Brigitte Erbe’s family was relocated from Germany to Tetschen, Czechoslovakia towards the beginning of World War II when her accountant father was assigned a job working for the German government. Brigitte was born in Tetschen and lived there until the day of her fourth birthday, December 5, 1944, the very day the invasion of Russian soldiers forced the family to leave Tetschen and escape to Frankfurt. This excerpt from Brigitte’s essay about celebrating Christmas that year is the final installment of our 2016 series featuring writers from my memoir classes who are immigrants to the United States. Thanks for reading!

by Brigitte Erbe

Christmas of 1944, the year I had just turned four years old, stands out above the others. My parents marveled when I told them that years later. To them, the Christmas of 1944 symbolized loss and deprivation.

We had made it to my uncle Anton’s house just before Christmas after a horrifying trip from Tetschen, my hometown in Czechoslovakia. We were refugees and had lost everything except for a few belongings in a wooden cart. We traveled in open coal wagons, spent nights in train stations and hotel rooms so cold the windows were covered in frost and my sister’s diapers froze on the line. The physical danger exacerbated our hardships — Russian soldiers threatened to shoot my father and our family was briefly arrested at the train station.

When we finally arrived, even if my parents had the money for Christmas presents, the city of Frankfurt had been bombed to rubble and there was no place to shop. Yet in my memory, that Christmas was also the very best.

The Christmas tree was in the corner of the living room, aglow in candle light when we entered the room. And Christkindl brought me the best presents of my entire life — none ever made me feel more special and important. I received a little wooden chair and a purse.

The little purse was used, made out of cardboard. It is still so vivid in my mind I could draw a picture. I put the little purse around my neck, anticipating kindergarten.

And here I was, with my very own chair. I never thought that a child could own her own furniture. It was the perfect gift!

My mother later told me that my uncle found an old beat-up children’s chair in the basement, and he and my father fixed it up as best they could. They didn’t think it amounted to much, but Christmas had bestowed on me a feeling of being grown-up. I was in heaven.

I hope that experiencing my joy that first Christmas gave my parents the feeling that, after all, they had found a new home.

The kids at Swift had a lot of energy and questions.

Back to me. Brigitte found a new home in America years later when she received a Fulbright Grant and left Germany to Attend Vassar College. After meeting and marrying American Bill Erbe in graduate school, she accepted a position at the Department of Teaching and Learning at Roosevelt University. Retired now, Brigitte volunteers twice a week for a third grade class at Swift Elementary, a Chicago Public School where a majority of the students are children of immigrants. The photo was taken last year when Brigitte invited Whitney and me to meet her beloved third-graders — they made us feel special!

We’re on the Amtrak train from Milwaukee back to Chicago after a lovely Christmas day visit with our son Gus in Watertown, and a lovely overnight at the Pfister hotel in Milwaukee. This followed a lovely Christmas Eve spent eating Chinese food with our friends Steven and Nancy, who were visiting from Urbana, followed by a lovely performance by Tammy McCann and a great trio at the Jazz Showcase. This followed a lovely get together at our place for Beth’s birthday, with neighborhood pals from our Hackney’s days, all eating gourmet Sloppy Joes that I whipped up.

Gus liked his nifty combination White Sox/Blackhawks scarf.

It was, to put too fine a point on it, just a lovely holiday.

Now back to Amtrak. The train between Chicago and Milwaukee is a joy. It runs, unlike, say, the Amtrak between Chicago and Champaign, on time like a European train. Big seats, Wifi, no driving, who cares what the weather is. There’s a Zipcar across the street from the Milwaukee Amtrak station. We get off the train, hop in the car, and are at Gus’s within an hour. No Kennedy expressway, no Edens expressway, no tolls.

We’ve been carless for years now and I couldn’t be happier about it. It was weird at first—I grew up in the suburbs where cars were a necessity (and of course, the suburb only existed because of cars). I’d had a car since forever. I liked driving, until I didn’t. I did always like cars from an entertainment point of view—but not nearly as much as I do motorcycles.

