Vell, Vell, Vell: The Life of a Twentieth Century American Immigrant

By Paul W. Reidl

This is the moving story of William J. “Bill” Reidl. He grew up as a German in a village in southern Hungary, came to America in 1920, worked hard, and lived the American dream. He was a humble carpenter and raconteur with a self-effacing sense of humor. His is a story shared by millions of his peers—escaping war and violence, finding happiness and love in America, and living a long and happy life.

More importantly, it is a love story—his love for his wife and how he dealt with her descent into Alzheimer’s for decades, his love for his children, and above all, his love for his grandson. It is a story of their love for each other as family, the good times they shared, and the sad times they endured.

This will make the reader laugh and cry and, hopefully, inspire them to explore and preserve their family’s story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781647015138

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Village

Wilhelm Willy Jakob Reidl was born on a wintry February 25, 1905, in Kucura, Hungary, to Michael and Magdalena Reidl. He had two siblings: Andreas, age six, and Sophia, age nine. A second brother, Wilhelm, had died a year earlier. Michael was thirty-four years old at the time; Magdalena, twenty-eight.

The village of Kucura was in the Batschka region of Hungary on the southern flank of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. It straddled the dirt road that wound its way through the broad, marshy valley between the Danube and Theiss Rivers. The area was first settled in 1543 as a rest stop for weary travelers and their horses, with the lone inn known as the Kod Zura or the Maid’s Inn. Due to the efforts of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, it blossomed into a farming community dependent on the fertile lowlands between the two great rivers. The land was flat, treeless, and sparsely populated. At the urging of the emperor, German settlers began to settle the area in the 1760s and the village was formally incorporated in 1803.

Willy was the third generation of Reidls to be born in Kucura. Originally from the Black Forest region of southwestern Germany, the Reidl family had immigrated to the Batschka region during the eighteenth century as part of the Donauschwaben migration (loosely translated, the Schwaben people who traveled on the Danube). Following the expulsion of the Turks (Ottoman Empire) from the Batschka and Banat areas of southern Hungary, the Habsburg monarchy established a settlement program for these sparsely settled lands in order to increase the Austrian Empire’s agricultural production and to discourage potential invaders, such as the Serbs from moving north into the empire.

Much like the American government’s efforts to settle the western frontier, the Habsburgs offered a host of incentives to the German farmers: free transportation, free land, free housing, free horses and cattle, free building materials, free farming implements, and tax exemptions. Willy’s ancestors took advantage of this offer and floated down the Danube River on barges to their new home on the empire’s southeastern frontier. The Danube is a large, fast-flowing river, and they must have felt like there was no turning back. These were no motorboats; they were floating with the current. It is hard to imagine how they felt watching tiny villages, the occasional castle or monastery, and miles of forests, slip past day after day, and wondering when they would reach their promised land. Later in life, Willy recalled what his parents had told him:

Dey settled dere because it vas good land to farm. And Austria-Hungary vas afraid dat de Southern States such as Serbia vould move north and settle it. And dey vent ahead and gave everybody twenty or twenty-five acres—vatever it vas I don’t know—and so much money to go ahead and settle it. Just like dey did over here maybe vhen dey gave people in the United States land out vest. And people from Germany moved down dere for de land, you know, and dey started to farm dere and build villages.

By the time of Willy’s birth, the Batschka county—and the county immediately to the east known as the Banat—was dotted with Donauschwaben farming villages. Kucura itself had grown to over 4,000 inhabitants, nearly 1,250 of whom were of German ancestry.

Willy’s great-great-grandparents, Daniel and Barbara Reidl (née Gutwein) were two of the original Donauschwaben settlers of the village of Sekisch (or, in Hungarian, Szeghegy, and now called Lovcenac) in the Batschka. They arrived in 1784, and the village was incorporated in 1786 as an evangelical Lutheran community. They had six children, and in 1812, their oldest child, Michael, moved southwest to Kucura—perhaps because there was land available for farming. He married Margaret Ehringer of the nearby village of Torschau. They had eleven children, three of whom died in childhood. The Kucura evangelical Lutheran community built a new church in 1861 and one of Michael’s sons, Johann Reidl, became the church inspector—a position he held for over thirty years. Johann was also the postmaster and the person responsible for building the telegraph system. Another relative, Phillip Reidl, was the village tax collector.

