THE NARRATIVE ARC
I Was Born in 1933 — Haunted by History on 11.5.2024
Remembrance, if you’re old enough, can be painful
I was born in 1933. So, rather infamously, was the Third Reich.
Though I was out of the U.S. at the time — busy getting born in Brazil to my educational missionary parents — authoritarianism (German style) and I grew up together. That was about all we had in common; German citizens suffered and died in concentration camps or suffered in lesser ways under tyranny while I enjoyed a carefree childhood in small-town Virginia.
My good fortune was thanks to my parents having realized that a global upheaval was coming and thus given up a life they loved — my dad, helping start a college in Porto Alegre that still exists; my mother, teaching music and dance to preschoolers — to bring their four daughters back to the U.S. I was incredibly lucky to have had those insouciant years.
But here is one of my earliest memories:
My father appeared, in what seemed the middle of the night, beside the double bed I shared with my sister Mimi. We were about 4 and 6. He woke us very gently and carried us, one in either arm, downstairs to where our mother sat in her traditional armchair with her…