The Pfister lobby was in full holiday glory.

And now, I see cars strictly as a necessary evil.

And evil, really, isn’t that much of an exaggeration. I came across this article in The Atlantic awhile back: it sums things up pretty well. It’s insane, when you step back, what driving costs us in blood and treasure. I know, I know, depending on where you live, you don’t have a choice about it.

But we do have some choices. In some places, a choice is public transportation. Almost everywhere, walking is an option.

And Beth and I walk like crazy. But in the winter, it gets a little dicey. Beth broke her hand last year in a fall. And as we age, such things are a bigger and bigger deal. In our neighborhood, the walks in front of apartment buildings, condo buildings, and businesses are well shoveled. But there are these strips of purgatory that go untended. Treacherous stretches that get iced up over freeze-thaw cycles and only go away after a warm spell or a hard rain.

For example, the proprietors of surface parking lots often don’t shovel adjacent walks—though they do, of course, plow the spaces for the cars. And we have a nice little park that serves as sort of a town square for our neighborhood, replete with a fountain that operates in the warm months. Somehow, though, the park district decides not to shovel the walks in the winter.

It makes for some unwanted adventure, especially for the elderly or, say, blind people.

All of which struck me the other morning as we walked to the Amtrak station. Holiday vehicular traffic was extremely light. Pedestrians were everywhere. The streets had been plowed clean. The empty bike paths had been plowed. But the sidewalks were spotty.

I sorta get why that is. But I sorta don’t. Sidewalks are public thoroughfares. But somehow it’s incumbent on households and businesses to keep them clean.

We live with cars and the havoc they wreak as if it all were inevitable. But it’s the product of choices. The mother of all choices was the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. It was sold as a national security measure—it connected all Air Force bases, no matter how far flung, for example. Of course, automakers were all for national security.

That project was to last 10 years. Ha ha.

Anyway, I know it’s not going to change anytime soon. But I do think we can do some things—like face the fact that we subsidize car ownership with tax money. To the tune of $1,100 a household, according to an estimate in this article entitled The True Costs of Driving. One thing we can do is raise user taxes—gas, tolls, etc.—to reflect that true cost.

And maybe one day, that’d help pay to keep the sidewalks clean.

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukah! Loyal blog readers will recognize today’s featured immigrant – 96-year-old Hanna Bratman, a writer from the memoir-writing class I teach for older adults in downtown Chicago every Wednesday, grew up in a Jewish family who owned a butcher shop in Mannheim, Germany. “We had many Christian people working at the shop, and we had lots of Christian friends and neighbors, too, “she told me, explaining how friends would join them at their house for Christmas every year. “The Christkind wasn’t the one to come to give presents, though – it was Santa Claus!”

Things changed for Hanna’s family and friends after Hitler took office. Hanna escaped on her own before World War II. She was only 19 years old when she arrived, alone, in the United States. Others in her family didn’t make it out in time.

That’s Hanna, the author. (Photo by Nora Isabel Bratman)

”On Santa Claus day in Germany, I found myself on the train from Mannheim to Trieste, Italy where the MS Saturnia ship was to take me to safety to New York,” Hanna writes, explaining that when she arrived in Trieste, she was told the refugee ship had docked in Genoa instead. “So we were transported to Genoa on a train at night. That’s where I met MY LOVE: my future husband, Eugene Bratman, was also on the MS Saturnia, escaping to resettle in America.”

Eugene and Hanna married and continued heading west to find work and acclimate to new ways of living – including skiing on Wisconsin hills rather than European Alps. “After moving to Chicago, Eugene and I invested in ski boots and skis, and as often as possible went to Wilmot Hills, where at that time they had a tow rope that I mastered quickly,” she writes. “On 3-day holidays, we took the train to Iron Mountain, Michigan for 2 or 3 days. We did this several times and stayed in the same hotel always by the railroad depot. We ate pasties just like the locals.”

