CHAPTER FOUR: THE FAMILY MOVES TO EUROPE, 1945-1947
Edith and her Sons Go to Europe
While Cecil was in Germany working for the American military government, first in Bad Homburg and then in Berlin, his family remained in the United States. Edith was eager to join him, as she wrote to her sister Renée on June 18, 1945:

As for me, I have only one wish: to go with the children to join him as soon as possible. Not necessarily to live in Germany, but perhaps in France, or in Switzerland, where he could come to see us from time to time – or in Sweden if they send him to the North. But she was also reluctant to travel to Europe, as she wrote to Cecil on April 30, a few days before the end of the war:

I wonder where you will be sent, and what you will see, and what an impression it will make upon you. I cannot help but mourn for the devastation wrought upon the city where you and I met. Cities have souls, too, some people call it atmosphere, it makes no difference what you call it, it is the very particular thing you feel, your mood or state of mind when living in one particular place, as different from what you feel when in another place. . . .

The difficulty is: where, in Europe, can I go and know that the children will have plenty of milk and everything they need for their health and growth? . . . If you work for the Army, you will probably be fed by the Army ( I hope so, I do.) But we, as civilians, will have to share the hardships of all the other civilians wherever we happen to live, and I cannot make up my mind to take the children over to starve and freeze. Before I bring them over, you will have to find us a place where you can guarantee them food and warmth. Culture is important, but at Nana's [Daniel's] age, milk is more important, and that goes for Cedric, too.

Despite the scary news reports, Edith could not stay away from Cecil and Europe. So she inquired about moving to Switzerland. On June 15, she wrote to Cecil:

Yesterday at the Swiss tourist office, the man was very enthusiastic. He said Lugano and Locarno are as warm as the Riviera, had oodles of pensionen [rooming houses], that no French could reside in Switz. because their money isn't worth anything – and nobody else but British and Americans. But I know the British can take only 10 pounds out of the country – in any form. And American tourists with no reason to be in Europe don't get passports.

He said the Swiss are in good shape as far as food goes, the only well-provided- for country in Europe. I asked him if you could bring in some food. He said "Probably OK– but you must see consul in N.Y. " He said the cost of living was 30% up since before the war. My guess is that you will find rents cheap or cheaper than before, travel the same, and hired help cheap from our standards.

Among the attractions of moving to Switzerland and living in hotels was the thought of being freed of housework. In July of that year, she wrote to Cecil:

The idea of no more or at least less housework is what keeps me alive. If you knew how this drudgery, this everlasting work, work, work, rush rush, rush is wearing me out! I don't mind working, but from the minute the kids open their eyes till way in the night––––Sundays or holidays––it's always the same––and always a dirty house––and always mountains of things undone. Sure, I'd rather go without sugar and without candy and with ersatz dresses a thousand times and have a maid and time to know that I'm alive.

So, dear, at last you've really found the way to make me happy. Give me leisure so I can be my own sweet-tempered self, not a nervous, haggard, worn out housewife. Let me be a "lady" with a cultivated mind and well-cared-for nails, and I'll be a credit to you and you'll be proud of me, and I'll boost your career. It's good business to invest in one's wife, too, you know!

On November 2, she wrote to Cecil's mother and sister Lucy:

About two weeks ago, I heard that my passport had been granted, and this evening the OWI in N.Y. phoned me to say the Swiss visa had been obtained, and I am to call for the passport Monday morning. There remains now but the matter of securing passage which should be easy enough.

So on November 6, 1945, she wrote to Cecil:

Friday I heard from OWI that my passport was all ready, with visas and all, and I was to come and get it. And you had sent that lovely cable expressing your jubilation. But I, instead of rejoicing, could not bring myself to take the fateful decision to sail for Europe now.

Everyone I speak to, every newspaper I pick up, warns of suffering and want and privation and cold and epidemics and riots and whatnot, in Europe this winter. And although no mention is made of Switzerland, still it is in Europe and Europe is small, and Switzerland is right in the middle of it, and if an epidemic breaks out somewhere in France or Germany, for instance, it is not going to recognize Switzerland's political neutrality. . . .

