Elinor didn’t let that dissuade her. As far as she was concerned, his parents’ opinions couldn’t have been worse than what she had endured living in Arizona. With the same optimism, devotion, and determination they had exhibited at Camp Florence and while they waited to be reunited from across the ocean, Elinor and Frederick began to pack for Germany.9

On August 1, 1952, Elinor, Frederick, and five-and-a-half-year-old Stephen boarded the TSS Neptunia, a passenger liner sailing from Boston to Bremerhaven, Germany.

Life had irrevocably changed everywhere in Europe after World War II. Even before the war ended, Margarete and Karl had been reduced to using food ration cards just like every other Austrian and German who survived the collapse of Nazism. Toward the final months of the war, fearful of bombing, they left their apartment in Vienna and retreated to a home in the Austrian countryside that Charlotte claimed her father had previously shared with a mistress.

That he was a German officer in the reserves made Karl a prime target for reprisals in Vienna after the war, undoubtedly adding to the decision to leave Austria permanently. Even though Austria was once part of the Third Reich and took part in Nazi atrocities, the country’s narrative after Germany’s defeat became that of a victim of a brutal dictatorship, not that of a collaborator.

With territories redrawn, millions of Europeans would have no choice but to live elsewhere—mandates implemented by British, French, American, and Russian occupation forces, which needed to control and keep track of displaced populations. Charlotte even kept her mother’s Allied Expeditionary Force DP Index Card, the ID the Allied governments gave to displaced persons during the war. The card provided serial numbers that allowed governments to track people who were being resettled. After their temporary stint in Siegen, Karl and Margarete moved to Vogel beck, in Lower Saxony, Germany, where Karl started another company. He didn’t sit back and wait for Germany to figure out its next steps as an occupied and battered nation. He loved working, being in charge, and making money too much, and he quickly figured out a way to profit from the country’s rebuilding efforts.

His new company in Vogelbeck was called Feuerfest, later renamed Refratechnik. It developed refractory bricks made of slag from the steel and iron industries. Soon Karl had acquired enough money from contracts to move the factory to nearby Göttingen and build a beautiful house, in which he, Margarete, and Charlotte’s daughter, Kristina, were able to live quite comfortably.10

Elinor and Frederick were naive about the climate of post–World War II Göttingen, and would soon discover it wasn’t a congenial place for a mixed-race couple. Their primary concern was that Karl and Margarete had the means to house them and provide employment for Frederick, and that Kristina could be a playmate for Stephen.