Willy’s grandfather, Niecoloaus, was born on January 18, 1832. He was also a farmer. On September 9, 1851, he married Anna Elisabeth Bauman (born July 4, 1833.) They had twelve children, three of whom died in childhood. Their oldest son, Willy’s father, Michael, was born in 1870. With so many uncles, aunts, great-aunts, great-uncles, and Reidl cousins, a fair number of the Germans in Kucura were related in some way.

The Donauschwaben villages were designed in Vienna, Austria, and built largely according to that design. Kucura was a typical village. It was laid out in a rectangular grid, about 3,500 meters by 1,500 meters in size. The southern part of the grid was delineated by a drainage canal. The east-west lanes parallel to the canal bore names common to dozens of similar villages: Hungarian Lane (Ungarngasse), Churches Lane (Kirchengasse), Main Lane (Hauptgasse), New Lane (Neuegasse), and Water Lane (Wassergasse). The streets were wide and ruler straight. Ten ponds ringed the village. The vineyards, orchards, and farmlands were beyond the ponds. At the center of the village were the Greek Catholic and the evangelical Lutheran churches, the latter with the narrow, tapered Baroque-style steeple with the twin onion-shaped skirts that was typical of such churches in German villages. The schools were adjacent to the churches.

Although Kucura was predominantly a German town, it was ethnically diverse. Germans, ethnic Hungarians (Magyars), Serbs, Slovenes, Ruthenians (Romanians), and other ethnicities lived together in the village, sometimes not without tension. There was also a small Jewish community. Willy observed this much later in life:

You had your rights and everyting just like any of de Hungarians or de Germans over in Austria. But ve didn’t have de same kind of schools and everyting because it vas all new territory. Ve only had vone school in de town and de Slovenian people, de Hungarian people, and de German people had to go to dis school. Dere vas always friction dere, you see, in Kucura.

De parents, you know, like de Slovenians, dey vere of de belief dat dey should belong to Serbia. But vhy did dey go ahead and move into dat section of de country? Vell, dey had a chance to go ahead and move. But as soon as de Germans and Hungarians moved into dat section, vell, de Serbs started coming too. But de people dat vere already dere, dey didn’t go ahead and try to mistreat dem or not get along wit dem. Dey let dem live between dem. Ve found a vay to get along.

The Reidls were one of the larger clans in Kucura. Willy’s grandfather Niecoloaus died before Willy was born; his grandmother Elisabeth lived with his family. His entire childhood was spent within the cocoon of this closely knit, extended family. The village was always buzzing with children, and the clan did everything together: attended church services, celebrated festivals, worked in the fields and shops, and shared suppers. Although some had moved to other villages in the Batschka, by marriage or by choice, they always returned to Kucura to be with the extended family. It was their home.

Growing up in Kucura must have been comparable to growing up in any ethnically diverse farming village in Europe in the early twentieth century. Life was measured by the seasons, the planting, the harvest, and the church festivals. The wooden houses were small and tidy; their furnishings, simple. Many homes had large covered porches that provided relief from summer’s heat. The wide streets were unpaved, and they turned into muck when it rained or during the spring thaw. Since there were no cars, the traffic consisted of horse-drawn wagons, livestock being herded to pasture, and an occasional chicken. There were no cars, no daily newspapers, no telephones, no movie theaters, no radios, no televisions, no personal computers, no cell phones, and no internet. There were no sports teams, no iPods, and no video games. There was no indoor plumbing; the privy was behind the house, and water was carried into the house from the well or the cistern. The village, the church, and the family were at the center of their universe, and with dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins as neighbors, who needed anything else?

In his later years, Willy loved to reminisce about his childhood in the Old Country. In his memories, it was almost a magical place, where brothers and cousins roamed the fields, swam in the ponds and the canals on hot summer days, and played tag or football (which we would call soccer). It was a place where music and dance and homemade wine and beer flowed freely during festivals, weddings, or whenever the clan got together. He fondly recalled his father and uncles drinking homemade mulberry wine and whiskey and singing German folks songs while others played a fiddle or a piano. And everyone danced and danced and danced. And he recalled snitching some of that wine himself on more than one occasion! Despite the fact that his extended family had lived in southern Hungary for over a century, however, they still considered themselves Germans. They spoke German; they prayed in German at the evangelical Lutheran church; they sang German songs; and they celebrated German traditions and customs. Willy knew only a few Hungarian words, and as he liked to quip, he couldn’t repeat those in polite company!

