My mother was born 110 years ago today (March 25) at a Midwifery Institute in Celle, Germany. It was the middle of the First World War and her father was out of the picture. I grew up with rumors of what happened to him - we knew he was still alive and raising a.second family - but details were sparse. All we knew is that Bertha Rühmann, whom I knew as Grossmutter, was effectively a single parent of twenty who had no viable means of raising a child.
One of Bertha's sisters, Johanne, was married to a man named Paul Gundelach and living in his home town of Braunschweig. Johanne had just had a child as well, Paul Jr., about a month before my mother was born, and took my mother in. Living in a country which has just lost a World War was a challenge, but the Gundelachs lived on a farm and had food to eat. Her daughter now cared for, Bertha got a job as a stewardess on the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line and traveled the world.
Sometime in the next eight years Paul and Johanne were able to make a deal with an uncle named Henry Aust who had emigrated to America some years before to sponsor them as indentured servants and in 1923 Paul finally fulfilled a vow he had made to himself watching soldiers being blown to bits in Russia. He and his wife, Johanne, their son Paul Jr. and their niece/adopted daughter, climbed aboard the good ship Bayern in Hamburg and sailed away to a new life in America, landing in New York on October 26, 1923 and making their way to Torrington, Connecticut, where Henry Aust called home.
Paul and Johanne Gundelach legally adopted my mother - she had come across the ocean as Klara Schultheis, her original birth name - and had two more children, Carl (written American-style, with a C) and Rose (a name which worked equally well in both German and English). That adoption notwithstanding, four years later, Grossmutter's ship docked in New York and she made her way to Torrington, where she decided she had no choice but to stay, take my mother back, and live happily ever after in America.
Carl and his wife had two children, eventually, and Rose and her husband had three, giving me a bunch of cousins to grow up with on my mother's side of the family, to match the four I had on my father's side. The families remained close and it wasn't long before Johanne and Paul Gundelach became known by everybody in the family and far beyond as Mutti and Vati - the German equivalent of mommy and daddy.
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| Gundelach family gathering circa 1955 back row first four heads: Uncle Paul, My father, Uncle Carl, me next row in, from left: Aunt Rose, Vati, Mutti, Klärchen (my mother), Aunt Connie, Grossmutter, Uncle Pete (Grossmutter's third husband) front row: three kids: cousin Nancy (Uncle Carl/Aunt Connie's daughter); my sister Karen, cousin Jimmy, Nancy's brother |
Mutti and Vati continued to refer to my mother as their daughter. They called her Klärchen, as they had when she was a little girl. I often reflected on the fact that I had not the normal two, but three, sets of grandparents - and with them all the extra aunts, uncles and cousins. We have not kept in close contact, but the connection among the few survivors are still there. My sister, the tallest of the three kids in front of my mother, turns 80 this year and is a great-grandmother.
My mother died of a heart attack at the young age of 60. Today she would be 110, and I am acutely aware she has been gone for a full half century.
As the years go by, my fantasy of finding a time machine only grows stronger. If I could go back in time, I would want to get my mother out of bed and to a doctor rather than take a pill and see how she felt in the morning - a decision which was to be her last. I'd also enjoy getting to know her as a woman twenty-five years younger than me.
All the questions I would bug her with.
So many questions.
Happy Birthday, Mom.
