Heini, Heini, Heini

Ok so I’ve know that China and I don’t mix well since I took Chinese in High School, but Heini’s Chinese story is driving me crazy.  After finishing what I could read in his folder, my aunt Marianne and I got together Sunday to go over the handwritten ones to see if I had missed anything.  Oh and I had. … SOOOOO MANY little details about the ghetto in Shanghai and his troubles getting out.  We worked on his folder from early Sunday morning until like 4 in the afternoon.  There were many desperate outbursts from the both of us, as we made it through sentences like  “We only got out of the ghetto because of _______.”  For some reason the most important parts of the sentences were nearly impossible to read!  But we made it slowly through about a fourth of them.   I have been working on the rest since, and I will get together with Marianne in order to finish, but not till after Sarah leaves.   Sunday, after working,  Maia and I headed to Lucia and Nacho’s  house to watch Man of la Mancha and the Wizard of Oz.  We had a blast catching up and eating Lu’s famous cake and Nacho’s yummy faina.  On Monday, we headed back to work at around 8:00.

 Maia headed out to a bookstore with view of the beach a few hours after we got back to Elena’s.  When she returned we ate lunch with Elena, and then we headed to see our Elena.  That would be the wonderful lady that took care of us when we were little.  She started working for my grandfather’s GRANDMOTHER.  That would be my great great grandmother! Elena is now 92, almost 93, and she is doing wonderfully!!  On the way there, we took the bus to meet Marianne and kinda got out like 4 stops early, so we had a lovely 20 block walk, but the weather was incredible!!!!  (not too hot, not too cold, and sunny).    Once we made it to Elena’s it was like traveling back 15 years.  She still looks the same, sounds the same, and treats us the same.  She told me about my great great grandmother, and how she would put sugar in the food that Elena cooked, because she didn’t want her to cook it. 

Maia and I with Elena

After leaving her house, we headed to Elena’s (my aunt) house to get the house ready for Sarah’s arrival on Wednesday. 

Tuesday  was crazy!  We woke up sooo late! Too late to wash our sheets and have them dry before night time.  So clever me decided to go get them washed and dried.  I called information to get the number and address to the nearest place.  Then Maia and I walked there, left the sheets, told my aunt, found out the guy leaves clothes smelling horrible, called the guy so he wouldn’t wash them, found out he had already put them in, and then waited to pick them up later.  When we realized that he had washed them, we moved on to our next task… Making pastel de carne (Sheperd’s pie).  After this, we rushed to shower and make it to my grandmother’s to take her out for tea.  We took her to a lovely café and then rushed back to get the sheets at 6:00.  On our way back with our LOVELY  smelling sheets, we saw this older man (70 ish) running in front of us.  He was in such a hurry and it was incredible the shape he was in.  Maia and I just stared as he rushed to catch the bus.  After making it back, I made Sarah’s birthday cake, wrapped presents, and had the Sheperd’s pie for dinner.  Funny story…  We decided to have Coca Light with our dinner…. However, after Maia, Elena, and I tried and failed at opening the bottle,  we resorted to using a wrench… It still took 2 of us to get it open.  TOOOOOO FUNNY!!!!!!!!!

Today, I went to get Sarah from the airport and Maia went to see her best friend here.  She had not seen her in 7 years, and they had a blast.  Sarah and I went back to Elena’s to shower and unpack.  Then we headed to pocitos, walked around, found a cafe, and sat down to eat lunch. 

Sarah's soup bowl!

Maia came and met us, and after eating we took a little walk around the “Rambla.”  The most beautiful place here.  It is a street that goes along the coastline.  Today was a lovely day to do that.  

Sarah was beat and cold, so we chilled and we waited for my aunt to get back from work and we ate the cake and Sarah opened presents.

Cold and tired Sarah

 

More fun!

Ok, so I figured that the next time I wrote I would be done reading.  But… NO.  Heini and his hand writing turned out to be a PAIN!!!!  However, the work isn’t horrible, and we’ve had some great days to go with it.  On Friday we had our own little adventure to “El Geant.”  It is a huge store with a mall on the outskirts of Montevideo, where Maia had an appointment to renew her I.D.  Once there we looked around, bought some fun things, and looked around the store.  At one point, the ABBA song “money, money,money”  was playing, and Maia and I, like the fools we are, were singing along.  At one point, an older man  starts walking our way, so we stop.  And then we hear him sing “money, money, money, must be funny, in a rich man’s world.”  We had to bite our lips not to burst out in laughter.  After that, I sat down to have a coffee, and Maia did her little paperwork, and we left.

