The first American relative who showed up at the Elmhof after the war (and the only one I can remember, although there were others) was Mama’s first cousin, Army Captain Grenville Emmet (1909-1989). His father, Granny’s brother Grenville Emmet (1877-1937), had been the American Special Envoy to the Netherlands in 1933-1934 and Special Envoy to Austria until his death in 1937. Mama’s brother Nicholas Biddle (1906-1986) was a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy and still actively engaged in the war against Japan. Mama did not see him again until she returned to America the following year. Two American soldiers stationed near our village, Bill and Mack, their last names now forgotten, came to visit us at the Elmhof every Sunday in the summer of 1945, as recorded in my diary. Mack flattered Mama by telling her she looked like Katharine Hepburn. Bill, an army cook, made a proposal of marriage to Wini, as she later told me, but Wini was not tempted. Bill and Mack returned to the States in September. Later American friends at the Elmhof included the UNRRA workers Jean and Margaret, attached to the DP camp in Rosenheim. They remained good friends back in America.

Our own return was delayed by the absence of a civilian government or administration as well as American red tape, apparently because Mama was still classified as an enemy alien for having been married to a German. She may also have been reluctant to leave Wini behind. As a Dutch citizen with a brother who had joined the SS her immigration would have been much more problematic than Mama’s repatriation. Her brother Ronald claimed that he had never actually sworn allegiance to the Nazis, but this did not save him from prosecution in his home country after the war. We spent one more year at the Elmhof before departing on our return trip to the U.S. in June 1946. Mama and Wini took charge of converting the lawn in front of the Elmhof into a huge vegetable garden, as they had previously done in Ried. Nonetheless, food remained the most pressing problem we faced. Mama gained a life-long aversion to green tomatoes, which we harvested early to beat the frost and fried in various forms to add some vitamins to our meals. We did begin to receive Care packages and huge tins of dried eggs and dried milk from our relatives at home, which Mama always shared with the increasing number of residents of the Elmhof. One new addition in the spring of 1945 was Erich, an Austrian boy about Betsy’s age, who had lost his parents and his home in the fighting around Vienna. He had been picked up while wandering aimlessly in search of a place to stay by our playmate Tassilo von Winterfeldt, who was the same age and lived with his mother Tanya and their former maid Frieda with us in the building adjoining the Elmhof. Erich stayed with us for several months and participated in all our activities. We were very impressed by the toughness and worldly wisdom he had acquired as an orphan on the road.

We four American children soon established a daily routine of walking to the Autobahn to beg for chewing gum, candy, food, and, on behalf of the adults at the Elmhof (who sometimes told us not to come back until we got them them), coffee and cigarettes. Cigarettes had become the principal means of exchange in Germany at the end of the war as the German currency and postage stamps lost all value. All over the country people fought over cigarette butts in the streets and on the sidewalks. These were then stripped of their tobacco and converted into new cigarettes. American tobacco was, of course, particularly prized for its superior quality.

On one of our first tramps to the Autobahn we encountered huge columns of German prisoners of war being marched to detention camps. I remember how, during a “latrine break,” squatting soldiers answering nature’s call covered the entire hillside as far as the eye could reach. Among the marching prisoners was Papa, functioning as an interpreter for the American guards, who gave him permission to come over to greet us. His American connection and command of English did gain him some privileges from his American captors, but proportionately greater hostility from those of his fellow prisoners who regarded him as a traitor or a brown-noser. In his memoirs, written toward the end of his life, Papa credited his survival during and immediately after the war to his ability at crucial times to recognize the Mörderblick (murderous eye) in persons who wished him ill. He prided himself on his foresight in staying out of their way.

During that spring and summer the best opportunity to get to know American soldiers and obtain hand-outs came when military vehicles broke down and pulled over to the side of the Autobahn to await repairs, sometimes for several days. By and large, we children were treated amicably and generously by the soldiers, some of whom were quite amazed to run into an American family in Germany. Our peculiar national status, however, apparently caused some dissension as to how friendly their deportment toward us should be. After all, the non-fraternization rule was still in place, and many of these soldiers had lost buddies to German shells and bullets in the war. While most of the GIs we encountered accepted our self-identified status as an American family stuck in Germany, extraordinary as it must have seemed to them, there were at least a few who viewed us children simply as linguistically dexterous Germans, concealing our true identities behind a good English pronunciation and vocabulary. The hostility of some of these embittered soldiers was quite palpable as, in the name of their fallen comrades, they tried to talk their buddies out of indulging us “Krauts.” But such hostility was rare, if nonetheless a reaction with which we always had to reckon.

