“What did they want with Otto?”
I’m not sure Mommi knew at that point exactly why Papa had been arrested. My parents had heard that, since the United States had entered the war, German Americans who were known sympathizers of the Third Reich had been arrested and some interned. And they knew that, since Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese Americans had been rounded up and interned, too, many of them simply because they were issei, Japanese-born immigrants to the United States. Most had done nothing wrong; they had simply been born inside a nation with whom we were now at war. But Papa wasn’t a sympathizer of the Axis powers. He had been a legal resident of the United States for eighteen years. He believed Adolf Hitler to be a dangerous man. He didn’t have close family fighting in the Wehrmacht. He didn’t have hatred in his heart for the Jews. He didn’t have hatred in his heart for anyone.
So Mommi didn’t answer Mrs. Brimley outright. She said instead, “They took our photo albums. Our letters from home. My wedding portrait.”
And Opa’s medals, I wanted to say, but didn’t.
“Why? Why did they take them? Why was Otto arrested?” Mrs. Brimley was growing impatient. When your German neighbor gets arrested, you deserve to know why. I could see she was thinking this.
“I have to call someone,” Mommi said again, and this time she dashed back into the house.
Mrs. Brimley turned to me, still hungry for an answer. “Why did the FBI arrest your father?”
Her words sounded so sympathetic then, and so obvious a thing to ask. But it was the question that would haunt us all for decades to come.
“I don’t know,” I said, because only bad people got arrested. Papa wasn’t a bad person.
I left Mrs. Brimley and went back inside the house, all thoughts of Lucy Hobart gone. When Max and I went to bed that night, Mommi was still on the phone. She’d been on the phone for hours, talking to different people, sometimes in English, sometimes in German. She was no doubt asked by everyone she talked to why Papa had been arrested. There were thousands of German Americans in Davenport. Dozens upon dozens of them were working just across the river at the Rock Island Arsenal, where weapons of warfare were being manufactured at all hours. So what was it that Papa had done? Why did the FBI arrest him? I kept hearing her say, “I don’t know! Nothing they said made any sense!”
The long answer, we would soon learn, was that the FBI officials were afraid that my unnaturalized father was loyal to Germany, favored the Nazi regime, was engaged in subversive activity to aid the enemy, and was uniquely skilled and conveniently placed within an occupation where he could do much damage to the citizens of the United States.
The short answer was, as most short answers are, more to the point.
They were afraid.
4
I’ve heard it said of immigrants like my parents that they crossed the wide ocean to pursue the American Dream, that fabled happy existence characterized by prosperity for those who work hard and lead lives of integrity. It has always seemed to me, though, that you need to keep your eyes wide open to achieve that kind of life, don’t you? A dream is only a dream while you sleep, when your eyes are closed to outside forces. The way I see it, you can’t work hard and be a good person with your eyes closed. That means the American Dream is not a dream at all. It’s a wish. You can make a wish with your eyes closed, but you open them after you blow out the candles. With your eyes wide open, you labor to lead an honest life while you wait to see if your wish will come true.
As I watched the black car that held my father disappear around the block, the strongest sensation I had was not that this couldn’t be happening, but that it was. It was like being awakened from a stupor, not falling into a nightmare. I couldn’t have explained it to anyone then. Not even to myself. It was only in the years that followed that I realized this was the moment my eyes were opened to what the world is really like. Months later, in the internment camp, Mariko would tell me she believed there were two kinds of mirrors. There was the kind you looked into to see what you looked like, and then there was the kind you looked into and saw what other people thought you looked like.
The moment my father left with those men, that second mirror was thrust in my face. And there it stayed. Up until that moment, I thought my identity had its beginning with my parents, because isn’t that how all children come to be? You exist because your parents met each other, fell in love, got married, had a child who was you. And then you trailed along after them, becoming the person you would be because of where they took you, and where life took them.
My parents emigrated to America in the spring of 1925 as young newlyweds eager to put down roots in the land of seemingly unending horizons. Seven years had passed since the end of the Great War, and people had started to trust one another again, to allow for one another to stretch and build and hope again. That’s how my papa would describe it. He had been fourteen when his father came home from the First World War. My Opa, a gifted surgeon, had spent the years of the conflict in a field hospital, saving the lives of countless wounded soldiers, often while himself in harm’s way. The fighting didn’t come to Pforzheim, where my papa lived as an only child with Oma, so his most vivid memories of the Great War were of waiting for his father to come home from it. Food had become scarce because of the Allied blockades, but my Oma had a big vegetable garden and a root cellar and chickens, and even though the military pay that Opa sent home every month was not the same as what he earned at the hospital in Pforzheim, it was enough to keep them from starving. My father remembered chopping down what seemed an endless number of trees in the woods behind their house when coal was no longer available, all while wearing clothes that were a size too small and his father’s too-big boots because nothing of his own fit anymore and nothing new could be bought. Papa told me the Great War was a perplexing situation that he didn’t fully understand except that the monotony of its many deprivations felt like a flattening of his soul. He recalled being happy and relieved when the war was over even though Germany hadn’t been the victor.
My grandparents’ house, three stories of half-timbered beauty, had been in the Sontag family for a hundred years. The Sontag men, up until Opa, had all been watch-and jewelry makers, as were so many others in Pforzheim. The city was and still is famous for its watches and jewelry. Even so, Opa had hoped Papa might want to become a surgeon, too. But my father didn’t want to be a doctor, not even when Opa came home from the war a decorated surgeon. Papa wanted to make new discoveries in the fields of science and industry. He wanted to be part of something innovative and pioneering, like developing a new fuel source or a better system for purifying water or a way to replicate human blood cells. He had always been interested in the amazing things that can happen in a research laboratory.
Papa met my mother in 1924 at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, now known as the University of Stuttgart, thirty miles from Pforzheim, where he was studying for a degree in chemistry. She worked in the library, shelving among the stacks, and because he went there daily to study, he saw her often. Papa told me and Max more than once that Mommi was as sweet and lovely as an angel, despite having known incredible sadness, and he couldn’t help but fall in love with her. When they met, Mommi’s parents were both deceased; her mother died of tuberculosis when Mommi was only three and her father, who was sixteen years older than her mother, had died of a massive stroke when she was fifteen.