Rosary made in Czechoslovakia

Happy Easter, everyone!

Today I would like to share with you a very unassuming item. It is a rosary my mom received from a neighbor in the late 1940’s. It is very special to me even though I am not catholic, and my mom is not either. At least that is what she tells me.

My mom had a very difficult childhood. She probably shares this with most people of her generation. During the WWII, she didn’t get much schooling at all. If I would tell that to my students, they would most likely say that she was lucky. Well, she didn’t think so. Among many reasons for not being able to attend school was the fact that she was very sick. She contracted typhus and survived polio, just to mention some of her predicaments. I guess to live a normal life after polio makes her almost a miracle child.

But she didn’t only survive diseases; she also cheated death several times after the war was already over. In one of those occasions, being unlucky actually proved to be good luck after all: My grandmother and her five daughters were supposed to evacuate on a ship crossing the Baltic Sea. There were too many people on board already, so they were denied boarding the ship. Later they found out that that ship was destroyed, and all of the passengers died.

There were, unfortunately, many more of those close calls, but to make a long story short, my grandmother and her five daughters made it in 1947 to their new home to what was later to become East Germany. There they found safety, and after a few years, with the help of the Red Cross, they also managed to reunite with my grandfather and her brother. By the way, during the time they were refugees, my uncle was lost because he had joined some of the other villagers on a on a different carriage, but the bridge the caravan had to cross was blown up. There was no way to join his family. I can only try to understand how devastating it must have been for my grandmother to lose her child.

To get back to the rosary: My mom’s family did not have anything, anything at all. A friendly neighbor gave this rosary to my mom. I guess it is the cheapest one you can imagin. The beads are made of white glass and the metal seems to be brass. It is stamped with a short form that I believe stands for Czechoslovakia.

This posting is for you, mom.

Happy Easter to all and Peace on Earth!

P.S.: The photo is the only photograph of my mom as a child.