So this is the situation: You and I both moved heaven and earth to obtain this passport, and now that I have it and must leave within two months, I am scared stiff, I have cold feet –– just like on my wedding day! . . .

Don't think I don't worry about you being in Germany this winter when Eisenhower predicts riots and whatnot. If the Army withdraws from Germany and the population gets really cold and hungry, then who knows that could happen! And on November 13, she wrote:

If you heard what I hear on the radio and what I read in the paper, you would worry about yourself as I worry about you. But perhaps you don't know what's going on in Germany as much as we do here (sic!). Anyway, it seems that in Frankfurt the GI's never go out alone or unarmed, and there have been attacks by Germans, etc. etc. As to the misery and hunger and cold and potential epidemics, the conservative N.Y. Times devoted two full pages to this topic today, besides two big articles on the first page. . . .

Don't you think I'm right, Darling? Everyone, everyone without exception, thinks I'm out of my mind to want to go to Europe now. And when you yourself, in one of your recent letters, said that we should come over in May if you got that job in London, then I knew that you, too, thought it unwise for us to bring the children to a cold and hungry Europe in the middle of winter.

Here is the article by C. I. Sulzberger that appeared that day in the New York Times and that had frightened her:

"EUROPE FACES DREAD WINTER; FOOD, FUEL AND HOPE SCARCE"

Despite redoubled relief efforts by the victorious Allied powers, the unhappy continent of Europe faces one of its bleakest, saddest winters since the chaos of the Thirty Years' War, reports from key cities show. Cold, famine and misery vie with each other in the ruins of last year's battlefields and the terrible specter of potential epidemic already creeping through the gutted ruins of great cities threatens to sweep out across a frightened world.

More than 20,000,000 desperate and homeless people are now milling east and west, north and south across the Continent. . . .

The apocalyptic horsemen are once again trampling a Europe whose vital energies alone have saved it time and again from their deadly hoofprints. New serums, penicillin and the sulfa drugs may well rescue the Continent from another deadly influenza epidemic such as slaughtered the survivors of the last great holocaust. . . .

But the resistance of Europe is low. Tuberculosis is rife. The very young and the very old especially are beginning to die in droves as the autumn leaves fall.

Sulzberger's fears, like that of many people at the time, were based on memories of the aftermath of World War One. In the years 1918-1920 a pandemic of influenza (the "Spanish flu") had swept around the world, killing between 17 and 50 million people. There had also been food shortages, especially in Germany between the end of that war and the signing of the Versailles Treaty in June 1919.

Meanwhile, Edith's good friends Fernande and Alfred Dain, then living in central France, wrote to Cecil on November 9, 1945:

We received a letter from Edith yesterday mentioning her hope to have her passport delivered for Switzerland soon. . . . She fears the epidemics and starvation of which your American press is so prolix, and you'll rejoice when you know that my answer tells her about French press giving "translations of American newspaper articles," but nothing of its own re those horrible possibilities, which in fact we do not dread here at all, the food situation improving little by little. Bread is free of tickets since the 1st of Nov. We have had delivered 200 kg coal per home and "baby and old people" received 400 kg wood. The gas situation is giving us double allotment, electricity is almost "as much as needed". –– La vie est belle! –– From what I hear over the Swiss T.S.F [radio], it is even more beautiful in this country chosen by the Headricks!

Cecil was also encouraging, as he wrote on November 14:

The thing to do is to sell the house, which you are going to do anyway, so as to burn our bridges behind us. Then come on as soon as you feel like it, all things taken into consideration. One thing for sure: Europe is in much better shape, even the German cities, than the newspapers make out, and Switzerland is one of those fat little bourgeois places that is a bit short of fat and sugar. But the cultural advantage and the new life that comes with travel will make up for all the little inconveniences incurred by having to do without a few things.

