A lifetime of birthday and Christmas gifts hasn't left my sister and me many ways to surprise our mother. Over the years, we've learned that personal time with her and the memories that those personal experiences create is most important, and to that end, last Christmas, we gave her the wonderfully inventive gift of a personal biographer. As a result, I have been knee-deep in research for the last four months and that research has been life changing.
Cindy and I had always thought she was a typical Mom…..until we were old enough
to visit friends’ homes without her around. It was then that we noticed
that not all moms dressed like she did every day – stockings, a beautiful day
dress, hair and make-up perfectly done, sensible shoes. Not all moms
cooked like she did – that beef tongue laying on the kitchen counter, complete
with all those icky papillae sticking up and all those frayed muscles at the
cut end, all waiting to be covered later with that sickly cream sauce and paired with
those horrible Brussels sprouts that had been boiling on top of the stove when
we got home from school. Not all moms continually scraped their plate
like they had been starved during a war. Not all moms insisted on
formalities at family dinner every night – linen tablecloth and napkins,
milk never in the carton but always decanted into a pitcher, sterling napkin rings and flatware, heirloom Meissen china (although every now
and then coupled with a dish or bowl out of the Fab soap powder box).
It was only much later, when we were both grown and out of
the house, when I met General Jimmy Doolittle and casually asked him to autograph
a picture for my mother “whom he had bombed in Tokyo when she was 17", that I fully realized that all the stories we had been told as
throw-away tales were actually true! And this tale of a little German girl, who came
to be living in Munich and Tokyo during incredibly tumultuous times and eventually became a US citizen, turns out to be the incredible story of our very not-typical mom.
My research for her book has included reading and translating 70 year old letters from my German grandparents. Doing that opened my
eyes to a world I'd heard of, but never really understood.As I read these letters in date order, I was overwhelmed by
two main themes - firstly, by the arc of personal and world history that they
cover and secondly, by the personal insight they both bring to those
events. No matter how much I may have learned during my own schooling,
even through university, these letters truly brought the personal successes and
joys and the historical horror of those times to life for me. Through the
writing of Mom’s book, I’m beginning to learn the details of her life during the
war in Japan, but now I’m able to look through a crack in the door to what it
must have been like for my family in Germany. These letters have been a
real joy for me to read, as they bring my German grandparents to life again for me now
and, most importantly, I begin to understand and appreciate what all of them
must have had to sacrifice to continue any semblance of life during those
difficult times. Family, friends, food, safety, normalcy – everything was
at risk. Without personal letters like these, my generation, and
certainly my son’s generation, would never really be able to believe that their
very own family experienced such horrible times. Amazing!
The book is well underway now, but just to whet your whistle until it's finally published, here's a summary of her book -- Helga: A Memoir of Privilege, War and Family.
She was born in 1925 in Germany, her father a
published pediatrician (the family story is that he was a doctor to high Nazi officials' children in Berlin at one time). Her parents divorced when she
was 3. Her new stepfather and mother sailed for Japan in late 1931,
leaving her for four years with relatives in Munich when she was only
6. Her stepfather was eventually asked to work in the German Embassy’s
Naval Attache office as Paymaster/Purchasing Agent by Admiral Paul
Wenneker and he started work there in the mid-30s.
Mom followed, at age 10, on a steamship from Hamburg to Tokyo in 1935 -
strangers hired to accompany her. She lived there, a German in Japan, from
1935 to 1948. Little food, terrible times and, as a "gaijin", always on
the wrong side. She was on the train to her best friend Ulla Ott's
(daughter of the German Ambassador to Japan) birthday party when the
train was stopped for Doolittle’s Raid, and everyone was told to take
shelter. As she was only a very naive 17 years old, she tells me that
she and her friends went to a nearby ice cream shop for a snack until
the bombing was over (!!!). Geez!!
She survived her family home being burned to the ground during the March
10, 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo, and was again on the train when the
Emperor spoke to his public after Hiroshima. Her family had their summer
house in Hakone, near where she met her first American GIs staying at
the Myanoshita Hotel. She met my Dad, a Cajun from Louisiana, on a blind
date in Tokyo very soon after his arrival in Japan as part of the USAF
occupation troops.
Mom's parents were repatriated to Germany in 1947, but Mom accepted
sponsorship by an American Army officer, Lt Col Albert Watson, and family
to come to the US on their dime. She contracted to work out that payment as their
nanny and I still have the original "contract" they all signed in January
1948.. She sailed alone into San Francisco in February 1948, surprised to
find nothing bombed. She spent 1948 as a nanny for the Army family. In
December of that year, Dad finished his tour of duty in Japan, arrived
in San Diego, paid off her indenture and married Mom three days
later.....and then took her to his home in the bayous of Louisiana to
"meet the parents", then to Omaha, to his next PCS assignment. After one
year at Offutt AFB, she then returned to the bayous for one year, alone
with me, an infant, while Dad went on an unaccompanied tour for one
year to the nuclear testing site of Eniwetok Island in the South Pacific. She became a
naturalized US citizen while he was gone. I still have the original newspaper
articles from the local Louisiana newspaper.
I continue to be amazed at her life - first as the child of an affluent
and intellectual family, then as a German in Japan during the war, then
working as a nanny, then living, yet again as a foreigner, in a very
conservative small bayou town in Louisiana on her own with an infant.
Although I've heard many, many of her stories, I am still surprised at
the resilience, poise, and lady-like demeanor she retained throughout her
life. Mom lived through the beginnings of the Nazi
upheaval in Germany, through the bombings and destruction of WWII Japan,
through constant relocation, through learning new languages and customs – all
before she was 23 years old. In spite of
it all, she still says she considers herself lucky. I say she spent her life
surviving lucky!
