June 16, 2008

Old letters and a new family: Debbie's discoveries

BY ROY MITCHELL

The despair and heartbreak of Anna's letters are unmistakable, even when translated into English.

“You said with hot kisses, 'I will come back to you.'... You never did come back.”

The American soldier who “never did come back” was Paul Crook, a farmer from Chatsworth, Ga. When he received Anna Reinoehl's letters in 1946 and 1948, Paul couldn't understand the words that were so passionately directed at him. Paul had been stationed in Germany in 1945, at the end of World War II. While he knew some spoken German vernacular, he could not read the language.

Paul never told his mother, brother, sister, nor anyone else stateside about his German romance with Anna, just that the Reinoehl family that kept writing had been “really good to him.” Yet, retrospective evidence loudly reaffirms Paul Crook's desire to rekindle the lost love that a quick change of military orders forced him to leave behind.

Paul never married, and none of his relatives had even known of him dating after the war. Despite this perceived romantic disinterest, Paul kept a picture of a young German woman in his wallet until it was almost completely disintegrated. His brother Charles remembered how Paul also mentioned a desire to return to Germany. Burdened with the economic constraints of farm and family issues, Paul never raised the funds that would enable him to see Anna again. With the passing of years, Paul must have known that Anna would eventually go on without him in her life.

"I cried a lot. You were gone so fast. You know that my heart was with you. Now I am alone and unhappy.”

Paul's family members recalled the letters from Germany that no one could understand, and they also knew of the picture in his wallet. Yet, none of his family or friends appeared to have ever put the pieces together, leaving his fractured surreptitious romance undiscovered. In 2001, kidney failure sent Paul Crook to his grave with a secret that he held to himself, presumably forever. But the story doesn't end there.

Four years after Paul's passing, his nephew's wife, Debbie King, discovered Anna's letters in a hat box. Without anyone to translate them, the passionately written letters in neat German script sat on a shelf on Debbie's computer desk for nearly a year.

 Yet, as she would dawdle at her computer the 60-year-old mystery begged to be solved, almost calling out to Debbie while she sat near the yellowing parchments.

“I waited...I am still waiting for you, you know that I love you so much.”

Fourth of July week 2006, Debbie took three of Anna's letters to Curley's Cove Campground in Cedar Bluff, where she and her husband are part-time residents. A campground acquaintance of theirs, Ignaz Ackermann, a Swiss engineer, can read German and had agreed to decipher the letters. Debbie, her husband David, and their son Jason, gathered around an oversized outdoor table on the shores of Lake Weiss with Ignaz and his wife Marie.

Ignaz read every sentence, unveiling the adoration, longing and despair of each letter. As the passionate mystery of the time-worn epistles unfolded, Debbie recalled, “We sat stunned at first, and in shock, as the letters revealed the love she had felt for him.”

Debbie and David wondered if Anna was still alive. Through a search that included letters, e-mailed correspondence and Internet posts, a woman in Germany gave Debbie an address of someone that might be related to Anna.

“I had to tell Anna that Paul had not forgotten about her all those years ago,” Debbie said.

Productive correspondence went slowly, but one Friday morning King discovered a translated e-mail from Anna's 61-year-old son, Josiah Reinoehl. In the brief transcript, a fact unbeknownst to Paul, and not even included in Anna's letters, completely stunned Debbie.

“I almost fell out of my chair,” she remembered.

As confirmed by his birth date, Josiah Reinoehl is not only Anna's son, but Paul's, too.

“It was so nice, we were so happy until we had to say Goodbye. Do you still think about me?”

Josiah explained that Anna waited five years for Paul's return before marrying a Hungarian immigrant. Around the time Paul died, Anna suffered a debilitating stroke, leaving her husband to take care of her, as he has ever since.

The secret romance discovered led Debbie to pen the lover's story in a book entitled, “Somewhere in Germany”, which she mostly wrote at their lakeside campsite in Cedar Bluff.

“I used to sit outside under the trees and proof read all my copies before I would type it,” Debbie recalled.

“Somewhere in Germany” can be purchased at Debbie's website www.somewhereingermany.org, as well as www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com.

David and Debbie have communicated with their “German family” for over a year now. By the this past weekend, Uncle Paul's stateside family finally met Josiah and some of his clan from Germany at the Atlanta airport.

Appropriately enough, the long-overdue family gathering was scheduled for Father's Day.