Finding Michael - 5

 Michael and Vati as I remembered them

Christmas was getting closer. I thought maybe I should send Michael a package, even if he didn’t want to see me, or my husband and I could go see him, just get there unannounced.

But I reconsidered and tried calling one more time. At the very least, his caseworker could let me know what Michael needed or wanted and I would send him a Christmas present. This time, a different, friendlier, man talked to me.

“Why do you want to see Michael?” he asked, and I explained all over again that I was his sister, come from America, and hadn’t seen him for almost forty years. “If he doesn’t want to see me, I’ll understand,” I said. “But maybe you could tell me what he would like to have for Christmas, and I could send him a package.”

“Why don’t you give me your number,” the man said. “I’ll forward it to Michael, and if he wants to talk to you, I’ll make sure he will. If he doesn’t, I’ll call you within the next two hours or so.”

Not holding a lot of hope, I gave him my phone number, and the waiting started again.

When the phone rang two hours later, I knew it would be Michael. I had no doubt. I answered, and the same friendly voice said, “Hold on a minute, Mrs. Herbert. Your brother wants to talk to you.”

Michael sounded nervous and excited. When I asked him if I could visit him, and we could go out to have some coffee and cake, he told me he didn’t drink any alcohol or coffee, and needed to watch what he eats. “But you can come and visit me in my home, and I’ll have some Christmas cake for you. For an hour or so,” he added, and I knew he was wondering how I would treat him.

We made out a time the next Sunday, and hung up. All that week, I worried about what to talk to Michael about. I decided not to ask him anything about his past. That was for him to bring up. Finally I selected some photos of my children, and some old photos of Michael, and decided to tell him all about the States.

World War II, Carnival Life, and Family Relationships in Carnival Girl

Here is an Article about Carnival Girl, published in Meridian Magazine. The writer, Jennie Hansen, does a wonderful job explaining the complexities of the book. Enjoy this really great review!

Meridian Magazine: World War II, Carnival Life, and Family Relationships in Carnival Girl

The Scooter 2nd Part

Vati was reaching behind the picture with one hand while holding it in place against the carousel with the other.

In my excitement about maybe getting a new scooter for me and my siblings, I didn’t notice his irritated cussing at the screw. “Vati,” I called, “can we get a scooter for ten carousel tickets?”

Vati didn’t even turn to look at me. “No. Leave me alone. Now I dropped that &*&% screw.”

I stepped closer. If he’d just listen he would understand that this was important.

Before I could open my mouth again, he said, “Get out of here, now.”

I knew that tone of voice. If I’d persist now, he would push me, or worse, hit me, so I trudged back to the girls and Josefa, who was bent, inspecting the younger girl’s scooter.

I walked up to the older girl who looked at me expectantly. “My Vati won’t give me any tickets.”

“I guess I’d be happy with seven tickets, too,” she said.

“I can’t talk to him right now. He’s mad. Could you come back tomorrow?”

Josefa straightened and almost dropped the scooter. “Yes. Tomorrow. We’ll get you the tickets then.”

“And bring the scooter. Maybe if he sees it, he’ll give us the tickets.”

“Sounds good. I’ll bring it later.”

“Please?” Josefa chimed in. She looked at the girl with her bright, brown eyes and made her really cute face.

The big girl smiled at her.

The littler girl reached out her scooter. “Here. You can take a ride.”

I wandered off. Too bad I couldn’t make a cute face like Josefa could.

Mutti called me into the caravan home and gave me the new potato peeler we’d bought a little while before. “Here. Peel me six potatoes. It should go easy with this.”

Listlessly, I hacked at the potatoes, all the while thinking about that scooter. How we could whiz through each new town with that! All the other kids would be so jealous.

Josefa drifted in, and soon Mutti called out the caravan door, “Vati, Franz, essen kommen, come and eat!”

We finished our supper. When Vati was finished, he pushed away his plate and leaned back.

He grinned at me and Carmen and patted Franz on his head. “I got something for you children.”

Franz looked up. “What is it?”

The way I knew Vati, it probably was something that required us to help Mutti in the caravan home. But his next words confused me.

Vati focused on me. “It will keep you out from under your mother’s feet, I hope. Come on out and see.”

I rose and followed after Franz and Josefa.

