Helga

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!