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Carnival Girl
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Click on this link to pre-order your copy!
Here is a link to a news release about the book Carnival Girl: The Standard Examiner
Sonja Herbert just finished a radio interview with The Cultural Hall about Carnival Girl. Information about when and at what radio stations it will air will be forthcoming.
Carnival Girl will be published by Cedar Fort Publishing in June 2012!
Here is a copy of the press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
About to be Published: A Spiritual Awakening in Post-WWII Germany
1/27/12—Provo, Utah—German convert and immigrant Sonja Herbert announces the release of her memoir, Carnival Girl: Searching for God in the Aftermath of War.
Even for Post-WWII Germany, Sonja’s life was unusual. Readers will experience Germany through the eyes of one little girl, but from a very unusual point of view, since she was the young daughter of a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a circus, and she grew up traveling the carnival circuit in a devastated Germany.
“The devastation and my mother’s stories of hiding from the Nazis seemed normal to me when I was little,” Herbert says. “But as I grew up a little, I realized that most Germans didn’t have to hide and most children do not live in traveling caravans. I was different, and that’s when I started to wonder what it would be like to live in a real house, like other children.”
Sonja had a spiritual experience at a very young age, but her mother who had turned agnostic disapproved of any signs of religiosity. “Nevertheless,” Sonja says, “I kept praying in secret. As I got older, I searched out the local churches in the towns we held our carnivals in.”
The reader experiences with Sonja the difficulties that arise as she grows up with seven people living in one small caravan. As a pre-teen, Sonja attends school in a different town every week or two, and the drunken burghers, celebrating their town’s yearly festivities, do not leave her happy to be part of the carnival. Her desire to leave the carnival grows as she gets older.
At fourteen, Sonja meets the Mormon missionaries, and against the disapproval and ridicule of her family, converts. “I knew that the only way I could live my new-found religion was to leave the carnival. Since that was impossible, I put it into God’s hands.”
Young Sonja traveled a long and unusual road to be able to live the Gospel instead of having to work the carnival every Sunday. With her, the readers will experience the guiding hand of God as she clings to her faith under the most difficult circumstances, and they will leave the story with their own testimonies strengthened.
Pre-order your copy of the book today from Amazon.com or DeseretBook.com or find out more information at germancarnivalgirl.com.
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About the Author:
Sonja eventually served an LDS mission, got married to an American soldier, and at twenty-four she immigrated to the United States. She received an MA in Language Acquisition from Brigham Young University, taught high school and ESL for many years, and is now a full time writer. A mother of six and grandmother of eleven, she resides in Provo, Utah.
Sonja’s writings have been published in many anthologies. Some of her stories are:
"A Lesson for a Son," and "Final Goodbyes," Patchwork Path: Dad's Bowtie, July 2009
"Schooled," Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On , June 2009
"Goodwill to Men," The Ultimate Christmas: The Best Experts' Advice for a Memorable Season with Stories and Photos of Holiday Magic September 2009
"Just a Small New Year's Resolution," Chickensoup for the Soul: My Resolutions, December 2008
"Letting the Light Shine," Christmas Traditions: True Stories that Celebrate the Spirit of the Season, November 2008
These reviews will be on the back cover of the book:
This captivating glimpse of life in a post WWII carnival played around in my mind even when I had to put the story down. Not only does “Cross and Carnival” cover unusual details of living a day-to-day life on the road, it also weaves in the miraculous love and ever-guiding hand of God, even for a girl growing up beside a merry go round. Unforgettable.
Shirley Bahlmann, author of the popular “Odds” series
There was no Marshall Plan to relieve the dysfunction of Sonja Herbert’s nomadic family as they traveled through a Germany struggling to rebuild after World War II. Beautifully crafted and evocative of time and place, Herbert's memoir shows us both the light and shadows of her unique childhood, one of six children raised in a carnival caravan.
Liz Adair
Whitney Award Winner
sezlizadair.blogspot.com
Background | |
| | Sonja Francesco was born in Germany, two years after the war had ended. She was Margot and Kolya's third daughter and the second one who lived.
When she was little, Sonja didn't know it was a struggle for her mother to raise her children in a caravan home and keep food on the table. It all seemed so normal.
Sonja eventually had five siblings. Kolya's and Margot's children never went hungry, but with the constant stress Mutti, as the children called her, didn't have a lot of love to go around. This is the award-winning story of Sonja's upbringing in the most dire circumstances, and the joy and wonder she found in spite of it all.
AWARDS WON
The prologue of Carnival Girl won First Prize in the December 2005 Joyous Publishing Writing Contest. These chapters are also part of the book, Prize-Winning Stories, which was published in January 2007.
Chapter five, titled, "What's in a Name," won Honorable Mention in the Laughing Gull Writing Contest.
Chapter six, titled "Tschilper," won Finalist in the M Review Writing Contest. Read it here: M Review Tschilper
This is what the contest judges said about Tschilper:
A young girl in post World War II Germany learns a lesson about compassion and the lengths to which her parents will go to feed the family. The convincing voice of the seven year-old narrator is equally at home whether mimicking the sounds of baby chicks or the exasperated orders of a pragmatic mother in this story, which evokes the drama of day-to-day survival.
Chapter seven, titled, "Wally," won runner up in the Joyous Publishing Writing Contest, June 2006.
Parts of several other chapters, combined into one story, has been published in December 2006, in the anthology, His Forever: Real People Coming to Jesus.
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Carnival Girl
Prologue
This prologue to Sonja's memoir won First Prize in the Joyous Publishing Writing Contest, December 2005!
