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Chapter 3

Rooted in Love

For my father and my mother have forsaken me,

but the Lord will take me in.

PSALM 27:10, ESV

My mom and I arrived in Germany to visit my grandparents in the month of April. Ingeborg, depressed and unhappy, concocted a bizarre tale that she had divorced my father. It was another blow to my grandparents. They loved him and had placed his pictures throughout their house. Not realizing the true source of her depression and emotional instability and believing she was now on her own, they suggested she leave the baby with them until she recovered and put her life in order. The idea must have been more than acceptable to Ingeborg, who didn’t want the baby in the first place.

“Where is my daughter?” my dad asked, bewildered, when he met her at the airport.

“I left her in Germany,” Ingeborg stated.

Fear and helplessness gripped Bari as his mind processed what Ingeborg was saying. “But I’m her father, and I want her,” he stammered.

Ingeborg shrugged and retorted, “She’s better off there. Her grandparents love her more than you do.”

Bari’s dismay turned to anger. “I’m buying you a ticket right now. You are going right back to Germany to get my daughter and bring her back to me.”

Dad bought the ticket on the spot. Ingeborg got on a plane that night without having left the Toronto airport, flew back to Germany and then returned to Canada without me.

This time when Bari met her at the airport, she announced, “I want a divorce.”

“I want my daughter!” he insisted.

Ingeborg had the advantage. “Over my dead body,” she spat. “You will never see your daughter again.”

SEPARATED

My father went to the chief of police in Toronto, who contacted the chief of police in Berlin. He discovered that he had no legal right over me while I was in Germany. My mother was a German citizen, and he wasn’t. I was in her country. What’s more, if he were to go to Germany to get me, he would risk being jailed, not because my grandparents would have him arrested but because my mother had the wicked foresight to make such arrangements.

My parents separated but remained in Toronto. One day Bari was driving in the city and saw my mother just ahead of him. He sped up and cut in front of her so she couldn’t get away. In the middle of an intersection he jumped from his car and knelt on the pavement beside her door, begging her to bring me home. Delayed cars honked and tried to get around them. She refused him mercy and repeated, “Over my dead body. You will never see your daughter again.”

Eight months later Ingeborg called my dad. “If you want Belma, you can go get her. She’s with a woman who has a private adoption agency in Toronto.” She gave him her number. He immediately called, and the woman confirmed I was there. Identifying himself as my father, he said he would come right away to pick me up.

He arrived at the address. Ingeborg was there with a woman she introduced as the proprietress. She had divorce papers in her hand and demanded that my father sign them before he could see me. In desperation, he signed them. Ingeborg left, and the woman said, “I’ll be right back. I’ll go get Belma.”

My dad waited. The woman didn’t return. She had disappeared out the back door. My father not only discovered the place wasn’t an adoption agency but found out I wasn’t in Canada. He had fallen prey to one of Ingeborg’s schemes. He later learned that she had paid the woman to deceive him.

After this incident my father was unable to cope and had to seek psychiatric help. It would be another 19 years before he would see me.

HEAVEN

On the other side of the ocean, however, I was thriving.

One of my richest memories is of spending time outside the city with Oma and Opa on a garden property they had purchased in 1904. We went there every weekend. Without a car it was a 45-minute walk from the underground train near our home in Berlin.

Our garden weekends could not have been more heavenly. My memories of those days—the contented chatter between my grandparents as they worked, the clean air thick with the scent of flowers, the warm breezes, the security—helped sustain me through the horrendous years to come. It was a beautiful garden filled with love and smiles. I’ll never forget walking hand in hand along the pathways with Oma, admiring each unique flower and exploring their centres with my nose to find the sweetest aromas.

I loved to be with Oma. Slim, with dark curly hair, she always wore a skirt or dress. I never saw her in slacks, not even in the garden. She was always a lady.

Opa was fun. A little taller than Oma, he was a jolly man. He loved to laugh at life. He, too, was always dressed respectably, including in the garden, where he grew and looked after every kind and colour of flower and fruit tree.

After the war everyone preserved their own produce. Oma canned everything. She loved to put down my favourite fruits—sour cherries, pears, raspberries, plums.

While my grandparents worked, I played house with my doll, rode my tricycle down the pathways, made roads in my little sandbox, and played with Purzel. She and I were great friends. I dressed her in a wedding dress, and we all laughed, seeing her strut with a veil.

The house in the country was a small one-room painted-board structure with no insulation. It contained a plain bench, a chesterfield and a table. At night we put the table on the bench and made a bed where we all slept together.

My great-grandparents had a little house right beside us on the same property. They also came on weekends from their Berlin apartment. They visited us in the garden and brought me candies. I was raised as if they were my grandparents and my grandparents were my parents. A lovely family! I was a blessed child.

