Halina

This is the story of my mother's life, born Halina Anuszewska, September 11, 1918, in Warsaw, Poland, and died Halina Graf, December 9, 1994, in Berlin, Germany. She was no famous person. Yet she led an extraordinary life under extraordinary circumstances and in the midst of extraordinary times. She was a survivor. Of a childhood that deprived her of the means to develop her creative talents and drove her into an unsuitable early marriage. Of WWII, the Polish uprising in Warsaw in 1944, and the concentration camps in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. Of the postwar chaos that eventually landed her in Stuttgart Germany. Of her second unsuitable marriage there to my father, and her two children by that marriage (me and my sister). Of her third unsuitable marriage to a charming alcoholic. Of even greater importance are her own adventurous spirit and her imagination. She could have been a dancer, a singer, an actress, a romance novelist if circumstances had been in her favor. Instead she lived her own "impossible story". I have it in her authentic words in three parts: An autobiography she wrote at my request; a series of interviews I held with her and recorded on tape when I visited her in Berlin three months before her death of cancer in December 1994; and a tape she recorded for me for my birthday. I have translated the original texts from German into English and added notes where necessary. I also wrote introductions and postscripts to the several parts, to explain some items, fill out the narratives, and add my own thoughts and impressions.