Outside, leaning against the caravan steps, stood a brown scooter with red handlebars.

“Oh,” Josefa said, for once speechless.

Franz touched the handlebars. “Can I learn how to ride it, too?”

Vati patted his back. “Sure you can. But first, let your sisters try it out.” He turned to me. “Is that what you wanted earlier when you bothered me?”

I nodded. “Thank you so much,” I managed to say.

Carmen added, “We’ll take good care of it. I promise.”

And that was how we got our scooter. When we were traveling, it rode in the pack trailer, where Vati stored the carousel and the other attractions.

Franz soon learned to ride it too, and not long after, raced it down a steep declining street. He couldn’t brake in time and hit the wall at the end of the street. He had to have six stitches in his forehead.

Learning English

Art Towne with Baby Daniel

Art Towne was a tall, spare, quiet man. But it was easy to be around him. The quiet times with him were comfortable, and when he talked to me, he spoke clearly and slowly. After Gary left, I cleaned up the kitchen and Art made himself comfortable in the living room. I joined him there and together we watched the news on TV. Or at least, I tried to watch!

I thought I spoke English pretty well, but now I hardly understood anything the newscaster said. He spoke way too quickly, and the kind of news he brought was strange. I didn’t know anything about this country and especially not about this part of Colorado.

So I made it my goal to learn English as quickly as I could. And I was lucky. The next day, Art went to work and I was alone in the house. I surfed the TV channels when I came upon something familiar. Star Trek! I had watched that in Germany almost every week, and I could remember the story lines. So every afternoon at 2:00 PM I turned on the TV and watched Star Trek. I loved listening to Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk in English, and I could tell my understanding of spoken English was quickly improving. However, it still took me almost the whole time my husband was away to learn to understand television news.

Culture Shock -- On the Way to Meeting Verna Towne

On my first day in the United States, staying at Grandpa Art and Grandma Verna Towne’s home, I followed my husband outside to see Verna in the hospital. I stepped from the house into a snow-covered, much too large yard. I blinked into the bright January sunshine and stopped short.

“The sun is shining on the snow,” I said. “I need some sunglasses.”

Gary laughed. “We get sunshine a lot. Let’s go to the drugstore first and get you some glasses.”

“The drugstore? Isn’t that the store where you get medicine? Can you buy glasses there too?”

“Yes. It’s not like in Germany. You can buy all kinds of things there.”

He helped me into his father’s car. The older Mr. Towne had already gone to work at Mesa Verde, where he was the maintenance foreman. I assumed he had taken the train or a bus, until Gary said, “Dad took the truck so you won’t have to struggle to get in, with your belly.”

“I suppose there’s no bus or train that could take him to work?”

“There isn’t. I’ll show you where he works on the way back from the hospital. But first let’s go see Mom. The doctor said she could go home in a few days, but she can’t wait to meet you.”

Gary pulled onto the main street of the small town his family lived in.

I stared out the window and forgot to breathe.

The buildings along the road all were low, two stories at the most, and there was so much unused space between them. I felt like we were swimming through emptiness.

 Mancos, Colorado, still looks like this.

  We left town and drove on to Cortez, but it didn’t get any better. Trees and what seemed unused fields lined the road, all covered with the brilliant snow, made even more bright by the relentless sun in a truly blue, cloudless sky. Even the sky looked different here, not the washed out, smoggy blue I was used to. I felt like I had been transported to Mars, or some other, unknown planet. 

Tomorrow, I'll talk about meeting Verna Towne for the first time.

Elfriede Markus

Elfriede Edel as a Young Widow

 Mutti’s mother was a widow when Mutti was four years old. She was young and pretty, and wanted to have a man in her life. She went out dancing and having fun while leaving the little girl all alone at home. Eventually she married again, and her name changed from Elfriede Edel to Elfriede Markus.

Elfriede was very young when Mutti was born. She was far from her family and didn’t really know how to raise a child. In many ways, Mutti was emotionally and physically abused. She told me a few years ago that parents of that time hit their children and rarely praised them as a matter of course.

 My wedding in 1973. Elfried and Max are in the front, with my baby brother Michael between them. I'm right behind Max, and my father is next to me with my sister Josefa. Mutti is on the right behind Elfriede, with my husband Gary next to her.

And that’s the reason why I never met my grandmother Elfriede until my wedding at 23. When Mutti was still small, she swore she’d never hit her children. When the war was finally over, Mutti was six months pregnant, so she and Vati got married as soon as they could, with no one of Mutti’s family in attendance.

A year or so later, before traveling to Berlin became very difficult, Mutti and Vati visited Max and Elfriede Markus in Berlin. Then they took their circus back to Hessen, the heartland of Germany. Mutti had no contact with her mother. They never wrote each other. Telephoning was out of the question because of our constant travels. My grandmother must have tried to visit when I was small, but I don’t remember that. When we were older, Mutti told us children that she had no wish to have her mother close to her children, because she was afraid Elfriede would hit us. She didn’t want that, and she didn’t want to deal with her mother.

However, by the time I was 23, they had contacted each other again, and my grandmother was invited, and came, to my wedding. I never met her again after that.

But even though I grew up without grandparents, I hope I have become a pretty good grandmother! I enjoy being a grandmother very much!

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.

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.

Bath Time!

 This room in a bathhouse is a little older, but it's very similar to the ones I used to take baths in when I was a girl.

 Vati moved the caravan to the end of the commons, hooked up the stairs, and we children exploded from our tiny home, exploring our new surroundings. Geese waddled on the grassy meadow, and down a small incline we found a pond.

“Children, come eat,” I heard Mutti call from the direction of our caravan.

My stomach was grumbling. I skirted around a goose and followed my sisters home.

We crowded each other at the kitchen table. Mutti ladled out potatoes and peas and carrots for everyone. Finally she sat down with a sigh. She took a few bites.

Franz pokes Josefa, who squealed.

Mutti said, “Quit making all that noise. And look at you! You children aren’t just noisy, you are filthy.” She turned to Vati. “These children need a bath. We’re close to Giessen, why don’t we all go take a bath tomorrow?”

Vati put down his fork. “I do have some time. Okay, we’ll go first thing in the morning.”

Cool! I remembered the last time I took a bath. That must have been at the beginning of the traveling season. I couldn’t wait. It would be fun.

After breakfast the next morning I had forgotten all about bathing. I swallowed my breakfast roll and drank the rest of my milk in the cup, ready to go outside where the sun was shining.

“Just a minute,” Mutti called after me. “Carmen, Sonja, Josefa, stay here. You girls are old enough to get your own stuff for the bath. I don’t have to do everything for you.”

“What do we need to take?” Josefa asked.

Carmen, as the oldest, knew. “New underwear and socks, dummy,” she said.

Josefa and I took off for the bedroom, where our clothes were stashed in shallow drawers under the bed.

“And don’t forget a new dress,” Mutti called after us.

Carmen showed us how to wrap everything into the dress, and we were ready. Mutti had hers, Vati’s, Franz’s and the baby’s stuff in her large shopping bag.

Vati must have been glad to go to the bathhouse, too, since he wasn’t grumbling and had the car already started.

Franz and we three big girls squeezed into the back of the VW. Mutti stashed the clothes under the hood of the car and sat next to Vati, Eva in her lap.

At the bathhouse, Vati paid for all of us. We children cost 25 pfennig each, and Mutti and Vati cost 50 each, which was half a Deutsche Mark, or half of 25 US cents.

The attendant, and rotund woman with gray hair, handed me and my sisters each a bar of soap and a towel and reminded us not to take too long. I balanced the towel and soap on top of my dress, the same way Carmen and Josefa did.

Vati took Franz’s towel, took Franz by the hand, and they left for the men’s section.

Like little ducklings, we trailed after Mutti. She showed us three adjacent cabins, one for each girl, and told us she’d be in the one next to Josefa with Eva.

Mutti told me and Josefa to watch Eva in the hall while she went into Carmen’s cabin with her and started the bathwater. She did the same for me and Josefa, then disappeared into her cabin with the baby.

I found myself in a tiny cabin, just large enough for a bathtub and a wooden seat on the opposite wall. I could lock the door! That was fun. We had no locking door in the caravan. After I locked and unlocked it a few times I deposited my clothes and the towel on the bench and put the soap into the soap holder by the bathtub. By the time I had my clothes off, the tub was more than half full. I turned off the faucets and sank into the wonderful warm water. How nice it would be to have warm or hot water running out of the walls in the caravan. But that wasn’t possible; even I knew that.

In the tub I drew soap letters onto my arms and legs, splashed with my hands and feet and turned over and over like an otter I had seen in a book once. I felt like singing but knew it was verboten, forbidden. Also, Mutti didn’t like it when any one sang, so I didn’t.

Eventually I remembered to wash my always cropped hair. I dove under the water to rinse off the soap. That was so much fun. When I finally got out. I thought that I still had soap in my hair, so I carefully started the water again, the way Mutti had shown me, first the hot and then a little of the cold until it felt right. I held my head under the faucet and let the water run through my hair and down my neck.

Someone knocked on the door. I turned off the water. “Hurry up,” Carmen said, loudly, but not too loud so as not to bother other bathers. “Mutti is already out.”

I held my head against the door and said, “I’m already done. I just have to dress.” Hopefully, I wouldn’t be the last one to be out.

With the towel, I rubbed my hair and my body dry and slipped into my clean clothes. The old ones I rolled into the old dress and unlocked the door. My sisters and Mutti sat in the waiting room at the end of the hallway. My heart sank. Mutti would be mad that I was the last one out. But then I realized Vati and Franz weren’t there yet. Good. She wouldn’t single me out then.

I ran into the waiting room and plopped onto the bench next to a scrubbed and damp Josefa. From the men’s section, Vati came out, skin red and hair wet. Franz trailed after him, also with wet hair.

That night in our caravan, I went to sleep with the sweet smell of soap and lavender in my nose.

Water

 A typical small town well in Germany. I got water from many wells like that.

Oh, how I hated it when Mutti said, “Sonja, take the canister and get some water!”

She might have run out cooking or mopping the kitchen floor (which was almost impossible to keep clean with seven people coming and going all the time.)

I’d grab the hated canister, an old U.S. army metal contraption Vati had exchanged from an American soldier for some free circus tickets. He got it when I was a baby; before he lost the circus. It had a small opening on the top with a chained-on screw-in lid, and it was heavy even without water. But, living in a caravan, it was an important part of our lives. We had no running water, and at that time, we also had no way to store a large amount of water. So, every day or two, one of us children had to get water.

If we were in a small town, I’d go to the town’s well, located near the center of the town. It had a trough connected to the pump, which was always full of water, ready for the cows and other livestock to come home in the evenings and take a drink before going on to their barns. I’d put the canister onto the grate under the pump, grab the long handle and pump it up and down for the water to come up. Until I was about twelve, I could not carry the canister when it was completely full. It held about ten gallons. I filled it as full as I could carry and dragged it back to the caravan home.

In towns where the well wasn’t close, Vati asked a neighboring farmer if we could get water from his outside tap.

To save water, Mutti made us wash only our hands and faces in the evenings. I don’t think I saw a toothbrush until I was ten.

To get us ready for bed, Mutti filled a bowl half-full with water and put it onto the kitchen table. She grabbed the baby, little Eva, or later, baby Michael, and wiped her face with a rag reserved for the children. Then she soaped her hands and rinsed them in the water.

The next-oldest child was next. We used the same water for the three youngest, and the same face rag for all of us. When it came my turn, I swiped the rag over my face. Sometimes Mutti inspected our work. “You missed your mouth,” she might say, or, “wash your ears, too.” But most often she didn’t even look. The last one, Carmen, poured the used water into the slush bucket by the door and put away the bowl.

One after the other, we tromped into the back compartment, the children’s bedroom, took off our clothes and slipped into the cold bed.

Tomorrow I’ll talk more about water in the caravan.

Home Again!

                          Many German police cars looked like this at that time.

            “That’s not ours,” I said. My heart beat faster, and the pastry in my stomach roiled. Maybe Jesus didn’t want me to go home again. Maybe He didn’t love me, after all. I grabbed Josefa’s hand, the only support I had left in this world. Josefa squeezed my hand and started crying again.

“Don’t cry,” the policeman said. He didn’t seem too upset. “I know of another place where your family probably is. Let’s go.”

He started the car and off we went. This time I watched the streets. I didn’t feel like admiring the stars anymore. What would happen to me if the policeman didn’t find our caravan home? Maybe I would die, since I was such a bad girl and couldn’t even take care of my sister. My eyes burned and tears threatened to come again. Then I remembered my prayer, and how peaceful I felt when it was over. Jesus would help. I sighed and closed my eyes. “Please, let us find our home,” I whispered so Josefa couldn’t hear. A sense of safety surrounded me.

