|
Trip breathes life into picture from past
Published October 11, 2009
There is a little girl in a picture I have studied all of my life. In it, I am several months old and she is two years older than that. Her mother is holding both of us in her lap while the three of us gaze into a camera.
The photograph was taken in Germany about 10 years after the end of World War II in Europe. The little girl and her mother were German citizens. My mother and father were renting a little room on the second floor of their home. It was a newly built structure at the end of a street that stopped in the trees of a hillside.
I was born in Landsthul, Germany. My father was in the Air Force stationed near that now famous Army hospital and he was one of the many enlisted serviceman who lived off of the base. His choice of quarters in our case was wise because he not only found my mother and I comfortable living quarters, but a loving German family as well.
Little did the three of us know our time spent living in that house with that family would have a lasting influence on us the rest of our lives. Although I was just a baby, the stories, food and German phrases my parents continued to use became a part of who I am.
Germany and those pictures seemed so far away, and I never dreamed I would ever return to that little house.
But this past summer, thanks to the encouragement of a Russian foreign exchange student who we might as well have adopted, my wife and I found the impetus to travel across the “Big Pond.”
To us, Yulia Chernyavskaya is as close to a daughter as you can get without the legal papers. Now a senior at the University of St. Petersburg, she had traveled to Germany for the summer break to study the language. She begged us to come see her and offered to translate for us as we traveled the country.
My sweet wife, who had long since come to grips with the fact that a vacation for me was a week spent riding a tractor in Mason, Texas, was speechless when I said, “Let’s do it. Let’s go to Germany.”
And to her disbelief, to Germany we went.
We met Yulia in the Frankfurt airport, and my first bout with the Autobahn was a rain-slickened, surreal blur. Somehow we made it to our destination in Mainz and spent a day recovering from the time change.
By the second day, I was like a horse pawing at the ground to go see Landsthul.
The house we had lived in was in a little town next to Landsthul called Miesenbach. Thanks to an onboard GPS system and Yulia’s map-reading skills, we drove straight into the driveway of that house in my baby pictures.
I wanted to sit and stare at it for a few minutes, but there was a young lady in the driveway, grocery sacks in hand obviously needing an explanation for our intrusion.
Yulia quickly explained why we were there and asked if she knew the family that had built the house.
Of course she knew builders — they were her grandparents and her mother was the current owner. Her mother, as it turned out, was the little girl in my baby pictures. Even more surprising, her mother was only a few blocks away, cleaning one of her rent houses.
The young woman encouraged us to stop by to see her. At first I said no — I was raised to not impose — but thankfully my traveling companions weren’t raised the same, so to the rent house we went.
As we pulled into the drive, a lady potting plants turned to look at us. She had the same puzzled look as her daughter.
Yulia left the car first to ask her name and explain why we were there. She then looked back at me and nodded.
Beyond the garden gloves, soil stains and years of living stood the beautiful little girl in my pictures, now a beautiful lady, Karola, the daughter of Alma and Leo Wach.
Still a total stranger, she allowed this old grey-headed American to stand next to her to have a picture made for my mother. Then, after trying to explain through Yulia what her family had meant to my mother and father, I thanked her for her time and we got back in the car.
As we were about to back out of the driveway, Karola came up to the window and asked if we would like to have coffee with she and her husband later that afternoon. Of course I jumped at the chance.
Our visit that afternoon was charming. A table of china was set for coffee and cake in their backyard garden. We looked at old family photographs and exchanged tales about our lives and families.
To say the least, if was a remarkable experience.
As I sat in that backyard, studying the old house and watching Karola’s face, I had to smile. Many years ago, the Wach family took my little American family in and made us feel comfortable, and here it was happening again.
Whoever said, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” nailed it. There was a reason the baby picture of the three of us meant something to me, but the words had always escaped me. Now I understand.
Bill Cornwell is editor and publisher of The Facts.
Share |
Save |
Mail |
Print
|
|
|
 |
|
Click for all
Top Ads listing
|