August 2004
I’m waiting at the airport with my husband Ken and my two youngest daughters. My mother will soon arrive. I haven’t seen her for eight years. When she finally comes along the walkway, it takes me a moment to recognize her. She is smaller than I remember, but, at 84, she isn’t frail. I can’t imagine my mother being frail.
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| | Her once black hair now is an artificial auburn, the gray coming through at the roots; but her eyes are still dark and as piercing as ever. Mutti, as I still call her, is excited to be in America.
I have just finished writing the story of her journeys with the circus through Nazi Germany. During this visit I will talk with her about her life on the carnival circuit while I was growing up.
But first Mutti tells of her time with my father and her struggle to have a normal life.
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My mother had children before me. Mutti, half-Jewish, hated and despised, a woman of much sorrow, bore children and presented the world with new life at a time when her people were being fed to furnaces by the millions.
Because Hitler was still in power, Mutti didn’t dare visit a doctor during her first two pregnancies. My oldest sister was born in a circus caravan, far too early, and lived only a few hours.
After the death of this child, Mutti became pregnant again, in early 1945. She took it as a blessing and was sure this time things would turn out all right. By the time the baby was due to be born, Germany had become safe. In June, the war was over, and a few weeks before the birth of the baby, Mutti and Vati, my father, were able to be married by a representative of the hastily thrown together new government of Germany. Carmen was born, in a hospital, two months after the marriage ceremony.
Carmen, too, was born premature. Her breathing was labored and painful, and she could barely move. The skin on her bottom was so thin and tender, Mutti saw the blood vessels through it.
“I’m so sorry, Frau Francesco,” the doctor told her. “There is nothing I can do. The incubators are destroyed, and we just don’t have the resources to keep your little girl alive.”
“Please, Herr Doktor, what can I do?” Mutti begged.
“Take her home. Try to feed her. If God wills, maybe she’ll survive.” He smiled a tired, sad smile. “Your love can do more for her than what we can do here.”
He left to attend the many war casualties. |
| Mutti took the barely breathing baby home to the rickety old caravan home where she and Vati lived.
Carmen was too weak to suck. For almost three months Vati and Mutti took turns feeding her every two hours, day and night. Mutti pumped the milk from her engorged breasts. At first they fed Carmen by eyedropper, and then with a bottle.
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| | For many months it didn’t look like Carmen would survive. When she finally was strong enough to suck and even started to take solid foods, diarrhea hit. For days the little girl screamed with cramps and lost almost all her bodily fluids. In desperation, Mutti took her to another doctor, in another town, where the circus was playing at the time. This doctor, too, was overwhelmed trying to treat the wounded soldiers and civilians who poured into the western towns from the east, to worry about one small baby. After a cursory examination, he told Mutti dysentery had left the baby severely dehydrated and, since she couldn’t hold any liquids, he didn’t think she would recover. Mutti could try to keep her hydrated and hope for the best, but that was all that could be done in such a situation.
To this day, Mutti doesn’t give up easily. In tears, she found a drugstore and asked what could be done if a person had dysentery. The druggist sold her a small box with black tablets, carbon tablets. He warned her to be very careful, because such tablets could easily worsen the situation. Faced with the danger of losing another child if she did nothing, Mutti ground up half of one tablet, stirred it into a bit of oatmeal and fed it to her sick baby. Carmen survived.
Sometime in February 1947, Mutti stood at the table in the kitchen section of her circus caravan home, butter knife in hand. While spreading margarine and strawberry jam on rye bread for little Carmen’s breakfast, she hoped against hope her period was only late. With unseeing eyes she stared through Carmen, who sat on a chair atop a block of wood covered with a pillow. The coal burning in the kitchen oven suffused the small room with warmth. Carmen stuffed small bites of bread into her jam-covered mouth. The cold late winter rain pounded on the thin caravan roof and ran in rivulets down the window by the kitchen table.
Standing in the kitchen and watching her baby eat, Mutti didn’t know if she could do this again. Maybe she was fated to have bad pregnancies. She knew she wouldn’t have the energy to snatch another baby from the jaws of death. Not with having to sell tickets in the circus and caring for little Carmen, too. So far, each of her pregnancies had produced premature babies. She was convinced she’d have another preemie if she were pregnant again.
She wiped the baby’s face, picked her from the makeshift high chair and placed her safely on her hip. Automatically she cleaned the kitchen table, all the while thinking about her predicament. She couldn’t go through this again. This time she’d break. But what else could she do?
She told herself to cheer up. Maybe her period was just late. She’d be all right. If this were but a false alarm she’d be very careful from now on. She watched Carmen, in her old playpen in the living room, the middle section of the caravan, and decided to let Kolya, my Vati, know.
At noon Vati came in from helping to put up the circus tent, and she told him. He comforted her and told her to wait and see. If there were another baby they would take care of it, too. Surely this one wouldn’t be premature, now that they had more and better food to eat. And this time for sure they’d have a boy, someone to carry on the name and the circus.
On September 29, 1947, I was born. I was lucky. I was born after the war, and in much better health.
On the one hand Mutti was happy. This baby was on time, strong and healthy. On the other hand, I wasn’t the boy they had wanted. They didn’t even have a name for me, another girl. After a few days to consider the problem, Vati decided to call me Sonja, after his sister.
Eighteen months later, my sister Josefa was born. Mutti asked the doctor if there wasn’t something she could do so she wouldn’t get pregnant again, but the doctor told her no. She should consign herself to God’s will and be glad He had given her these children.
Mutti cursed the doctor and her fate. Three children were too many in these bad times. She wasn’t able to care for more and would do what she could to prevent another pregnancy. And just eight months later she was pregnant with her fourth child.
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