by Roxi Harms
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE: Hungary
PART TWO: A World at War
PART THREE: Germany
PART FOUR: Canada
PART FIVE: Peru
EPILOGUE
DRAWINGS Map of Elek, Hungary
Layout of Adam's childhood home
Journey through war-torn Europe
PRAISE FOR
THE UPSIDE OF HUNGER
"By turns loving and cruel, heated and chilling, adventurous and terrifying, Adam's tale captures the imagination and fills the mind with stories that linger on long after the last page has been turned. An indelible read."
KATHY HEFFERNAN, Advance Readers Association, Canada
"A vivid retelling of the events of one man's life, the sum of which amounts to an extraordinary tale. The writer has crafted the story with striking attention to detail. Fans of historical fiction, particularly regarding the WWII era, will especially appreciate this superb debut novel."
KIRSTEN BELITZKY, Creator of Flashlights on the Beach: A Path to Happiness
"Adam Baumann is a 20th Century hero—a mixture of the ambition and independence of an Ayn Rand hero with the tender heart and family devotion of an ordinary man. Roxi Harms does a magnificent job of capturing the complexities of Baumann's character, both the extraordinary and the ordinary. With skill and detail, she brings to life the story of a man who triumphed over the limitations of history to become his greatest self."
GINGER MORAN, Author of The Algebra of Snow
"Based on real events crafted into a beautiful narrative, The Upside of Hunger reveals the story of Adam, his incredible life, and the fascinating history of his family... readers will become invested in the Baumann family and their story, unable to put it down until the very last page."
MELISSA KOONS, Author of Orion's Honor
"Harms takes history and puts a human face to it."
ROXAS JAMES, Author of Unexpected and Reflections of Yellow Brick
The Upside of Hunger
a true tale
© 2018 Roxi Harms
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Heidi Miller and John H. Matthews
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The Upside of Hunger is based on a true life story which was shared with the author over the course of more than 400 recorded interviews. All events and characters are real. Much effort has been put into ensuring the accuracy of dates and locations. In some cases, where the passage of time has faded the details of memory, or for ease of reading, fictional names have been created and dates have been estimated. Dialog between characters and characters' inner thoughts have been developed by the author to bring to life the stories told in the interviews. Where historical speeches are quoted, excerpts, rather than entire speeches, are used for brevity. And although much research was completed in the pursuit of historical and cultural accuracy, this book is a novel and is not intended as a history text or a biography.
for Adam,
who has lived a life I truly revere
PART ONE
Hungary
"We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true."
Woodrow Wilson
CHAPTER ONE
Western Hungary, December 1941
"I'm sorry to bother you so late." The voice at the front door could be heard clearly in the dining room.
Adam froze, a forkful of tender boar and rich, savoury gravy halfway to his mouth. He'd been found. For an instant, he was flooded with fear. Then the fear turned to anger. I'm not going back to pruning grapevines and shovelling shit, he thought. Suddenly, he thought of his mom and his sisters, and was filled with an urgent longing for home. God, he missed them.
"My name is George Baumann," the voice at the door continued, "and I'm looking for my 12-year-old son. I understand from the people in the village that you have a young boy staying here."
"Please come in, Mr. Baumann," came the Count's voice. The creak of the big iron hinges reached their ears, telling them the door had been opened wide. The Countess, seated at the end of the heavy wooden dining table, fixed her gaze on Adam. The hinges creaked again as the thick wooden door swung shut. "It's true that we have had an orphan boy staying here for a few months. We were just having some supper. Come this way to the dining room and I'll introduce you."
First the Count, and then the visitor appeared in the doorway, bringing with them a draft of crisp winter air. The room went unnaturally quiet. But not an empty quiet.
Then the newcomer spoke. "Adam. Thank God."
His dad stood there, eyes locked on him. Now what? What kind of licking would be judged suitable? But strangely, his dad didn't look angry. His eyes were glistening. Adam wasn't sure what to do. He swallowed past the sudden lump in his throat.
"Hi, Dad," he said in a choked voice. "What are you doing here?"
"What am I doing here?" Adam's father exclaimed, then rushed on. "Your mother has been crying non-stop. It's been damn near four months. We'd almost given up when we got your letter. I took it to the train station and they knew the town on the postmark. I would have been here last night if we hadn't been sidelined for the afternoon to let military supply trains through to Hitler's operations in the east. When I finally got to the village, the first person I asked knew about you. Seems like everybody around here knows about the orphan living with the Count."
His dad stopped and looked around as if he'd just remembered there were others in the room. Adam watched as he gazed at the Count and Countess and the little girl who stared up at him from her seat across the table from Adam. His eyes continued around the sumptuous, candle-lit room, taking in the stag's head on the end wall, and the ornately framed painting of a large man, draped in jewels and furs, sitting in a throne-like chair.