Edith and the Boys Set Sail for Europe.
On January 15, 1946, after Edith finally obtained permission from the State Department to join Cecil in Europe, she wrote to Cecil's mother and Lucy:

I have reserved passage on the SS "Gripsholm" sailing for Le Havre on Feb. 17. It's a Swedish ship run by the U.S. Lines temporarily. Was a hospital ship during the war. Brought also a lot of American internees from Germany and other places. Food & service are supposed to be excellent. Anything Scandinavian stands very high in my estimation. I have great admiration for those three little countries and I have long cherished the desire to visit them some day.. . . .

Cecil wrote lately of the possibility of his being transferred to Berlin. If it should be permanently, I might move up to Denmark just to be following him around for the fun of it. Now that I have no home I'll get me a gypsy's wagon and trail after him all over Europe.

According to Cecil,

. . . after she had packed enough household goods and clothing "to last twenty years" as I had promised she would be living in Europe, . . . Edith and the boys shipped out for Le Havre. I made up an excuse for going to Paris to see about some poster material for the Information Centers, and took off to meet the family.

After disembarking in La Havre, she later recalled:

Cecil met us there as well as my dear friend Fernande and her husband Fred Dain. We stayed in Paris a few days. Paris in 46: no food, no light, the women in wooden shoes. Fernande, of a well-to-do family, was grateful for the pieces of string . . . around the packages which I had brought.

On March 22, she wrote to Renée about her impressions of Paris:

My impression of Paris? People don't seem hungry at all. On the contrary. Many have fresh rosy cheeks, many women especially have natural colors, which you don't see in N.Y. The others are well made up. They are all well-groomed, but poorly shod! Shoes are the worst! Not that they have holes in them. Oh no, but they have thick wooden soles, they look rough and a little crude compared to the fine American shoes. The children wear big shoes with rough soles and even nails. As for the clothes, they aren't very elegant but I didn't see people in rags either. Outdated clothes, a little threadbare, black turned green. But not everyone. Far from it!

As for food, from what little I have learned, everyone eats on the black market. For example: Fred, Fern. and I entered the bistro for lunch: appetizers, steak, salad, cheese, aperitif, wine, coffee and liqueur, all delicious, but $3 per person! At the café this evening: champagne, liver pâté, etc. but also what prices! But everyone does barter. Fernande exchanges the eggs from her chickens for bread vouchers at the bakery for butter for meat. Also she has all the bread she wants, legs of lamb, roasts, as much as she wants, etc. Everyone does the same. For a population of 40 million there are 56 million ration cards – the difference is sold!

On the train the service in the restaurant car is impeccable but the coffee is barley coffee and saccharin is served instead of sugar.

In Paris there are already a few buses running, a few trams, quite a few cars. Taxis are still rare. You can only get them at train stations or police stations. Last month you needed a permit from the police station to obtain one, but it's free.

And in a letter to Cecil's family in Kansas, she wrote:

The little I saw of Paris didn't look so bad. No emaciated faces, no people in rags. On the contrary, many more rosy cheeks than in NY. The rest of the women are well made up. But the contrast is striking between their well-cared-for hair and stylish hairdos and their shabby looking shoes. The shoes are the worst part of their costume. To us, they look heavy and ugly, heavy wooden shoes, etc.

The bread I found delicious. Not white but crusty and crunchy and home-made bread, not factory bread. People all buy on the black market and this way they all eat and some eat quite well. And they all have connections in the country, which enables them to barter one thing for another.

In Switzerland
On March 17, 1946, the whole family took the train from Paris to Switzerland. Edith later recalled:

As we could not yet go to Germany, Cecil accompanied us to Locarno where he had planned we should wait until a home for us in Germany could be found. He spent a day or two with us, until we got settled at the Hotel del Sasso, in Orselina, a village above Locarno, and then he left for Frankfurt.
We spent two months in that hotel. The food was delicious and abundant, the guests extremely nice.
We spent two months in Locarno, one of my most pleasant recollections. We took many bus trips in the beautiful surrounding country: Brissago, Ascona on the Lago Maggiore; Canovalli and the other abandoned villages in the desolate and barren Alps of Italian Swit. Cedric went to the Italian school.
In May we left for Lucerne where we stayed a week, then on to Weggis, in a nice hotel right on the edge of the lake, and my young sons fished from the window, calling themselves the window fishermen. After Weggis we went to Vevey, stayed there a few days, thence to Gruyère, stayed a week or two, thence to Gstaad in July. At the hotel we made the acquaintance of a charming Belgian woman, Mme Dierickx, whose little daughter, Viviane, was my boys constant playmate.
After Gstaad, Wengen above Interlaken, where from the Hotel Falken where we stayed we had, from our window, a magnificent view of the Jungfrau, Monch and Egger Mts.
That was August. Cecil came. We went on a hike to the Kleine Scheidegg above Grindelwald.

In a letter to Cecil's mother and Lucy, she wrote:

Here in Switzerland apparently there has been no trace of suffering of any kind. Less heat in the winter in the cities, meat only 4 days a week, bread, butter, eggs are rationed etc. But in quantities sufficient for health.
You should see the window shops filled with cakes & pastry the likes of which I have never seen. And the candy! But all require points of course and the prices for us are sky high.

In June, she wrote to Cecil's mother and Lucy:

I'm not unhappy here, believe me. It is paradise. I have never seen people so polite, so friendly, not the friendliness of Paris shopkeepers, but a fundamental, sincere friendliness. . . .
We leave Basel on Sunday. We will go towards Montreux, then Gruyère. Later on the Interlaken side. Cecil said he would come to Switzerland for a week in a month. But I only half believe it.

Trucking through Alsace
That month, Edith and the boys left Switzerland for three days to meet Cecil, who came to Bern to acquire a truckload of books and take them to Frankfurt via Basel and Strasbourg. Edith took advantage of the ride to visit her European relatives, who had returned to Strasbourg from Vichy at the end of the war. On June 25, she wrote a long letter to her family in America. This letter is a diary of the three days she and her boys spent with Cecil. The first first part of the letter deals with meeting Cecil and traveling with him and his truckload of books from Basel to Strasbourg:

Today I have a lot to tell you. I wrote to you for the last time from Berne last week where I had gone to extend my temporary residence permit and learn from the U.S. Embassy at which border town I was to meet Cecil who was to come on June 22 to pick up a shipment of Swiss books for its libraries. Having learned that it was in Basel, we arrived here last Tuesday. We immediately went to the border to see how it was. And we saw that there was a chain stretched from one end to the other of a wide street which separates the suburb of Lysbuchel (Switzerland) from the village of St. Louis (France), with French and Swiss customs officers on one side and the other of the chain. As it is raining and has rained here in Switzerland everywhere I have been almost constantly since the end of April (the last month in Locarno was nothing but rain and fog), I saw myself and the children standing in the street in the rain, talking to Cecil on the other side of the chain, because I thought he wouldn't have a Swiss visa. I therefore took steps not only to obtain a French visa but also permission from the Swiss authorities to leave and return to Switzerland. It took me four days of errands, going there, coming back, etc. I obtained permission to leave Switzerland for 3 days.

So Saturday morning the 22nd at 9:45, the three of us were in front of the famous border chain, in pouring rain, waiting for the famous truck which was to bring Daddy and take away $9,000 worth of books printed in Switzerland. At exactly 10 a.m., the truck arrives, the kids rush like crazy, passing under the chain, ignoring the border formalities, and shouting Daddy! Daddy!

I, more wisely, showed my passport with its visa allowing me to go and kiss Cecil on the other side of the chain, and if necessary to go to a café and spend indoors the few hours which he had. While he was getting his truck loaded, I had to declare my money, show what I had in my small carry-on suitcase, etc.

When he had finished, Cecil said to me "We are going back via Strasbourg" (his Negro soldier driver and him). I told him laughing: "Take us, I have a visa for three days." He said, "Okay." We have lunch, and around 2 p.m., we pile in the back behind the crates of books in this huge truck covered with khaki canvas, and here we are, driving through France! The rain always. Water seeps through the canvas, flows everywhere through rips, the boxes are hard, no room for legs, but who cares!

