The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

by Maria Augusta Trapp

  As one voice came the answer: “Yes, Father.”

  “Then, let’s get out of here soon. You can’t say no three times to Hitler—it’s getting dangerous.”

  The next morning saw my husband and me at the Archbishop’s palace.

  “Your Excellency,” he said, “this is a secret, and I ask you to treat it as such. My family and I have decided to leave the country secretly very soon. Father Wasner has become like one of us. He is in the same dangerous position we are, since we declined the offer to sing for Hitler and he is our conductor. Furthermore, as editor he has stuck out his neck many times. It might be wise for him to leave, too. We have nothing to offer him. He would have to share whatever will be our part. We go-for better, for worse—but we want to extend to you the invitation to send Father Wasner along with us if you so see fit, for we have asked him, and he is agreeable.”

  The Archbishop had become very, very serious. After a long while he got up and said:

  “Will you please come again tomorrow for the answer?”

  When we were ushered into the large audience hall at the Archbishop’s palace the morning after that, where many portraits of former Princes of the Church greeted one from the walls, the door opened and in came His Excellency in his red cassock.

  “I haven’t talked to anyone, nor asked anybody’s advice. I only prayed for light; and now I tell you this as your Bishop: It is the Will of God that you leave now and take Father Wasner with you.” Then the elderly gentleman raised his eyes and looked out through the window, where one could see the dome of the cathedral, and slowly he added: “It may be that some day this will prove of great value to this diocese.”

  Visibly moved, he gave us his blessing and left.

  Once more their father assembled the whole family, little ones and all, Father Wasner included, and related what the Archbishop had said “as our Bishop.” We all felt that here-with we were beginning a new chapter of our life, to which their father seemed to give the outline when he said at the end:

  “We have now the precious opportunity to find out for ourselves whether the words we have heard and read so often can be taken literally: ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His justice: and all these things shall be added unto you.’”

  Part Two

  I On the “American Farmer”

  IT WAS September, 1938.

  “And this is the American Farmer,” said the friendly bus driver who had taken us to the docks in London, pointing to a rather small white ship.

  “How many passengers will be on board?” Georg asked the steward who showed the Trapp Family to their cabins.

  “Seventy, Sir. It’s a nice number. I’ve been on big boats but I prefer this one. You get to know all your passengers. It’s almost like a big family.”

  “How long will it take to reach New York?”

  “Eleven days, Sir. We are a small boat, only seven thousand tons. But you’ll enjoy your trip, I’m sure.”

  And we did, very much so. From the first day we felt the friendly spirit on board. The passengers were mostly Americans going home. Our cabins were close together, and in the dining room a large round table had been reserved for the Trapp Family.

  “Children, I can’t believe it,” said Georg when we all met for supper; and with this he spoke for all of us; we couldn’t believe that we were really on our way to America.

  “I feel almost dizzy, so much has happened in so short a time,” I said. “It all seems like a dream. Just imagine: six weeks ago today…”

  “We left home for…”

  “Mountain climbing in South Tirol, Italy,” said Werner.

  “Yes, and in order not to make anyone suspicious, we had to leave in our usual clothes; and now when people on the boat see our Austrian costumes, they want to know whether we are Dutch or Norwegian,” said Hedwig laughing.

  “Then came the anxious weeks of waiting,” continued Rupert.

  “What waiting?” Lorli wanted to know. The little one had followed our conversation, wide-eyed.

  “Don’t you remember, Lorli,” Agathe explained to her little sister, “when we were in the mountains in St. Georgen, how we prayed every morning: ‘Dear Lord, let us get safely to America’? You see, such a trip is very expensive, and we had no money. There is a man in America who wants us to give concerts there, so Father wrote to him and asked him to lend us the money for the trip and send us the tickets for the boat. That’s what we were waiting for in St. Georgen.”

  “It’s only a week since the tickets arrived,” said Father Wasner. “It seems so incredible to me that I got the permission to go to Italy. Do you remember the feeling, Rupert, when we read in the newspaper that the very day after we all left, the border was closed, and nobody could leave the country any more?”

  “Yes,” said Rupert, “I remember. And how lucky we were, Father,” and he turned to Georg, “that the Italian Government had not allowed your Navy pension to be paid outside of Italy. In that way enough back pay had accumulated to pay for our stay in St. Georgen and our tickets to London.”

  “I can’t get over it,” I said, “how nice it was of Mr. Wagner to send us the tickets.”

  After we left the English coast, we came into rough waters. The population in the dining room diminished overnight. Where were all those gay people chatting happily in many different languages, who had been enjoying last night’s supper? At breakfast the very next morning the waiters in the dining room had hardly any work to do. I had come down with Georg, but the rest of the large round table which had been reserved for the Trapp Family remained empty. Right after breakfast I went around from cabin to cabin, and I found my poor children in all stages of wanting to be dead, the truest sign of seasickness.

  “And you’ll be next. You’d better lie down,” said Georg, and looked at me worriedly. “By the way, how is Barbara?”

