrzyniak, or Francesco (which was his artist name) owned Circus Francesco, one of the largest circuses in Poland before the war. The family traveled along the Polish-Russian border a lot, and during one of their tours in Russia my father was born. So technically Vati was a Russian, not a Pole.

I learned about that when I got ready to get married to an U.S. soldier. My fiancé, Gary, had a top security clearance. When his superiors discovered that the father of his bride was born in Russia, they advised him to just live with me and marry me after he’d left the service.

For both of us this was out of the question, however, so Gary took a demotion in his clearance and a less sensitive job in the Army, and we got married. Eventually, they returned him to his highly classified job, since he was the best they had for it!

Back to my Polish grandparents. I’m not sure if it’s true, but Mutti told me that Vati had two older brothers who stayed in Russia when the circus returned to Poland before the war. In any case, the Nazi army invaded and conquered Poland. Circus Francesco kept traveling in Poland, but within a very short time the Nazis requisitioned the circus, made a Nazi party member the owner, and forced the Wawrzyniak family to work as hired artists in their own circus. The Nazi owner then gave the circus to a small German circus family as a wedding present, and now the family traveled in Germany. My grandfather died shortly after he was forced to work in his own circus in Germany. Mutti told me it was from grief to see his life’s work stolen away.

This happened before Vati and Mutti met. After the war, the Wawrzyniak family regained their circus, and, before I was born, they returned to their beloved Poland. Mutti refused to go to another country where a totalitarian government ruled, so Vati stayed with her in Germany. His mother must have died around that time, since when I was born she had already passed away.

My father’s two brothers and one sister stayed in Poland. We children met Uncle Henrik only once, and never met Aunt Sonja or Uncle Josef.

The only family I knew of lived in our little caravan home.

Next time, I’ll talk more about Mutti’s parents and why we never met them, either.

More About Mutti

 

 Mutti in 1998

Provo, Utah, 1998

My last three children, now teenagers, my husband, and I picked Mutti, now 78 years young, up from the airport. Her coal black hair was streaked with rusty red, the gray covered up. Her black eyes, now imbedded in wrinkles, were as alert and expressive as ever. She was excited to be in America. And for me, it was time to finally keep the promise I made to myself so long ago, to have her tell me her story.  A few days into the visit, I asked her if it would be okay if I interviewed her about her youth.

“There are still some things that are hard to talk about,” she said, “but it’s time to tell the story.

“I’m going to write a book about your life,” I told her.

Mutti laughed. “We’ll see. But even if you don’t, the story needs to be told.”

The next day, armed with three empty 90-minute tapes and a tape recorder, I entered the kitchen where Mother sat at the table drinking coffee.

“Are you ready?”

Mutti put down her coffee and nodded. I showed her how the tape recorder worked and started her talking with a question. “What was your father like?”

And she told me. The story spilled out and I taped for hours, filling all three tapes. I listened, entranced, to a life undermined by the Nazis, the life of a scared young woman in Hitler’s Germany, who wanted nothing but a little happiness in her life. This is a story that should never be forgotten.

As I listened, I started to understand why Mutti had been so distant when I was a child, but as a child, I saw the lack of love in our lives as normal. 

Later, I transcribed my mother’s story, and then used it as an outline for a novel. The book is finished, but not yet sold to a publisher. Hopefully, that will happen in the near future, too.

Read the first chapter here: Walk on a Wire.

Deciding my Future

 Thank you Alexandrea Zenne, for this beautiful picture of a tightrope walker! That's how I imagined a high wire walker to look when I was in fifth grade!

Germany, 1958 

My paper on Icarus and Daedalus had received an “A” in the fifth grade class I attended that week. In spite of my haphazard education and in my childish enthusiasm, I decided I would be a writer one day. And the first thing I would write about would be Mutti’s life. I ran home, full of excitement.

Mutti stood in the kitchen of our caravan home, stirring soup in a pot and listening to soft music coming from the radio in the living room.

Over the sound of the music I heard my siblings outside, helping Vati put up the merry-go-round. Good. I had Mutti to myself for a few minutes, and she seemed in a good mood. Now was the perfect time to do some research for my future writing career. 

I leaned against the counter opposite the stove. “Why did you join the circus Mutti? And how did you find it? What did you do in the circus?” I half expected her to brush me off, but she didn’t. 

