Return to Gaschurn, Sixty Years Later. Part Two. Haus in der Sonne

 Continued from Return to Gaschurn, Part One

Up, up, up along the winding road into the mountains, and there we were. The village was nothing like I remembered it; but then, I remembered very little, at the most those quaint solid-wood chalets. I kept an eye out for Haus in der Sonne while driving through, but as I'd suspected it was long gone; yes, I'd looked it up online and no Pension of that name existed. The buildings in the village centre were modern, of brick, with a few chalets in between and on the hillside above. 

I wasn't quite sure what I was doing in Gaschurn. Retracing my steps, yes; but how? I didn't know a single person there, and I didn't have a plan. I needed a plan.  Haus in der Sonne had to be central to that plan. I also needed a hook; how would I explain myself?

On the way up it had all seemed pretty clear. My plan would be to find someone, an older person who remembered Haus in der Sonne, and to have a chat about the old days. The hook would be the photograph. This one, found again after rummaging through a shoebox of old photos.

I remember that pullover well: Mrs Williamson had knitted it for me, and I loved it. Here I am, gazing up into the mountains that so impressed me at the time. It can’t have been cold as I wasn’t wearing a jacket, or gloves, or a cap. To my surprise, up there wasn’t very cold at all.

And so, armed with just a photo, I put my plan into motion. I needed to meet someone, an older Gaschurner, but as we parked the car and stepped out into the street it seemed a vain hope: the street was empty. Not a single person in sight. And so my first reaction was disappointment. Had I come all this way in vain?

I hadn't planned a 2022 return to Gaschurn. It seemed that the stars had all aligned to bring the visit about organically.

My son had been working on a farm just outside the Austrian town of Dornbirn, which is the largest city in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg, close to the Swiss border.
Now, in March 2022, he had quit his job and needed to return home to Ireland; which meant packing all his belongings into his car and driving back to Ireland through Switzerland and France. He'd then take the Cherbourg-Dublin Ferry. A very long and exhausting drive, and he'd been ill. Someone to drive back with him, to take the wheel now and again, would be an enormous help.

It was the opportunity I'd been waiting for...

Vorarlberg. Yes, that memory popped up: crisp outline of white mountains against a brilliant blue sky, snow glistening in the sunshine. My son loved Vorarlberg. His reaction to the beauty of those mountains, that sunshine, that sky, was similar to mine: a beauty so intense tears would come to his eyes.

Gaschurn was not even an hour's drive from Dornbirn. The time had come to return. So one sunny morning we did; and here we were. I was back. 

Now, as we left the car. the village seemed deserted. We had parked in front of the Tourist Information office, but even that was closed. We set off to meet someone, anyone.

Walking along the empty main village street: nobody. Not a soul in sight. I knew that in Germany and Austria the Mittagspause, midday pause, is almost a holy thing: the shops close down as people take their precious lunch break; lunch being the biggest meal of the day.

But there was nobody on the street. Strange, I thought. Where is everyone? I thought this was a major tourist resort these days?

Finally we did spot someone, a young man with a backpack. We spoke to him; it turned out he was an English tourist. He pointed us in the direction of a restaurant, down the road that led into the valley. 'That's also where you can get the cable car up to the mountain,'  he said. We parted company, and made our way to the restaurant, a modern pizzeria. Perhaps there I'd meet the "older person" who would answer my questions; questions I hadn't  properly formulated, not even to myself. As usual, I was in ‘play it by ear’ mode, but by now slightly frustrated.

We went into the restaurant and ordered drinks, and while doing so I addressed the staff member behind the bar. 'Do you know of any older person from Gaschurn?' I asked. 'Someone who has lived here a long time?'

The barman, who turned out to be Albanian, pointed to a man sitting alone at a table. 'Talk to him,' he said. So we sat down at that table.

 I pulled out my photo and showed it to him. 

'Do you recognise the place where this photo was taken?' I asked.

 He looked at it for a while, and then he said:

 'Yes. This was taken at the Silvretta lake dam.’ He pointed to something in the photo: ‘See: there's the dam wall.'

As soon as he said it, another memory opened up. That word 'Silvretta': it rang a loud bell loud and clear, and suddenly it all came back to me: yes, we had been up to the Silvretta Lake, Mrs Williamson and I. That's where the photo had been taken.

So finally I had my older person; but he wasn’t quite old enough. ‘Do you know of a pension called Haus in der Sonne?’ I asked. ‘That’s where we stayed in 1963.’

‘Wait a moment,’ he said, and whipped out his phone, dialled. ‘Can you come to the pizzeria?’ he said into the phone, and then, ‘now. Right now.’

Within minutes, another man turned up at our table. The first man introduced us; his name was Mr Tschofen.

The first man told the second man of our mission. ‘They are looking for someone who knows Haus in der Sonne!’ he said.