Our lifestyle was simple, but it was more than adequate. It seemed abundant and, in today’s materialistic world, even enviable.

Our refrigerator was a hole in the ground. Opa climbed down into it and filled a basket for Oma to pull up with a rope. The bathroom was an outhouse, but it seemed perfectly normal, and no one minded. We didn’t have running water, and neither did anyone else. We had a pump with an endless supply of cool, clean water. A coal stove and candles took the place of electric heat and lights. We went to bed when the sun went down and got up when it rose.

A FOUNDATION OF FAITH

Every night we prayed to Jesus, and sometimes Oma told me stories about Him, even though she never spoke of having a personal relationship with Him. Faith probably came down the family line. I can imagine that her mother prayed with her the way she did with me. Oma certainly raised me on Christian principles of honesty, integrity, respect for elders and other godly values. We also celebrated the accepted Christian holidays. Both Christmas and Easter were special.

At Christmas we went to the Roman Catholic Church to see the nativity scene. We also bought a tree, never bigger than me. Opa measured it and said, “Okay, that’s the tree.” We took it home, put it on the table and decorated it.

All our food was homemade, except the oranges on the lazy Susan in the middle of the table. This was the only time of year we had them. Every delicious treat was placed on it. We gave it a twirl, and whatever stopped in front of each of us, we ate. We swung that lazy Susan all night—just Opa, Oma and me, and we spent a lot of time together. Family was everything.

At Easter we were in the garden house. Oma got up at five o’clock in the morning and put Easter eggs in the flower buds outside. When the sun rose and warmed the petals, they opened, and there were the eggs! One year Opa dressed up in an Easter bunny suit and hopped past us. I thought about it for a moment. “Oma,” I said, “I don’t want the Easter bunny. I want Jesus.” I told her I thought I had been born in the wrong time period. I so would have liked to be born when Jesus lived on earth. Even then, when I was so little, I longed for Him.

PREPARATION FOR LIFE

My grandparents influenced me in many life matters. Among important things I learned from them was how to handle money wisely. They taught me to take a penny and stretch it to ten—a skill that prepared me for the work I do now.

Like so many, we had very little after the war. I went shopping with Oma every week. We wrote a list and visited four stores. In each store we priced the items and recorded the prices. Then we went back to the store that had the best price. Whatever money was left, we hid under the table between the wash pans and saved it.

At five years of age I learned to save. Oma got me play money and showed me how to count it. I stared into her twinkly green-brown eyes as she taught me, loving every moment with her. She made pretend grocery lists of things for me to buy with the money and a game of seeing how much I could save. I played shopping with my little cash register for hours, lining up make-believe money and dolls and pretending to take them to the store to buy things.

Oma also gave me an allowance of ten cents every week, as long as I was a good girl. She said, “We’re going to spend five cents and save five.” We went to the store with five cents, and she helped me learn how to spend it. She pointed out how value increased through wise choices: “You can get ten of these candies, or five of these. Make sure you get the most for your money.”

There were no better people to teach me life skills than my beloved Oma and Opa. Oma taught me how to set the table—knife here, fork there. She taught me good manners and was always proud of me. When we walked down the street and met someone, I had to curtsy. She instilled a strong sense of goodness in me, saying, “This is wrong, but that is right,” and she showed me what to do.

My grandparents loved me and gave me a wonderful sense of security, but somewhere in my heart I knew something was missing. Things weren’t quite what they were supposed to be, because I wasn’t with my parents.

As much as I wanted a mommy, I especially felt my daddy’s absence. I looked at him and my mother in photographs and thought how handsome he was. I could feel that he had adored me, and my heart ached to be with him. I stared at his picture and wished I could see him. I didn’t understand why he never came to visit. My mother came only once, when I was four years old, and I remember her pushing my stroller. I was so happy, thinking, I’ve got my mommy! I’ve got my mommy! I knew this was the way it was supposed to be.

When I was five and a half, Ingeborg sent me a parcel from Canada. Oma always spoke positively of her. “Look!” she said, handing me the package. “Your mommy sent you these sweaters.” Out of my mouth came the words, “Why would she send me all these sweaters if she doesn’t love me?” My young mind had grasped the truth.

SCHOOL DAYS

Kindergarten was just around the corner from us in a Protestant church run by Catholic nuns. I liked it, but it made me nervous. The nuns who taught there were strong, loud women and made me feel uneasy. It cost money for parents to send children to kindergarten, and for that reason I was only there in the morning. At noon Oma picked me up, because in the afternoon we only had lunch and a nap.

On the day Oma enrolled me in grade one I felt a particular twinge of sadness. I loved my grandparents, but I was almost ashamed that I didn’t have parents. Everyone else was with their mom and dad, but I was with my grandmother.

