PORT TOWNSEND — When Edel Lessing Sokol was a girl in Eastern Europe, she used to sit at night and watch her grandmother sit in front of a mirror, undo her braided bun and then brush her long, dark hair.
As she brushed, her grandmother, who spoke German, would tell Edel the stories and legends that she had heard as a girl.
“I can be there right now,” Edel says of hearing her grandmother’s voice.
“There” was the town where Edel, her parents and five siblings ended up after fleeing their home in East Prussia before the advance of the Russian Army in 1945.
Catching the last train out of town, the family left behind their home, their business and all their possessions, starting over with nothing — except the stories that Oma, the grandmother, remembered.
Now, Edel, who lives in Port Townsend, is passing down those stories to her grandchildren, who call her Omi. And she has set down one of those stories in a book, called Amber and Flax.
Subtitled “A Story from Ancient Preussenland, Land of Dark Forests and Crystal Seas,” the book is a retelling of a legend that explains how bernstein, or amber, and flachs (flax) came to the people of ancient Prussia.
It dates back to the time before the arrival of Knights Templar, Edel says, who were ordered by the pope to go to Prussia and convert the inhabitants to Christianity.
“The people there were still worshipping trees,” Edel says.
Trees prominent
Trees figure prominently in the legend, which pits the people and their protectors, the Water Lady and the Earth Lady, against the demons that live under the earth.
Edel asked Deborah Oldham, a Port Townsend artist, to illustrate the story, creating characters from photographs of Edel’s grandmother and mother, her children and their grandchildren.
Edel dedicated the book to the descendants of her father, Willie Lessing, who survived the invasion and the destruction of East Prussia, a region of the German empire on the Baltic Sea that no longer exists.
“Now it’s a no-man’s land, part in Poland, part in Latvia,” Edel says.
“It is a political idea. It is an emotional idea.”
The youngest of six children, Edel was born in October 1944, in the town of Korschen.
Until the war, it was a fairy-tale existence: the family owned a house in town and a bakery, and her grandmother lived on a little farm.
But at the start of 1945, her father was fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front, which was creeping closer to Germany — with Prussia in the way.
Then one day, Edel’s mother was at the market with a cousin when she heard a voice say, “Don’t turn around. Go home right away, pack up and leave.”
Her mother did as she was told, packing suitcases and taking the children, ages 12 to 3 months, to the train station.
Realizing they had no food for the journey, she left the children with the cousin, returned to the house and emptying the suitcases, cooked pancakes and filled the cases with them.
One step ahead
The family got the last train out of Korschen, Edel says, and managed to stay one step ahead of the Russians.
“My mother said you could always see the fire in the sky,” she says
Her father, who had warned the family to leave, also managed to get out of Prussia and join the family in Germany, as did Edel’s grandmother.
Later, the Russians purged all the Germans from that zone, several million people whose heritage was lost along with their political identity. While Edel’s whole family escaped, others, including the mother of a family friend, were not so lucky.
“We sat in a small room surrounded by old pictures and books as she told me stories about East Prussia,” Edel writes in the prologue.
“The family had lost their son and had no other children. Like our family, they were also refugees from East Prussia.”
Edel also remembers the trummer frauen, women who cleaned up the bombed cities of Germany by forming bucket brigades to clear rubble, for which they received extra rations.
She also knows that if her mother had not been strong, she and her siblings might have ended up as wolf children, orphans who lived in the woods of war-torn Europe and scavenged for food.
But that, she says, is another story.
For now, she is happy to have the story she started writing 10 years ago in print.
Designed by Lou Faulkner, also of Port Townsend, the book is available at Imprint Book Store.
Edel, who is available to give readings at schools (e-mail preussenfrau@hotmail.com), notes that is appropriate for older children.
For Jack and Heike, her younger grandchildren, she gives an abridged version. But the connection to their Prussian roots is still there.
“When I tell the stories to my little ones,” Edel said, “I hear my grandmother’s voice.”
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Port Townsend/Jefferson County reporter-columnist Jennifer Jackson can be reached at jjackson@olypen.com.