‘My parents used to own that guest house!’ said Mr Tschofen, and my jaw dropped to the floor in the biggest Wow! of the day, of the holiday.

And so I had found my connection. Mr Tschofen could tell us all we wanted to know. His parents had owned the building; before becoming a pension in the early 60s it had been a Kindererholungsheim, a health-restoration home for children needing rest and recovery: Germanic culture is excellent at that sort of thing.

Next, Mr Tschofen whipped out his own phone and, opening his photos, showed us an album full of the pre-pension Haus in der Sonne, complete with the children having their holiday. And so I made the connection to the past. Mr Tschofen is younger than I am so he would not have encountered me on that 1963 trip, but he had stories to tell and he turned out to be the missing link I had come here for. The circle had closed.

There were photos of the children playing outside the house, and getting ready to ski

Mr Tschofen’s photos of Haus in der Sonne brought it all back: yes! That was where we’d stayed, Mrs Williamson and I. I remembered the rack for skis at the side of the house. I remembered the lobby, the stairs, the massive wooden walls, the wood-burning stove…

He even had a photo of the kitchen. It was all there!

 We sat and chatted with the two men for a while and then, on their advice, walked down to the bottom of the valley and that was where we found the people. Not only shops that were open– a supermarket, a tourist shop, a ski-equipment shop – but the cable car office and, most importantly, people, swarms of them, all in their winter-sport gear and many of them carrying skis on their shoulders.

We parked the car in a huge car-park that was so full we had trouble finding an empty slot.                                                                           We bought cable-car tickets and rode the bubble up to the top of the mountain, a journey that seemed endless. All around us snow-covered slopes, people skiing down them, people on skis being dragged up in order to ski down again.

There at the top we found the people, and the party. This was why the village was empty. There’s a  restaurant up there; the outside tables were packed full and loudspeakers blasted out loud, energetic music. The sun shone brilliantly into a cloudless blue sky.

 The view was spectacular:  miles of white fields undulating into the distance, dotted with what looked like moving insects, but was actually people, people on skis, people sidling up and sliding down the slopes.

However, this wasn’t the Silvretta Lake; it was Montafon, the skiing area just above Gaschurn. Silvretta, where I had been as a child and where the photo had been taken, was further down the valley, accessible with a different cable car. 

                                                                  

                                                                        We didn’t stay long up there. 

Not being a fan of loud music, I had no inclination to join the partying guests at the restaurant. I’d have preferred the silence of the mountains; after all, I had come to make peace with the place, and peace is to  be found in silence rather than noise. But I did have my photo taken:

 Gaschurn, Sixty Years Later.

But peace can also be found within. Just being here, meeting two friendly men who could reconnect me with the past, had done the trick. The ghosts of the past were finally dispelled. Who cared what had happened in 1963? That was another time, another culture, another era. This was now, and Gaschurn, the mountains that surrounded it, the vast blue sky and the pristine white of the valley, had done their cleansing work. I was free.

As we drove away I saw the modern day Haus in der Sonne. It is at the entrance to the village, next to the police station. I would have stopped to take a photo, but my camera was out of charge. That seemed somehow right.

 

Return to Gaschurn, Sixty Years Later. Part One.

Many years ago -- 59 years to be exact -- my then guardian Mrs Williamson asked me a crucial question. ‘Where shall we go, Jo?’ she asked. ‘Would you like a summer or a winter holiday?’

(Why she called me Jo – well, that’s all part of my recently published childhood memoir, The Girl from Lamaha Street).  I was, at the time, attending a girls’ boarding school in Harrogate; Mrs Williamson, who ran a riding school in the north-west county of Cumberland, was the woman my mother, back in Guyana, had appointed to look after me during the school holidays. Mum  had offered us both a holiday, and I could choose the destination.

The answer to that question was easy and obvious: ‘Winter!’ I replied immediately, without a second thought.

 I hated winter. I hated the cold and the icy wind and the sleet the grey skies. For two years now, I’d longed for sunshine – proper, hot, sunshine, white beaches, blue skies and aquamarine seas. I longed for the Caribbean, or if not the Caribbean, for the familiar warmth of the ambiance and the people of my own country Guyana: people who looked and talked just like me, who knew what I was about. Yes, I was beginning to feel homesick.

 So the shock was huge when, a few months later, Mrs Williamson announced our destination: Austria, a skiing trip, in the snow-covered mountains! She had misunderstood my choice of destination. She thought I wanted a winter-sport holiday.

Being the shy, introverted girl I was, I did not show my shock, and did not object. I accepted her choice. And so December 1963 found us both flying off to Basle airport in Switzerland. From Basle we took the train and the bus to the quaint little village of Gaschurn, nestled into a valley in the eastern Austrian province Vorarlberg.