I was afraid I wouldn’t do well in school. In some ways I felt stunted or incomplete—unable to move ahead without my mother and father. I was different because my parents didn’t want me and I had to be raised by my grandparents.

In grade one we learned to read, write and do math. Then in grades two and three, we learned to print. Math in Germany was about four years ahead of the Canadian curriculum.

Every day when I went home Oma helped me with homework. She always pumped encouragement and delight into her “little precious one.” At times she taught me songs she wrote, and we did little dances together.

Another joy I experienced with my grandparents was life at the store they owned. After the war, many people didn’t have electricity. Opa, being an electrician, fixed their lamps and restored electricity to homes that were bombed out. Oma got up at three o’clock in the morning and pulled a little wagon to the next town. At the garbage dump she filled it with scrap metal, which Opa used for making lamps. He installed wiring in people’s homes and sold them his homemade lamps.

HOME AT THE STORE

My grandparents were really hard workers and made a million dollars in 13 years because ours was one of the busiest stores in town. Opa sold his lamps there, and Oma tended the counter. She was conscious of her appearance. Her hair had turned white when she was 30 years old from the traumas of war. “People don’t want to see an old lady behind the counter,” she quipped, and she dyed her hair dark.

I spent a lot of time at the back of the store. It was home to me. Oma’s kitchen was there, with space for me to play. Some days Oma wore a path from the storefront to the kitchen, where she cooked and baked. The aroma of strudel baking always filled the air. I also recall her making liver and onions once a month. When she made it, it tasted wonderful!

There was a Murphy bed in a room between the storefront and the kitchen. Sometimes we slept there to deter burglars. It wasn’t uncommon for Oma to spot thieves and run out the door and down the street after them.

She was often alone in the store, looking after things by herself while Opa worked at someone’s house. I felt sorry for her. Even then I wondered how she managed all her tasks and me.

I was mesmerized by Oma’s stories about the war. One particular story of running for cover gave her nightmares.

WAR AND DANGER

Before bombers came, she said, two warning sirens sounded. At the first one, people had five minutes to get to the bunker. On one occasion when the siren wailed, she ran to the bunker, but some friends who lived on the same street didn’t hear it. They didn’t run for cover until the second siren. By that time, they only had three minutes to get to safety. Panicked, they ran to the shelter, but it was too late. The plane carrying the bomb roared overhead. Oma turned to look just as the bomb dropped. Its heat liquefied the asphalt, and the street became a molten river that buckled over the people like a wave, swallowing them and burning them alive. Oma heard their dying screams and watched in horror as they disappeared.

Each time she told this story she relived the grief of losing her friends and being the only one to survive. As a little girl I listened spellbound, hoping my presence would comfort her.

Oma told me story after story, crying and feeling pain for those who had suffered. Whenever Oma could, she tried to alleviate suffering. I remember how many times she reached out to others, especially to one single mom whose son, Rainer, was my best friend.

I never learned what happened to Rainer’s father. Perhaps he had died in the war, but I felt very sad for Rainer because he didn’t have a daddy. My grandparents used to help his mom however they could—with groceries or electrical needs. Rainer and I played together when his mother came over. I remember her wiping tears as she and Oma talked. Meanwhile Rainer and I made great, long games of hopscotch on the sidewalk with chalk—a luxury—and hoped it wouldn’t rain to wash away our drawings.

Even though my life seemed to be near-perfect and the night of the Berlin Wall terror was behind us, danger still prevailed in Berlin. At our country house, my grandparents were always alert, not knowing when a Russian soldier might appear. Fortunately, Oma’s premonitions always warned us in time, and Opa never questioned them.

Once while we were in the garden, she sensed that something was wrong and warned Opa to be prepared for “a dangerous intruder” that day. Right away Opa turned the furniture in our little house upside down and sprinkled dirt on it and on the floor. It looked abandoned. Sure enough, four hours later the Russians came.

Opa had built a hiding place under the floor, and we scrambled down into it. Oma held her hand firmly around Purzel’s snout. From where we were hiding we could see the boots of the Russians marching toward our house. The soldiers opened the door and looked inside. Opa understood them to say, “Oh, we must have already been here. There is nothing here. It’s been dealt with.”

No matter how frightening things were, I always felt safe because I lived in my grandparents’ love. Had we lost everything or had nowhere to live, it wouldn’t have mattered, as long as we were together as family. My life was built on a foundation of love and security that strengthened me to endure the coming years. Regardless of how horrendous things became, my grandparents had given me a plumb line for what was right and healthy and what was wrong and abnormal. Soon that knowledge tested my very life, but God had a plan.