LYNNWOOD — Longtime Lynnwood resident, Elizabeth Arnswald Dost, has published a book about a collection of letters written by her husband, Helmut Dost, which she mostly learned about after he died in 1994.
The letters were brought to her attention briefly years before, through her brother-in-law, Martin Dost, during a visit to California. Martin had had the historical insight at a young age to save the letters that described the adventures Helmut went through while he was separated from his family since he was 16 years old.
The book “Home Alone in America Letters Exchanged by a Young German in the U.S. and His Family in Berlin from 1946 to 1955,” made up of the actual letters between Helmut Dost and the rest of his family, read like a novel and were quite revealing and exciting, Arnswald Dost said.
“After he died I wanted to read the letters just for my personal use but it was such an outstanding, complete and fascinating collection of letters that I just knew they would be of interest to a wider readership than just the family,” she said. She added, “I didn’t realize how little we (she and Helmut’s two sons) knew about his life.”
Because many of the letters were written in German she first had to translate them, a job she managed to do herself along with connecting the letters with background and transitions.
Arnswald Dost has had experience in journalism, teaching and social work and felt it was her duty do something publicly about the letters.
“I thought I had become the custodian of a historic treasure and I knew I had to do something about it,” she said.
Arnswald Dost said Helmut Dost was born in the United States before the second world war. After the war started, he and the rest of his family were sent directly back to Germany. Only because he was American-born could Helmut then come back as soon as the war ended and he was able.
Arnswald Dost’s story begins: “It was September 1946, just a year after the war’s end, when an American-born German youth stepped off the ship alone in New York City. In a hasty decision, precipitated by the chaotic aftermath of World War II, Helmut’s well-meaning parents had sent their gifted teenager alone to the United States to claim the supposed advantages of his American citizenship – and hopefully pave the way for their own early immigration. Little did they dream that nine years of separation lay ahead!”
The letters exchanged during those years by Helmut Dost in the United States and his family in Berlin tell a “suspense-filled story of a young man’s unanticipated struggles and challenges in the country of his birth,” she writes, adding “At the same time, they give us intriguing glimpses of life in beleaguered West Berlin during the tense days of the Cold War.”
The letters tell the story how Helmut Dost had a “single-minded mission,” she said, to enable his German-born family to join him in the United States.
“As you read the letters, you will witness the transformation of an impressionable German schoolboy into a thoroughly Americanized GI and veteran of the Korean War,” she said. “The letters follow Helmut from a lost opportunity to study at a prestigious private academy in Vermont, his ensuing apprenticeship to a German shoemaker in San Diego, three years of grueling toil on a chicken farm in California’s Bay area, news of his father’s tragic death in Germany, and the redeeming experience of five years with the United States Marine Corps,” she said.
Finally Helmut and his brother Martin and their mother were reunited in 1955.
Having them there finally freed up Helmut Dost, Arnswald Dost said, to enter the University of California on the GI Bill, which would ultimately lead him to a doctorate in physics, and a career in defense-related projects, eventually finding and marrying Arnswald Dost and living many of his last years in Lynnwood.
One thing that still astounds Arnswald Dost is the letters almost didn’t make their way to her.
She said, “Helmut had a debilitating stroke in 1992, his brother turned the letter collection over to us in 1993. Then — both brothers died in 1994.”
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