Twenty Minutes

This book is my attempt to explain that photograph. To tell the story of where that sadness came from. What it cost her. And how the young woman in this picture - the one with the perfect hair and the weight of the world behind her eyes - became the woman I knew. The woman I called my mother. The one who stood on the stoop of our house on Delaware Avenue in Flushing, surrounded by pink roses, with warm eyes and a quiet smile, and somehow made us feel safe in a world that she knew all too well to be extremely unstable.I began writing this story for my grandchildren - six of them - so they would know the woman they never had the chance to meet. Their great-grandmother on the Goessmann side, who never lived long enough to see her own grandchildren graduate, get married, or have children of their own. The great-grandmother who came to this country to build the family we all belong to. It is an accumulation of work I have been building since 2003.But the more I wrote, the more I understood that her story did not belong only to our family. My mother was one of nearly three million Sudeten Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War - families who had lived in their towns and villages for centuries, who were given minutes to leave and told that none of it had ever really been theirs. Most of those stories were never written down. Most of them died with the people who carried them. This one did not, because I refused to let it.September 28th, 2026, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death. I thought it was time her story was told.My mother was a very private person and never talked much about her life in Germany during and after the war. That was her generation - they looked forward, not back. They worked. They built. They did not dwell. But I felt it was a story that needed to be told, not just for her sake or for ours, but for anyone who has ever lost a home, rebuilt a life, or wondered whether the quiet woman at the end of the street might be carrying a history larger than anyone around her ever knew.That is a long journey. I will do my best to tell that story - that remarkable journey. What she had to do to survive. How she made it. And why I will miss her and think about her every day until the day I die.