I was nearly two when German troops marched into Poland in 1939 and plunged the world into war. By the time I was six, my secure life was shattered as we began an odyssey of fear and deprivation, first in fleeing conflicts within the Axis, and then as refugees behind German lines. These experiences affected me profoundly and shaped the person I was to become after my war-scattered family was reunited and found a haven in the United States. I arrived here as an eleven-year old with a burning desire to ‘belong.’ Not wanting to dwell on my origins, I rarely recounted any of the adventures and hardships suffered by my family, but when I did, I was uniformly urged to set them down on paper. It has taken many years to recall and capture the feelings and emotions experienced in those days, but the process has also been an affirming one. I graduated from Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania with a degree in mathematics and worked first as a teacher and then as a systems analyst and manager at a Fortune 500 company. I have always felt a need to ‘give back’ to this wonderful country for the opportunities it has given me, and to that end have engaged since my early adulthood in a variety of volunteer activities. Founding a local “Friends of the Library” organization has been one of my proudest achievements.
Uncertain Survival
by Julia Brooks
Uncertain Survival
by Julia Brooks
Published Jan 09, 2019
251 Pages
Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Book Details
The Chemist’s Packet
It began when I was only six, but my terror as Russian troops advanced on our home can still be starkly evoked by certain references to the Second World War. That terror became nearly unbearable when I learned that my mother had a small packet of poison hidden in her purse and was determined to kill us rather than have us fall into Russian hands. This book describes how she uses determination and ingenuity to survive the involuntary separation from my father during the hazardous flight from our centuries-old German settlement in what had become Rumania, her resourcefulness in achieving a precarious survival in Austria during the final months of the war and our marginal existence in a displaced persons’ camp amidst the ruin of an inhospitable post-war Germany. It is the true story of a scattered family that is gradually reunited to persevere against unlikely odds.
While moral issues regarding the war are explored, this work is primarily an account of my parents’ courage as they fought for our survival during desperate times. It also depicts our frequently frustrating, often humorous and ultimately successful struggles as new immigrants to the United States.