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From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden, 1939-1949: A Child's Journey
Collection of poems written from the viewpoint of a little girl living in Germany during World War II.
- GenresPoetry
57 pages, Paperback
Published February 17, 2016
10 people want to read
About the author
Rose Mary Boehm
15 books64 followersRose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was three times nominated for a ‘Pushcart’ and once for ‘Best of Net’. DO OCEANS HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS? (Kelsay Books July 2022), WHISTLING IN THE DARK (Cyberwit July 2022), and SAUDADE (December 2022) are available on Amazon. Also available on Amazon is a new collection, LIFE STUFF, published by Kelsay Books November 2023.
More on Rose Mary Boehm on her website:
https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
Her Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR9f...
See her (dormant) poetry and art blog:
http://houseboathouse.blogspot.com/
Boehm is also a gifted photographer. For her photographs go to:
http://www.bilderboehm.blogspot.com/
More on Rose Mary Boehm on her website:
https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
Her Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR9f...
See her (dormant) poetry and art blog:
http://houseboathouse.blogspot.com/
Boehm is also a gifted photographer. For her photographs go to:
http://www.bilderboehm.blogspot.com/
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 28, 2016
I rarely recommend poetry books to friends who don’t read poetry, but I can’t imagine a reader who wouldn’t be moved by this book. You won’t have to struggle to understand: it’s the child narrator who doesn’t know what is happening. Children care nothing for government regimes, politics, or policies. They only seek love, food, warmth, and a safe home. They feel the pain when those things are taken away. The author was a little girl in Germany when World War II arrived, took her daddy away, sent her running to a bomb shelter each night, made her hungry and cold, and forced her to leave home for the safer countryside which was taken over by the Soviets. You’ll want to reach your arms back in time to comfort her, even though your own family was fighting the Nazis. Everybody loses in war.
The poems, all numbered, not titled, are vignettes, like little Hen’s daily diary entries – some before she could have written them herself. In Poem 2, we see she’s a normal child, caring more about the flowers on her wallpaper than the mysterious stuff the adults are up to. Poem 3 gives me chills. Her older brother wears his uniform from the Hitler Jugend, and she marches around the flat behind him singing. She says, “I want to be like him when I grow up.” By the end of the book, she is forced to sing about Stalin, and her mother’s trying to find them an escape back to their home in West Germany.
She describes the persistent voice on the radio,
“Hard, loud, excited. Rising…rising.
My stomach cramps.
I feel just like I do when I hear those whizzing sounds
before the bangs.
Mother moves toward the radio.
She turns the voice off.”
She doesn’t know who that voice is, but we do, and are terrified for the world. In another poem, her parents are arguing while she’s in bed. Her mother says, “ ‘Your precious Fuhrer…’”
“Suddenly my father’s voice hisses: ‘Don’t talk like that,
Mother. They’ll lock you up or send you away.
Think it. Don’t ever say it!’”
One of the most touching poems describes going to meet the train to see her long absent daddy:
“I stood on the platform.
I stood there for many long years.”
Since I grew up hearing my parents’ big band music, it was sweet relief from the grimmer poems to watch as Hen puts on headphones to her brother’s forbidden crystal radio. She hears the American Forces Network. After her brother tells her the radio says they are losing the war, she hears the music:
“The sound makes my skin crawl with pleasure. Sometimes
the instruments play together, sometimes they skip,
bouncing in all directions.
Then they meander, taking side and byways.
One instrument after another
gets a chance to break loose from the rest of the group
and show off.”
She can’t help but tap her feet, but her brother warns her she must NEVER hum or sing “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in public.
Boehm’s wonderful poems work like a coming-of-age novel. A child’s hope for a better future and gift for finding good memories even in rubble can make it bearable to witness the world’s worst moments. It may also help to remember as you read that Boehm became a UK national and writes her poems in English. You know that little girl survived.
The poems, all numbered, not titled, are vignettes, like little Hen’s daily diary entries – some before she could have written them herself. In Poem 2, we see she’s a normal child, caring more about the flowers on her wallpaper than the mysterious stuff the adults are up to. Poem 3 gives me chills. Her older brother wears his uniform from the Hitler Jugend, and she marches around the flat behind him singing. She says, “I want to be like him when I grow up.” By the end of the book, she is forced to sing about Stalin, and her mother’s trying to find them an escape back to their home in West Germany.
She describes the persistent voice on the radio,
“Hard, loud, excited. Rising…rising.
My stomach cramps.
I feel just like I do when I hear those whizzing sounds
before the bangs.
Mother moves toward the radio.
She turns the voice off.”
She doesn’t know who that voice is, but we do, and are terrified for the world. In another poem, her parents are arguing while she’s in bed. Her mother says, “ ‘Your precious Fuhrer…’”
“Suddenly my father’s voice hisses: ‘Don’t talk like that,
Mother. They’ll lock you up or send you away.
Think it. Don’t ever say it!’”
