This Book is Dedicated to:

The Lost, the Orphaned, the Abandoned, & the Adopted…

The Kinderheim

I think fear is being unloved

The mystery of being a child in the Kinderheim was unencumbered with fast food diners, videos or other such things, rather it was nurtured with the dread of wondering whether or not to tell the Schwester (you know…. THE Schwester…) that your thumb might have been broken when the bus driver came to a halt, having hit a lay pedestrian.

Seeing him unconscious was disturbing for a 4 year old, wondering if your thumb was broken is an entirely different matter. I was too afraid to say anything. So where was the courage and bravado? I think I was pretty much whipped, but if you wish, send me a note and let me know if that was a normal reaction or just regimented fear?

I think fear is being unloved. We are not alone if we are loved. If we love, we are not alone.  That being said, I was basically on my own. There are cowards in life that just lash out and try to beat some sense into their own existence and then are people that do otherwise. I think I am one of those. Just a person that for a second has a dream.

There were late night fantasies as I laid on my back and dared to dream, and dared to share, and like a little Shakespeare would speak of things in the darkness of the night- to my fellow 6 year old inmates to a degree, that in the mind’s eye would gleefully leave their own beds for a moment to engage in the fantasies of life in the fabulous “America” that was somehow confused with a child’s musings of lions, tigers, giraffes, alligators, and African people equally clothed and mixed up with the dressage of native American Indians. It was America I was going to. I was certain of that. Those were heady times filled with hope and a gasp of a young prayer that life would certainly change.