Bittersweet Memories - The Life Story of an Immigrant Daughter

1. Memories

I knelt beside my father’s grave in Germany as the sun was setting. It was Sunday afternoon, the flower shops along the boulevard were closed, and I regretted I had nothing to leave behind. While reaching into my purse for a tissue to wipe my tears, I pulled out my business card. On the back of it I wrote “Dear Father, I’m sorry we didn’t get to know each other, there was so much I wanted to say.”

After tucking the note into the shrub next to the headstone, I walked away, recalling the last time I saw my father at age eighteen. He had come to the restaurant where I worked, with hopes of talking with me. My heart beat as I saw him get out of his car. In disbelief, I noticed that my mother-- they had divorced when I was eight years old—was seated at the far end of the dining room.

Not knowing what to do, I hid in the kitchen. My mother had forbidden any contact with him, and by now, her control over me was nearly total. My father realized I wasn’t coming out, and left. I had not seen or spoken to my father since I was ten. He left the restaurant without even nodding to my mother. It would be eleven years later that I received word of his death. There was so much to explain, and now that couldn’t happen.

It was a cruel twist of fate. What if she had not been in the restaurant? Should I have talked with him or called him later? But this was a father I hardly knew. What I did that day can only be understood by those who have fallen under the power of fear. For years afterward I looked for him in every red car.

In my search to learn about my father, my husband and I made a trip to Germany, now with our little girls. In Munich my father’s German childhood friend and colleague, accompanied us to my father’s grave. After lighting a candle, and wiping away tears, I asked his colleague if my father understood the reason why I rejected him was fear of my mother’s retaliation. “No, he never understood,” was his reply. It was then I knew I had to tell this story.

I was in kindergarten when my mother, brother and I were shopping. Waiting in the car I heard someone tapping on the window. It was my father. He had seen me sitting there from the window of his consulting office, while my mother was across the street at a convenience store. I slowly rolled down the window, and watched anxiously to see if my mother was coming. He leaned down and through the open window said, “Your mother is not well, she is imagining things.” I started crying. At five years old I was trying to absorb what was happening.

I didn’t want to believe what he said, yet I knew there were problems at home. My brother had started sleeping in my mother’s bedroom, while my father slept in his room. I tried to understand what he was saying, but was attached to and also fearful of my mother. “You have to believe me,” he continued, “it is not your fault or your brother’s.” What was going on, I thought, as my father’s words echoed in my mind? I wiped away tears as Mom returned to the car, never knowing what happened.

Meanwhile, my brother’s life had grown bleak. Blackie, our dog, and my brother’s best friend, was taken to a dog pound. A neighbor had reported my family as being immigrants, and immigrants were not allowed to keep a dog according to an outdated law. Such distrust was similar to life in Nazi times, which our family had just left. Broken-hearted, my brother sobbed, and said “why did we have to come to America?”

I dreaded the days and nights of quarreling and fighting. My mother endlessly accused my brother of minor issues. A workman, doing repairs on the furnace, apparently dropped a cigar on the basement floor. My brother was accused of intentionally putting it there to upset our mother that someone entered our house. This became the “cigar story” as my brother and I tried to figure out what was going on. Obsessions over what most people considered minor incidents continued and increased.

As tensions grew, I hid under the staircase in the basement. My arms and legs felt heavy as that of an elephant. My brother, only eleven years old, thought if he confessed to things he hadn’t done, everything would be alright. It didn’t work. Mom continued to accuse him, he grew nervous and started to stutter. Years of writing letters of appeasement passed, in a vain attempt to lessen her outbreaks.

Before he left for college, my brother’s final coerced letter revealed he was still under her spell: To Whom It May Concern: I hereby affirm that any letters or confessions I have written are the complete truth. I have written these letters in full seriousness, and still have the opinions that I set forth in them. A sense of unworthiness and pain continued most of his life. Fortunately for me, I must have remembered what my father tried tell me many years before.

While clearing out my mother’s house, I found my favorite childhood book “Of Courage and Valor,” biographies of famous men and women. It had been one of my father’s last gifts to me. While leafing through the book, a yellowed piece of paper fell out. It was a letter my brother had written to me that I never received. Broken-hearted, I recalled his unhappy youth that he expressed in the letter. In it he tried to say he didn’t deserve Mom’s accusations, especially the names he had been called by her: liar, traitor, devil, evil, Lausbube, and that he belonged in a reform school. My brother couldn’t tell anyone because, as a teenager, who would have believed him. Despite his efforts to appease, he was told that fate would punish him. Little did we know how fate would take a tragic turn.

When World War II ended, Germany was in ruins. My father, a German engineer, was among a select group of scientists mandated by the United States government to come to America. This became known as “Operation Paperclip.” Its purpose was to secure high-caliber scientists in strategic fields. It was apparent the US and USSR were ending their war-time alliance, and that the Cold War was beginning. Germany had designed and built the V-2 rocket, the world’s first guided ballistic missile. Its power was from the use of liquid nitrogen and alcohol. Since it flew faster than the speed of sound, it could not be heard before it struck.

From “American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe’s Secrets”: Revolutionary developments in aeronautical engineering were in progress in Germany a long time before we fired our first shot against the Nazis. Yet, a long time after that shot, after we had managed with considerable difficulty to gain the upper hand over our enemies, there we were, out in no-man’s-land, scrambling around for the secrets of Nazi airpower. We hadn’t listened to the foreign correspondents who told us in newspapers, magazines, and books that Germany was working on something big.

Technical power was important to both former allies, and the rush was on to recruit German scientists. It was likened to that of a treasure hunt. The scientists selected were “superlative specialists” and would save the US years of work and billions of dollars. Other German scientists were not as lucky as they and their families were transported to small villages where there were neither research facilities nor work. There they were interrogated until the Office of Military Government of the United States was satisfied that all desired intelligence information had been extracted from the scientists. It is estimated that 1,800 technicians and scientists, plus 3,700 family members were part of this group. They were detained for month’s even years in an effort to deny German reconstruction.

My father had never belonged to the Nazi party, and clearance was quickly granted. His departure, January 1947, on a troop transport ship to New York was swift. My mother found herself alone with both grandmothers, my five-year-old brother, and herself three months pregnant. They all lived in a small apartment outside of Frankfurt. Both my grandfathers had died young.

While crossing the Atlantic Ocean, he wrote in his journal: After seventeen days of enduring heavy storms at sea, the sky darkened, the sun and its red light vanished and all the hundred thousand lights of Manhattan appeared. I stood on the deck admiring the impressive sight, and talked with an American officer about my future in the United States. Prior to his undergraduate and doctoral studies, my father had thirteen years of schooling including five years of English instruction. His knowledge of the English language would prove to be a great asset in coming to America.

While they leaned against the ship railing, an officer told my father about the Statue of Liberty as they passed her in the harbor. It had been designed and built in France in 1884 and shipped to New York, a gift from France to America for its principles of liberty. The base of the statue was funded by ordinary adults and children. The well-known words engraved on the pedestal were written by Emma Lazarus, a Jewish young woman:

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

the air-bridged harbor that twin cities...