On the bus back, a guy and his guitar got on (approx. 20 years old).  The bus driver warned him that he was the 4^th to get on and that people might be tired, but he did anyhow.  When he went to talk to us, he could barely speak without coughing, he had no voice, and it was obvious he had a fever.  Maia and I looked at each other and braced ourselves for what was about to occur.  When the guy started singing, it was AMAZING.  Our jaws dropped, you couldn’t tell that he had no voice and was sick… It was amazing.  We gave him some money and then continued to Elena’s house. 

Once there we enjoyed the afternoon and then at 6, headed to Ale and Mati’s for dinner.  We had a BLAST! Stayed up chatting till around 2 a.m. and then went to bed.  This morning, we went to “la feria” (a little market, well … not that little) and shopped around. 

 After that, we headed to a “Parrilla,” where we had enough meat to feed a million!! After that, we returned to Elena’s (the wonderful Ale drove us) and we got ready for the ballet.

We met up with Lucia and Nacho before the ballet in front of the theater, and then we sat in our amazing seats that my aunt got us through Canal 12 (the tv station she works at).   The ballet was WONDERFUL!!!!  I, who usually never likes ballets, was beyond impressed!!!  I would recommend it to anyone.  There was a mix of all kinds of music, percussion, and dances. LOVED IT LOVED IT LOVED IT!  Now, I am back at Elena’s and am about to finish up with Heine, because I truly can’t read his handwriting for another day!!!

Old picture of the Barro Negro Bus (theater on bus)

Inside bus

Old pictures!

Rubito Making Asado!

Watching Rodrigo's soccer game

Silvana making pasta

Rubito making the sauce

The rain/hail in Atlantida

LONG LONG LONG UPDATE!

So I was told my last update was pitiful, so I am playing catch-up now !!!! Well, last I wrote it was to quickly mention everything that took place last weekend.  After getting back to work we went to the movies to watch “el Cuento Chino” with Marianne.  It was wonderful! Very funny, but also hard to figure out if some of the jokes were on the racist side….  After that we went with Marianne to Atlantida. The bus driving really stepped on it, and we made it in only 1 hour!  The walk back to her house from the bus stop was wonderful… It was not too cold and it wasn’t that cloudy!  So I grabbed the umbrella that my aunt had, and I danced and sang “I’m singing in the rain,”  like a fool down the empty dark streets! It was refreshing!  Once at her house, we worked on some letters and then headed to bed… We stayed there till 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and then, since we had not been to the ATM, we legitimately sat down on the floor and had to round up all of our coins to make it back to Montevideo on the bus!!!! 

Once in Montevideo, it was RIDICULOUSLY cold!!! We were not ready for this, since when we left it had been ok! Wednesday, we kept working on the letters until around 3, when we headed to Tienda Inglesa to get groceries for the week.  We got a fishy call from Elena asking us to buy ravioli and whole milk…  Maia and I looked at each other and said “WHOLE MILK???”  But we followed orders and returned home.  When I opened the door to her apartment I see a man sitting by the dining room table.  None other than the one and only Pablo!  The only family member we had not seen this week   came in from Buenos Aires to see the HUGE Penarol soccer finals!  They played in Brazil, but there is nothing like watching soccer game with friends and people that care as much as you do!  We hung out with him and watched the U-17 Uruguay team play Rwanda.  The game ended with Maia’s future husband leaving the field injured… Poor thing! After that we did some work and then returned to our soccer watching positions and watched/listened to Penarol’s game….  Sadly they lost….

After that, already midnight, we headed to bed, because today we had a TON to do.  We read and translated until 1.  Then we headed to the police station.  YES, the police station… We got arrested. NOT.

Maia has to renew her national I.D. tomorrow, and she has to have proof of reporting her lost old one… We got there to hear a hysterical woman, who looked a little under the influence, yelling at a poor little police man behind a desk.  She talked about how Saturday she got into a fight with her boyfriend, got mad, started yelling, told him to take the kids, and he did.  Now she wanted them back because she wanted to leave the city.  She wanted to see what his report said, in order, to see all the lies.  After 45 minutes of waiting, I realized that we didn’t have a cell phone, so I told Maia I would rush back to Elena’s apartment (3 blocks away) to get it, in case Pablo left while we were still waiting.  When I returned Maia had already done it all!  Even put up with the policeman that could not spell anything.  She spelled out her name, and still, he misspelled it.  PRICELESS!!!!!!!  After that we came back to say goodbye to Pablo and continued working!  I am almost done!!!!!!!!!!!!!  All the legible letters are almost completed!!!!  It’s crazy to think that!!!!

