My great-aunt’s real name was Helena, but everyone called her Lenie.
I don’t know much about her — like many of my relatives, she passed long before I was born — so it’s hard to judge what she was really like. The one photograph I have of her, taken sometime in the early 1900’s, shows a tall, slender women with light eyes, pale skin, and curly hair in the brownish-gold shade sometimes called “dishwater blonde.” Her face is oval, her nose a bit long but still elegantly shaped, and she wears a fashionable wasp-waisted suit and a towering hat. My grandmother, her only sister, is similarly dressed but shorter, with darker hair, a squarer face, and penetrating gray-green eyes. The family resemblance is unmistakable despite the difference in height and coloring.
According to family legend, Lenie was very much like my aunt Betty, her elder niece, and those of you who’ve been reading these diaries for a while know what that means. Lenie wasn’t as frivolous or flamboyant as Betty, but she had the same lighthearted, slightly befuddled approach to life, and the same blithe self-assurance that comes with being the designated Pretty Girl of her generation.
That isn’t to say that her life was unalloyed sunshine and roses. Her first husband, Julius, was a schoolteacher, which ensured that Lenie could continue to live in the style to which she’d become accustomed, but they never had children of their own. This is probably why my grandmother named her own first-born after her brother-in-law, not that this probably was much comfort since young Julius of course was raised by Grandma, not Lenie. Worse, Lenie wasn’t even sixty when her husband passed in 1937, so she faced the prospect of a long and lonely widowhood since her only brother was dead and Grandma and her brood had moved out to The Farm in Venango County.
Fortunately she found comfort with a longtime family friend, a gentleman named Peter Keller, whom she married in 1939. Although she still called herself “Lenie” or “Lena,” trying to trace her movements after her second nuptials is difficult because her legal name was now “Helena Keller,” and if you think that’s confusing now, just imagine how it was in the 1930’s, when Helen Keller was an international celebrity, bestselling author, and social activist.
Regardless, Lenie’s second marriage was a joyous occasion. She was no longer a lonely widow but a happy (albeit middle aged) bride, and she decided to celebrate by taking her new husband to visit relatives over in the old country. She and my grandmother had been born in Pennsylvania but their older brother Adolph had been a baby when their parents moved to America, and there were still cousin overseas who’d kept in touch over the years. Lenie herself was fluent in both English and her ancestral language, so there wouldn’t even be a communication problem.
So it was that my great-aunt and her new husband set sail for Germany in the summer of 1939.
Yes. Really.
For those of you whose immediate reaction was “Germany in 1939, what were they thinking?,” please recall that Lenie was basically Aunt Betty version 1.0. Neither of them were particularly political or informed about current events, and it’s entirely possible that Lenie simply thought they were going on a jolly trip to see the family, nothing more. Remember, Betty managed to distinguish herself in Spain by dismissing Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who was not yet dead) as “the little man with the mustache” when asked whether he’d attended a charity bullfight. Lenie may well have had similar thoughts about the somewhat larger man with the mustache in Berlin, especially since by all accounts he’d revived the local economy, showered the populace with low-cost vacations, concerts, and other goodies, and triumphantly showcased the New Germany at the 1936 Olympics. She was American, after all, and a good Lutheran like the rest of her family. That they might have been better off going to the Grand Canyon or Cape Cod or the Wisconsin Dells or pretty much anywhere else in America almost certainly never crossed their minds.
Regardless, they seem to have had a wonderful time, at least at first. I have a badly faded postcard Lenie sent my grandmother from Hamburg saying “everything is beautiful,” and from her perspective it likely was. Germany was clean and prosperous, the exchange rate was favorable, and the countryside was gorgeous. There was plenty to see and do, excellent food and wine to sample, and the German relatives welcomed them with open arms. If one didn’t pay attention to the newspapers or the radio reports, their honeymoon might have been justly called “idyllic.”
At least until they decided that things were going so well they should extend their vacation a couple of weeks and sail home in September, not August.
Their cousins were silent when Lenie informed of this happy decision. They then asked if she’d changed her sailing date yet. When she said no, she and Peter were still scheduled to go home in late August, the cousins glanced around, made sure their fine, strapping son Manfred was nowhere in earshot, and said, “No. Go home. Go home now.”
Lenie looked bewildered. “But why? Everything is so pleasant and — “
“You don’t understand,” said one. “You cannot stay. There will be war in the next few weeks. You must go back to America before then.”
“But — “
“No. Trust us. There will be war.” The cousin did not raise her voice, but it was clear she was not joking “Everyone knows it is coming by September at the latest. You cannot be here when it starts.”
“But — “
“Lenie,” said the cousin. “You are not safe. Our son Manfred has been watching you ever since you arrived.”
Lenie froze, mouth half-open. “What?”
“Manfred is in the SS, the Leader’s bodyguard. He thinks you are spies and has reported your every move to his superiors,” said the cousin. Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “He’s been going through your luggage. You must leave, as soon as you can.”
What Lenie said was never reported to me. I do know, however, that Lenie and Peter kept their original sailing date in late August. That’s why they were back in Pittsburgh when the funny medium-sized man with the mustache invaded Poland barely a week after they got home.
It’s also why, when my uncle Louis tried to find those cousins late in 1945, once the war was over and he was able take some leave after the long and bitter fight to liberate Fortress Europe, he had no luck. To this day I have no idea what happened to those cousins Lenie and her husband visited, or even what town they lived in. They and their world were swept away, lost forever to the ambition and bigotry of a regime so cruel it attempted to remake the world to further its aims.
As for Lenie...whether she truly realized how close she came to disaster isn’t clear. But every time I see that ancient postcard, all I can think is “what if she hadn’t listened….”
My great-aunt was lucky. She listened to her cousins and never experienced the horror to come, although she must have been crushed to learn that her hosts had disappeared. Others, such as the subject of tonight’s diary, were not so lucky.
Read More