I remember being dazzled by the glorious mountains that surrounded us, jagged and white, etched against the brilliant blue of the sky, the snow glistening and sparkling in brilliant sunshine. I remember thinking this was the most beautiful place in the world; being overwhelmed by the majesty and magnificence of the Alpine landscape. 

At first everything was fine. Mrs Williamson and I, and another friend who had travelled with us, stayed in a Pension -- German for Bread-and-Breakfast – called Haus in der Sonne at the edge of the village. I loved it there. The house fascinated me mostly because it was all of wood: actual massive logs, not planks painted white as in my native Georgetown but in the typical traditional chalet style so prevalent not only in Austria but in the Alpine regions of Germany and Switzerland.


The chalet had a cosy atmosphere, with a wood-burning stove lending an sense of Gemütlichkeit– a wonderful and untranslatable German word which combines that very cosiness with warmth, relaxing with good friends or family, and a deep sense of spiritual wellbeing.

I started to learn German; I had always loved learning new languages and this one fascinated me. I learned to ask for the translation dictionary in German, and to count to one hundred. I had made my peace with this unwanted holiday, with snow, with skiing, with having to wait a year or two for my yearned-for tropical beach.

I felt culturally integrated – a concept that had never concerned me back then. People, almost all adults, fellow guests at the Pension, were friendly and I was a part of it all.

And yes, at first everything was fine. I began my children's skiing lessons.
I was in a children’s beginner group on the gentle slopes. I put away my original reluctant prejudice and applied myself to learning to ski: sidling up the slope, whooshing down again. To my surprise it all turned out to be quite enjoyable...


It hadn’t really registered that I was in any way a foreigner, different. I was used to being the odd one out, skin-colour-wise, having lived in a very white England now for two years. Yes, I was, as the cover or my memoir hints, the only brown girl in an English boarding school. As one reviewer of my memoir puts it:

At this point the reader is conditioned to expect a tale of prejudice and discrimination but in fact Sharon was happy at the school and did well academically and socially, being accepted in spite of her colour.

But now, in Gaschurn I was to be given a rude awakening.

I hadn’t even realised I was different to everyone else. Or rather, I wasn’t different, but I looked different. The children of Gaschurn must have decided among themselves that I needed to be informed of how terrible it was to look different, because one afternoon, on my way home alone from the slopes, they gathered, about twenty of them – or maybe it just seemed like twenty or more, I didn’t count. I just know that I was suddenly the centre of a circle of children, all chanting: ‘Negerlein! Negerlein! Negerlein!’

Once again, I didn’t need a translation. I already knew that the suffix -lein is a diminutive. So I was a little one of those N’s.

I stood there in their midst, shocked to the core, and when they dispersed, I walked back to Haus in der Sonne, tears misting my eyes, trying to comprehend and make sense of what had just happened.

I never forgot that incident; neither did I speak of it at first. I never told Mrs Williamson or my mother or any adult, for that matter, and it was years before I spoke of it to friends. I'm of the "sticks and stones might break my bones but words will never hurt me generation", and I tucked it away in my mind as just one of those things.

But it had hurt. It did hurt. Yes, these kinds of wounds don't bleed, and nobody will see them and sympathise if you don't talk about them. If you don't tell others, they remain your own problem, the kind of wound that you need to address yourself, deal with yourself, heal yourself. And Mother Nature has generously gifted us all with the inner means to do so; that's how we develop resilience and inner strength. 

We have all heard anecdotes of people who went through horrendous childhood experiences who nevertheless grow up not only unscathed but strong; strong for having gone through hard times and come out the other side, mature and resilient, even without adult assistance. Even young children learn to do this, teach themselves to do this. I certainly had, and I was already pretty tough, and as far as bullying experiences go, this one was pretty mild.

 So yes: it had hurt. No, I hadn't been traumatised, as a friend once conjectured, but certainly my self-confidence, once so unassailable, had taken a pounding. And  its remnants were still there, in the form of an ugly memory niggling at the back of my mind, a memory that left me with a feeling of coldness, being shut out, an alien, unwanted. 

Frozen out, when everything in me yearned for belonging.

Years, decades, passed. I married a German citizen, a cellist from Frankfurt, and then, after divorce, another German. I became a German citizen. I lived in Germany for over forty years. I became fluent in German.  

Over the years I visited neighbouring Austria several times, at first on holiday, later to visit my oldest granddaughter, who is Austrian. I was in her hometown Salzburg at her birth, and returned there year after year. 

In both Germany and Austria I navigated through many an incident which could be called racist, and learnt to deal with them, small, inconsequential things I could easily shrug off. But I never once encountered anything as blatant as what I later referred to as the Negerlein drama. And I never went back to the idyllic village of Gaschurn in Vorarlburg.

But that drama gnawed at the back of my mind, and I always knew that one day Gaschurn would beckon me back. I needed closure.

 
Last March, I did return.

Part 2: Return to Gaschurn 2022.