A far-away look settled in her eyes, and she sighed. “That was a long time ago, child. I needed to get out of Berlin, and the circus seemed the perfect solution. It was a way out of all my trouble.” She stopped, turned the propane fire under the pot to low, and pulled a chair from the kitchen table.

I slipped into the converted bus seat Vati had screwed to the floor between the table and the wall. “Did you need to leave Berlin because of Hitler?”

“Yes. The Nazis were everywhere. I was lucky to find the circus.”

“Did you meet Vati there?” 

“Yes.” 

Enveloped by the enticing aroma of oxtail soup, we sat at the kitchen table. Mutti told me about how she met my father. I listened, as quiet as the circus audience when the tightrope walker performs. Mutti rarely talked about her life, but as long as I could remember, I knew she was half-Jewish and hid from Hitler during the war. I watched her, still so beautiful, talk about a past that was surely more bitter than sweet, and knew I would one day write the story of her life. 

And I have!

Tune in for more soon!

About Mutti

At 91, Mutti like to talk about Berlin and how she grew up. She loves talking about the Busch fashion store, where she apprenticed at fourteen, and where she stayed until she was eighteen. It seems those four years were the highlight of her life.

The original owners of Busch’s fashion store were Jews. When the Nazis deported them to a labor camp after Kristallnacht, (the Night of Broken Glass) the new Nazi owner fired her. Mutti loves talking about Busch’s, but she doesn’t talk too much about what happened to her after she had to leave there.

Once, when she was visiting me in Provo, where I live, we sat down, I asked her guiding questions, and she told me what happened. I taped our conversation, and using her unusual life as an outline, wrote a novel about her efforts to stay ahead of the Nazis during this terrifying time.

My memoir, Carnival Girl, will be published in a few months, and I hope Walk on a Wire, the novel based on Mutti’s life, will be next!

I’ll write more about Mutti tomorrow.

Mothers and Babies

Mutti gave birth to seven children. The first, a girl, was premature and died shortly after being born. This baby came into the world in the middle of the war, at a time when the Nazis had instituted the Final Solution, and Mutti's life was in constant danger. Too afraid to go to a hospital, my mother gave birth to my oldest sister in the circus caravan, with only my father's sister, a circus dancer, in attendance. I can't imagine the grief and sadness Mutti must have felt.

She became pregnant again a few months later. The war was over when Mutti was eight months along, and she got married right before the baby was born. But Mutti, like everybody in Germany at that time, had had no food and was not in best health. Carmen, too, was premature.

I'm telling the story of Mutti's first two babies at the beginning of my memoir, Carnival Girl. This memoir will be published in June, and I'll keep all of you informed, so you can read that amazing story.

Mutti eventually had three girls, a boy, a girl, and a boy.

I gave birth to seven children. The third, a girl, died at birth, from complication after a car accident. I always felt that I was missing a child after that, and that feeling still is with me today.

Eventually I had a boy, a girl, a boy, and three girls. Such are the parallels in mine and my mother's life!

On Mothers

Now that my childhood memoir is about to be published, my mother is a lot on my mind. My mother, who now is 91 years and is still strong and healthy, lives in Stuttgart, Germany. Mutti, as I still call her, was the most powerful influence in my young life. But even as a little girl, torn between loyalty to her and my own perception of what is truth, I couldn't always agree with her or do what she expected of me.

Mutti was born a few years before Hitler ascended to power, in the most important city of Europe, Berlin. Her father, who passed away when she was only five, was Jewish, and her mother a well-to-do Aryan. With her black eyes and dark hair, Mutti stood out from the other Germans around her. She struggled for self-validation all her life, but never quite was able to see herself as equal to everybody around her.

In order to come to grips with Mutti's disregard of affection and praise, I have written the story of her life as a novel. This novel, which I call Walk on a Wire, has received the distinguished Eaton award for best unpublished manuscript of the year, but has not been published yet. In this story I tell of my mother's struggle to stay alive in the Third Reich. She eventually hid in a circus, where she met my father, the rightful owner of the circus. After the war, Mutti and my father were married. They kept the circus for a few years more, but then had to abandon it in favor of a tiny carnival. With a merry-go-round and a shooting gallery, they traveled the small towns in central Germany, trying to keep their rapidly growing family fed.

And my memoir, Carnival Girl, is the story of that life, as seen through the eyes of one little girl.

I will post bits and pieces of that life, parts that didn't make it into the book and parts I had forgotten, on this blog. I'll also be talking about forgiveness and grace and the miracles that happen in spite of the mistakes we make.