"We are most pleased to see you, Mr. Baumann," said the Count. "Adam's memory has been failing him, and I'm afraid he hasn't been able to remember where he's from. Your finding us is most fortunate indeed." He spoke calmly.
"Won't you sit down?" said the Countess who had risen to stand beside her husband. "You must be hungry after travelling all day. May I fix you a plate?"
After a moment, Adam's dad answered hesitantly. "Well, yes. Please forgive my manners ma'am. It's a pleasure to meet you."
"It's a pleasure to meet you," she replied with a warm smile. "My name is Marika. And this is our daughter, Irena. Please, sit," she said, gesturing to the chair her husband had pulled out beside the little girl.
After staring for a moment at the brightly painted hearts and flowers adorning the tall wooden chair back, and the rich brocade on the seat, he seemed to make up his mind and sat down. He shifted uncomfortably as his eyes flitted around the room again, from the candlelight dancing on the embroidered draperies to the silver serving dishes in the centre of the table where the Countess was filling a plate.
The modernization that was occurring in much of the world in those years had not yet reached rural Hungary, and the daily lives and trappings of the nobility remained much as they had been for generations. Not much had much changed for the Baumanns in generations either, but that was the extent of what the guests had in common with their hosts. As Adam followed his dad's gaze around the room, seeing the things that had become familiar to him in the past months, the contra
st between the shabbiness of his father and everything else in the room startled him a bit.
"Where have you travelled from exactly?" the Countess asked, placing a heaping plate of food in front of their new guest. The potatoes, mixed smooth with milk and butter, had become a favourite of Adam's. The rich gravy the Countess had poured over the pile of sliced boar threatened to flow over the side of the plate. His dad would love it.
"Elek, clear across Hungary on the eastern border with Romania," his dad answered, looking down at the food. The Count reached over Adam's dad's shoulder to pour wine into the pewter goblet he had placed there.
"Please eat, everyone, before it gets cold," said the Countess, looking around the table.
Adam stared down at his plate. He'd just been so tired of the yelling and the spankings. And all the sameness. Nothing ever changed in Elek. Chores, school, lickings, more chores. That last fight he'd had with his dad was the same as countless others. But then he'd made the spur-of-the-moment decision to leave, and everything had changed. Walking mile after mile, hitching rides when he could, every day had been filled with new sights. Every turn had held more excitement than he'd ever felt before in his life. And then being invited to live with the Count and his family. Life had never been so good. But he missed his mom and although he'd tried his best not to think about it, the thought of the worry he'd caused her hovered constantly in the back of his mind like a bad dream that wouldn't fade. She'd be waiting at home for him to return with his dad. And his dad, who had a strange, mildly puzzled expression on his face when Adam dared to look over, well, his dad had come a long way to find him.
CHAPTER TWO
Elek, Eastern Hungary
Like most people in the village of Elek, the Baumanns were descended from German settlers who had arrived some 200 years ago. Conditions back in Germany in the early 1700s had been harsh, unless you were a land baron or a member of the clergy, and the Baumanns were neither. Along with millions of other peasants, hunger was the only thing they had plenty of. When a nobleman named Harrucher arrived to solicit Catholic families to settle vast stretches of land in the recently conquered Kingdom of Hungary, granted to him by the Habsburg Monarchy, Gottfried and Ursula Baumann had bravely raised their hands. They were hungry for change. Perhaps that was where Adam got it from.
A procession of horse-drawn wagons loaded with the meagre belongings of the immigrants laboured eastward across Germany, covering several hundred kilometres before loading onto crude barges and floating down the mighty Danube through Austria, part of present day Slovakia, and into Hungary. Near Budapest they disembarked and continued east. By the time they reached the promised land, they'd covered over 1,100 kilometres.
The Kingdom of Hungary had been decimated by 150 years of Turkish occupation. Forests had been chopped down or burned, farms pillaged and left dormant, their inhabitants dead in their burned-out homes. Without the rich vegetation holding the land in place and absorbing the crisp, sweet water of the rivers, the vast plains had flooded. As the decades passed, riverbeds, fields, and roads blended together and vast swamps had appeared, covered in dense brush and emitting noxious vapours. Mosquitoes flourished, while water fit for human consumption became difficult to find. A permanent change in the ecosystem had occurred in those dark times, and now the task of the German settlers was to make the land productive again.
Alongside several other families, the Baumanns were assigned to settle in Elek, an ancient townsite near the Romanian border that had flourished in the middle ages. Despite the conditions, or perhaps because of them, the new settlers toiled tirelessly, defeating the ravages of hunger, fending off raids by tribes from the east, defending themselves from the elements, and nursing their sick through the endless waves of typhoid, malaria, and dysentery. Slowly, their persistence began to pay off and a functioning community took shape.
