Through My Eyes: Leslie Maitland on Writing her Mother’s Story



Bookreporter.com first published this Mother’s Day post on April 30, 2012. View the issue here.

Recently, returning things to a box of my mother’s memorabilia that I had used in my research for the nonfiction book I wrote about her life, I came across a Mother’s Day card that I had made for her many years ago, when I was in college. In view of the depth and breadth of all my previous rummaging through the artifacts of her past, I was surprised to have overlooked this card. Now I admit to taking a little belated pride in the passable watercolor of a pot of violets that I had painted on the cover. But what stunned me was a statement in the message that I, her first child, had penned to Mom inside:

“On the day that you became a mother, I entered life to mirror your life through my eyes.”

I read the words again, and a storm of emotions overwhelmed me. Having just finished years of work writing about her life in CROSSING THE BORDERS OF TIME, I was taken aback by the sentiment expressed here by my younger self. Had I truly known so long ago that I would dedicate myself to a concentrated mission as my mother’s biographer? Even before embarking on a journalist’s career — indeed even before setting off on any sort of adult life — had I already embraced the goal of telling my mother’s story? The simple clarity of the card’s avowal surpassed my conscious understanding. Did that mean that I had done what I was always meant to do? There could be satisfaction in believing that.

At the same time, it seemed disturbing to read a declaration that implied I’d seen my very reason for existing as bound up in that loving mission of recording and transmitting my mother’s story. Perhaps, the daughter of a survivor, I’d felt it as a duty. Or had I meant it was essential, ordained, engrained in my identity? As much a part of me as I was part of her.

Mom herself, of course, has always been an enthusiastic storyteller, and her accounts of life in prewar Germany, in occupied France, in Batista’s Cuba, and in New York City of the 1950s have enthralled me always. Cruelty, war, love, and escape were themes that filled my daily life even as a child. But the residue of longing and regret that lay like dust on my mother’s romantic memories made me share her wistfulness for a period that I myself had never known. Everything that truly mattered seemed to beckon from across a border of time that barred me from experiencing personally the sort of life that gave rise to stories worth retelling for generations.

History grew very real to me. Her history. Her story. I knew every character in every tale by name; I saw their fates spin out before me; and ultimately, when I decided to write about them, I knew exactly where to go to track them down. Because I was also my father’s daughter, trained against assuming the truth of anything not verified, I would retrace my mother’s steps and, as that Mother’s Day card predicted, mirror her life through my own eyes. Still neither Mom nor I could have possibly imagined where that journey of rediscovery would lead me, when I went in search of her lost first love, and how thoroughly it would change her world.

Meanwhile, just last month, as we eagerly anticipated the publication of my book about her, Mom was precipitously hospitalized with pneumonia. For several weeks, plagued by complications, she was seriously ill, and I deeply feared an outcome that would take her from us and rob us of a moment I had counted on our sharing. I gave her the bound galley with an inscription, prayed that she would live to see the finished book, and am profoundly grateful that she is now on the road to full recovery.

In the anxious hours I spent at her bedside, however, I gained another understanding of what I’d aimed to do in documenting the dramatic story of the mother I adored. Not only would I make her real to unfamiliar readers, as to her own descendants yet to come, but I myself would know her with an extraordinary degree of intimacy and insight. The pages of my mother’s life would remain with me forever and permit me to hold on to her. On Mother’s Day and always.