  “Oh, just fine,” I replied, withdrawing obediently to my cabin, which I shared with the little girls. Lemon-colored, they had been tucked away by their father in deck chairs. In spite of all prophecies of the doctor, Barbara didn’t seem to have minded the excitement of the last months, nor my inability to keep to the diet and bed rest. She was supposed to come some time after Christmas, and she seemed to have decided to keep her date.

  Back in my cabin, I went to bed as I had been told to, and waited to get seasick. For a very long time I sat there, paper cup in hand, but nothing happened. The boat was thrown around like a little ball. It moaned and cracked, it bent over from one side to the other, but my stomach seemed to be undisturbable. Nobody came, and I was getting bored. And hungry. When the gong sounded for lunch, I got up and placed myself as the lone representative of the Trapp Family at the large table. Georg, the other survivor, went from one cabin to the other, holding heads.

  After three days the storm was over, and the deck became populated with greenish, hollow-eyed figures, who recovered speedily in the warm sun. The sea was now like a mirror.

  It had become clear to me that we had to learn English, as in America all the people talked that language.

  “All right. If I have to learn English, let’s go!”

  When my husband noticed my eagerness, he said teasingly:

  “Do you know how you can learn English in twenty-four hours? You learn every hour one-twenty-fourth!”

  This was about what I had in mind when, on the first clear, sunny day with people on deck, I came along, fortified with a pencil and a pad, listening a little while to the people talking. When I had discovered a group of English-speaking ladies and gentlemen, I approached them and said, with the politest inflection of my voice, the only phrase I knew:

  “Please, vat is fat?” pointing to my watch.

  “A watch,” a gentleman answered, looking very friendly.

  “E Votsch,” I wrote down seriously. “And fat?” pointing to my ring.

  “Ring,” he answered.

  “In English, please?” I asked.

  “Ring,” he repeated and smiled.


  And this was the beginning of a unique English course. These people saw my serious desire to master their language in as short a time as possible; they also understood the necessity, and they turned out to be perfectly wonderful about it. After we had pointed all over me, them, and the immediate surroundings, I filled my little notebook with such precious words as:

  E Neiff

  Dschuhss

  E Spuhn

  Refjudschie

  Dschentlmän

  bjutifull

  Tscheild

  ei

  Manni

  juh

  Soon we proceeded from mere words to little phrases, like:

  Haudujudu

  Haumatsch

  Denkswerrimatsch

  Hooatsdeteim

  One day dear Miss Powell, an English actress and a very lovely lady, started to work on my pronunciation.

  “You must not say ‘vat,’ darling,” she told me. “Say ‘Hoo-wat,’” and she brought forth a little mirror; “‘Hoo-wen, hoo-were.’”

  Most eagerly I “Hoo-wat-ed” into the little mirror a mile a minute, feeling very English.

  One of the group, an American doctor, was a great wit. He also took me alone for private lessons, and without warning, taught me a lot of slang. With a serious face I wrote down: “If somebody is very excited and you want to calm him down, just say…If you want someone to leave the room quickly, just say…” I was deeply grateful to Dr. Johnson, but especially so some weeks later when situations arose in which his advice came in most handy.

  Our Americanization process took on speed. Our friends invited us for some real American drinks: ginger ale, Coca-Cola, and root beer. Ginger ale was fine, but Coca-Cola and root beer I declined decidedly, after the first taste.

  “That’s too American,” I protested.

  We learned from Dr. Johnson the American currency: pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and bucks.

  We learned our first American songs: “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Old Black Joe,” in new settings by Father Wasner, and we liked them very much. On the last evening there was a great party on board ship, and already I could understand a good deal of what people were talking about, thanks to our new friends: Victoria Powell; Dr. Johnson; Mary Hugo, a teacher from Duluth; and the nice American consul who was going home to Cincinnati from the South Seas. They say that the first impression of a person is the real one, and you will come back to it time and again. This was our first meeting with the American people, and our impression was that they are kind, generous, and helpful.

  When we woke up on the last morning, we were passing Nantucket, and soon we would be in New York. Everybody was at the railing and there, like a mirage, the tremendous towers of Manhattan emerged out of the fog.

  This—was—America!

  II The First Ten Years Are the Hardest

  BEWILDERED—completely bewildered—that’s what we all were when three taxis spilled us out on Seventh Avenue at 55th Street in front of the Hotel Wellington, us and our fifty-six pieces of luggage: all the instruments in their cases, the spinet, four gambas, eight recorders, the big trunks with the concert costumes, and our private belongings, one of the bags marked “Barbara von Trapp,” containing all the dainty little things our babies had worn.

  While I was standing on the sidewalk waiting for the unloading, I spelled slowly what the huge lighted letters said: “D-R-U-G-S-T-O-R-E.” It was the first time that I had met the word. In Europe we didn’t have drug stores. How relieved I felt!

  “That’s good,” I thought. “I am living in the hotel with the drug store. I can never get lost in New York!”