Once their daughter and son were born, Eugene and Hanna stuck closer to home. “With the children, we only traveled to Wilmot again, where I spent most of my time on the Bunny Hill,” she writes, pointing out that Eugene had a lot more to adjust to when it came to skiing. At home he’d skied in the highest range in the Carpathian Mountains, a mountain range that forms a natural border between Slovakia and Poland. “Eugene was a graceful, very experienced skier, well known in the Tatra Mountains.”

Their first baby was born in 1945. Baby furniture was hard to come by, but they did have a pram, and Hanna writes of dragging the buggy up and down from their second-floor apartment at 1059 Dakin, usually with the baby in it. She sterilized glass baby bottles and nipples in a large soup pot she’d brought from Germany five years earlier. “Rudy Joan, our beautiful but fussy infant had to put up with an inexperienced easily panicky mother,” she writes. . “We had no family to ask for advice or help. My very few new friends were busy with their own families.”

Rudy slept in a cradle that Hanna describes as “a transformed beautified extra-large laundry basket.” Their ship’s trunk was covered with a tablecloth and topped with their beloved radio. “The baby slept through many radio concerts and night parties,” she writes, remarking on how precious the public radio station that played classical and jazz music was to them. “Our Blaupunkt radio was tuned to the latest new transmission station WFMT which we loved and supported with a donation of $15.00, a big part of our budget.”

The radio was Hanna’s domain, she says. “And the phone on the buffet was my lifeline to the world.”

Hanna and Eugene’s children grew up strong, thanks in part to advice from their pediatrician’s wife, who Hanna would regularly call with questions. “The strict rules were to feed a baby only every four hours, not a minute sooner to establish a routine, no excuses,” Hanna writes. “Rudy was an early gourmet, she preferred her mother’s breast to boiled water.”

Rudy also liked undivided attention. “In the evening, as soon as Eugene turned the key in the entrance door, she would start crying,” Hanna writes, referring to her baby as a Schreihals (an incessant loud crier). “One day she cried and cried and when I looked she had thrown up and was all covered with vomit, face, eyes, ears, hair, clothing a mess, her face red with rage” Hanna took one look and panicked, reached for the phone and called the doctor. From her essay:

I told the condition of that baby who can hardly catch her breath and had a mess of stuff running out of all openings. This good doctor listened patiently and finally said reassuringly:” Have you tried to clean her up?” End of phone call.

These days Hanna celebrates holidays with her lively and talented children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She had little desire to return to Germany, but the couple did make one trip to the Carpathian Mountains Before her love Eugene died in 1997.

“This was in spring, so there was no snow, but the chair lift was operating for tourists.” She writes that the people operating the lift recognized her husband immediately. “These people had been Eugene’s ski buddies in the 1930s — they gave him a royal welcome and free rides.”

Next up in my series of writings featuring immigrants enrolled in my memoir classes: Mia Miller. For this installment, I’ll excerpt from one of her pieces.

That’s Mia.

Mia was born in Egypt in the French speaking Jewish community of Cairo. Her family later moved to Paris, where she attended college and fell in love with Jonathan Miller, an American who was also studying there. The two of them were married in the United States, and after retiring from a long career in education and social work, Mia now volunteers teaching English to immigrants who have children enrolled in Chicago Public Schools.

When I asked the memoir writers in my classes to write about a celebration that centers around food, Mia chose Thanksgiving. “It is, for me, a Jewish immigrant, a holiday that has universal meaning for all of us in America, no matter what our race, creed or ethnicity,” she writes. “It’s a holiday where I am reminded that I have so much to be thankful for for being in this country with the many blessings that were bestowed upon Jonathan and me.”

Mia came to the United States in 1969 and celebrated her first Thanksgiving in Niantic Connecticut with Jonathan and his parents. “I learned to cook a Thanksgiving meal from my much beloved mother in-law, Vivian Miller, whom I called Mom,” she writes. “I loved every dish Mom served.”