Ok, so I know that was a lot! But I am heading back to reading Heini’s letters from Shanghai!  I’m currently trying to find out the details of this story!!

Some quick catching up...

Last week turned out to be incredibly productive!  I made it through two of the longest folders!!!! Kurt Wilk and her friend Ulla!  Ulla’s folder also included some letters written to her in 1937 that I could not read because the Suetterlin was driving me crazy!  I’ve decided, it is smarter to wait and meet with Hanne about these, than spending a million hours trying to decipher them…  These millions of hours I am spending reading English, Spanish, and German letters….  There have been sooo many incredible things that I have read, that it would be hard to note them all.  However, the last one that I read discussed the unification of Germany and my grandmother’s fear that Nazi forces would reunite again.  The stories just keep  coming… My cousin also gave me an interview he did with her.  Here, she explains her feelings toward Germany and her nationality.  Overall, I am thoroughly pleased with the amount of information I’m finding, and that almost everything is relevant!  Now, I have to finish up a folder with Menia’s letters (another friend) and then I will have two “random folders.”  After that, all the reading of letters I can do, is done!   The rest will have to wait for Hanne’s help.  I will continue to read material until June 29^th.  The material will include all the documents and a very very thick travel journal (1961) where Oma finds many of her friends scattered around the world.   I am slowly seeing the end of the reading tunnel!!!!

After a week of a LOT of reading, we took the weekly family break.  The whirlwind began on Friday night with Catalina.  We spent the night over there and spent the morning with her on Saturday, even though she was kind of sick!  At noon my aunt and Catalina drove us to Atlantida, where we spent the rest of the day with my other two cousins, Rodrigo and German, and my aunt and uncle.  We had a blast!  We played board games, watched Rodri’s soccer game, drove around Atlantida, ate our first asado in years, and ate her homemade spaghetti and pizza!!! Then at midnight they took us to my aunt Marianne’s house, where the thunderstorm continued and the hail began.  We slept wonderfully with the sound of the storm and the ocean… Soooo… Sunday we ate lunch in Atlantida, greeted my father for father’s day, and then got on the bus back to Montevideo.  Once in Montevideo we picked up my grandmother, took her to my uncle’s house and we watched OHS’s  the Wizard of Oz together.  We brought her a present because it was “grandparent’s day” in Uruguay.  After enjoying this time with her, and a little time with Cata,  our uncle took us to “la ciudad vieja” to meet up with Lu and Nacho.  We had a blast with them!! They are the best! We had a wonderful tea with them, and then headed to “barro negro,” which is a play on a bus!! It was soooo funny!  It had the usual characters you would see on a bus and more!  After that we went by my uncle’s house to get our bag, and since we were sooo tired we crashed there for the night.  We left early this morning to return to work! 

After reading half of Menia’s long file, we headed to the movies tonight.  We watched “un cuento chino.”  It is an Argentinian film that turned out to be very funny and entertaining!  Then we took the bus with my aunt back to Atlantida, and we brought letters to work here tomorrow!  So…. Tomorrow afternoon we will head back to Montevideo and have a pretty quiet routine week of work after a crazy but WONDERFUL weekend! 

           

Stepping on Toes

Today, I think it finally realized how different my grandmother and I are. 

Being here for 3 months was worrisome for many reasons… The first being that the work is tough and there is not really a wrong or right way to do it.  The second was family. Three months is a long time, and they haven’t had to put up with me for this long in 10 years, and my poor aunt has never had to live with me!!!!! As I invade my family’s life for 3 months, my main goal is to not step on toes.  I’m trying to be helpful, neat, optimistic, available, and invisible all at the same time.  I love being here, but at the same time I have to realize that I just catapulted in into my entire family’s daily routines and we have taken over every aspect of my aunts life.  There is nothing I love more than my family, but at the same time, I want to be able to leave in August with them still wanting to see us the next time we come. This involves not over doing it and making sure that we get to see everyone without unintentionally making some feel unimportant and ignored..…  

