As dire as the financial situation had been in the States during the Depression, my parents never imagined they would return to Germany other than for a visit to Pforzheim, which they had hoped to make after the U.S. economy turned around. A voyage for all four of us was going to be expensive, and saving money during the Depression was nearly impossible. Papa had faithfully written to his parents every turn of the seasons, and Oma and Opa in turn wrote to him. Papa saw from his father’s letters that things had been changing in Germany in the 1930s. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party had been in existence for only five years when Papa and Mommi left Germany, but by my first birthday, the Nazi Party—as it was abbreviated for ease of conversation—had become the largest party in the German parliament, and a former Austrian and vocal anti-Semite named Adolf Hitler was its champion. Then, in 1933, all political parties other than the Nazi Party were banned in Germany. Opa hadn’t been overly concerned by this development, and his letters to Papa had been full of praise for Chancellor Hitler’s ideas and programs. Papa wrote back to my grandfather with his reasons for concern, namely that he felt a single-party regime could give rise to a dictatorship. But of course on the day the FBI searched our house it was not my father’s cautionary letters to Opa that they found, but Opa’s laudatory letters to him, which Papa had kept purely for sentimental reasons.
Papa and Mommi had saved half of the money needed for the four of us to make the long-awaited trip to Germany when Opa died suddenly in August of 1939. I remember when the telegram came for Papa. We’d never gotten a telegram before. I was ten years old and I had never seen my papa cry until that day. He explained he was sad that his father died without ever having met Max and me. I remember a friend from Papa’s work turning into our driveway the next day in a shining blue car to take Papa to the train station. Papa had to get to New York Harbor first, and then board a ship bound for Hamburg, and then take another train to southern Germany.
Papa was gone for four weeks, with half of that time devoted to travel. He came home from the funeral with Opa’s military medals in a velvet case and spicy-sweet lebkuchen wrapped in shiny foil wrappers. I remember my mother asking him, in English, if it had been hard to come back. He had said Germany would always have a special place in his heart, but his home was here now, in Iowa, with her and with Max and me.
Two days after Papa got back, Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, the first of many countries his armies would roll into in his quest to bring about a new kind of world.
Being only ten, I didn’t appreciate what the invasion of Poland meant. France and Britain declared war on Germany just days after that. I remember my father announcing this to my mother while I was eating a slice of the gingery German lebkuchen, still moist from having just been unwrapped.
My parents began to speak quietly to each other about the affairs going on in their homeland after that. Papa would go to a German American club in nearby Bettendorf to play cards and he would come home whispering secrets to Mommi about what was happening that I was not meant to hear. I didn’t care. None of the talk of politics and war interested me. I do remember my father saying to Mommi at one point, “We should get our declarations in.” He meant declarations of intent to become American citizens.
Before anything came of my parents’ declarations, however, something else happened. Just half a year after Germany occupied Poland—and by this time Denmark and Norway had been invaded, too—Congress passed the Alien Registration Act. I was unaffected, being an American citizen by birth, and only eleven, so its passage went unnoticed by me. My parents, however, as legal residents but not citizens, were compelled to go to the post office to register and be fingerprinted. They were asked questions about their family and educational history in Germany, organizations they belonged to, and occupations they had been and were currently engaged in. They were given alien registration numbers. A file was begun on my father on the day he was fingerprinted, a file that he had not been concerned about because he believed he had nothing to hide. He’d been in America for fifteen years. He was not a Nazi Party member. He had declared his intent to become naturalized. He loved his new country.
As the war in Europe intensified, my parents—like many German Americans—watched quietly from the sidelines, willing the conflict to end before it got any worse or hoping at least that the United States would remain neutral. Any hope of that evaporated, of course, when four days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war against the United States.
None of us knew that after Pearl Harbor, my father was being routinely watched for signs of subversive activity. For me, the war was happening far away from where we were and had nothing to do with us. My family and I practiced the air raid drills, we put up blackout curtains, and we conserved where we could and were careful with our war ration books and red stamps and blue stamps. We lived like all the other Americans in our neighborhood did.
But my parents were not like all the other Americans.
Still, Papa wasn’t concerned for himself. Why should he have been worried? He was working hard and living a life of integrity, which was all that the American Dream required of you.
My father’s trip to Germany just before Hitler invaded Poland was to bury his father, but the reason he went was not as important as that he went. One day, unknown to Papa, FBI agents came to his place of employment and asked his supervisor and coworkers what they knew about Otto Sontag’s visit to Germany a year and a half earlier, and where they believed Otto Sontag’s loyalties lay. Then, some months later, Stevie Winters told his father what Mr. Sontag had said about making a bomb. Mr. Winters promptly reported this to the FBI.
Next thing you know, Papa, Mommi, and I were sitting in our kitchen while FBI agents tore apart our house looking for corroborating evidence that Alien #451068, also known as Otto Sontag, was a threat to national security. They found the book Hitler wrote, the war medals, Opa’s many letters, and all the photographs of my father having lived a German life prior to coming to America.
Papa had told me ages ago, years before the war, that terrible things can happen when you mix two substances that don’t belong together. He was worried I might one day naïvely mix laundry bleach with ammonia and he wanted to make sure I understood some things cannot be stirred together into the same pot because they will react in ways that can hurt someone.
It is that way with fear and ignorance, I think. Those FBI agents were ignorant of my father’s true loyalties because they didn’t truly know him. They saw what little they saw and feared he was a danger. A threat. An enemy.
I would learn this is what happened to Mariko’s parents, too, and to many of the other families at Crystal City. Mariko’s father and mother, who’d been in the States even longer than my parents, had countless family and friends back in Japan, many of whom were serving in the Imperial Japanese Navy. But Mr. Inoue wasn’t a dangerous man. He was just a grocer from Little Tokyo.
Lucy Hobart was found and returned to her anxious parents on a snowy evening five days after she ran away. The next time I saw my father it was a blistering-hot afternoon in mid-July, and we were more than a thousand miles from the only place I had ever called home.