Around 4:30 p.m. we arrive in the village of Diebolsheim where the driver takes a wrong turn. As it was difficult to turn around (there was a trailer still attached to the truck) a farmer led us (Cecil was behind with us and didn't know it) into a field so that the truck could turn. Result: it gets bogged down. Impossible to get out: the three tons of books and three tons of the truck itself are sinking deeper and deeper into the mud. The kids and I took refuge in the village inn (luckily this didn't happen in the middle of the countryside!) and Cecil went to telephone the American police station in Strasbourg (we were only 35 km away) so that they can rescue us. They promise to come. We wait. Cecil calls again. Same promise. It's getting dark. Still no one.

We have dinner at the inn – very good. We ask if there are beds. No, no beds. No one in the village has one. Village partly bombed. Families forced "to double up." Seeing that we were still going to stay there, the young woman offered us two old sofas for the children to sleep on. I accept, delighted. They are both in a pretty little room on the first floor. Only very clean blankets, no sheets. I put the children to bed and went back down to the main room of the inn, sat next to Cecil, sipping a glass of red wine and watching all the male element of the village playing cards (it was Saturday evening). They all speak mostly Alsatian, which resembles the German dialect of Basel like one drop of water resembles another – or almost. Cecil and I say, "Well, we'll sit up all night like it's New Year's Eve." He takes out a bottle of Cognac that he had bought at the PX in Frankfurt and hands it to the innkeeper for all his friends. The innkeeper's wife then remembers that the village teacher who lives there is absent from Saturday to Sunday and that the room is free. Would it be okay for us to sleep in his bed? You bet! At 10 p.m., as it was pouring rain, I accept with enthusiasm. I go up to see the room: very clean, newly painted, hot and cold running water, clean real linen sheets with hand-embroidered pillowcase, gold- colored silk blanket: great luxury!

While I'm upstairs, Cecil takes out his second bottle of Cognac and passes it around. However, he had trouble with his driver who refused to sleep in the truck: "Ah love my life. I don't wanna get killed in that field out there." The poor guy was scared to death that he would be lynched. So Cecil said to him: "You got us in that hole. Now it's your duty to stay there and watch over the property. If you don't, you're AWOL etc." So the poor guy had to wrap himself in his blankets and sleep in his truck – which didn't kill him.

The next day Cecil calls again and again and again. During this time we had a very good breakfast: omelette, butter and jam, nothing was missing.

We were having lunch around 1:00 p.m. when a jeep and an enormous "wrecker" arrived from Strasbourg. We leave our soup there and run to the field of action. The whole village has gathered, in the rain, trampling in the mud. Half a dozen of these guys get to work and after half an hour the monster begins to move and then come out of its hole. We are saved! We return to our rabbit stew, cherry pie and bowl of strawberries, then get back in the truck, and at 5:00 p.m. we are in Strasbourg!

The Family in Strasbourg
The second half of Edith's letter is about her French relatives who had spent the war in Vichy, in the part of France not occupied by the Wehrmacht. In April 1945, after France had been liberated but the war was still raging in Germany, she wrote to Cecil:

I told you, didn't I, that I have heard from all the Vichy Relatives. The parents are with the youngest daughter and her husband at 70 rue de Paris, Vichy. They have written again saying that they have bread, but are absolutely destitute in the way of clothing. The oldest daughter, Netty Blicksilber, rue de l'Horloge, Chantelle (Allier) is in great penury. She lives with her husband who was injured and is incapacitated, her 3 children, a girl of 8 ½, and a boy and girl twins of 5 ½, her mother in law and a 16 year old niece whose parents were sent to some concentration camp, all seven of them in two tiny rooms with an old box as a table, 5 chairs and their suitcases for sole furniture. They all sleep on the floor. So, if you can do anything, they are the ones who need it most.

At the end of the war, the family had returned to Strasbourg, and Edith took the opportunity of traveling with Cecil to pay them a visit. In her letter of June 25, 1946, she wrote to her mother, who was then living with Renée in Washington:

I want to call the family. Nobody has a phone. We have dinner at the American officers' restaurant then we go around 8:00 p.m. to 3 rue du Travail. Like that! A surprise! Beautiful house. I ring. Someone comes down in the elevator. It's Netty. We kiss. Then she said to me: What a shame! I don't dare bring the children up. Mine all have mumps! So Cecil stays with C and D downstairs. I'm getting ready to go upstairs. There's Uncle coming down. He was about to go out. He comes back up with us. We meet the aunt on the landing. I meet Della, Raphael's wife (he had left for Lyon that morning). The two apartments are on the same landing. Beautiful large rooms with high ceilings unlike any in the U.S. Raphael's apartment has superb furniture. The Germans didn't touch anything. On the other hand, they completely cleaned out the parents' apartment which now contains Netty's furniture, who does not have an apartment, as her house had been bombed. I saw her children in bed; I kept at a distance. I also saw Raphael's little one (8 years old) who was also starting to have the mumps! Then Netty's husband came. Then Rachel's husband. As the Mullers live far from the Hirschs. René took Raphael's car and took us to his house so we could see Rachel. She also has a huge apartment with furniture like I will never have, saved from their store in Vichy, their apartment in Strasbourg having been completely robbed!

To see these apartments and this furniture you would think they were very rich people, which the Mullers were before the war. (Rachel told me that they had 2 million francs worth of merchandise, a factory with fifty workers, a store with a ground floor and four floors). They got other people's furniture, naturally, from Muller at very reduced prices.

I didn't see anyone in rags, quite the contrary. Rachel was wearing a dress that she told me she had received from us. The aunt wore a coat that I believe was also from N.Y. She always looks elegant and neat. She looks healthy. The uncle too, his face a little more wrinkled naturally. He claims he is seventy-three years old. When I told him that you [Serafina] were seventy, he told me that he was not wrong because he had obtained his birth certificate from Snyatin. He immediately complained of his intestine, but I think he did so before also.

The next morning, after sleeping at the hotel and saying goodbye to Cecil who left with his truck for Frankfurt, the children and I returned to Rachel's house who had invited us to lunch. A beautiful, well-served meal in a superb dining room, a maid summoned with a bell. (When rich people become poor, they are always richer than others anyway). An exquisite hors d'oeuvre (made in part with American canned goods from the family in N.Y., no doubt). roast beef, vegetables, chocolate cake made by Rachel (with American cocoa too, she told me) and fruit. I'm telling you all this, Mom, so you don't worry that they're dying of hunger. They were quick to tell me that it was in my honor that they had incurred all these expenses. I believe it. Who eats like that all the time? After the appetizers, the children were no longer hungry.

Rachel talked to me a little. She told me what the aunt had told me the day before (and what I had guessed) that Netty's husband was a "Schlemil," that he didn't want to work, that before the war it was Rachel who dressed Netty and the children, who helped them throughout the war, and the parents too of course and these two old women who still live with her, the mother and aunt of René Muller. But now as they have lost everything –– what they had left in Strasbourg and what they had in Vichy, they have to start again from scratch.

From a supply point of view, it's much better now. You get anything you want by paying the price, even silk stockings! There is milk, vegetables, fruit. She told me that if I came to live in France, especially in the countryside, I would not be hungry. I realized it in this small village.

What I saw of Strasbourg by tram etc. let's say one house in twenty was bombed. Here a pile of bricks, there a house in good condition with a perfume store. Further on, a house with demolished upper floors, inhabited apartments below and a fashion store with the latest fashions. On the railroad station square there is a large void and debris which were once two hotels (the people were in the cellar, no one was killed, the doorman of our hotel told me). But the other hotels operate as if nothing had happened.

As my permit to return to Switzerland expired on June 24, that is yesterday, I had to leave Strasbourg by the one o'clock train to Basel (three hours by train). The uncle and aunt were at the station to say goodbye to us.