As time passed, dams were built and dikes constructed to better control the river system across the plains. Flooding became a less constant threat. Bit by bit, the growing system of drainage ditches in and around Elek rendered more land dry enough to plant and yields gradually grew. With the passing of time, residents came to understand their new land, passing that knowledge down to each new generation of Germans born there in Hungary.
These years were filled with challenges we can barely fathom, but the Baumanns were also blessed, for the three sons born to Ursula thrived, becoming the genesis of a long line of Germanic Hungarian Baumanns.
By the early 1800s, Elek included a smattering of Hungarians and Romanians, and a community of Gypsies had sprung up on the south edge of town beside the sand pit, where they scratched out a living using their wagons to haul sand to building sites as the town grew. By the dawn of the 1900s, the village was home to over 5,000 residents. No longer living under the oppression of serfdom, people prospered or struggled according to their individual nature, and over the generations, the population became comprised of landowners in their own right, whose families had worked diligently to purchase land and make it productive, tradesmen who had developed successful businesses, subsistence farmers, and variations in between. Churches and schools had been built and municipal order had been established. The grassy banks of the wide, acacia-lined roadways made tasty feeding grounds for small livestock, and a shared pasture had been staked out for communal cattle grazing.
The high water table in the area fed the wells that were dug as each new home was staked out and built. But drinking water remained a problem. The area had never recovered from the layers of rotting sediment left by the Turks, giving the water a most unpleasant taste and smell, which the people suspected contributed to long-term illness. The snow and rain they captured for fresh water was never adequate, and year after year, residents attempted to dig deep enough to find a clean source. Finally, in 1894, they succeeded, striking an artesian water supply that was pure and fresh. A large, central well was established, equipped with a system of pulleys and buckets. The town well became a new meeting place, where women and children came regularly to lower their buckets down and hoist up clean water to carry home to their families.
Since that courageous journey halfway across Europe to an unknown land nearly two centuries earlier, the people of Elek hadn't ventured far. It was as if that great trek had created in them an innate need to stay close to home so as to never feel that detached again. Of course, long distance travel and communication remained limited the world over in those years, but in Elek and neighbouring villages, interest in the world beyond was exceedingly minimal, and a few kilometres between farms was as far as most had ever ventured. Nostalgia for the German motherland remained strong, and people held fast to the ways of life that linked them with their heritage, taking comfort in the small, static world they'd created.
In the late 1860s, Adam's great-grandmother, unwed at the time, gave birth to a son. The young mother called her baby son Florian and gave him the Baumann family name to pass down to his sons and grandsons. From a young age, Florian had an uncommonly adventurous spirit and a talent for music, traits he was to pass down to his grandson, Adam, decades later.
Florian's musical abilities earned him an invitation to participate along with a group of some thirty-odd other young teens from Elek in an unprecedented trip to the United States in 1882, organized by the charming and somewhat mysterious leader of the youth brass band at the time. Florian was amazed at the things he saw in the world beyond Elek. After his return, he tried to explain what he'd seen. Farmers in other parts of Europe and in America had wheeled devices that they filled with corn seed and as they pulled them across the field with a horse, seeds were dropped at perfect intervals. They had machines they could drag behind a team of donkeys and cut a swathe almost two fathoms wide. Some of the boarding houses the band had stayed in had water piped into a water closet on each floor for washing, and indoor privies. But no one was particularly interested in Florian's fantastic tales. The people of Elek were proud of what they'd accomplished in their colony and so they c
ontinued with their traditional ways, hoeing the land in the spring and harvesting with scythes each autumn.
After his return from abroad, Florian Baumann apprenticed as a carpenter and after a time, he started a family. Although he was a good provider, life never seemed to meet the expectations of his wife Veronica, whose disposition became increasingly bitter as she raised her children, and they in turn raised theirs. Florian, on the other hand, had a ready smile and a twinkle in his eye as their eleven children, including his first son, whom they named Florian for his father, and his second son, who was called George, grew up in their little three-room home at the edge of the town's vineyards.
Adam's maternal grandfather, Johann Bambach, was born in 1887. Like the Baumanns, the Bambachs had immigrated from Germany many generations earlier. Around the age of twenty, Johann and his bride Maria settled into a little tenants' hut on one of the big farms outside of Elek, tending the animals and crops while the landlord lived in a fancy house in town with his family. As each of their two sons and three daughters grew big enough to lift and carry, Johann hired them out as farm hands and housemaids, as his father had done before him. But for as young as he'd started working, Johann had never developed a taste for it, and when his children's meagre pay became adequate to support the family, he moved them into a little house in the poor end of Elek, near the Gypsy settlement, and took on the less demanding job of town cow herder. Each morning during the summer months he slowly herded the cows of the townspeople to the communal pasture, kept an eye on them through the day as they grazed, and then followed them back through the streets as they headed home for milking. Meanwhile, in the kitchens, laundry sheds, and barnyards of various Elek residents, his eldest daughter Anna was growing into a hardworking, capable young woman.