Someday You Will Understand by Nina Wolff Feld

Author:Nina Wolff Feld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

* Yiddish for “miserable Jews.”

CHAPTER 9

It Is Your Moral Duty: DPs Among the Ruins in Austria and Germany

Finito, my father’s puppy.

While my father was en route to Austria, Harry Truman, the former justice of the peace who was now a leader of the Western world, was preparing for his first journey overseas as president. This was also his first Atlantic crossing since soldiering during World War I. He was going to meet Stalin and Churchill in Berlin at the Potsdam Conference to discuss the terms that would end World War II and lay the groundwork for Germany’s postwar government.

The leaders were supposed to design a new future for Germany to grow a stable postwar economy. However, the division of the country into four separate and distinct zones of Allied occupation by the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France, as well as the revision of the German-Polish-Soviet border, became major points of contention, with the three superpowers unintentionally ushering in the Cold War that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first steps toward German reunification in 1989. Had some of the broad strokes of the plans at Potsdam been laid out differently, tensions and divisiveness might not have risen to such high levels and the Cold War might have been averted.

While traveling abroad, my father wasn’t the only one writing home to his mother and sister, of course. So was President Truman. In 1955, Life magazine published excerpts from the president’s then- forthcoming memoir. In what is now one of his most famous “Dear Mamma” letters, he addressed his mother and sister Mary from the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. He must have penned it after a long and frustrating day with Stalin and Churchill. He wrote, “Dear Mamma and Mary, . . . You never saw such a pig-headed people as the Russians. I hope I never have to hold another conference with them—but, of course I will.” Whether a young soldier addresses his mother as “Chère Mamo,” as my father did, or a president writes “Dear Mamma,” I guess the common thread that exists among us all is that, no matter what one’s rank or stature, mother is always mamma.

On the fourth of July, my father and his captain left San Michele near Verona after he was transferred to the 15th Army Group. They loaded their little truck with all their belongings and piled into the front seat with one extra passenger, the smallest of war orphans, a little brown dog of undetermined variety they had named Finito. Judging by the photographs of people posing with both my father and said mutt, this tiny fellow wreaked havoc with all of the women they met along the way.

They passed through Riveretto, where they stopped to eat, then Trento, Bolzano, and Brenner, crossing the border well past nightfall. Temperatures fell as they climbed through the mountains toward the Brenner Pass. My father layered his uniform with his Eisenhower jacket and winter field coat against the crisp alpine air.

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