I wish that I had paid more attention when my mother told me stories from her childhood in Denmark. She had related such glimpses of her life on numerous occasions over the years. Sometimes the specifics would vary. Mother would amplify a detail or two that she had previously omitted. But in the main her remembrances were all familiar to me. I would listen politely, but rarely prodded her to fill in any gap in her narrative. I fancied myself a writer, but never took any notes of what my mother told me about her life. For many years I had devoted my time to writing a succession of admittedly mediocre short stories. I frittered away my days concocting these made-up stories when I had a wealth of true stories passed on to me by my mother. But it never occurred to me to commit these far more interesting stories to paper. Mother often spoke of growing up on her father’s farm, how she had learned to ride a horse. She and her family witnessed the German invasion of Denmark in 1940, and when she moved to Copenhagen in 1943 she saw first-hand the brutality of the Nazi occupation. But of such recollections, I made not a single note, and when I set myself the task of writing a memoir of my mother, everything had to be summoned up from my imperfect memory.

Fortunately, my mother was usually very good at recording on the backs of the pictures in her photo albums the specifics of who, when, and where. I have used her albums to stimulate my memories of the stories Mother told me over the years. I also have the aerograms, written on thin blue paper, that she saved from her mother to inform me of what was going on in her family back in Denmark. My mother, with her training as a bookkeeper, was also diligent in recording the dates of our many trips to Denmark and the chronology of our moves here in the States. Without her records, I would have been hard-pressed to come up with these important details. So in a sense, I feel that my mother and I were working together on her memoir.