Beginning

This is the beginning of a journey. I think of it as my father's journey, because I imagine that he would be leading it if he could, but in fact,  I am not sure that he would embark on this adventure, because I am digging deep into the past, a past he left far behind a very long time ago. I am returning to the place where he was born, the landscape that defined him in his early years, the world that was his but is no more, the world he abandoned or more accurately, a world that abandoned him.  He moved forward and only looked ahead. I am encouraging him to reminisce, to wander back in his thoughts and memories, to provide me with context, with details, with direction.

I know no one personally with more interesting or adventuresome a life story than that of my father. The obstacles and challenges and reversals and opportunities he encountered make for an incredible story of survival. He grew up in a small town in a Danube Swabian community in the Vojvodina in what is now Serbia, the oldest child of comfortable landowners, and was groomed to follow in his father's footsteps as a politician. He studied law at the University of Belgrade and served in the Serbian cavalry for his military duties. When later studying in Berlin, he was drafted in the German army and was sent to the Russian front, and miraculously survived horrific conditions to find his way to his family, who were by then refugees in Austria. He had hoped, along with his family and members of his community, to return to his home in Ulmenau on the Danube, and worked for some years in an organization whose sole purpose was repatriation, but when it became clear that there would never be an opportunity to return and reclaim lands and homes and communities, he made the decision to begin a new life in a new continent and did not look back.

I am meeting my sister and my daughter to retrace his route, from the end to the beginning and through the middle. I have a lifetime of stories to guide me, and when I ask my father for more details, his photographic memory astonishes me in its intricacy and comprehensiveness. He is part of this journey, his journey and ours.