Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann
Author Angie Littlefield was born in Hamburg, Germany, and immigrated with her family to Canada in 1954. Her grandmother stayed behind in Hamburg. Littlefield saw her Oma (the German equivalent of “granny”) many times afterward, both in Germany and in Canada, and was very fond of her. Oma was warm and kind and fun to be with. Angie’s relationship with her mother, on the other hand, was very strained, as her mother was moody and temperamental. Growing up in Canada wasn’t easy either, as Littlefield’s German background made her the butt of anti-German sentiment from her schoolmates, as the horrors of World War Two and the Nazi treatment of the Jews became more widely known to the world.
Her Oma died in 1976, leaving a hole in Littlefield’s life. Then, while going through family papers after her mother’s death, in 2000, Littlefield made an extraordinary discovery: her Oma had been Jewish. This was a surprise, as Littlefield, as well as her mother, had been raised as Lutherans. But there was more. Oma had been interned for eighteen months in Theresienstadt, a notorious concentration camp. Then, upon her release in June 1945, she had walked the 600 kilometres from the camp back to Hamburg, following the course of the Elbe river, which flowed from near the camp in northern Czechoslovakia to Hamburg.
In 2008, Littlefield duplicated that trek. Walking with Oma is the story of that experience. The aim was to get more insight into her Oma—who she was and what she had been through. But the walk turned out to be far more than that. It became a journey of self-discovery for Littlefield, in ways she hadn’t imagined. And through it, she also came to understand her mother better and what she had been through as a young woman at the time.
Oma’s trek turned out not to have been just a walk through the countryside, but a harrowing experience through the horrors of the closing days of the war. The Russians were advancing, pillaging and raping as they went. The Germans were retreating. Cities were being bombed, Hamburg included. The city of Dresden, which was on Oma’s route, had been flattened by American bombs just months earlier. German refugees were everywhere.
Passing through the verdant German countryside and quaint medieval towns, Littlefield learned of what had gone on in June 1945. She had arranged to meet en route people who had been alive during the Nazi years and had lived through those months in 1945 when the war came home. All had been either children or young adults, and Littlefield learned of the trauma that they had experienced, and, in all cases, still lived with.
Through this, Littlefield came to appreciate the suffering that had been inflicted by the war on the German people, including her mother, who, in addition to having been harassed as a Mischling (mixed Jew and Aryan), had lived through the bombing of Hamburg.
The Foreword to Walking with Oma talks about “intergenerational trauma”—the passing on of personal trauma from one generation to the next—and, through this long walk, Littlefield learns of the horrors that had scarred her mother and how those scars, through her mother’s often abusive behaviour, had been passed on to her.
Walking with Oma is a revelatory work on many levels. Littlefield brings to light what is often ignored about war: its immediate and lingering effects on normal citizens caught up helplessly in violence and destruction. An enormously powerful read.
Walking with Oma is published by Now Or Never Publishing.
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