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Finding her lost father

THE BOX FROM BRAUNAU:
In Search of My father’s War
By Jan Elvin
272 pp. AMACOM $24.95

Reviewed by Ruth Douillette

When does a daughter begin to understand the person behind the man she calls Dad? Often not until she’s grown and her father is dead. She cleans out the family home, looks through drawers, reads old letters, and finally glimpses the man her father was before parenthood stole his identity.

In Jan Elvin’s case, her 85-year-old father was still alive when she came across the handmade tin box bearing the words “Braunau 1944” that had sat on his desk throughout her childhood.

Like many homes where soldiers return from war harboring memories too horrible to share, Elvin’s was full of secrets and silence. Overcoming a hesitancy learned in childhood, Elvin asked her father for the story behind the tin box. He quietly turned over his wartime journals, letting the words he’d scrawled in a battlefield journal tell his story.

Bill Elvin, a decorated WWII combat veteran, would likely be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder today. Back then it was called shell shock. No matter what the name, combat veterans often relive fearsome memories, hiding invisible wounds, while struggling to live a “normal” civilian life.

His controlling behavior, anger, and anxieties kept his family at a distance. Like the tin box that sat in full view on his desk but was never opened, Bill Elvin, too, remained sealed. Even as Elvin yearned to know more, she approached her father with cautious respect, knowing that attempting to open him could result in an explosion of emotional shrapnel.

“My initial goal was to describe Dad’s war experiences,” she says. “The book is a search for my father’s war. ... By writing it, I got back the father I lost years ago.”

Researching the story behind the box gave me a way to get to know this enigmatic but beloved figure in my life. Old, half-forgotten memories tumbled over me, some as pleasurable as the lilacs in Virginia, some as disturbing as the chill in the air during family quarrels.

A half a century later he chose to write his answers to her questions. When he spoke on the telephone, his voice choked with tears Elvin found difficult to hear.

“For years I’d bemoaned Dad’s inaccessible emotions,” she writes, “but now I longed for my old ‘stiff-upper-lip’ Dad. It was jarring to deal with even this hint of pain... I couldn’t bear the break in his voice.”

Two months after D-Day, Bill Elvin had disembarked at Omaha Beach, Normandy, a junior infantry officer with a wife and baby son back home who were unaware that the man who kissed them goodbye was not the man who would come home little more than a year later.

We follow the war through Bill Elvin’s eyes from battlefields in the German countryside, where he was a first lieutenant in General George Patton’s Third Army, 80th Infantry Division.

Elvin’s meticulous research fills in the gaps in her father’s grim narrative. Like all wartime accounts from the muddy front lines, Bill Elvin’s leaves no doubt that war is hell. His journalistic skills, his eye for the poignant detail, and his articulate expression make his account particularly stirring. From a German battlefield he writes:

There was a hell of a fight going on just up the hill in front of us. We stood around or leaned against a tree or sat down, not saying a word. Waiting. A leaf would fall from the tree and every man would start and look at his buddy. Up front someone would shout something indistinct; in a hoarse whisper, coated with fear, a rifleman would ask a mortar man, “What was that?” And the answer would always be a dull, “I dunno.”

In 1945 when he and his men arrived at Ebensee, a labor camp in Braunau, Austria, he met the skeletal dying man who gave him the tin box. That scene moved him to tears more than a half-century later.

Because her father was a newspaper reporter who still wrote for the weekly paper he’d once owned and published, Elvin chose to “track down the ‘real’ Bill Elvin” through interviews, investigations, and research. With this professional distance, she was more comfortable asking the probing questions, she writes.

Elvin’s childhood stories alternate with her father’s accounts of the war. We see her as a child learning never to sneak up behind her father, never to jump on his back, to wake him only from across the room, never to startle him with a loud noise.

His use of pidgin German learned in the war—vashender handender hoak for wash your hands, rausmitsche for get out—was playful, as was singing “The Infantry Song” on car trips, but it covered a chilly tension between her parents that didn’t escape Elvin’s eye. Elvin and her siblings learned to hold in their emotions. “Tight, tight, tight, and down, down, down,” she quotes from her father’s journal—a life-saving credo for an infantryman, unhealthy for a marriage and children.

Bill Elvin died before the book’s publication. No doubt it would have been hard for him to read. The story is a complex one. It is a daughter’s tale, a father’s tale, a father- daughter tale. It’s a tale highlighting how war damages a soldier’s soul, and impacts those who love him. It’s a tale of understanding and forgiveness— a love story, really—and a cautionary tale. When will it ever end?

Elvin approached her father’s war with respect and honesty. We are privy now to his past and the sad story behind the box from Braunau. Learning its background has opened doors to Elvin’s understanding of her father, adding insight to the love that was always there. Amidst the inhumanity of war, there co-exists a bond of love and empathy for fellow sufferers. Such is the message of the tin box.

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Ruth Douillette retired after 35 years as a middle school teacher, and now freelances as a writer and photographer. Her essays have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, Cup of Comfort, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Under Our Skin, an anthology about breast cancer. Her photography has been featured in flashquake's gallery of art. Ruth is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. For a sample of her writing and photography, visit Upstream and Down~.

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