At a very young age, wholly unintended, I learned that no matter how well we feel protected, war is a vicious circle.
My parents had been born in the late 19th century in the Bukovina, in the Eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where they had suffered through the first World War. When it was over, my parents moved to Switzerland, where my brother and I were born.
When Hitler came to power in Germany, my mother questioned if Switzerland would be able to stay neutral. She was not going to live through another war. And thus, in 1939, we emigrated to America and settled in Woodmere, a small suburb on Long Island. Most of our family had stayed behind in France, Romania and Russia.
On Sundays, the cousins who also had fled to the United States would visit us on Long Island. Invariably they would discuss their wonderful youth in the Bukovina, which had been destroyed in World War I. My mother described the hardships, how her mother had mixed sawdust with their flour rations to make it go further. Her parents didn’t eat breakfast so there be more for the children. Our father would recount to us how during that war, his father, a flour miller, forfeited money and bartered his services for food.
Then they would discuss what was going on during World War II. There were rumors of horrible concentration camps in Europe. My father got a postcard from France that his sister had been deported to Auschwitz. From the time I was 8, my older brother and I would listen to these stories. I remember thinking that these were their stories, not mine. That I would never have such worries. I was now in America.
Fortunately, quite a few of our family back in Europe had managed to survive the war. Thus, in the summer of 1947, my parents booked us passage on the Mauretania to Paris, where we were to meet relatives we hardly remembered.
The ship was glorious, with its movies, swimming pool and nightly dances. Most of the passengers were like us, Europeans who had spent the war in the United States but who could not wait until Europe recovered from the war. They wanted to see their relatives and friends, and hoped that maybe there would be something left of their old home. But I grew up in America; I was not a part of their stories.
On the day we arrived in Cherbourg, the captain informed us that because the port had been bombed, we would be transported ashore via tenders. The passengers crowded the railing on deck for our first glimpse of the Europe I had heard my parents talk about — the Europe where children were polite, where the culture was beyond comparison, where the cuisine and wine were excellent. It was also the Europe my family and I had been glad to leave in 1939.
As we got off the tender, we stared in silence at the bombed buildings. There was nothing left, just open cellars and jagged, broken walls. We then boarded a train to Paris, still in silence. We looked at the countryside with its ripped-up roads, burned-out barns, exposed staircases leading to nowhere.
In Paris, a cab took us to the Hotel Regina, an old world hotel near the Louvre. But there was no traffic. Paris seemed silent.
After we unpacked, Mama produced a very large, round corn bread from our deli in Woodmere. “There is really no food available,” Papa said, “and in the morning we’ll be glad to have that with our tea.” The bread had been packed in layers of wax paper and linen towels.
“They have no bread yet?” I exclaimed. “They are eating ground- up rats,” my father answered.
We had dinner in a vegetarian restaurant. In the bathroom, neatly cut-up newspapers took the place of toilet paper.
The next morning, Papa ordered tea for all of us, then noticed our deli bread. In the center was a large hole where the rats had come in the night and eaten. Papa cut around the hole and gave us each a slice.
We spent our days with about 18 of our European relatives, ages 10 to 70, all of them underweight, pale and nervous. They told us how they had managed to stay alive, often hiding, sleeping three in a bed, starving, freezing and paying people to help them survive. I went with some younger cousins to the Louvre. They talked of the relatives who had died in labor camps or been gassed to death in concentration camps. I comforted myself by thinking, “This can never happen in America.”
We discussed how America would help Europe. Our parents talked about the Marshall Plan, which would give Europe all the food it needed.
Finally, we took a train to Switzerland, which had in the end managed to stay neutral. The people looked happy and healthy. The cities were clean. Our friends told us how, while they were cut off from imports, they had made do with what was available. I kept saying to myself, “I can’t wait to get back to the States where we have no shortages.”
Before heading back to New York, we stopped in Paris to say goodbye to our family, who saw us off at the boat train to Cherbourg. As the conductor yelled “Parti, Parti,” we threw kisses at our relatives from the open windows.
In our compartment was a somber-looking man wearing an old- fashioned dark pin-striped suit. The passport he was holding had a diplomatic insignia on it and the name of a country I could not decipher. Was it Czechoslovakian? Hungarian?
As the train neared Cherbourg, I saw khaki-colored boxes neatly arranged for shipment, or perhaps for distribution in Europe.
“That’s the Marshall plan!” I exclaimed, full of pride. “We in America know how to get things done. There will be no more shortages in Europe.” Our diplomat, who had sat without speaking throughout the trip while we had chatted merrily, said softly, “That’s not the Marshall Plan. Those are the American dead being shipped back.”
We looked out the window again and recognized the boxes as coffins. None of us spoke as the train moved very slowly, as if to honor the dead. As far as the eye could see there were khaki-colored coffins.
My chest tightened. I tried but could not comfort myself with the words, “In America, we . . . .”
We, too, are affected by the vicious circle.
Edith Lynn Beer (edithbeer@ ) divides her time between Steamboat Springs and New York.
