15 Summers: 2016. Germany, What a Concept

15 Summers: 2016. Germany, What a Concept

“Just buy the ticket and take the ride”….Hunter S. Thomas

My mother, Oma (grandma in German) as we like to call her, is a card carrying American by choice and German by birth. She is without a doubt, one of the most amazing human beings to ever walk this planet. She has worked hard all of her life, is always happy, generous and caring, never allows herself to complain or make excuses, and came from and survived unbearable tragedy and heartbreak as a young child growing up in Nazi Germany during WWII.

Growing up, my mother never really told us much about the atrocities she had to endure as a child. For whatever reasons of self-preservation, she kept those stories to herself sealed tight in some corner of her mind. I knew very little and only that her mother, my grandmother, died due to illness related to starvation. My grandmother, Kathe Herrmann, had three young children when she died. While fleeing for their lives, whatever food she could find, my grandmother chose to give it to her children before feeding herself. In the end, that selfless level of love and sacrifice is what caused her death.

          When my grandmother died, my mother, the oldest of the three and about 10 years old at the time, was forced to care for her younger sister and brother, surviving by whatever means were possible. They had no home, their father’s location was unknown, most of her family was either dead or fleeing for their own lives, the Russian Army was brutally invading and attacking the German people, and food was scarce.

In early 2016, for whatever reasons, my mother started to talk about her early childhood in Germany and about her mother. One evening at a family BBQ dinner at my home, I mentioned to my mom that maybe she and I should take a trip to Germany. Much to my surprise, she agreed. Over the next several months, she opened up more about her family’s history and stories about her childhood. We decided that we would, in addition to vacationing and sight seeing, retrace her exodus from village to village from the time her home was destroyed and she was forced to flee to the point when she came to America.  

I also decided that I would take a few weeks for myself and rent a Harley Davidson and explore Western Europe. Liz, my wife, also decided that she would meet me somewhere in Europe after visiting her friend, Patricia Talbot, in England.

We bought plane tickets for late July, 2016, and planned on staying in Europe for a month. I had about 4 months to brush up on my German language skills……thank you Youtube. I speak Spanish fairly well and use it daily at work so I also figured I should also spend some time exploring and adventuring in northern Spain.

Plans were made, remade, and remade again. A touring Harley Davidson Ultra Classic was reserved at the Harley dealership in Munich. And, hotel reservations were made for Oma and I for our first ten days in Europe, the planned sight-seeing portion of our adventure.

Oma, who never asks for anything, let it slip that she had always dreamed of riding on a gondola in Venice. That’s all I needed to hear. I was going to do whatever it took to get her to Venice. I made plans to take her to Bavaria, Austria, Slovenia, Italy, and Switzerland in our first 10 days. We had planned to figure it out for the rest of the trip after that.

The day of departure came and we hit the friendly skies of Lufthansa.