The Mystery Notebook
After my memoir Flight – A Memoir of Loss and Discovery by an Aviator’s Daughter was published, I heard from quite a few readers, some of them long-lost friends and people I had encountered many years ago, but also strangers who were moved to reach out. Among these was a woman in Grenoble, France, Dr. Susanne Bertier- Foglar, who had found an old school notebook with the name of my sister, Jurate Gustaitis and “English VII B” on its gray cover. Several pages had been torn out, leaving tiny scraps with a few letters that appeared to be parts of English words in ink along the spine. The remaining pages were covered with exercises in French, in a handwriting “that could have been” her mother’s, wrote Dr. Berthier-Foglar, a retired professor of American Studies.
She had found this notebook among old papers she was sorting for her 93-year-old mother, who did not remember how the notebook came into her possession, nor any schoolmate named Jurate. “During the 1944-45 school year, my mother was a pupil at a gymnasium close to the Schlossberg “ (a rocky mountain in the center of the city, with the ruins of a castle on top) in Graz, Austria, wrote Dr. Bethier-Foglar.
We too were in Graz during 1944-45. Paper was scarce in war-ravaged Europe, so one would not have thrown away any notebook that still had blank pages. Was it possible that my sister and the mother of the retired professor in Grenoble were classmates in the gymnasium at the Schlossberg? They were almost the same age, born only two days apart in May 1929.
Dr. Berthier-Foglar must have searched on the internet for my sister. She found an article about me and my memoir, Flight, in The Standard, an online newspaper published in San Francisco. It mentioned Jurate. So she contacted the reporter, asking to be put in touch with me. I passed the messages on to my sister, who responded to Dr. Berthier-Foglar:
“Your mother and I definitely used the same bomb shelter, the Schlossberg,” my sister wrote. It was dug into the mountain and considered very safe. When inside, one couldn’t even hear the bombers.” Jurate remembered a day when she emerged at the “all clear” siren after a heavy aerial attack, frightened for herself and her family. Then she had an experience that played a pivotal role in her life.
“I stepped into the tram car to go home. It was empty except for a beautiful young woman dressed as a novice nun, all in white and light blue. Her hands were in her lap and there was such peace radiating from her that it stopped me in my tracks. I remember thinking, ‘I want that peace,’ and then, immediately, “‘But you already have it. You are in God’s hand.’ I can’t explain it but I think the notebook is somehow related to that day. …I was never again afraid of the bombings.”
Jurate became a devout Catholic.
Susanne and her family sought safety in the countryside, at the home of her grandmother, during the chaotic time at the war’s end. The grandmother also sheltered some of the other refugees passing through. Russian troops moved to occupy Graz and “a massive exodus ensued.” Those who did not flee hid girls and women “in boarded up attic nooks and haystacks.”
Our family had no place to go and no way to flee. But my mother’s fluency in Russian and German enabled her to serve a useful role as translator. She met a kind Russian officer who helped her to avoid being shipped back to Soviet-occupied Lithuania. Later she connected with a sister of my father’s in New York, who sponsored us for resettlement in America.
Susanne Berthier-Foglar’s mother returned to Graz after the war ended, finished two more years at the gymnasium, went on to the University of Graz, married, had a child (Susanne), moved with her husband to France, had two more children.
“In 2020 we sold and cleaned out our family home …. and I am still sifting through the papers, which is a fitting occupation for someone recently retired,” wrote the former professor. Jurate, meanwhile, taught elementary school for many years, raised five children, was twice widowed, and now enjoys a flock of their offspring who visit her at her home on Lake Michigan.
“This notebook has no historical significance,” Dr. Berthier-Foglar had written. Perhaps. But it intrigued her enough to spend time and effort to track down its first owner. And how amazing that it should turn up, more than seventy-five years after my sister wrote her name on its cover, a reminder that the past never completely gone, that traces of it persist, spark our curiosity, and sometimes open new views into earlier times. To Jurate, this story is an example of the many acts of kindness by individual people that, even in the most terrible times, in the long run prove more powerful than fear and evil.
Readers of my historical memoir Flight will not find any mention of the novice nun on the tram in Graz --despite her importance to Jurate-- because I only heard of her now, in the correspondence between a stranger in Grenoble and my sister, prompted by the discovery of a reused notebook with a gray cover and porous wartime paper pages with yellowing edges.
Dr. Berthier-Foglar has mailed the notebook to Jurate, who never met her mother, Hedi Ilse, but who shared its pages with her at a dark time, when both were about fifteen years old.
Dr. Berthier-Foglar
Jurate Evans Moriartey