My mother has come for a visit. She normally lives with my sister, but my sister is away for a few days so my mother is visiting.
As I sat on the couch next to her I am always reminded of how odd it is. Here is a woman who has the most incredible history, and here she sits. She is 83 years old, and it is truly amazing that she is here at all. As I grew up I never fully grasped what she had gone through.
Here is a woman who was orphaned at a very early age and separated from her siblings. Here is a woman who was drafted into the German Army at 14. This was in 1940. Not a good time to be in any army but she is the definition of a survivor. She was in Dresden when it was bombed. She has told me about running through the city as incendiary bombs were being dropped. She told me about seeing babies ripped from the arms of their mothers because they were pulled into the firestorm. A firestorm creates its own winds and the "violent, erratic wind drafts suck movables into the fire, while people and animals caught close or under the fire die for lack of available oxygen." She told me about seeing the animals from the zoo running around and a tiger eating someone. She spoke about a detached head rolling to her feet. She said she had to take the clothes and shoes off of dead bodies as her clothes had been burned away. She talked about going to the river and seeing the water on fire. People on fire jumping into the water only to continue burning.
I've read Slaughterhouse 5 and realize that what Vonnegut experienced was mild when compared to those in the midst of it. My mother didn't speak of this often. When I was really young I just knew that my mother got a little odd around February 13th. I knew that she couldn't sleep with her door closed and always needed a nightlight. How can people survive that intact?
She returned to her army job soon after the bombing. Her job was as a telephone operator for Hitler. She often saw him. She said he was crazy. Everyone knew he was crazy. They also knew they had to keep quiet or they would be dead. It's easy to say what one would do in that situation - especially when not actually ever facing the situation. Humans have a great will to survive.
My mother was captured by the Americans and was in a POW camp. She escaped from the camp and was captured by the Russians only a few months later. When I was young we would go swimming and I always wondered about the scars on her thighs. They were an odd shape and there were a number of them. Eventually she told me what they were. Bayonet wounds. When she was captured by the Russians she was pinned to the ground by a particularly sadistic soldier, by his bayonet through her thigh.
I cannot fathom going through even one of these events. I cannot imagine the nightmares. I've heard them as I grew up but I cannot ever really understand. When I was 12 my mother and I went to Germany. She had mentioned a couple of times that she had a sister, but that she had died in the War. While we were in Hamburg my mother had the idea of looking in the phone book. She remembered the name of a young SS officer that my Aunt had been dating. She looked up that last name, called the number and that one phone call brought about a reunion I will never forget. On the other end of the phone was my Aunt. Each sister thought the other had died in the war. Their meeting, 40 years later, was unforgettable. Because of one phone call, I had an Aunt and my mother found her sister. I will always remember the tearful embraces of long lost sisters.
These are just a few snippets of her life. In the last 10 years she has survived a stroke that did take its toll on her health - but hasn't dimmed her spirit or will to survive.
I work as a college biology professor. Each day I am faced with students complaining how hard their life is because they have to work 20 hours a week. How they cannot afford the latest gadget. There are some that don't understand why they cannot do as they want. As I watch them on campus, as I listen to their stories, I cannot help but think of my mother and all she has witnessed and experienced in her life. For me it puts everything in perspective.
This is why I sit on the couch next to my mother and I am just amazed that here is a person that is part of history. The bad and the good. If I've learned nothing else in life, I've learned that i can easily handle whatever life has in store for me. I come from a survivor.