The car went around a dark corner onto a dirt road. At the edge of the car’s lights, I made out two people running toward us. I thought they looked like our parents, but for a moment I wasn’t sure. I gripped Josefa’s hand harder. However, when they came into the light, it was our Vati and Mutti.

“There are my parents,” I yelled. Everything was okay now. I hadn’t hurt anyone, and the police had even helped me. Mutti would be mad, but that was okay, as long as I was home again.

The policeman stopped the car and said, “All right! I told you I’d find your family.”

He stepped from the car and talked to Vati. I opened the door and got out. Josefa scrambled after me.

Mutti bent and put her hands on Josefa’s shoulders. “Are you all right? God, I was so worried.”

I stood in front of the car, hands folded over my chest. Mutti let go of Josefa, turned to me and touched my face. “What happened? Where have you been?” she said. “We worried out of our minds. Vati and I were just on our way to the police.”

 “We got lost,” I said.

The policeman said good bye and shook our hands. “It was a pleasure to be able to help you two ladies.”

Josefa giggled.

Mutti gazed at me, frowned and shook her head. “Come on,” she said. She didn’t seem too mad. We scurried after her and Vati, back to our caravan home.

“We already ate,” Mutti said. “It’s late, but I’ve saved you some food. Hurry and eat and go to bed.”

“The nice policemen gave us some pastries,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

“Me neither,” Josefa said.

Finally back in our warm home, we took off our clothes and washed our faces in the kitchen bowl before we went to bed.

Safely in my bed, I folded my hands and whispered a heartfelt “Thank you,” to Jesus.

Pastries for two Hungry Little Girls

Tasty Pastries for Little Sonja and Josefa - The Amerikaner on top and the Berliner on Bottom!

Ever since my experience in Wiesbaden, when I was nine, I liked the police. That night, in the warm police station, the policeman didn't seem mad.

He smiled when he asked me where we lived. I told him I didn’t know. He shook his head and led us into another, smaller room.

A brown paper bag stood on a large table with six chairs around it. Along the wall, under the window, a heater hissed and clanked. Warmth radiated from it. The policeman helped us take off our coats and told us to sit in two of the chairs.

“You must be hungry,” he said. “Would you like a pastry?”

Josefa and I nodded in unison. My mouth watered. The policeman allowed us to choose a pastry from the brown paper bag. Josefa found a Berliner, and the bag even held an Amerikaner for me. It tasted sweet and flaky, and I swallowed and took another bite, looking around me. Everything would turn out all right now. The policeman ate a pastry too. While we ate, other policemen entered, took pastries and talked to our policeman.

When we finished eating, he said, “Do you feel better now?”

We nodded.

“Now tell us what your Vati does and how you live.”

“We are from the carnival,” I said.

“Carnival? I didn’t know there was a carnival this late in the year.”

“We just arrived here. We are in winter quarters,” I said.

“There is another caravan home too, and pack-trailers,” Josefa added.

“Mmm,” the policeman said. “I think I know a few places.” He got up from his seat. “Let’s go and find your family.”

He helped us from the chairs and into our coats. Our small hands in his big ones, he escorted us to a green and white police car. We drove in the dark. The large lighted road gave way to smaller, darker streets. Soon we couldn’t see much of the neighborhoods we drove through. I leaned against the window and craned my neck. I saw the moon, a shallow scythe, and a few stars. How pretty the dark sky was! Jesus lived up there, and He had helped me find a way home. I was sure the policeman would take us straight home now.

The car stopped. When we got out, we saw a lighted caravan home in the dark. I started smiling, but then realized it wasn’t our home.

Still no Way Home

After my little prayer to the Jesus I had learned about in school the year before, I felt less frightened than before. I looked around, searching the dark street on that fateful evening in Wiesbaden. 

Shoppers rushed by. A tall man slowed and watched us from under the brim of his hat, then stopped.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. “Where are your parents?”

“We are lost,” I said.

Josefa cried again.

“Where do you live?” the man asked.