We've had so little time to talk, but my impression is this. If they suffered before, they no longer suffer now. They live in superb apartments, with furniture that neither the Biels nor Zara have (thanks to their furniture factory of course). With everything we and Netty sent, they have something to wear. . . And as Rachel told me, they can now feed themselves. Everything is expensive, obviously. But in the United States too. We have done enough for them. They can manage now. No one looked hungry. The children and adults all looked good. If they suffered before, it is over now.

After their visit to Strasbourg, Edith and her boys returned to Switzerland, while Cecil went on to Frankfurt. On July 7, he wrote to Edith, Cedric, and Daniel:

Now I'll tell you everything that happened since I left you at the Hotel des Vosges in Strasbourg:

My truck was waiting for me downstairs, We inquired as to where to drive to get to the Rhine. Then we came to a bridge built on boats and what a sight. It had rained hard during the night and as you know for days before. So the mighty river was up to the edges of its banks.The river was flowing at a terrible and swift pace, a raging torrent, and the bridge was only a few feet above the water. Men were standing on the boats that held up the bridge, watching the fast moving water rush past. It was a mean and angry river, a twisting, whirling, mad old river, a dangerous mighty, brutal, menacing stream. I wish you could have seen the Rhine at Strasbourg.

After we had lunch at Karlsruhe (I have not forgotten to find you some maps of Europe as fast as I can), we got on the Autobahn, a broad highway with no cross traffic that circles Germany and connects all the larger cities, and our motor got hot, so we began to run on fewer cylinders, finally crippling into Frankfurt after six in the evening.We unloaded the precious Swiss books and I went to bed.

Moving to Berlin
The family's hope of being reunited had to be postponed until the American occupation authority in Germany allowed dependents to join their employees and found housing for them. As Edith wrote to her mother in June 1946:

According to Cecil, families of officers who have been in the military for several years have "priority over me." Therefore, due to lack of sufficient accommodation, I was put on the list of Sept. But maybe it will be Oct. or Dec. or whatever. I'm starting to no longer believe anything.

Not until August or September 1946 was Cecil awarded a house in Berlin and was the family authorized to move there. The next chapters will describe the lives of Americans and Germans in Berlin during those momentous years.


A Belgian Voice After the War
Before we turn to the story of our lives in Berlin, let us turn to the letters that Edith exchanged with her Belgian friend Denise Dierickx, whom she had met during her stay in Switzerland. In the letters that Madame Dierickx wrote, she describes Belgium after the war. In October 1946, she wrote:
Our industries are working as much as possible, but mining and electrical energy problems are slowing down production. Some electric generators, having been damaged by the events of the war, are out of service and it will take years to replace them, which forces us to import German electricity. But the English policy aimed at the reconstruction of German industries has rationed us. And many people are angry at the idea of partial unemployment in their factory while in Germany these dirty Germans are getting back on their feet.

And in February 1947, she wrote:

I realize the duality of this luxurious and brilliant atmosphere, alongside the ruins, the German misery, and I assure you that I have no pity for the Germans, who now endure what we endured for five years, through their own fault. . . .

Brussels is cheerful, the appearance of the illuminated stores, displaying to the dazzled eyes of passers-by everything of which we have been deprived for years, and we are certainly for the moment the focus of attention of the whole world.

What she wrote about the economy of Belgium and Brussels did not soften her opinion of Germans:

We Belgians are specialists in hatred of the Germans, and I assure you that our indignation was immense when an article appeared in our newspapers this week announcing that it was permitted to send parcels to these poor Germans!! Our English allies suffer from hunger, from the cold, from the lack of textiles, our French neighbors, especially the inhabitants of Paris, suffer from hunger, and have to pay 1000 francs for 1 kilo of ham (official price!) and we have no right to send them the slightest package!…

How can you like this execrated race? Is it terribly painful to be around them every day? Does hatred disappear or does it grow??? In any case, your hatred can never be compared to ours who were crushed under the Nazi heel.