New Year’s Day and 60 Years Ago.

Mom in Russia - age 16

New Year’s Day, I went to my mom’s. We played a game of scrabble. I was losing the whole game until she started going on about something, lost attention on the game, and set me up for a triple and I had ‘sizes’ on my tray and boom that was the game.

We cooked dinner together and played a second game. I happen to win this one too at the last minute. It’s okay because she takes great pride in the fact that she taught me everything I know (about scrabble). The main thing is that it’s a good challenge for both of us and we had fun.

My mom pulled out one of her older photo albums and I had to take it home to scan the photos. There are pictures of the German soldier that carried her name from Russia to East Berlin. He wrote it on a piece of paper and rolled it up, stuck it between his toes. Apparently having a name with a certain ethnic origin written on a piece of paper was not politically correct in 1950. In East Berlin, apparently, he couldn’t connect with the International Red Cross to turn in a name of a displaced teenager without getting interrogated, or worse, so he then managed to pass it to his nephew in western Germany who was able to get it on the international Red Cross radio.

Mom’s Papa (Gross Vater to us) survived the concentration camp, Russian and German bullets, the Russian prison and was back in Vienna when a neighbor heard my mom’s name read from a list of displaced persons. This was in 1950, a full 60 years ago. A year later she was able to leave Russia.

My Aunt Edith, mom’s surviving sister, who had made it to the States already, was sewing a coat for Mamie Eisenhower (or Mamie’s secretary) and had some pull to get my mom on a plane from Moscow back to Vienna. Aunt Edith even sent material to my mom while she was still a serf walking the cow to pasture every day in White Russia and the village seamstress made a dress for her. In the photo above, you can see a bit of that pretty pink dress, under her sweater. How things got done in those days without Skype and Gmail, I just can’t imagine.

Further, the family that had taken my mom in during the war wanted a glass cutter and Aunt Edith obliged. I can only imagine that this simple tool may have paid back in dividends for the austere life they were able to provide for my mom sharing their dirt floor hut with the “German” through several harsh Russian winters.

A interesting side note: Mom became Catholic during her years in Russia. Upon returning to Vienna, Papa asked her to renounce Catholicism and embrace Judaism, the religion of her birth, but she refused. I asked her, “Mom how could your refuse your Papa after all that trauma, war, separation?” She had an answer for me, “I was a teenager …rebellious, I guess.” Mom is still a devout Catholic, with a proud Jewish mother’s tenacity. She visited Israel last month. Her reaction to the trip? “I never climbed so many steps in all my life.”

Nephew of German soldier who got my mom's name to the Red Cross.