“I don’t know,” I said and swallowed my tears. “We just got here. We live in our caravan home.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“I think it’s that way,” I said and pointed forward.
           The man looked in the direction I pointed and shook his head.

“I can’t help you,” he said.

Turning to Christ

We were all alone on a busy street in Wiesbaden, and had no idea how to get home again. I was cold and hungry. Josefa sniffled, either from the cold or from suppressed tears.

 “Come on,” I said brusquely. I had to do something, and decided to go straight ahead.

But Josefa didn’t come after me.

“My feet hurt,” she said.

She stood rooted to the middle of the crowded sidewalk.

“Come on.” I stamped my foot.

 Josefa shook her head. Her face screwed up and two large tears rolled down her cheeks. She opened her mouth and wailed.

People jostled around us, ignoring our little drama. Cars roared by, and I barely heard Josefa’s wail in the din. The cold air smelled like Vati’s tractor when he turned it off.

I rubbed my hands. Why wouldn’t anyone help us? I turned to Josefa.

“Don’t cry,” I said. “My feet hurt, too. But we have to get home.”

Josefa didn’t move. She cried harder.

I swallowed my own tears and pulled on her arm.  “Shush,” I said. “If you want to go home, we have to keep going.”

Fear settled in my stomach like a hard stone. A sense of failure engulfed me. Instead of Carmen, I was finally in charge, and I had messed up. My responsibility for Josefa added to my fear. I needed to make things right for her. She depended on me, but I, myself, was helpless. How I wished I knew where to go!

Suddenly the thought of Jesus lit up my mind. Jesus would help. Just like He answered the prayers of the children in the pamphlets I read, He would help me too. But I better not let my sister and the people around see me pray. They would laugh at me.

Josefa was still crying. She wouldn’t hear me. So, instead of folding my hands, I balled them inside my pockets, screwed my eyes shut, and whispered quietly, so only Jesus could hear me, “Jesus, You love me. Please help us get back home. Please. Amen.”

I was still cold when I opened my eyes again, but the stone in my stomach had dissolved. The people around us may not care, but we were not alone.

I patted my sister on the arm. “It’s all right,” I said. “We’ll find the way home. Let’s go, okay?”

Josefa wiped her face with her sleeve and nodded.

However, I still didn’t know what to do.

Lost

On our first day in winter quarters when I was nine, my eight-year-old sister Josefa and I went into the town to get out of our mother's hair and to explore our new surroundings. We looked at things and when inspecting the goodies in a bakery, we got hungry and decided to go home again.
       I led Josefa to an intersection, where we turned into a street I thought would take us back. But when I looked around, nothing seemed familiar. The street was larger, not smaller, and traffic increased. In the gathering darkness, the lights in the stores along the street switched on. I swallowed a lump in my throat and pulled on Josefa’s coat sleeve. “Let’s go back to that intersection.”

Josefa looked at me with big, brown eyes and nodded. I bit my lip and surveyed the road as if I knew where to go. My sister trusted me. I was the leader and somehow I would find the way home. With renewed determination, I trotted back the way I thought we came. Josefa followed.

At the intersection I looked and looked, but couldn’t recognize anything familiar. How long had we been gone?

I suggested we turn another corner. “Maybe that’s where our winter quarter is.”

However, high buildings lined that street. Everything was dark. The buildings seemed to loom over us. Small windows dimly glinted in the light from the far off street lamps.

Josefa slowed. “Are you sure this is the way home?”

Now even the people were gone. We were all alone. My throat hurt, and I balled my hands into tight fists. I was older and needed to be an example for Josefa. I couldn’t let my fear show.

I told Josefa we should return to the larger street. At least there we could see something.

I shivered. Josefa stuck her hands into her armpits. Her breath burst out in little puffs of steam. My hands and feet ached from the cold and my stomach rumbled. How good a butter and jam sandwich would taste! But first we needed to get home.

I led Josefa to the next intersection and surveyed the streets leading from it. I recognized nothing. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. My heart sped up to a gallop. I wanted to cry. People rushed around us on both sides, but no one noticed us, and nobody seemed to care.

Checking out the New Neighborhood

 A typical, busy street in Wiesbaden, similar to the one Josefa and I checked out.

That first day of winter quarters in Wiesbaden, Josefa and I decided to get out of Mutti's hair and check out our new neighborhood. We went to the hook by the door, grabbed our coats and struggled into them while we barreled down the steps which Vati had already connected to the outside of the front door.

