The Wandering Jew

The past couple years of writing have confirmed my suspicion that a good childhood is strongly correlated with both happiness and sanity.

For example, my love of T-shirts, Donuts, Pancakes and Photography, fascination with Computers, pursuit of E-tickets, my big sister, being a nerd—every one is rooted in an early memory. For the most part, I was a happy kid.

My mom didn’t get the same opportunity. As I wrote in Yom Hashoa, the Nazis stole her childhood:

My mom is a Holocaust survivor. My grandma and grandpa put her on a train when she was 12. That was the Kindertransport, and it took her to safety in England where a family with a daughter her age, took her in.

My mom would have turned 99 last week, and since she’s passed, I’ve tried to understand more about this time in her life. She rarely talked about it, but I know it lurked behind a lot of her personality including why she was so spectacularly stubborn.

Leaving Vienna on that train and her subsequent year in England, alone and on the run from the Nazis, had to be traumatic. My mom told a few stories of the good times, and sometimes I would hear about an event in passing. My sister helped fill in some blanks as did JFran, who shared her time growing up in England to coax details out of my mom.

The train from Vienna took a couple of days, and the kids weren’t allowed to get off. They stopped in Prague before entering Germany. There would be no stops in Nazi Germany, they went straight through to the Dutch port city Hook of Holland. My mom waited there for a ferry to cross the North Sea, another journey now by ship, filled with more unfamiliar sights, sounds and sensations.

The ferry took her to Harwich, England. Hundreds of Kindertransport children were housed there in emergency accommodations at an old summer camp. However, it was winter, and my mom was cold, outfitted with Wellington boots that didn’t fit (Wellies), and fed a British diet including smelly smoked fish, bones and all (Kippers). It was strange and she didn’t like any of it.

My mom stayed at that camp for weeks before being placed in a Foster home. She remembered trying to find her a new family in a room full of signs she couldn’t read, amidst a crush of people speaking a language she couldn’t understand.

The foster family lived in Bath, the mom was a nurse and they had a daughter the same age as my mom. She came down with measles from her journey. Measles was a nasty virus back then and a common occurrence in the stuffed quarters of the Kindertransport.

Her new family’s daughter caught it as well, so the mom quarantined them together in a bed with only an English-to-German dictionary for entertainment. Three weeks later, my mom emerged fluent in English. My mom would later learn Spanish and a little Korean too.¹

The time in Bath with her foster family was a bright spot for my mom. However, it didn’t last long², and she left her new family for a boarding school outside London. I wonder if she got to celebrate her 13th birthday with that family.

She must have been at the boarding school another six months before my grandparents sent for her, having made it out and over to the United States³. That trip across the Atlantic must have been something. My mom went on a big and crowded ocean liner filled with 1,500 passengers and crew. It was winter again, and they zig-zagged across rough Atlantic seas, running dark at night to avoid enemy submarines.

My mom was bedridden at the end of her life, and so I spent a lot of time at her bedside—both of us bored. To her dismay (she was both extremely organized and extremely possessive), I’d rummage through her desk. When I found her Immigrant ID Card, I looked up the boat, the MV Georgic, and showed her a picture of it. Her eyes lit up and she told me how fun that trip was, because the boat was full of American soldiers and she got lots of attention.

That picture makes me happy—she looks like a handful. It’s not like my mom didn’t have agency. While much of what happened that year was out of her control, she was never shy and I think that year stoked a fierce desire to regain control over her life.

She settled in with my grandparents, completing high school and college in Boston and apparently she still hadn’t seen enough:

After college, she moved across the country to LA, where she met my dad. Yom Hashoa has the wedding pic:

When my mom got out of high school, my grandpa’s job took him to Los Angeles. About 5 years later my mom and dad met at UCLA.

A few years after that, they married downtown at the LA courthouse, with my grandpa and grandma as witness.

Maybe 10 years after my mom and dad got married, my mom took me on a vacation to Crater Lake. It’s the only trip I ever went on with just her—my sister stayed home with my dad. My mom wasn’t particularly nurturing, but I have warm memories of Crater Lake—going on hikes, singing songs in German and listening to books at night.

We took the bus. My dad drove us to the Greyhound station in Bakersfield and from there it was a long day to Oregon overnight, and then another bout of buses and shuttles to get to Crater Lake.

The most vivid memory I have is my mom’s excitement, bordering on hysteria, when she saw my dad in the parking lot when we finally pulled back into Bakersfield. My mom sat by the window, anxiously looking out, and when she spotted my dad on the other side of the bus, she leapt over me to yell and wave at him, bumping into passengers on the other side of the aisle while the bus was still pulling in.

I’m not saying my mom was unhappy, or that she was crazy, but she often behaved like a 13 year old, and I do think her fractured childhood made her a little nuts.

When I turned 20, she jumped on the back of my new motorcycle for a spin:

After they retired, my parents made a trip back to Europe. But my mom didn’t want to go to Vienna, she wanted to go to Bath, where I think she had a moment of happiness with her foster family.

I took my kids to Vienna to see where their grandma grew up. This article has a picture of her apartment, just around the corner from Sigmund Freud. While my mom was not the easiest person to get along with, she worked hard to suppress her childhood trauma, and I think that was key to my happy childhood.

Here are a couple of old Vienna pics before the Nazis. The back of the first pic of my grandparents notes how much I look like my grandpa in my mom’s neat handwriting. The second picture is my grandma and her three sisters⁴. My grandma was the oldest, on the left:

My mom loved plants, and growing up, a Wandering Jew plant lived in our kitchen. It was perched high on a shelf, and it grew all the way down until it reached the floor. My mom would take cuttings and plant more.

We gave my sister this Wandering Jew when we visited, we have more cuttings growing in our house.

1. She taught English in LA’s Koreatown, and the community sent her and some other teachers to Korea.

2. Not sure why, but my moms relationship with her mom was strained, so my theory is that my grandma didn’t like her living with another family and arranged it.

3. I don’t know how they got out.

4. The youngest sister got out with her family to Australia. My sister thinks the middle sister got out as well, but we don’t know where.