  The tallest houses in Vienna have five or six stories. When the elevator took us to the nineteenth floor, we simply couldn’t believe it, but rushed immediately to the windows and shudderingly looked down into the deep gorge, at the bottom of which crawled little cars and tiny men. That was the first thing we reported home: “and we live on the nineteenth floor!”

  The friendly gentleman from our concert manager’s office who had helped us through the Immigration and installed us at the hotel left us now with a friendly, “See you tomorrow.”

  Our last meal had been lunch on board. It was around eight o’clock and we were all hungry. But we were not on the boat any more, where we had just sat down to a full table three times a day. The cruel question had to be raised now: How much money do we have? After all the pockets had been emptied and every nickel and dime from all twelve of us had been collected, it showed the fabulous sum of four dollars. That had to do for supper and breakfast, and tomorrow we would ask Mr. Wagner, our manager, for some money in advance. The boys were sent downstairs with two dollars to buy bread, butter, and fruit. Fresh fruit had been scarce on board, but on land the fall is a good time to buy fruit cheaply, and so we feasted on quantities of apples, plums, pears, and grapes.

  As we were all very tired from so much standing around and waiting, we soon went to bed. After putting our shoes outside the doors of our rooms, as was done in all European hotels, we retired, only to be awakened one by one by the night watchman, who informed us that our shoes most certainly would not be shined next morning, but they might not be there any more, and we’d better take them in. Funny.

  Next morning I wanted my husband’s hat ironed before he appeared at the manager’s office in it. To my great astonishment I learned in the lobby that for this I had to go to a shoemaker’s.

  Georg and the boys brought back the startling news that their shoes had been shined at the barber shop!

  What a strange country!

  Now I went out to look for that shoemaker to straighten the hat. I went around the block and around another block, and around a third block, not paying any attention to the numbers of the streets. I didn’t have to. Just in case I should get lost, I knew where I belonged. It hadn’t occurred to me to remember the name of the hotel. I was so impressed by the fact that I lived in the hotel with the drug store. After quite some searching I found my shoemaker. The hat was ironed, but I discovered that I was completely lost. Never mind. I stepped up to the next policeman and said very politely:

  “Dear Mr. Cop, where is hotel with drug store?”

  To this very day I have a tender affection for those tall New York policemen, because this one got me back safely to the Wellington.

  Then we went to see Mr. Wagner. The nice gentleman had come again to guide us. First we walked over to Sixth Avenue, which at that time had an elevated, also the first of its kind in our experience. I was deathly afraid, and clung tightly to Georg’s arm when I had to cross the street with trains roaring over my head.

  “The quickest way is the subway,” and our friendly guide dived at once into a staircase, which obviously led under the street. This was really frightening. What a noise! On one side of the platform express trains thundered by, while on the other, locals came and went. The very air was in vibration, and I, simply rooted to the ground, decided not to take one single step in any direction. I was sure I would die there. Neither I nor Barbara could stand a second more of this. Then I found myself in the inside of a howling train, from which we were spat out a few stations farther along. When we reached daylight again, I was near tears.”

  “Georg,” I pleaded, “promise me that we will never do that again.”

  But before he could do so, our guide had another good idea.

  “This is Macy’s, one of our largest department stores,” he announced beamingly. “On the eighth floor they have a wonderful toy department. Let’s take a quick look. The kids will like that.”

  And in the store we were, and for the first time in my life I was confronted with a staircase which moved by itself. First I stared at it, thinking this in itself was an exhibition piece; but when I saw people step on it and be moved upwards in front of my very eyes, I got an uncomfortable feeling, as though I were witnessing witchcraft. When invited, however, to take the fatal step myself, I most vigorously declined. Meanwhile, a number of people had gathered beh
ind us. We were obviously blocking traffic.

  “Go ahead, don’t be silly,” whispered Georg encouragingly. With a lump in my throat, I put out one foot hesitatingly, but when it touched that moving thing, I quickly drew it back as if I had been bitten by a snake. Now good-natured, kind-hearted Americans gathered around me, and good advice from all sides made the situation more embarrassing by the second.

  Behind me my little girls giggled: “Look, Mother is afraid,” and I wished I had never landed on this continent.

  “Close your eyes, lady, and take a step.”

  This was the best advice given so far. Now I was on it. How would I get off? That is easier. The staircase just slides you off, whether you want to or not. And this repeated itself seven times: “Close your eyes and take a step.” Seven times? Oh no! Up to this day whenever I have to use an escalator, I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

  Finally we left Macy’s, and were seated in Mr. Wagner’s office; and the elderly gentleman with the round, pink-cheeked, apple face looked like a very nice grandpa. We thanked him again for sending us the tickets for the American Farmer. He most willingly let us have money in advance. The concert tour would start in a week. So far, he had eighteen dates from the forty promised. His diction was not so clear as Victoria Powell’s, so I had difficulty in understanding him. But this I did understand when he said in parting in a very comforting tone and with a twinkle: “The first ten years are the hardest!”

  My greatest worry had been: how to keep Barbara’s presence concealed from the world. At home I had had Mimi, a seamstress in a near-by village, a smart little woman. To her I had confided my secret problem.