“Mom,” I asked curiously, “Since your family is in Poland behind the Iron Curtain, how is it that you got here to the United States?”

      I had not thought to ask before, as it felt natural enough to have a father from Yugoslavia and a mother from Germany. Yes, my mother is from Germany. The town she grew up in was deep in southeastern Germany, a part known as Upper Silesia, just adjacent to Poland. And Poland, located between Germany and Russia, was in a precarious position. During WWII, Poland became the pawn in a tug of war between the two powerful nations. At the end of the war, Russia was part of the victorious Allied Forces. It had overrun Poland and Eastern Germany and desired to expand its official borders westward. In order to do this, the half of Poland closest to Russia became Russian. In return, Russia gave Poland part of occupied Eastern Germany, Upper Silesia. So, at the end of WWII, my mother’s family found that their home, deep in southeastern Germany, was suddenly in Poland.

“They would not let us out, so I escaped,” Mom calmly explained.

       My mother, this quiet, petite woman had never seemed adventurous. But she had escaped! Let’s just say I was a little more than surprised. “Tell me about it,” I said, intrigued.

       Mom’s hand froze mid-air, teacup hovering en route to her waiting lips, as she visibly struggled to recall a past long buried. The cup found its saucer.

      She began, “Well, after the war, the Russians came into our home town, Klausberg, and took over the government. I was eighteen years old. Many things changed, as you know.” She took a delicate sip of tea.

       My mother brought my sister, Regina, and me to Poland for an entire summer’s visit in 1963 when I was ten. That was the first time she had seen her family since leaving them in 1946, seventeen years before. I cannot even imagine how much she had missed them. Even after our three-month visit, my mother extended our time there by another two weeks because of her own mother’s heartfelt request. How could she deny that? It left us with a mere week in Germany before catching our ship home. She never spoke of the past, and now I listened with anticipation to all she would tell.

      And she quietly continued, “The Russians damaged the railroad tracks as they came in, so they had the German women rebuild the railroad. There were no men because the war was not over. I did not want to fix the railroad, so I decided to leave.”

      I could see Mom’s point. How could the refined lady across the table pound rails and haul steel? Why, I had never even seen her wear slacks, only dresses.

      It would take years to draw the whole story from her and her siblings. But now she talked of hoping, of waiting for the right opportunity to escape and of the friend who went with her. On June 1, 1946, they escaped to a Polish refugee camp and hit an impasse. They could go no further. Then they ran into a traveling Catholic priest who remembered them and told them how to cross the border checkpoint. She told of the married couple who pretended she and her friend were their children to enhance the disguise. And she expressed what it was like at the refugee camp on the free side of the Iron Curtain.

      This was the beginning of the story. I then asked, “OK, but how did my Yugoslavian Dad end up in West Germany? How did you meet Dad? And how was it that the two of you ended up in the U.S.?”

      Whenever I asked her to revisit the story, it grew more vivid and detailed in my mind. Over the years I pieced much of the puzzle together. And the story always ended with the description of the trip to the U.S. by ship, including why my parents were able to leave when so many others could not.

      Sitting in our comfortable, American kitchen, she concluded the story saying, “We left West Germany on November 20, 1951 by ship. It had been a troop transport for the U.S. military. There were separate bedrooms for the men and for the women. Each room held two hundred people, all on cots stacked three high. The seas were very rough in November. My cot was on the bottom. Most women in the room were seasick. Of course, there was a terrible stench in the room, so I only stayed in the room to sleep and spent the entire day, every day, on the deck. Your father got me a crate that had been used to carry fruit, and I sat on that crate all day as the rough ocean waves crashed across the deck in the high seas.”

       “Wow, Mom, that sounds like an awful trip,” I said.

        “No,” she said, her voice wavering, “It was the best trip of my life!”

       I was reminded how lucky I was to have been born here, at a different time and in a different place. Over the years, I would ask my mother again and again to recount the story. Sometimes she would, and sometimes she wouldn’t. Gradually I asked more and more questions and learned more and more details. I tried several times to get her to tell the story to my children, but she always had an excuse why she could not tell at that moment. So my children have never heard it directly from her, only through me. In fact, my daughter wrote a paper on it in middle school on the part of the story I was able to remember. My mother loved that paper, and I’m sure she still has it. But, of course, she had to correct some of the details. I was always getting the details mixed up. I eventually learned that the best way to get her to talk was to start telling the story myself. Again, she had to correct some detail. This went on for almost forty years. At first, I would ask infrequently. Gradually, I would want to know more and more. But I just couldn’t keep it all straight in my head. After all, it wasn’t about my life.

      At some point in my young adulthood, I was talking to one of my aunts, Tante, in German. I cannot remember which Tante but I said to her, “Mom escaped from Poland because she did not want to fix the railroad.”

        “But your mother did rebuild the railroad,” my Tante corrected.

       What? There was more to the story. Clearly my mother would not tell. I’d heard the story a number of times, and I know she never acknowledged building the railroads. I wondered what else she may have left out.

       The day my mother first told me the story was the beginning of my interest in the story. The day my Tante made the comment about the railroad was the beginning of my passion for the story. It was a passion that grew into something bordering on obsession to know the rest of the story.

       Then, I got an opportunity to go to Germany in 2005 and would get to see three of my mother’s sisters and one of her brothers. Of course I brought along a notebook. I had goals for the vacation, one of which was to find the missing pieces of the story. By the time I boarded the plane, I knew I was going to do more than just find the missing pieces. I knew the story that had fascinated me for so long was about to become a book.