Inspiration

Today I went to the funeral of my nanny, Berta Haberleitner Dignon. Berta was one of the first people -- and the first Austrian -- I ever met. I know that the nanny relationship can be problematic, and I hope my parents paid Berta well, because she took wonderful care of me for the first eight years of my life while my parents were at work. I went on play-dates with her own grandchildren, and we visited her on holidays even after she had retired from working for us. I'd like to think that some small part of my interest in German comes from that early influence. I have distinct memories of learning my first German words (for doll, girl, etc), and my parents tell me that I first spoke English with an Austrian accent!

At the funeral, our priest shared a letter written by her son that gives some background on Berta's amazing, inspiring life:

Berta Juliana Haberleitner was born in 1922 and grew up in the village of Willendorf, which sits along the Danube River near Vienna, Austria. Her father worked for the Austrian railroad. Berta grew up during the Great Depression, and in the late 1930s Willendorf, along with the rest of Austria was overtaken and occupied by Germany during the build-up to WWII. She actually saw Adolf Hitler when he paraded through the streets of Vienna with the German army. As a teenager, Berta was taken away and forced to spend several months in a Hitler Youth camp in northern Germany. Her two brothers became conscripts in the German military: Fritz into the army and Rudi into the Luftwaffe [air force]. Her brother Fritz was wounded and spent over a year and a half in a Russian prison camp.

Obviously, that's a very positive spin on Austria's involvement in Nazi Germany. The reality, of course, was more complicated and less innocuous. Berta's village was only meters away from Mauthausen, the only concentration camp in Austria, and she told my dad that she remembers watching the trains pass by en route to the camp. She certainly knew something was up, although she claims she didn't realize how bad things actually were in the camps until after the war. I'm not sure if this was due to the fact that Berta was a young teenager at the time, or whether information was really that compartmentalized. Besides, Berta had worries of her own:

She and her family survived WWII and endured many hardships, including the relentless Allied bombings of her country and the invasion of the Russian Army on their vengeful march to Berlin. Because of the extensive damage, the first year after the war was very difficult: rationed food, rationed heat and electricity. She actually was shot at by a farmer when she crawled through his food plot searching for food when there was none. She ate horse meat for over a year. Berta left her family and Austria in 1947, determined to find a better life for herself. She emigrated to Glasgow, Scotland, with a Jewish family and worked as a nanny there. She met my father William Dignon, Sr, who was working for the Scottish Gas Board as a plumber.

Berta told me that she spoke almost no English when she met her future husband. He flirted with a German-English dictionary, looking up his sweet nothings word by painstaking word. One of her friends in Scotland told her that if he was willing to put that much effort into courting her, he was probably a keeper.

They soon married and in 1951 they decided to immigrate to the US and Pittsburgh with their infant son Alan. Mom and Dad ended up having four children ... Although he grew to become a successful engineer in the real estate business, Dad's life was cut short when he died of heart failure at age 54 back in 1979. Once again, Berta, as determined and strong-willed as always, carried on and lived independently for the next 30 years on her own. She died Sunday night at age 88 of complications from congestive heart failure and diabetes. 

In one of her moments of clarity recently, in a conversation with her granddaughter Jessica about the 16-year-old girl who was attempting to sail alone around the world, Jessica commented on how unbelievable it was that anyone would have the courage and guts to attempt such a thing. Berta looked up at her and said, "It's unbelievable the things you can do when you are unafraid." Words that perfectly capture my mother's remarkable story and life.

Berta's story cements for me the notion that human beings are capable of surviving pretty much anything. Berta withstood years of starvation, the destruction of her homeland, the loneliness of transatlantic migration, and the pain of her husband's early death. And through it all, she remained an incredibly loving and compassionate human being.

I was getting more and more nervous about going to Germany/Austria during the course of the past week. But after attending Berta's funeral, I'm not really nervous anymore. Studying abroad in Europe for a few months, with a six-year language background and e-mail and Skype contacts to friends and family back home, is nothing compared to what Berta was doing about the same age.

After I went to Austria for the first time in 2008, Berta told me that she had lived for two years in an apartment next to the Universitätskirche (university church) in Vienna. One of my first stops in Vienna will be to say a prayer in that church -- for Berta, her remarkable life, and for her power of the human spirit.