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

A Visit to Poland

 

I was eleven that year. One evening in November, after we settled down in winter quarters, I overheard Mutti and Vati talking.

Josefa and I were sitting at the kitchen table, finishing some homework, when Vati’s deep voice resonated through the small caravan home. “My sister would be delighted to have her namesake come and visit her.”

Josefa looked up from her math book and frowned at me. “What do they mean?” she mouthed.

I shrugged, but a knot formed in my stomach. Did my parents want to send me away? Maybe forever? I didn’t know how to live anywhere else but here in my family. Maybe Vati would go with me. Then it wouldn’t be so scary.

The next morning Mutti handed me my sandwich for lunch break. “Come right home from school today. We have to get your visa pictures made.”

I took the sandwich bag and stuffed it into my satchel. “Are you really going to send me to Poland?”

“It will be a great opportunity for you.” She opened the door. “Now go on or you’ll be late for school.”

“Will Vati or you go with me?”

“Don’t worry about that. Off with you to school.” She pointed to the outside.

I decided now wasn’t the time to discuss this and left. But the thoughts whirled around in my head. The way Mutti had answered my question indicated that I would go alone. I didn’t want to go to Poland alone. I didn’t know anybody in Poland. Why couldn’t I stay here, in our caravan, with my brothers and sisters? But if I’d say anything Mutti wouldn’t listen to me. She’d just tell me to shut up.

That day, in school, I tried to imagine what Poland would be like. All I could think of was a cold, rainy and dark place with lots of cobblestones and no trees.

I made myself hurry home, even though I would rather have dawdled. Mutti was waiting with her coat on and purse in her hand. “There you are. Let’s go.”

I dropped my satchel onto the kitchen bench and hurried after her, wondering what it would be like to have a picture taken.

The photographer took me to a small, dark room. He had me sit on a hard stool and told me not to smile. A flash made me squint, and then it was all over.

The photographer escorted us out. “I’ll have the photos ready in two weeks. It’s been a pleasure.”

Nothing much happened the next few days. Vati and Mutti didn’t talk about Poland anymore. I was relieved. Maybe they had forgotten.

One day, when I came home, Mutti said. “The photos for your visa are here.” She showed me a set of four black and white pictures. They showed my face and my too short cropped hair. I thought I looked ugly. Maybe Aunt Sonja wouldn’t like me when I arrived in Poland and would send me back again.

Vati sat on the living room sofa, writing in some papers. “My sister will be so glad to have a young person around,” he said. “I’ll mail the papers as soon as I’m done here. Then all we have to do is wait.”

I hoped getting the visa would take a really long time. Maybe it would take the rest of the winter, and by spring we’d be traveling again. Those papers might never reach us, and I’d stay home.

One day in February I came home and heard my parent arguing before I opened the door to the caravan home. I stopped on the steps and listened.

“I tell you, if we send her, we’ll never see her again,” Mutti’s strident voice came through the door.

Vati’s voice, quieter and lower, answered, “I promised my sister we’d send her. She’ll make sure our child will come back.”

“What can she do when the government refuses to let Sonja return? A month ago I wouldn’t have worried, but now…” Mutti’s words trailed off.

“Maybe you’re right. We could wait and see what happens. If the laws lighten up again, we can always send her later.”

“That’s an idea. I’m sure your sister will understand.” Mutti sounded relieved. “Maybe we’ll send her next winter.”

My heart grew lighter. At least for now I was safe. I decided that now was the moment to interrupt and charged into the caravan home.

My parents never said another word to me about it, and they never sent me to Poland.

My Father's Circus

Right before WWII started, and after the Nazis vanquished Poland, a high-ranking Nazi appropriated the Polish Circus Francesco. My Vati, who was the eldest son of the Francesco family, never had the chance to take over the circus when his father died shortly after the Nazis took over. Since Müller, the Nazi, didn’t know much about circuses and also needed skilled circus acrobats, he conscripted the Francesco family to work for ‘his’ circus.

That’s how Vati, and with him Circus Francesco, came to Germany. My father’s family consisted of their mother, an older sister, Sonja, my Vati, Colya, his two years younger brother Henrik, and a much younger brother, Josef. I was named after my father’s sister.

Mutti joined Circus Francesco as a cashier and ticket taker two years before the war ended. When the war was finally over, Vati and his mother regained ownership of their circus, and their first desire was to leave Germany, where they suffered so much, and return to Poland.

By that time, Mutti and Vati were together, had married and had their first surviving daughter. Mutti refused to go to Poland with Vati, because she never again wanted to live under a totalitarian government. So Vati said good-bye to his family and stayed with her and the baby in Germany.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you how I almost ended up living in Poland instead of our traveling carnival in Germany.

Food

The next few entries will be about food. About Mutti and food when she was little, about food after the war in Germany, and about food in our little caravan when I was a child.

Let's start with an account of Mutti's and my relationship to food. This is a dialogue between Mutti and me when she visited me in the States a few years back.

 I’m in the kitchen, preparing a late breakfast. I’m frying bacon and eggs.

“Oh God, no,” Mutti says. “I can’t believe you are eating that for breakfast. You have to watch your figure. You’re not skinny anymore.”

“It’s common in America. When you eat breakfast late, you make bacon and eggs and skip lunch,” I explain.

Mutti sighs. For her, breakfast consists of bread or cereal and coffee. “Sure you’ll skip lunch,” she says. “Please, none of that for me.”

Mutti wasn’t raised in the Jewish faith. She doesn’t disapprove on religious grounds. Many times, when I was small and we could find and afford it, we had pork chops for lunch.

I smile and assure her she won’t have to eat eggs and bacon.

An hour later, after we finished eating (Mutti had Müsli and coffee, while Ken and I enjoyed our bacon and eggs), my 17-year-old gets up. She comes from her room and rummages in the refrigerator. “What’s there to eat?”

“We already ate, just a little while ago,” I answer. “Eat whatever you can find.”

After some more rummaging, Liesel settles on a peanut butter sandwich. She gulps it down with some milk, then grabs her purse from the table and kisses me on the cheek. “I’m going now, Mom. I’ve got to be at work in ten minutes."

I hug her. Her hair tickles my cheek.

“Bye, Mom, bye Oma,” she says and is off.

“I didn’t have time for hugs and kisses when you were small,” Mutti says. “But I did cook you a hot lunch every day.”

I rinse the egg off a plate and think back. I can’t remember going hungry as a little child. But I still remember Mutti pushing me away when I tried to hug her and she was at the kitchen stove, or feeding the new baby.

“Once, at the end of the winter, we ran out of money. We only had bread and jam left to eat,” Mutti reminisces. “I think that was in Weilburg, in 1954, the year your little sister, Eva, was born.”

I was seven then and remember it well. Toward the end of that winter, before we went out again to run the carnival circuit, we eventually had bread to eat every breakfast and supper, and often also for lunch. Mutti bought the cheapest rye bread and spread it with margarine and Vierfrucht, a jam made from four different types of fruit.

We ate margarine and Vierfrucht sandwiches seemingly forever. I still remember the taste. Or we had rye bread with lard and salt, or rye bread with margarine and sugar. I never got tired of rye bread, but I did miss a hot meal at times. I never went truly hungry, though.

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!

Parallels

I have always seen myself as about as different from my mother as a daughter can be. Mutti is pessimistic, pragmatic, and unemotional. I see myself as optimistic, affectionate and considerate. Who knows, maybe I'm all wrong on that score! But may that be as it is, thinking about my mother last night I was surprised and amazed at the parallels I see in hers and my childhood.

Even though Mutti was born the eldest of two daughters in a well-to-do family, she was born with two strikes against her. Her beloved father, who was much older than her mother, passed away when she was only five years old. Mutti's father had been Jewish, a wealthy banker. He left her Aryan mother a nice apartment and quite a bit of money. And his daughter, my mother, he left the legacy she least needed; black eyes, curly dark hair and the obvious looks of a Jew in a Germany that rapidly deteriorated into despising and hating Jews.

I was born with two strikes against me also. I was born in a tiny circus caravan in utter poverty in a country that was reeling from an unjust war. I was born the second of six children. My parents had neither resources nor affection enough for all their children.

As a child, Mutti experienced prejudice in thousands of tiny gestures and actions of the other children, of her neighbors and even of her relatives. From earliest childhood on, she doubted her self-worth. When she was thirteen, she learned in school that half-Jewish children are inferior to Aryan German children. She learned that half-Jews like her, are stupid and ugly. That day, she ran home from school as quickly as she could and inspected her budding self in the bathroom mirror. In spite of her young age, she decided that she was definitely not ugly, and that decision has pretty much guided her life. She always dressed up prettily, and often talked about how beautiful she had been as a young girl.

As a child, I experienced prejudice in thousands of tiny gestures and actions of the different children we went to school with every week. In my family I was one of many, not getting any attention unless I did something wrong or bad. I heard about God in school, and, from a very young age, I developed faith in a loving God who'd love me in spite of all my faults. When I was fourteen, I met the Mormon missionaries and learned about and accepted the Gospel. That decision has guided my life and made me who I am now.

After all these years, I have a lot of love and respect for my mother who survived unimaginable injustice, without any recourse to a loving God. And I hope Mutti is proud of me also, in spite of my gullible ways and my strange American church!