Crossing the Borders of Time, in Images



Heinsheimer daughtersSigmarThe family lived in the beautiful medieval university town of Freiburg im Breisgau in the warm, southwest corner of Germany. Their home at Poststrasse 6 stood to the right of the Hotel Minerva.The Nazi newspaper in Freiburg, Der Alemanne, declared war on Germany’s Jews on March 31, 1933. It announced an anti-Jewish rally to take place on the square of the city’s cathedral and directed German citizens to boycott Jewish-owned firms, among them the Günzburger Brothers steel and construction supply company.The evacuation card issued to Janine by the city of Mulhouse in 1939 in anticipation of a German invasion over the nearby border. The French population fled en masse from border regions, but for almost a year – a period termed the Phony War – no fighting started. Janine’s family moved to Gray, a small village that was occupied by German troops after France’s swift defeat in 1940, while Roland’s family settled in Villefranche, a town outside of Lyon, where he attended law school. Janine (R) poses with Trudi and Norbert on the balcony of their Lyon apartment at 14, place Rambaud. It was in Lyon, part of the unoccupied zone, that Janine and Roland -- having first met in Alsace -- rediscovered one another, fell in love, and vowed to marry after the war.After France's fall to the Nazis, the collaborationist regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain imposed a new order called the Révolution Nationale that charged Jews, Communists, Freemasons, and the influences of laziness, drink, and egoism as being responsible for the country's humbling defeat.The brightly embroidered handkerchief that Roland gave to Janine at the pier in Marseille where she boarded the steamship Lipari on March 13, 1942, escaping France for Casablanca en route to Cuba. French Resistance leader Charles de Gaulle was sentenced to death in absentia, but he organized opposition to Hitler from asylum in London.Roland’s parting letter to Janine was a twelve-page declaration of love, containing vows of love and pledges to marry after the war. It was confiscated by British officials who searched the refugee ship when it stopped in Jamaica, but she later retrieved it, waiting for her poste restante in Havana, and she treasured it always. The steamship Lipari on which Janine's family escaped from Marseille to Casablanca -- the last ship to get out France in 1942 before the Nazis sealed off its ports for the duration of the war.Information on the Cuban refugee detention camp of Tiscornia – where the Günzburgers and hundreds of other Jewish refugees were held for months behind gates – was hard to find. As of 2004, the street sign on Callejón Tiscornia provided the only indication of where the camp stood. The site had become the home of Cuba’s Instituto Superior de Medicina Militar, where armed guards barred entry.Visas to enter the United States were extremely difficult to obtain for Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe, and only 10 percent of those technically slotted for them were ever awarded. Denationalized by the German government, Jews like Sigmar lacked passports and eventually needed affidavits like this one, dated July 19, 1943, to enter the United States.Leonard Laurence Maitland was a 28-year-old graduate of New York University’s School of Engineering when, just released from the United States Merchant Marine, he met Janine. Her father having intercepted Roland’s efforts to find her, Janine finally agreed to marry someone else, Leonard Maitland. In the archaeology of love, Janine's childhood autograph book, left behind in Europe when she fled, provided Leslie with an important clue that she was on the right track in seeking to learn the fate of Roland. As part of a project that has already memorialized more than 30,000 victims of Nazism throughout Europe, in 2005 the artist Gunter Demnig imbedded these two Stolpersteine or
The Heinsheimer daughters—Alice, Lina, Jennie, and Rosie, with their brother Siegfried—circa 1906. My grandmother Alice served as a nurse in the Eppingen Hospital, nursing German soldiers in World War I, and was subsequently matched with Sigmar Günzburger, a businessman from Freiburg im. Breisgau. When they married in 1920, she was 28, and he was 40. They quickly had three children: Norbert, Hanna (later known as Janine), and Trudi.
Sigmar served in the German Army in WWI. He is the second from the left in the front row.
The family lived in the beautiful medieval university town of Freiburg im Breisgau in the warm, southwest corner of Germany. Their home at Poststrasse 6 stood to the right of the Hotel Minerva.
The Nazi newspaper in Freiburg, Der Alemanne, declared war on Germany’s Jews on March 31, 1933. It announced an anti-Jewish rally to take place on the square of the city’s cathedral and directed German citizens to boycott Jewish-owned firms, among them the Günzburger Brothers steel and construction supply company.
The evacuation card issued to Janine by the city of Mulhouse in 1939 in anticipation of a German invasion over the nearby border. The French population fled en masse from border regions, but for almost a year – a period termed the Phony War – no fighting started. Janine’s family moved to Gray, a small village that was occupied by German troops after France’s swift defeat in 1940, while Roland’s family settled in Villefranche, a town outside of Lyon, where he attended law school.
Janine (R) poses with Trudi and Norbert on the balcony of their Lyon apartment at 14, place Rambaud. It was in Lyon, part of the unoccupied zone, that Janine and Roland -- having first met in Alsace -- rediscovered one another, fell in love, and vowed to marry after the war.
After France's fall to the Nazis, the collaborationist regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain imposed a new order called the Révolution Nationale that charged Jews, Communists, Freemasons, and the influences of laziness, drink, and egoism as being responsible for the country's humbling defeat.
The brightly embroidered handkerchief that Roland gave to Janine at the pier in Marseille where she boarded the steamship Lipari on March 13, 1942, escaping France for Casablanca en route to Cuba. French Resistance leader Charles de Gaulle was sentenced to death in absentia, but he organized opposition to Hitler from asylum in London.
Roland’s parting letter to Janine was a twelve-page declaration of love, containing vows of love and pledges to marry after the war. It was confiscated by British officials who searched the refugee ship when it stopped in Jamaica, but she later retrieved it, waiting for her poste restante in Havana, and she treasured it always.
The steamship Lipari on which Janine's family escaped from Marseille to Casablanca -- the last ship to get out France in 1942 before the Nazis sealed off its ports for the duration of the war.
Information on the Cuban refugee detention camp of Tiscornia – where the Günzburgers and hundreds of other Jewish refugees were held for months behind gates – was hard to find. As of 2004, the street sign on Callejón Tiscornia provided the only indication of where the camp stood. The site had become the home of Cuba’s Instituto Superior de Medicina Militar, where armed guards barred entry.
Visas to enter the United States were extremely difficult to obtain for Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe, and only 10 percent of those technically slotted for them were ever awarded. Denationalized by the German government, Jews like Sigmar lacked passports and eventually needed affidavits like this one, dated July 19, 1943, to enter the United States.
Leonard Laurence Maitland was a 28-year-old graduate of New York University’s School of Engineering when, just released from the United States Merchant Marine, he met Janine.
Her father having intercepted Roland’s efforts to find her, Janine finally agreed to marry someone else, Leonard Maitland. "Because God Made You Mine” was the bridal march at their wedding in Sea Cliff, Long Island on Monday, July 28, 1947.
In the archaeology of love, Janine's childhood autograph book, left behind in Europe when she fled, provided Leslie with an important clue that she was on the right track in seeking to learn the fate of Roland.
As part of a project that has already memorialized more than 30,000 victims of Nazism throughout Europe, in 2005 the artist Gunter Demnig imbedded these two Stolpersteine or "stumbling stones" in the sidewalk in front of the family's former Freiburg home. The inscriptions translate as follows: "Here lived Samuel Sigmar Günzburger, born in 1880, fled in 1938, survived five years of flight." "Here lived Alice Berta Günzburger, née Heinsheimer, born in 1892, fled in 1938, survived five years of flight."