In the later stages of Parkinson’s disease most patients develop progressive cognitive impairment and dementia. During his final year, Peter often spoke in German. He alternated between disorientation and lucidity. During his disoriented periods, he wandered. At night he would scream out in terror. It became clear that he needed round-the-clock care and, after much hesitation, his family all decided that he needed to live in the care facility connected to Peter and Janellen’s retirement community. The iron grip of Parkinson’s disease is difficult for families. It is a confusing kind of dementia, the periods of lucidity raising hopes that are repeatedly dashed. Peter was locked in during those last months. It was not always clear he recognized his friends or family members, but sometimes he made so much sense! “Ich bin müde” (I am tired) or “genug” (enough), he said.

On one of his lucid days in his final year of life, the family took him out of the care facility and gathered at the cottage near Lake Michigan where Janellen and Peter had spent weekends since moving to Chicago. When cleaning out his desk the family discovered a box of letters written between family members during and after the war. Some of these letters were written by Peter and told stories about food and the garden. Some were thank-you notes for Christmas packages from Else to the four boys with chocolate and gifts from the United States. Peter had never told his family about the letters. Curious, his family started to ask more questions. Peter spoke and told stories he had not told before.

He spoke about his mother, Else. “She did not have to leave.” Startled, we asked: “What do you mean?” Peter replied: “If she had been quiet, she could have stayed.” He had always talked proudly about his mother speaking out against Nazism. But it now appeared that this pride had always served as a mask for the little boy wishing for his mother. We spoke about his mother: about hiking in the Adirondacks with his mother in the years after Peter’s arrival in the United States, and about annual family visits to East Eden, in the farmland of western New York State. During those summers Else’s grandchildren ran amok in the fields, and along “Peter’s path” in the forest behind the house. They climbed into the tree house or scrambled up rocky cliffs, went swimming in the local swimming hole. At night, Else banished the grandchildren to the summer cottage to sleep (the children were also banished for an hour in the afternoon every day so that Oma and Opa could watch their beloved soap opera, The Guiding Light, about “the Bauers,” a middle-class German immigrant family). Else, endearingly called Moo Coo by Peter and Dieter, loved to cook German feasts of spätzle and sauerbraten. Else would sit in the yard feeding the hummingbirds from her hand. She raised an abandoned nest of baby robins, and they (or their relations) returned each summer – also to be fed from Oma’s hand. Else died unexpectedly in her sleep in 1970, of a hypertensive stroke, at 66 years of age. A death that with medical advances, is preventable, it shocked the family. Peter and Dieter had 20 years with their mother in the United States. But it was not long enough. As Peter said, “She did not have to leave.” She had fled again, without her children.

Toward the end of Dieter’s life, Dieter also spoke about his childhood in ways his family had not heard. He told the horrifying tale from before Else fled, about the public execution of the mayor and townspeople who spoke out against the treatment of the nearby Jewish community. As it turns out, five-year-old Peter, accompanied by his eight-year-old brother Dieter, happened to be wandering through the town center together one day and witnessed one of these hangings. Dieter quickly escorted his younger brother out of the town center, back toward their home. They never spoke about it. It was shortly after this episode that Else left Germany for Belgium, never returning, and Richard moved with the boys to Greiz in the east of Germany. It was not safe for any of them to remain in their village along the Rhine. Richard approached the Nazi regime with silent dissent and his children also lived through the war in silent dissent. The guilt and shame of having lived through this, even as children, was something that haunted their final days.

Before Peter and Dieter departed Germany, Richard had written to Else: “Let the boys find their peace – and let them find their way to separate themselves from their past.” Peter and Dieter moved forward but in different ways. Peter set forth on his path with quiet stoicism, avoiding conflict or attention. Dieter moved forward first with rage (for example, he smashed his step-father’s lawn mower with a sledge hammer shortly after arriving in the United States). But later Dieter centered himself with his outgoing and jovial humor and successful work as a chemical engineer. He was loud and fun, while Peter was a dreamer and more quiet. Although different in personality, Dieter and Peter remained very close. In his confusion in the final year, Peter would often call out for his brother Dieter, who had passed away the year before. Like Peter, in the final months of his life, Dieter experienced depression and disturbing childhood memories. Dieter had advanced heart disease and stopped eating in the final months of his life, gradually fading to 105 pounds. Dieter had only returned to Germany once as an adult, to attend his 50th high-school reunion in Greiz. Of his classmates, two had gone to America, and ten had died in French war camps.

As we have heard, Peter was a Kriegskind, a war child. He was too young for direct participation in the war, but old enough to remember the bombs, the hunger, the separation from his mother and then father, and the fear. He also experienced the feelings of guilt and shame, during the war, after the war and as a German immigrant in the United States. Was this the sadness that seemed to amplify in the later years of his life?