I don’t think I realized how much I avoid stepping on people’s toes until I started reading Oma’s letters.  Now, here is a woman who doesn’t seem to care how the others reacted to what she was writing.  I am by no means saying that she wasn’t a caring person, because she definitely was not.  But the way she handled situations has truly amazed me.  When someone wouldn’t write her back for months, she would write some really threatening letters… She would sign with her usual “much love” and at the end she would write “notice I didn’t say much love. That is how mad I am that you haven’t written me.”  In this way, everyone knew how much they meant to her, but they also knew how upset she would be if they didn’t write.  I am the complete opposite, if I don’t hear from people, I take that as a hint and instead of instigating anything, I keep quiet and avoid conflicts at all cost.  Whatever Oma thought, you knew.  I think it’s an admirable quality, and I think Maia got some of this from her.  Oma was willing to step on any toes, and I always admired her for it, even though when they were my toes, it killed me because sometimes I rather not hear the truth!

Anyhow… Now that I got that little fun fact out of the way, I’ll let you in on what I’ve been reading these past few days… It’s been A LOT!  I have read the folder of:  Pilar, Fani, Julio, Clarita, Erika, Moses and Sofi, Inge, Tante Lotte’s, and now I am looking at Ulla’s.  These people are friends and relatives of all sorts.   And the best way to describe the amount is with one of Oma’s lines in a letter to her friend Hanne in Berlin.  (2001)

“I have a whole big bag full of letters from all our old families, back and forth through time I see them ... a tragedy ... oh well”

I don’t know if she is referring to the same tragedy I am reading, and my translation is truly pitiful… But reading and witnessing the disappearances of these families is inexplicable.  One day her uncle Moses is writing from Israel about how Sofi is sick, and then the next day Sofi writes to say that Moses has died.  And this specific death happened naturally (or due to poverty) way after the Nazis…. The cause doesn’t make it any less sad, and for some reason just like in the other instances, the letters with the families always stop with one of my Oma’s letters inquiring about the other.  After a death is announces, a response seldom comes after, and that is the saddest part.   Well not really, because then come paragraphs like this one that my grandmother writes on Sept 21, 1946 about Edith (Hanna’s mother)

 “She is the only one of our loved ones from Germany who survived. My grandmother died in the street from a heart attack, but at least she was spared of the worst.  Aunt Frieda and little Tali were both deported.  One heard no more from them.  We get mail sometimes from uncle Heine in Shanghai, he is a cook in a concentration camp/ghetto there.  We are looking to bring him to Montevideo, but it is very hard.  Wish us luck. ”

The letters today haven’t been very uplifting, and the material isn’t new, but slowly the names and events are making sense.  Maia started to make family boards with pictures and the faces make the information even harder to swallow, but it is fascinating how much these letters have to tell!

               

Party!!!

So today was a mix of cooking, baking, rolling, and reading…  The letters came first… Same ole same ole...  This time, nothing that interesting, just some conversations with her neighbor who moved to Australia.  I plan on reading some more tonight, so perhaps I will find some new information. 

After reading some early this morning, Maia and I walked to Tienda Inglesa to get the things we needed for the birthday party tonight.  My aunt Marianne loves sushi, so that is what I made.  Right after I got back I cooked the salmon (since I refused to eat it raw and the smoked one was REALLY expensive) and made a ton of rice.  After chopping the cucumber, I called my cousin Lucia to get the recipe for her famous chocolate cake, it is incredible!!!  I baked the cake, gave it a Dulce de Leche filling, covered it with a mix of chocolate and dulce de leche, and then I covered it with meringues… SO YUMMY! 

Final Product!

After that, we cleaned and I made the sushi, which turned out pretty well!

Me and this kitchen have become best friends!

Sushi!!!!

By then my aunt Marianne came and we had put balloons out, and the “picada” (a.k.a. cheese, olives, little sandwiches, and chips) on the table. 

While we waited for Lucia and Elena, we watched some gossip on poor Forlan and Zaira… He has even been accused of having another MAN.  Poor guy, whatever the reason for the breakup was, Argentina is sure it is his fault, and Zaira’s sister says “the truth will come out.”  Hahahaha it has provided us with some good laughs!

Birthday girl answering her many birthday messages!

After everyone arrived, we ordered Maia some pizza and enjoyed some fun!  We had two cakes, since Marianne bought herself a cake, which was my Oma’s favorite cake!

Aunt Elena (host)

 After lighting the candles once, we hit up the other cake and did it virtually with the parentals as well!  Now, its back to work!!!

Cake numero uno!

Cake numero dos! With a crowd in Oxford through Skype!