I wanted to hold on to all the love I’d known there in Vienna— there had been so much—and yet still hang on to all the anger that had now seized me as if it had talons.
I realized what I really wanted was to go home. To California. Back to the place where my life had begun, back to the place where, forty years earlier, I’d left full of dreams. I was done with Vienna. Done with Lucerne. I was so tired and done with all of it.
“They would have killed her anyway, Johannes,” I finally said as tears slipped down my own cheeks. “You didn’t kill her alone. We all did.”
“It was me, it was me.”
“Yes, it was you. But it was Martine, too. And me. We all should have fought back the moment the Nazis first showed us what they wanted. What they hated. Every good person everywhere should have.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“That’s not true.”
“Power like that can’t be stopped.”
“Of course it can. Itwasstopped. It was stopped when the rest of the world finally said, ‘No more.’ But we waited too long. We should have said ‘no’ at the very beginning. There shouldn’t have been a ‘more.’ We waited too long.”
Johannes, still weeping softly, said nothing.
How much time passed as we continued to sit there, I wasn’t sure. When I rose to leave, he was no longer sobbing, but his head was still cradled in his arms.
I reached for his uninjured hand, laid my own across it, and held it there. He placed his bandaged one atop it, and for amoment, we remained that way. Then I withdrew my hand, turned from the despairing man, and walked out of his house.
Rain clouds had gathered while I’d been inside and were now rumbling overhead. As I walked back to the pension to collect my things, I couldn’t help but think that Johannes Maier would spend the rest of his life having bad dreams of being chased by demons through that same decrepit house of my own nightmares, while calling out for a daughter who would not answer him. When I reached the pension, the sky opened and the rain began to fall.
36
JUNE 1953
I am sitting at the patio table in the backyard with the invitation to come to New York in front of me when Amaryllis arrives home from school. I hear her greet Lila in the kitchen, lower her books to the kitchen table, and open the fridge for a drink.
Seconds later she is on the patio saying hello to me, too.
She is so tall and pretty, with wavy brown hair—so like Rosie’s—and Truman’s radiant eyes. I remind her often how much she favors them both in appearance. She is introspective and insightful like Truman was, but also unafraid to go after what she wants. And unfailingly kind. Her fourteenth birthday is fast approaching, and I can hardly believe how fast five years with her have flown.
“What’s that?” Amaryllis takes a chair next to me and nods at the letter. She has a glass of chocolate milk in her hand.
“I’ve been asked to speak in New York City. At a university.”
“Auntie! That’s terrific. You’re going, aren’t you?”
It is the first time I have been invited to speak somewhere that isn’t on the West Coast, and I am surprised and humbled and, if I’m being honest, a bit terrified.
“I suppose I should,” I say.
“Of course you should.”
I smile at her bold confidence and remind myself this was what I’d wanted when I first began speaking out against forced sterilizations at California institutions; I’d wanted from the get-go for the message to go well beyond me and the California state line. But now that it seems like it is finally starting to happen, I feel unequal to the task.
But then again, I had started out feeling the same way.
George and Lila had been my best cheerleaders early on, telling me I was more than capable and qualified to speak to audiences on the inherent dangers of eugenic ideology. And even Amaryllis in her own uninformed way encouraged me, though it’s just been in the last year that I think she suspects she’s somehow a part of what I speak to audiences about. She heard me mention Rosie’s name a while back when I was talking to an interviewer on the phone and I couldn’t get out of earshot quick enough. She doesn’t yet know all the complexities of how she was born, but I’ve promised myself to tell her this year on her birthday, now only a couple of weeks away. She’s been patient about being told the full truth, and I’ve been grateful for that.
I waited until a year after Amaryllis came to live with me to begin looking for a way to change California’s eugenics laws. Partly because I wanted to devote that first year to her and her alone, but also because I knew I’d be beginning a potentially long and difficult battle. Forty years of a legalized state-run practice wouldn’t disappear overnight. I knew that without George even telling me. I’d asked him how an ordinary citizen can change a law, and after reading his books on California legislation and the long process of getting a bill signed and old regulations repealed, and after too many unanswered letters sent to Sacramento, I realized I wasn’t beginning with the most convincing thing I could bring to the conversation. What I possessed to light a fire, even ifit was to be a small one at first, was my experience in occupied Europe. There was tremendous interest in the personal stories of those who had witnessed the atrocities of the Nazi regime. The shocked American public wanted to bear some of the weight of millions having perished by hearing the stories and taking on the pain as appalled listeners.
I realized I had a story to share about the disabled children of Austria, and at the end of my tale was the perfect entree to telling people what was happening right here in California in institutions up and down the coast. I could show them how it was all connected. I had read in George’s books that one person with a desire for change might struggle for years to get noticed by elected legislators, but a groundswell of public opinion probably would not.
I offered first to speak at church groups, which led to invitations to speak at civic clubs, and then college campuses and high school gymnasiums. I would always begin by saying, “I’d like to tell you a story about a little girl named Brigitta...” Audiences young and old hung on my words, and when I got to the part near the end where I told them the eugenic thinking that killed Brigitta and sought to kill Wilhelm was alive and well and all around us, every eye widened. And then I would tell them about another girl I cared about named Rose, a derivation of Rosie’s real name. I always left out the more specific defining details, like Rosie’s last name, so that I could protect her, wherever she was. And I left out the part that I was now raising Rosie’s child; that was to protect Amaryllis. But the speech was always impactful nevertheless. I encouraged every listener to write his or her legislative representative and join me in the effort to halt forced sterilizations in state institutions.