We meandered around the strange caravans. A tall, skinny man talked to Vati, a screwdriver in his hand. A woman stared out a curtained window, listening to them. She smiled without looking at us.

Josefa and I ambled along the fence and meandered down the path our tractor had come. Houses and shops beckoned in the near distance.

“Let’s see if there are any stores,” I suggested. “Maybe we can even find our school.”

“Yes, let’s.” Josefa sped ahead of me.

We turned a corner onto a paved road. A small bakery beckoned with cookies and pastries in the window. We sniffed the sweet smell of baked goods, and admired the wares through the window. A display of my favorite, a pastry called Amerikaner, the American, made my mouth water. The baker had placed the pastries, cone shaped and with white frosting on the top, in a pyramid of five on a plate. I imagined eating one, while Josefa pointed to the round doughnuts, called Berliner, covered in coarse sugar.

 We told each other how good they would taste, and went on. Soon a small intersection distracted us from our stomachs. We marched through it, to see what kind of other stores we could find.

The next road was asphalted instead of cobble-stoned, and cars sped by. Stores with large show windows lined it. Women with shopping nets bustled along the sidewalk, men with briefcases, bundled into warm coats, hurried around us. We looked, but didn’t see a school. The sun disappeared behind the buildings, and I shivered in my thin coat.

More to reassure myself instead of Josefa, I said, “Let’s go home.”

Winter Quarters

                                          Our new car looked a lot like this one!

The winter I was nine, we stayed in Wiesbaden for winter quarters, where I would attend third grade more regularly. When we arrived in Wiesbaden, Vati pulled our caravan home through a drizzly, dark afternoon. I sat on the bolted-down bench in front of the kitchen table, hugging the wall and peering out the window in anticipation, wondering what our new winter quarters would look like.

I thought back to my first grade winter in Atzbach, the only town in Germany that had storks at that time. In the summers, they lived in a huge nest on top of the school chimney. I had still been there, attending school, when the storks arrived in the spring. I loved these great, ungainly birds. Too bad we couldn’t go back to Atzbach. It would have been so nice to see the storks again.

But last year hadn’t been bad, either. That was my second grade year, and we spent that winter in Weilmünster. Vati had exchanged his old BMW motorcycle for a black VW bug with two tiny, egg-shaped rear windows, and blinkers that came out on the outside of the car, like little red flags. But the most exciting thing that year was the birth of our youngest sister Eva.

Now, once again on our way to winter quarters, the rubber tires of our home rolled along the ruts of the path, pulled by Vati’s old Deutz tractor. With every jolt, the caravan swayed. A large open field, fenced in on two sides and the back, seemed to be Vati’s goal for our caravan. Weeds grew like a small forest along the sides. Close to the fence on the right snuggled three other caravans, painted a light blue in contrast to our dark brown ones. One of them seemed a home, recognizable by the curtains in the windows. Two unfamiliar pack trailers flanked it, probably holding a carousel and other carnival attractions. I searched the windows of that caravan home. Maybe the family had children, and I’d finally have a friend for more than a week. I couldn’t wait to go outside and see.

Vati maneuvered our home around the other caravan and positioned it next to our pack trailer, which he had towed there the day before.

The Deutz made one more “chug,” and stopped. Mutti unwrapped the radio from its blankets on the sofa and placed it on the shelf over the coffee table. She directed Carmen to unlock the cabinets in the kitchen. Eva, ten months old, sat in her playpen in a corner of the living room, watching the commotion. Josefa and I stood by the sliding door that divided the kitchen from the living room, craning our necks to see what Mutti was doing.

“Get out of my way,” Carmen said as she rushed by me and Josefa. Little Franz, bundled in his jacket, pushed through and went outside, trailing after Vati, who connected our caravan home to the electricity and made sure everything was settled.

Mutti squeezed around Josefa to get into the kitchen. “You’re in my way. Why don’t you two go outside for a while,” she suggested.

I looked at Josefa, who must have felt as out of place as I did in our cramped home. I had an idea. “Let’s explore the new place.”

Josefa’s eyes lit up. We went to the hook by the door, grabbed our coats and struggled into them while we barreled down the steps which Vati had already connected to the outside of the front door.