Exile II: Not Here, Not There

I used to try to understand my exile. Where did it come from? How did it develop? It didn’t feel like something that just happened to me. It felt older than that, like it had already been in motion long before I arrived. Patterns don’t just appear. They build. Years, generations, maybe longer. I can only see back a few generations. Beyond that, it’s gone.

My mother was born into a war zone in 1942, in Ratibor, what is now Poland, but they were German. A few generations had lived there before her, maybe a hundred years, maybe more. I don’t know exactly. She was the youngest of three girls. Her sisters were nine and seven when she was born. Their early years were something like normal. Hers were not.

When she was two, her father died. A bomb wound that wouldn’t heal. That’s the story. Around that same time, word spread that the Russian army was coming. People said they were murderers and rapists. Families fled. It’s a good thing they left. Wikipedia wouldn’t even get into it. It just says Ratibor was devastated.

My grandmother left with three children. They walked. They took trains when they could. The weather was cold. Snow, freezing temperatures. At one point they were on a train headed toward Dresden. The train stopped short. The passengers were told to get off and hide in the woods. Snow everywhere. They stayed there while the city burned. Constant explosions in the distance. The sky lit up. No one knew how close it was or if it would reach them. They waited it out in the trees. They survived.

My grandmother got sick along the way. At some point, a farm family took them in and helped her recover. Then they kept going. They were headed for Hamburg, about 500 miles away.

They made it. My grandmother’s sister lived there, in a large house near the Elbe River. From the outside, it sounded like safety. But they didn’t move into the house. There was a small two-room shack on the property. That’s where they lived. They stayed there for years.

My mother grew up with soldiers in the streets, British and American. She remembered the Americans as loud, crude. The British more restrained. Just fragments like that. That’s what came down.

Later, she and her sister went to England as au pairs. From what she said, she went from being a young girl to taking care of an entire household. The family would leave, and she was responsible for everything. Different country. No reference point. She did it anyway.

They saved money to go to America. “The promised land.” When they arrived, they hitchhiked around for a while. Then my mother got a job at a bank. At some point she met my father. He didn’t stay.

The stories about him were always the same. Violent. Unstable. One night he hid in the attic and waited for her to come home. When she did, he tried to strangle her. My brother, two years old at the time, grabbed his leg and stopped him. That’s how it was told to me.

After that, she married another man, my stepfather, also German. We moved constantly. Every couple of years, a new place. Just enough time to start to settle, then gone again. No foundation ever held.

I didn’t think of it as exile then. But looking back, it’s hard to call it anything else.

Later, I repeated it. Different circumstances, same movement. Always relocating. Always adjusting. Always looking for something that never quite appeared.

What was I really doing? Looking for home. But there wasn’t one. Not here, not there.

I don’t know where it is. I think there isn't one. It's just this. Wherever I am.