What, then, are my earliest first-hand recollections from this time?
I have long thought that my earliest memory must have been seeing my mother and her best friend Claire, among many others in the apartment buildings in our neighborhood, throwing shredded newspaper out of their windows and yelling for joy that the war in Europe was over (V-E Day, May 8 or 9, 1945). In my memory of that, I am looking out past the buildings and I see the water (the Hudson River) and the land beyond it (the New Jersey Palisades) and I think these are respectively the Atlantic Ocean and Germany where my daddy is in the army and from which he will now return. (Jersey and Germany--- similar sounds to an infant not quite 2 years old?)
But, wait! If I was only two or so at that time, is it even possible that I actually remember this happening? Or was I just told about it later? Or did I later see photos of this or similar scenes, perhaps V-J Day, August 15.1945? In fact, a few years ago, out of curiosity, I told Claire (then in her mid-nineties) about that memory and she sweetly let me know that she and her family didn’t actually move into our building until 1946, so she couldn’t have been in that scene I remembered so vividly.
Other than this possible memory of V-E or V-J day... nothing. It’s all a blank (except for the photos in the meticulous albums my mother created with her priceless captions) until late December, 1947 and the great blizzard in New York City when my father took me to City Center Music Hall to see Larry Adler and Paul Draper and afterwards on the subway, he protected me (perched on his shoulders) from the pushing and shoving masses, especially a drunken sailor (er-lie in the mornin’)
However, with few, if any concrete memories of these war years, I am left to surmise, to infer, to guess, to hypothesize.
Who were these first time parents? How did they meet and marry and make a baby, all in just 2 wartime years? And then make another baby, born just weeks before the war ended in August 1945? And in the finally in post-war New York City, still another in January 1948?
Of course, I knew nothing until years later about “how babies were made” and I also knew almost nothing about my hard-working, rarely present father for many more years.
Ah, but my mother...she was my guide into life. Nearly all my early childhood memories are of her and of her stories and photos from her childhood in Germany with her slightly older brother, Helle, her warm and loving Muti, and her stern Poppa. The sandcastles they built at the beach. The ski trips they took in the mountains. The BIG house where they lived with servants when they were very little. My grandfather’s fortunes, made and lost.
And then fast-forward through Helle’s foolish bravery (December 1936) and his death (June 4, 1937); the failed intervention of the American government in his case; my mother’s and her parents’ narrow escape to America in late 1938; my broken-hearted grandfather’s death in September, 1940.
My mother’s rejection by the historically Jewish Mt. Sinai School of Nursing, ostensibly because her “English wasn’t good enough” (or maybe because her accent was too German for a Jewish institution at this time); and her acceptance (ironically) by Columbia Presbyterian Nursing School where she graduated first in her class with a B.S. and an R.N in 1941.
My parents’ whirlwind courtship and wedding (September 1941), officiated by a Protestant minister, the father of a nursing friend of my mother, in their Hartford, Connecticut home, much to the dismay of my father’s only-culturally Jewish family. (My father's brother insisted even 60 years later that my mother wasn't really Jewish.)
My father’s induction into the army as a doctor (November 1942).
My birth (June 5, 1943), followed by six months in Charleston, South Carolina where my mother, grandmother and father lived together, while my father served as an army doctor at Stark General Hospital. My Grandma Hirsch’s death (April 1944) and then another 6 months living on an army base (Camp Shelby) in Hattiesburg, Mississippi...
...which ended the day after we celebratedThanksgiving with my father’s deployment to the European Theater of Operations (ETO), November 1944.
And with the German surrender (April 1945) his preparation for the Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO) even as, in his absence, my mother gave birth to her second child, my sister, Barbara (July 13. 1945).
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| My mother's emotionally revealing caption, written in her Americanized printing more than 60 years later |
I try to imagine what my mother must have felt during these times--- she had been a nineteen year-old medical student in Prague when she worked valiantly, but ultimately unsuccessfully to prevent her brother’s execution; after which she’d spent several years in this new and unfamiliar country, caring for her emotionally shattered parents, while pursuing a career in medicine---not as a doctor, but as a nurse; and then suddenly, as the country edged toward war with her native Germany, she became the wife of this highly intellectual, sexually-conflicted American doctor she’d only recently met; and then she was the mother of two children, both born during while her husband (my father) served as a neuro-psychiatrist in a world war being fought against the very forces of evil that had destroyed her own family.
I try to imagine what she felt, but I cannot. Could I if I were a woman? Or a refugee from violence? Or young again, myself? Or if I hadn’t had all the privileges I have had? I don’t know.
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