In my journal that summer of 1945 I recorded the many hikes and excursions we children took into the neighboring mountains and countryside. We went swimming in the Rabsee, about an hour away, walking west on the Autobahn. American soldiers swam there, too, including one time to our amazement several truckloads of African-Americans from a unit in the still segregated army. I still wrote my journal in German, although Mama would no longer accept any poems or stories as presents for her birthday or for other occasions unless they were written in English – one sign of how greatly the times had changed. Nonetheless, my poetry had its admirers among the other residents of the Elmhof, including the displaced Balts, Heddy Lieven and her sister Irene Dewitz, who encouraged my precocious literary endeavors with lavish praise. My themes now reflected the changed post-war conditions. No longer did I write about the heroic Carolingian crusade to convert the heathen Saxons to Christianity or the Ottonian victory over the Magyars on the Lechfeld near Augsburg in the year 955, all part of the nationalist lore we imbibed in the war. Instead I attempted to appease Mama by setting my stories in an imagined America, in the style of Karl May.

School was temporarily suspended after the war as the ideologically contaminated textbooks were replaced and the politically compromised teachers were “denazified” in an effort to bring democracy to Germany. In the interim we took private lessons at Hinterhör from Director Rieder, the former (and future) head of the school at Schloß Neubeuern. For a time we also attended a Gymnasium (college preparatory school) in Brannenburg, several miles away. Mama took us to school in the morning by horse and buggy borrowed from Hinterhör. This was always an adventure, as the horse shied at every approaching car. Fortunately there were very few cars on the back roads, at least until the arrival of the Americans. Several months after the end of the war a gymnasium reopened (without textbooks) in Rosenheim. We could get there by train, although we had to walk more than two hours along the tracks to get back home, as the return train did not run until evening.

In May 1946 we paid our last visit to our paternal grandparents in Reichenhall, about 50 miles to the southeast close to the Austrian border. Here Papa had settled down with his second family at the end of the war. It was in Reichenhall, perhaps on an earlier visit, that I first saw, in the local cinema, the shocking footage of the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen and the mass burial, with bulldozers, of thousands of emaciated corpses. Films of Nazi atrocities were shown all over Germany as part of the Allied denazification effort. In the audience in Reichenhall there were muffled voices of outrage, disgust, and disbelief. In the back of the theatre one male voice could be heard to mutter that it was all Himmler’s fault.

On 11 June 1946 at 6 in the morning we left the Elmhof for the last time. I recorded our journey in the last of my childhood diaries still written in German. All the details of where we stayed, whom we met, and what we did can be found there, but the laconic monotone does not reveal any of the emotions my siblings or I must (or may) have felt — neither joy nor sadness, excitement nor regret. I do vividly remember the bed sheet that those we left behind unfurled from the balcony of the Elmhof, bidding us farewell and god-speed.

We travelled by truck to Munich, and from there by overcrowded trains to Lindau on the Bodensee (the Lake of Constance). A passenger steamer brought us to Constance the next day, where we crossed the border to Switzerland on foot, with little baggage and no money. Mama gave away her now worthless German marks to a porter who had helped us with our luggage. Olaf’s German shepherd Nora, who made the whole long trip with us to America, crossed the Swiss (and later the Italian) borders on her own and rejoined us on the other side. In Kreuzlingen on the Swiss side of the border we had our first meal outside of Germany, an experience that sticks in my mind because of the delicious flavor of the unaccustomed fresh-baked white bread. As prearranged with Miss Foote (1872-1968), a long-time friend of the family and an associate of Carl Jung’s, we travelled by taxi to Zurich and spent the night at the hotel where she lived.

