I Went to Germany Looking for My Father

I went to Germany looking for my father.

I didn't say it quite that way when I left. After all, my father, Ernst, has been dead for more than sixty years. He died when I was seven years old, and you don't exactly go looking for someone who has been gone that long.

Or perhaps you do.

For most of my life, I knew my father the way a little girl knows her father. I knew how it felt to be his daughter. I knew the enormous hole his death left behind, and I had the few memories that somehow managed to survive all these years. But I didn't know the boy he had been. I didn't know the brother, the teenager or the young man who had lived an entire life before he became my father.

His sister did.

My Tante Erika is eighty-seven years old, and before this trip I hadn't seen her in almost fifty years. When I arrived at her home in Germany, she wrapped her arms around me and cried. She told me she had thought she would die without ever seeing me again.

I had come hoping she would tell me stories about my father. What I didn't realize was that over the days we spent together, story by story, she was going to give me pieces of him back.

To Erika, Ernst wasn't simply her older brother. There were almost twelve years between them, and she described him as "father and brother in one person." Her actual father was often absent, and Ernst became the person who looked after her, protected her and, as I would discover, sometimes fed her.

The years after the war were desperately hard for the family. They had been forced from their home in Czechoslovakia, walked across the border into Austria and eventually been transported to Germany, where they arrived with almost nothing. At first they were housed in a Lager, the German word the family used for the refugee camp where displaced people were temporarily housed after the war. They were Flüchtlinge — refugees — and were not always welcomed kindly by the people already living there.

Food was scarce. Possessions were even scarcer. My father would go to the landfill to see if he could find pots, pans, plates or anything else the family could use because they didn't even have all the essentials we take for granted.

Eventually the family moved into a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Ditzingen. My grandmother Albine brought her elderly parents from the DDR to live with them, gave them one of the bedrooms and cared for them until they died, while also looking after her own family and working as a roofer.

Everyone did what they had to do.

My father worked long, physically demanding days and Albine made sure he had bread to take with him because he needed the strength to work. Erika, meanwhile, remembers being hungry much of the time. One day she took a piece of bread from Ernst's lunch and was punished harshly for stealing and lying about it. Ernst stepped in and told his mother, "That's enough."

After that, he would sometimes quietly give his little sister the food that had been packed for him and then go to work all day without eating.

Another time someone gave Ernst an apple. His first thought was to save it for Erika.

These were the stories that got me.

Not the big historical facts, although those matter. The bread. The apple. The small decisions nobody records because, at the time, nobody realizes they are telling you everything you need to know about a person.

"There was never a day in my life when I was with Ernst that wasn't lovely," Erika told me. "He had a warm heart for his sister."

Then she tried to explain just how good he had been to her, his mother, his parents and his grandparents and finally said she couldn't find words big enough to describe it.

I also discovered something much less profound that absolutely delighted me.

My father didn't particularly like meat.

As life gradually got a little easier, Sunday dinner in the Osterreicher home became the traditional pork roast, sauerkraut and noodles. My father would happily have skipped the pork altogether and eaten a plate piled high with noodles covered in poppy seeds or walnuts. Apparently, he could have eaten them every day. His mother sometimes made them especially for him on Sundays, which annoyed his father because everyone else was eating the traditional meal.

I loved hearing that.

My father loved noodles with poppy seeds.

It's such a ridiculously ordinary detail, isn't it? But that's exactly why it meant so much. For a moment he wasn't the father who died when I was seven. He wasn't a faded photograph or a name on an old document.

He was just Ernst, sitting at a family table hoping his mother had made his favourite noodles.

And I wanted more of him.

The promise he couldn't keep

My parents eventually decided to immigrate to Canada. My mother's family had come the year before after being sponsored by a beet farmer, and the letters they sent home talked about how much better life was there. That same farmer agreed to sponsor my parents.

My father's family was devastated.

When he boarded the train to begin his journey, Erika screamed and cried, "Ernst, don't go away. Please don't go away." His mother, Albine, ran behind the train calling his name and sobbing.

Erika was still young enough that she didn't really understand how far away Canada was. Her grandmother did.

She told Ernst that Canada was so far away he would never come back.

"Grandmother, I will come again," he promised her.

He never did.

That sentence has stayed with me.

Canada gave my parents opportunities they could never have imagined in those postwar years, but starting over wasn't easy. My father's training as an airplane mechanic wasn't recognized here, so this young man who had finished at the top of his class worked as a labourer and took whatever work he could find.

