c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In 1913, my grandmother left Yugoslavia at age 16 and traveled the immigrant’s voyage across the ocean to America. Here she created a legacy in what she liked to call “her adopted homeland,” but her choice meant that she would never see her Slovenian family again.

Her sister Ancka was supposed to join her in America the next year, but World War I broke out. Then the 1918 influenza pandemic swept through Europe. Then came the Great Depression, followed by World War II.

Despite being separated, the two sisters continued to write letters to each other in bold, flowing script. My grandmother kept them all, bundled by decade. I’ve inherited some, now yellowed and brittle, but readable if one understands old-world Slovenian.

I had no sense of how monumental this all was when, accompanied by two friends, I went to France as an 18-year-old to meet Christel Lahs, my grandmother’s niece. Just before New Year’s Eve in 1976, we arrived in the little coal-mining town of Stiring-Wendel, just a half-hour drive from the German border.

The coal mines were government-owned, so the little French town was littered with row upon row of federally subsidized apartment buildings. Christel knew we were coming sometime during the Christmas holiday, but she didn’t know when until the day she heard shouts coming from the street below her window.

An irate taxi driver was threatening to call the authorities on three American girls, who, lacking any French money, tried to force him to accept German bills.

At first, we misunderstood Christel’s hysteria as she flew out of her apartment, shoving money at the cab driver. The scene played out like the Tower of Babel, all of us at once gesturing and speaking bits of French, German and English.

Like a mother hen, she gathered us up, clucking and crooning, stroking our hair. For the next three days she whisked us from house to house in one endless visit to meet all the descendants of my grandmother’s family.

On New Year’s Eve, we drank champagne from Champagne, France. “This is the real thing, the others are fake,” she told us.

Christel and her husband Rudy thought we were laughing all the time because we were so happy, but they kept filling our glasses. We cracked up when Christel, in a show of hospitality, spread at least a half pound of butter on each piece of toast.

With regret, my friends and I look back on how we giggled when Christel played a tape my grandmother had sent her, singing German songs. At the time it sounded operatic, falsetto and terribly funny. Christel cried as she listened to the tape.

I didn’t know why Christel showed such an emotional display of affection to strangers until I was back home in Wisconsin, showing pictures of our visit to my grandmother.

At the end of World War II, she told me, Christel and her father, Frank, were liberated by Americans from the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. Shortly after, in 1946, Frank died in a coal mining accident.

On that day my grandmother began sending money to Christel to tide her over, including a $20 bill each Christmas. When my grandmother died in 1994, my Aunt Ann took up the tradition, sending Christel the $20 bill, tucked inside a holiday card.

The tradition continues to this day.

How thin the thread is that links the hearts of two people that never met. Someday soon it will be broken, as the new generations of my family in both America and Europe have no interest in roots and family stories of ships and poverty and old wars.

They, like me, have no feeling for the depths of a coal mine, or what $20 means to a young girl freed from Dachau.

I hope that love still sometimes travels like this through the world today, clinging to patchwork threads, sewn together by strangers.

(Sharon Roznik writes for The Reporter in Fond du Lac, Wis.)

KRE/JL END ROZNIK