Tini repeated her words and brought balm to my heart.
“Sixty years ago, they tore you from my arms. Never did I think to see you again. God’s Grace has brought you back to me.”
My Mercedes woman, whose name I never learned, walked quietly to where we stood. Beaming, she shook hands with Frau Fuchs, but declined the opportunity to linger. She spoke with tact and understanding:
“These moments are for you alone. I leave you to enjoy this special reunion.”
I followed Tini up the stairs to the fourth floor, marvelling at the erect back and powerful legs of this woman in her eighties. Although she barely came up to my shoulder, she gave the impression of strength. She was well built. Not fat, but buxom, her breasts proudly pointing the way. A sheaf of naturally grey hair enveloped a wrinkled face that to me was beautiful.
Words tumbled out of us. She spoke, I spoke, we both spoke, sometimes at once. A thousand questions, each answer leading in turn to fresh questions.
“Tell me about… how come… why… when… where… what did you do…?”
My questions continued, not just for hours, but for days. We took time out for other things without interrupting the long conversations about a past that I could not remember, yet that seemed etched into my being.
Helen in the arms of Tini, 1937
Tini confided that immediately after our departure, she had approached her boyfriend and announced that she wanted to be married. She had told him that her arms felt unbearably empty. Despite the financial and political uncertainties that swirled about them, he agreed to a hasty wedding. Their son and their daughter Erni were born shortly thereafter.
“It was as if I had to replace the child that had been stolen from my arms, ”
Tini said.
“When they took you away, they tore out a piece of my heart.”
The sound of Tini’s voice awoke wordless memories. Her accent itself is a strange clone of my own way of speaking. People used to comment that my accent was different from that of my parents who spoke
Hochdeutsch,
the cultivated German considered to be “classic.” It was strange that I spoke more of a dialect than my own family. Now I understood. My first intense exposure to language was through Tini who had spent her days keeping an eye on me as she prepared meals and did all the housework in a pre-electric era.
Tini spoke
“Böhmisch,”
the local dialect of the former kingdom of Bohemia that had become the cornerstone of Czechoslovakia. She was born not far from Strobnitz, the small village near the Austrian border where my father’s parents had long owned the town’s only store.
Tini told me that she was sure we left Strobnitz in September of 1938 and that we had gone to Prague. I replied that this was impossible because we did not come to Canada until the spring of 1939. Besides, my mother had repeatedly regretted that she had never been to Prague. Tini was unshakable in her version of the story:
It was right after Hitler made his speech about the Sudeten -land. Usually your parents didn’t need me in the evening, but that night they asked me to stay with you because they wanted to hear the speech. The whole family gathered around the radio. There had already been rumours about a place called Dachau and I heard them say that some Jews had just disappeared overnight. You left for Prague the next day, and I helped your grandmother close up the house in Strobnitz. Your grandparents moved to Budweis two or three days after you left, and they gave me a key to the house in Strobnitz. This is not a trust I could forget.
Only when Tini produced a postcard in my mother’s handwriting mailed from Prague in November 1938 did I believe her. My mother hadsent it to the address of Tini’s parents. Tini had kept that postcard through the war and all its attendant dispersals.
My visit was an emotional time for Tini as well as for me. In Germany, the topic of the war had been off-limits both for the millions who had voted for
“Sixty years ago, they tore you from my arms. Never did I think to see you again. God’s Grace has brought you back to me.”
My Mercedes woman, whose name I never learned, walked quietly to where we stood. Beaming, she shook hands with Frau Fuchs, but declined the opportunity to linger. She spoke with tact and understanding:
“These moments are for you alone. I leave you to enjoy this special reunion.”
I followed Tini up the stairs to the fourth floor, marvelling at the erect back and powerful legs of this woman in her eighties. Although she barely came up to my shoulder, she gave the impression of strength. She was well built. Not fat, but buxom, her breasts proudly pointing the way. A sheaf of naturally grey hair enveloped a wrinkled face that to me was beautiful.
Words tumbled out of us. She spoke, I spoke, we both spoke, sometimes at once. A thousand questions, each answer leading in turn to fresh questions.
“Tell me about… how come… why… when… where… what did you do…?”
My questions continued, not just for hours, but for days. We took time out for other things without interrupting the long conversations about a past that I could not remember, yet that seemed etched into my being.
Helen in the arms of Tini, 1937
Tini confided that immediately after our departure, she had approached her boyfriend and announced that she wanted to be married. She had told him that her arms felt unbearably empty. Despite the financial and political uncertainties that swirled about them, he agreed to a hasty wedding. Their son and their daughter Erni were born shortly thereafter.
“It was as if I had to replace the child that had been stolen from my arms, ”
Tini said.
“When they took you away, they tore out a piece of my heart.”
The sound of Tini’s voice awoke wordless memories. Her accent itself is a strange clone of my own way of speaking. People used to comment that my accent was different from that of my parents who spoke
Hochdeutsch,
the cultivated German considered to be “classic.” It was strange that I spoke more of a dialect than my own family. Now I understood. My first intense exposure to language was through Tini who had spent her days keeping an eye on me as she prepared meals and did all the housework in a pre-electric era.
Tini spoke
“Böhmisch,”
the local dialect of the former kingdom of Bohemia that had become the cornerstone of Czechoslovakia. She was born not far from Strobnitz, the small village near the Austrian border where my father’s parents had long owned the town’s only store.
Tini told me that she was sure we left Strobnitz in September of 1938 and that we had gone to Prague. I replied that this was impossible because we did not come to Canada until the spring of 1939. Besides, my mother had repeatedly regretted that she had never been to Prague. Tini was unshakable in her version of the story:
It was right after Hitler made his speech about the Sudeten -land. Usually your parents didn’t need me in the evening, but that night they asked me to stay with you because they wanted to hear the speech. The whole family gathered around the radio. There had already been rumours about a place called Dachau and I heard them say that some Jews had just disappeared overnight. You left for Prague the next day, and I helped your grandmother close up the house in Strobnitz. Your grandparents moved to Budweis two or three days after you left, and they gave me a key to the house in Strobnitz. This is not a trust I could forget.
Only when Tini produced a postcard in my mother’s handwriting mailed from Prague in November 1938 did I believe her. My mother hadsent it to the address of Tini’s parents. Tini had kept that postcard through the war and all its attendant dispersals.
My visit was an emotional time for Tini as well as for me. In Germany, the topic of the war had been off-limits both for the millions who had voted for
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