One of the most touching poems describes going to meet the train to see her long absent daddy:
“I stood on the platform.
I stood there for many long years.”
Since I grew up hearing my parents’ big band music, it was sweet relief from the grimmer poems to watch as Hen puts on headphones to her brother’s forbidden crystal radio. She hears the American Forces Network. After her brother tells her the radio says they are losing the war, she hears the music:
“The sound makes my skin crawl with pleasure. Sometimes
the instruments play together, sometimes they skip,
bouncing in all directions.
Then they meander, taking side and byways.
One instrument after another
gets a chance to break loose from the rest of the group
and show off.”
She can’t help but tap her feet, but her brother warns her she must NEVER hum or sing “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in public.
Boehm’s wonderful poems work like a coming-of-age novel. A child’s hope for a better future and gift for finding good memories even in rubble can make it bearable to witness the world’s worst moments. It may also help to remember as you read that Boehm became a UK national and writes her poems in English. You know that little girl survived.
Read
December 18, 2016A child's-eye-view verse narrative about growing up in Germany between 1939 and 1949, huddling with neighbors during air raids, hearing elders argue in low frightened voices about Hitler, secretly listening to forbidden American "Big Band" music via a handmade radio, becoming refugees in the countryside near Dresden to escape the Allied forces' bombing. You could think of it as a WWII analogue of Thanhha Lai's
Inside Out and Back Again
, both in its choice of subject matter (war and refugeeism, sister-brother dynamics, a family stripped of its father finding its core of inner strength) and its effort to capture it all through a precocious, perceptive young girl's perspective. Like Lai's, Boehm's narrative is well paced, leisurely and lyrical at times, dotted with often pitch-perfect "wisdom out of the mouths of babes." Describing how her father would always bring fish home for the family to eat on Fridays, Boehm's child narrator remarks:
I am never quite sure whether it's Friday
because he brings the fish, or whether
he brings the fish because it's Friday.
In another vignette, the narrator describes how her father sometimes clowned around with his two children during mealtimes, a scene that ends with a quietly pithy encapsulation of what a close and loving family they were:
He sticks the carved bits of [orange] peel into his mouth--
one behind his upper and one behind his lower lip--
and smiles at us with big, scary orange teeth.
That's about the most afraid I have ever been
of my father.
Another vignette ends with the narrator musing on the largeness of death and war and history in her childlike way, another instance where Boehm uses understatement to great effect:
Has war always been? Mother tells us about
the time before. Perhaps there will be a time after.
Maybe when people die they are taken away
to be mended, like my dolls when Mother takes them
before Christmas to the "dolls' hospital." They come back
with new heads, new arms--looking different.
Some parts of the book are overtly harrowing: a scene where the children witness a Prussian refugee woman being raped by Russian soldiers, a vignette in which the children meet a woman who tells them of her experiences in the Dresden bombing ("I burned / my hands on a torch. The torch / was my daughter."). Still, I think this book could be appropriate for older children or teen readers. Adults, of course, could learn from it, too.
I have a skirt made from parachute silk.
We play in a partly burned-out aeroplane
which has come down by the upper woods.
There is no body.
I am never quite sure whether it's Friday
because he brings the fish, or whether
he brings the fish because it's Friday.
In another vignette, the narrator describes how her father sometimes clowned around with his two children during mealtimes, a scene that ends with a quietly pithy encapsulation of what a close and loving family they were:
He sticks the carved bits of [orange] peel into his mouth--
one behind his upper and one behind his lower lip--
and smiles at us with big, scary orange teeth.
That's about the most afraid I have ever been
of my father.
Another vignette ends with the narrator musing on the largeness of death and war and history in her childlike way, another instance where Boehm uses understatement to great effect:
Has war always been? Mother tells us about
the time before. Perhaps there will be a time after.
Maybe when people die they are taken away
to be mended, like my dolls when Mother takes them
before Christmas to the "dolls' hospital." They come back
with new heads, new arms--looking different.
Some parts of the book are overtly harrowing: a scene where the children witness a Prussian refugee woman being raped by Russian soldiers, a vignette in which the children meet a woman who tells them of her experiences in the Dresden bombing ("I burned / my hands on a torch. The torch / was my daughter."). Still, I think this book could be appropriate for older children or teen readers. Adults, of course, could learn from it, too.
I have a skirt made from parachute silk.
We play in a partly burned-out aeroplane
which has come down by the upper woods.
There is no body.
June 18, 2021
I read this stark and beautiful memoir in poetry of the author's childhood in wartime Germany shortly after reading Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home, by my husband's cousin Alexander Wolff, about my husband's uncle's experience of Nazi Germany as a teenager and young man. One made a good companion to the other. Rose Mary Boehm's story in poems transported me to her child's-eye view of the war. It's one of the best history books I've ever read.
February 2, 2017
Boehm grew up under Hitler and later under Stalin after Germany was partitioned following the war. Her poems, written from a child’s perspective are cautionary and compelling.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews