Mathilde,
my mother, was born in Berlin in 1924. Her father was assassinated by Hitler’s
men in 1933. By 1945 she had lost three of her four brothers in the war. She
met my father in 1948, a charming Sicilian from Brooklyn who was stationed in
Germany with the U.S. occupation troops. He promised to feed her regular meals
and take her from the rubble of war torn Germany. She accepted the offer. What
she didn’t know was that under his charm was a vicious brute, who beat her and
then sent her to work in a sweat shop after they landed in Brooklyn.
Mother
escaped my father when she met a wonderful Jewish man, Mootzy, who moved her
out of Brooklyn to Shady, New York. Since Mother was not a German Jew, but a
German German, this was indeed a strange, but wondrous stroke of luck.
Shady, a tiny hamlet on the outskirts of
Woodstock, is nestled in countryside reminiscent of the rolling hills of
England and the pine forests of Germany. Shady & Woodstock was full of
artists, musicians and writers, and Mother’s older sister said it was more like
Germany before the war, than the Germany of the fifties and
sixties.
But all the beauty of Shady, the luck of
surviving the war and escaping my father could not wash away the pain of the
price of war. Sitting at Mother’s side as she lay dying, I listened to her war
stories. She tried to tell me these stories so many times over the years, but I
couldn’t listen then, because I had friends to play with, things to do, and I
was, after all, an American, as far removed from the truths of war as any
country has ever been.
Waltzing Mathilde
(Non-Fiction)
By Dennis Manuel
Independent Publishing Platform
ASIN #
B00GURUSK4
Price $0.99
148 Pages
Rating 5-Stars
“The Story of Love And
Sadness.”
Born in 1924 Germany, young
Mathilde lost her family to the madness of Hitler, and then had to survive the
war, and later the rape and beatings from Russian troops before meeting a young
American soldier who took her to America, where she raised two boys in another
kind of hell. It wasn’t till they left her abusive husband and moved to Shady,
a part of Woodstock, that life settled down some. But the young mother worked
two jobs to feed and raise her children.
This is the story of that
young woman as remembered by her son, from the stories she told of the war, and
her losses: surviving WWII, labor camps, starvation, and the Russians. It is
also the story of her love for her sons, and theirs for her. Woodstock
consisted of Bearsville, Shady, and Lake Hill, and was an artistic utopia until
the music event of 1969, when everything changed.
It is a story of love and sadness,
as this mother who suffered so much was still to suffer more in her life when a
cancer the size of a football was discovered in her stomach. When we read about
WWII and Germany, we only think of the madness that Hitler brought upon the
world, but we forget to look at the German people who suffered because of him.
The author has brought that reality to us in his memoirs of his life and the
suffering his mother endured all her life. It is well written, and gives
insight into another reality of that war. Highly recommended for those who
study wars, and for those that want to see love come out of something so evil
as war. But we should never forget, wars are when parents lose their children,
and wives lose their husbands, and children their fathers and mothers. And we
should never forget why we never want to go to war again. This is a story well
worth reading.
Tom
Johnson
Author
of PANGAEA: EDEN’S PLANET
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