According to Mama after the war, the usual transatlantic route via Hamburg or Bremerhafen was closed to us because of the huge demand for shipping to bring home thousands of returning American troops. As I understood it at the time, our stay in Switzerland was to be temporary but indefinite and would end when passage to America via an Italian port could be secured. We children were placed in a small boarding school in the Swiss alpine village of Villars, about 30 miles southeast of Lausanne in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Mama and Wini returned to Zurich to complete preparations for our voyage. Uncle Nick wired $500 to cover the costs of our stay and the trip. While the roughly 40 pupils at Villars attended classes, we four children received lessons in French.

On June 28th our alpine idyll came to an unexpectedly sudden close. We were told to return to Zurich immediately, as our transatlantic passage had been booked. The following day we travelled from Zurich to Lugano by train (through very long tunnels, as I appreciatively recorded). On June 30th we crossed the Italian border at Chiasso by bus, we children sitting on top of the baggage strapped to the roof. We left Wini behind in Lugano. She would rejoin us in Connecticut in 1948 after securing the necessary visa. Late that evening we arrived in Genoa, where our ship, the Vulcania, was scheduled to depart on the 5th of July. In the intervening days we did a lot of sightseeing in the heavily damaged city. Its destruction paled, however, against the devastation of Munich or Augsburg, the German cities we had most recently seen. In my diary I noted the good food in Genoa and the welcome chance to go bathing in the sea. What I did not mention, but sticks in my mind to this day, is the raw floating sewage we had to dodge while swimming in the polluted harbor.

Our ten-day transatlantic voyage on the Vulcania included only one stop. We did not disembark at Palermo, where we docked for several hours the next day. Instead, we stood at the railing in the blistering heat and watched Sicilian youths diving in the surprisingly clear water to retrieve coins thrown to them by passengers on board. That night the weather grew stormy and all of us children got seasick the next day. This did not prevent us from admiring the view of Gibraltar, however, which we passed on the evening of July 7th. After a week on the open sea we arrived at the entrance to New York harbor at dawn on July 15th. Betsy, who had gotten up early with Mama to see the Statue of Liberty, reported that Mama had been moved to tears. Mama’s older siblings, Uncle Nick Biddle (1906-1986) and Aunt Temple (1908-1983), met us at the dock in what must have been an emotional reunion.

We spent the first night at our great aunt Eleanor Emmet Lapsley’s (1880-1953) in Bedford, about an hour’s drive from the city. Tempy, still following instructions based on conditions in Europe and on board ship, informed Mama that it was safe to sit on the toilets in this house! We spent the next eight weeks enjoying the hospitality of our close relatives, two weeks each at Aunt Temple’s and Uncle John’s in Concord, NH, and Uncle Nick’s and Aunt Virginia’s summer home in Cohasset, MA, and the remaining four weeks with Aunt Eleanor’s daughter, Nora Iselin (1907-1971) and her husband Columbus, on Martha’s Vineyard. The marvelous taste and easy accessibility of ice cream was a source of wonder, but unfortunately it made me sick. Only later did I discover that this was due not (or not only) to my gorging on this novel delicacy, but to a lactose intolerance that I had apparently developed during the war. In Concord we got to know our Edmonds cousins, Nick, Liz, Ellen, and Johnny, only two years old at the time. In Cohasset and Milton, MA, we got to know our Biddle cousins, Ginny, Kitty, Liz, and Nick, Jr. Snatches of memory of that summer stick in mind: the discovery of peanut butter, the most delicious spread I thought I had ever tasted; the snapping turtles in the pond in which we swam in Concord; listening to Stephen Foster songs for hours on end on the automatic 78 rpm record player in Milton, a technical and musical revelation to me; fishing for flounder in Cohasset; hunting on Martha’s Vineyard, and shedding bitter tears after killing a rabbit with a 22.

On September 10th a new phase of our life was to begin. Olaf and I headed to St. Paul’s School, where we were to enter the third and first forms, respectively. We only saw each other once a week, however, at our German lessons with Herr Schade, as the upper and lower schools were completely separate at the time. Betsy was to go to the Chapin School in New York, the school from which Mama had been expelled sixteen years before. Tempy accompanied Mama to Cousin Leslie Emmet’s (1877-1960) summer home in Salisbury, CT, where he would enter the second grade. We would not see each other again until Christmas, the longest separation in our young lives.