When Mia was growing up, her own family kept celebrations and rituals to a minimum. Now she has embraced the Miller family traditions and made them her own. “To this day we have kept many of Mom’s recipes and traditions,” she writes, noting that the two holidays dearest to her husband’s parents — Thanksgiving and Passover – both center on food. ”For Jon and me, these two holidays are sacrosanct,” she writes. “The common thread of these two holidays is one of survival — Thanksgiving is about the pilgrims giving Thanks, and Passover celebrates the exodus of the Jewish People who left Egypt, the land of oppression, for a new life of freedom.”

Mia says she cherishes the “connectivity across generations,” and the way cultural, religious and culinary heritage passes from generation to generation. “Food brings people together,” she writes. “Thanksgiving is a Miller tradition that was handed down by Mom and Dad to us, from us to our sons, and I hope, in some part, to our grandsons and granddaughters when they become adults.” She ended her essay with a quote from a favorite American musical. “As Tevvye in Fiddler on the Roof used to say: Tradition, Tradition!”

Anna Nessy Perlberg was born in Czechoslovakia. Her mother, Julia Nessy, was an opera singer, and her entire family was devoted to the arts. Her father was Jewish, and when Hitler seized Prague in 1939 she and her two older brothers and their parents left their beloved city for New York.

Anna met her poet husband Mark when they both were students at Columbia. They were married in 1953, and a few years later Mark took a job with Time Magazine that sent him to its Chicago bureau. Anna found work in education and social work. Her last stint was as Director of Blind Service Association (a Chicago non-profit I cherish), and years after retiring she enrolled in one of the memoir-writing classes I lead. Here’s a story she read in class about her first years in Chicago.

by Anna Nessy Perlberg

Anna Nessy Perlberg reads from The House in Prague. Photo by: Diana Phillips, courtesy Lincoln Park Village

It was the middle fifties, and Mark and I had just moved to Chicago. My mother was with us for the holiday. The Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik was also in Chicago. He learned that mother was visiting us and so he came to visit her at our house.

He and mother had concertized together and although there was a difference in their ages — mother was quite a bit older than he — they were good friends.

When he arrived, they embraced and mother introduced Mark and me to him. Then they started to speak in Czech and to recall old times. Suddenly, Kubelik put his face in his hands, saying “It’s almost Christmas Eve, and I don’t have a vanocka.” Vanocka is the Czech version of the German stollen — a sweet cake-like bread, filled with almonds and raisins.

Kubelik looked so sad. Mark and I stared at him and then looked at each other. Simultaneously we had the same thought. After a minute or so, we excused ourselves, saying that we had an errand we’d almost forgotten, but that we’d be back.

We jumped in our car and drove to the Czech section of town on Cermak Street, a street, by the way, that was named after Anton Cermak, an immigrant from an area in Austria-Hungary that is now part of the Czech Republic. (Cermak was mayor of Chicago from 1931 until 1933, when he was at an appearance with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and died from an assassin’s bullet intended for the President-elect.)

in the 1950s there were three Czech bakeries on Cermak. The first one was all sold out of vanockas. Same for the second one. But the third had one left. When we told the Czech saleslady for whom our vanocka was intended, she wrapped it with special care and put a huge red ribbon around it.

Then back in the car and to our neighborhood. We were pretty sure that Kubelik had already left our house, but he had told Mother where he was staying. We drove to the Belden-Stratford Hotel, and told the people at the desk that we had a special delivery for Mr. Kubelik. They sent us up to his room.

Golden Alley Press published The House in Prague.

We knocked and when he opened the door, I said “Vesele Vanoce” (Merry Christmas) and we handed him the vanocka. He was surprised, then understood and hugged us both.

I think of it now, and like to remember that on that occasion Mark and I made someone special feel especially happy with a simple gift of a loaf of special Christmas bread.

The House in Prague, Anna Nessy Perlberg’s memoir of leaving Prague in 1939 and making a new Life in America, was Published this past summer. With immigration in the news, her story is very timely – her publisher, Golden Alley Press, says Anna’s book allows readers to “witness the family’s escape and voyage to Ellis Island and Anna’s struggle to become an American girl in a city teeming with immigrants and prejudice.”