People in Texas didn’t speak in terms of the four or five cows that brother Norbert would have brokered in Westphalia. Here, people had thousands of head of cattle. They took enormous risks and pulled oil right out of the ground. But the biggest difference was safety, security, warmth, acceptance—knowing that your hardest times were behind you and you’d made it through somehow.
I traveled thousands of miles to stand here in the snow and the cold where my Grandmother and her younger daughter, Eva, found one another in 1944, after eighteen months of heartbreaking separation, amongst thousands of women penned by barbed wire into two groups, awaiting role call.