Where the mind goes

Maybe it's a function of age, but my mind goes to the past a lot.

I can't sleep so I try to remember the past - what it felt like to be a child. Where we lived. Why we lived there........I have a complicated past and I remember back to when I was 2-maybe 2 1/2.

I was born in Berlin in 1937. We were Jewish - not very observant and quite assimilated - we thought.

My Father was a Berliner - proud of Germany - proud of the Olympics..........I think he must have been devastated at what became of his Germany. His "heimat".

Things got very nasty for Jews in the '30's. My Mother described it as the best years of her life.
She was young and in love - she married and had a baby. Wow.! That made me very happy too.
But in the climate of Germany at that time Jews were having all their civil rights removed; their businesses destroyed; their lives at risk as they walked in areas designated as being for Jews - wearing their yellow stars........puleeze. How could that be wonderful?

My Father at least was rational. He looked for a way out. He got a job in England helping to build a refugee camp for which he and his family would get free passage to New Zealand.
He left in 1938 - my Mother was to sell the business and gather as much as possible to take with her.

From England my Father could see the deteriorating conditions and the incipient war - Germany was totally blacked out and only heard propaganda on their radios and in their newspapers. After "Kristallnacht" I think it was, my Father told my Mother to take the baby (me) and get out.

Mom had a visa as a housemaid in England. So we left Germany with that exit possibility.

We rode a train to the port of exit - filled with women and children my Mother told me. It was night and the children all slept. The train stopped somewhere and soldiers - Nazis - got on and told all the women to get off the train. They assembled them on the platform and the train started to leave with all the children on board. My Mother had held back to the rear of the group and ran for the train with some others. Not all the women made it back. Mom didn't know what happened to the children left on the train.

The war started 6 weeks after we landed in England. We landed on my second birthday, July 16.

My Father was immediately interned as an "enemy alien". Mom was told she had to work, or go back to Germany - this must have been before the war actually started. I can't imagine them sending her back to a country they were at war with

. No housemaid position had provisions for a toddler, so a Jewish assistance agency arranged for me to be taken in - adopted? - by an English family.

My Mother met this man on the train platform. He spoke no German - she spoke no English.
She handed me over to him screaming my head off, and he left with me.

Many years later, Mr. Sims told me that within 6 weeks I was singing English nursery rhymes.
He had called me in Los Angeles to tell me that "Tanta", his wife had died. I thought of her as my foster mother - and indeed that's what she was. She cared for me, in her cool British way,
and we had stayed in contact - erraticaly(?) - for years after we left for the USA.

That's all for tonight. I'm sure my mind will bring me back here again.