And he wrote home.

While I was in Germany, Tante Erika gave me the original letters my father had written to the family from Canada. I can't adequately describe what it felt like to hold pages my father had once held in his own hands.

One letter from 1954 made me smile because it sounded so wonderfully ordinary. He told Erika about working and earning money, hunting antelope and ducks, and having socks full of holes and clothes that desperately needed washing. He wrote about going shopping on Fridays and sometimes seeing a movie or going to a dance.

He also told her he was lonely.

He teased her, told her to help their mother, encouraged her to learn English and said he thought about her often. And just in case she had any doubt about her position in his life, he reminded her that she was his only sister.

There he was again.

Not a story about my father.

My father.

The other side of the telegram

Years later, a man from the post office came to the Osterreicher family's door carrying a telegram. They didn't have a telephone at the time, so this was how the news arrived.

Ernst had been in an accident.

The family was sitting in the kitchen eating when something happened that Erika has never forgotten. A clock hanging on the wall above them suddenly fell. It landed in her father's soup plate.

But the clock didn't break.

Erika remembers thinking that this meant Ernst wasn't broken either. He was still there. He would be all right.

Two days later, another telegram arrived.

Ernst had died.

Erika was eight months pregnant at the time. Her husband Hans received the telegram and told her parents first. Albine broke down in tears, and there was immediate concern about the effect such a terrible shock might have on Erika and her unborn baby.

Then the family started arriving.

Anna came. Mitzi came. Within an hour, the Osterreicher family was together.

Of course they were.

One of the things Erika wanted me to understand about our family was that the Osterreicher bond was unlike anything else. They shared whatever they had, even when there was almost nothing to share, and in happiness and sadness, one was always there for the other.

Even in the midst of losing her own son, Albine was worried about my mother thousands of miles away in Canada. How would Lisl manage alone with two young children?

A Mass was held for my father and the church filled with people from the neighbourhood.

But more than sixty years later, it is the clock Erika still talks about.

To her, it was a sign.

Two girls

I knew the other side of that telegram.

I was the seven-year-old girl in Canada whose father didn't come home.

What I hadn't really understood until I sat across from Erika was that on the other side of the Atlantic there was another girl who had lost him too.

She had known the brother. I had known the father.

We each held pieces of the same man.

On our final afternoon together, I told Erika I had a few questions that might be difficult. I wanted her to know she didn't have to answer anything that hurt too much. The story mattered to me, but her feelings mattered more.

I asked what she saw when she closed her eyes and thought about Ernst.

Her answer was simply that there had never been a day with him that wasn't lovely.

I asked what I should remember about being an Osterreicher.

Family. Sharing. Being there for one another.

I asked what she wanted me to know about my father that no one else could tell me.

There wasn't really another story she could give me. He had been her everything. Father and brother in one person.

Then she told me something I wasn't prepared for.

She sees Ernst in me.

Her brother.

My father.

In me.

Finally, I asked what she thought my father would say about my coming all the way to Germany to see her.

"Helene, you did the right thing to visit Tante Erika. He would be very happy."

And that was pretty much it for both of us.

We cried. We hugged.

And Erika said, "He is watching over us."

Before I left Canada, I thought this journey might be about finding the seventeen-year-old girl I remembered being the last time Germany truly felt like part of me. I have a photograph of her, and whenever I look at it she seems so happy, so completely lit up by life. I had this feeling that perhaps I was going back to find her.

But somewhere along the way, something else happened.

My German started coming back. Memories came back. Family came back. And through Tante Erika's stories, my father began coming back too.

Not literally, of course. But the blank spaces started filling in.

I met the brother who gave his little sister his bread and went hungry himself. The young man who would go to the landfill looking for a pot or plate his family could use. The brother who tried to make people laugh when there wasn't much to laugh about. The young immigrant with holes in his socks writing home from Canada. The man who preferred noodles with poppy seeds to pork roast. The son who promised his grandmother he would come back.

And the father I loved for seven years and have missed for more than sixty.

My father never made it back to Germany.

But all these years later, his daughter did.

I sat at the table with his little sister. I held his letters in my hands. I listened to her stories. I cried with her. And for the first time, I began to know the man who had existed before he became my father.

I thought I was going back to Germany to find the seventeen-year-old version of myself.

Instead, I think I found the seven-year-old.

And after a lifetime of knowing how my father died, I finally began to understand how he lived.