Willy loved the smells of the village, and he remembered them fondly throughout his life: the smell of manure and freshly tilled earth; the breeze on a lazy summer day perfumed by the flowers entwined around the veranda; and the sweet dampness after a summer storm. He remembered the winter smell of smoke in the air from the cornstalks and the wood and coal burned for warmth. Above all, he remembered the kitchen smells, especially freshly baked bread.

Listening to the tales of Willy and his brother Andreas evoked comparisons to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—two boys who enjoyed their own outdoor adventures and flaunting authority, but who paid the price more than once with a good whipping. He recalled one game of tag that sent him tumbling down the stairs of the family root cellar, scattering produce everywhere. He ached all over from the fall, but Pa made me hurt even more!

Photographs of Michael confirm Willy’s recollection of his father: tough, stern, hardworking, and demanding. You can sense the power in his arms and neck. He had huge, workman’s hands and thick, strong fingers. You can almost feel his leathery, tanned skin and the calluses on his hands. His eyes were deeply set below thick, bushy eyebrows. The thick Hussar-style mustache commanded obedience. His word was the law in their household, and the law was strictly enforced. As the oldest surviving son, he had inherited the family farm of about fifteen acres. He worked the farm during the summer, and in the winter, he made wood furniture that he sold or bartered to the villagers and others in nearby communities. He also strung telegraph lines and had learned how to wire buildings for electricity. He was a leader in the community, a man of principle, who was well-respected by everyone—Germans, Serbs, and Magyars. In Willy’s words, He helped a lot of people dat never expected him to go ahead and help and everyting, and dat’s vhy dey loved him in Kucura.

By contrast, Magdalena Himpleman Reidl was a petite, warm, nurturing mama. She was hauntingly beautiful with a round face and deep-set blue eyes. Her parents died when she was a child, and she had been adopted by a local Magyar family. Her roots and where and how she met Michael are lost to history. She owned her birth family’s house in the village and had a substantial inheritance. Although she, too, worked the fields at harvest time, she devoted her life to raising her children and keeping a neat, orderly household. Willy fondly recalled that she demanded cleanliness: clean hands, clean face, and combed hair. He chuckled when he recalled how the two boys would come roaring into the house for supper filthy as pigs with summer dust, and she would swat them out with a broom, yelling, Vash up, vash up! He always spoke her name with reverence.

Magdalena had a good reason for insisting on cleanliness. Much of the land around Kucura was marshy muckland that flooded regularly. When the floods receded, the land was enriched by the human and animal waste that was carried down the Danube and Theiss Rivers from the cities and farms in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. But the same material that fertilized the land was also full of disease-causing bacteria. The standing water was a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Sanitation was lax. As a result, disease was rampant, and the best way to prevent it was to stay clean. Willy recalled that the local doctor lectured everyone on cleanliness:

De doctor built a building vit four showers, battubs and all dat, you know, so de people could come dere and go ahead and keep demselves clean. Dey couldn’t go ahead and keep demselves clean enough because dey vorked out dere in de dirt and everyting.

And vhat it vas, you know, de kind of ground it vas, vell, it vas muckland. And you know vhat it is. It keeps all de diseases and everyting for tousands of years in it, you know. And if you catch anyting, vell, dey try to keep you clean. And dat’s vhat he vorked at. He vas a good doctor.

Ve didn’t have batrooms in de house or anyting. Ve vent ahead and ve vashed ourselves in a big tub. Vhen ve took a bat ve had a big tub dat ve jumped in dere to vash ourselves. I’m lucky I had it.

Magdalena insisted on civilizing her children. Church, school, and music were her priorities even when work was needed on the farm. She demanded proper manners and indoctrinated her children with what would later be known as Old World values. Boys were respectful of girls. People were polite and said, please and thank you. Duty to family, country, friends, spouse, and children was paramount. If a neighbor needed help, you offered it and asked for nothing in return. Honesty, candor, and honor were essential elements of goodness.

The school in Kucura had one teacher and was a melting pot of languages and cultures. The schools in the German-speaking villages were constantly pressured by the Hungarian government to teach classes in Hungarian and assimilate the children into Hungarian culture and society. Magdalena believed that her children should have a broader education than the village school could offer, and she used her inheritance for that purpose. Willy’s sister Sophia had been sent to the city for schooling at a German-speaking school. (The exact city is lost to history.) When she was ten, she went to the United States where she lived with her aunt and uncle in Sharon, Pennsylvania, for five years and became fluent in English. Willy’s brother Andreas attended a boarding school in Hungary. Willy excelled in grammar school, and he enjoyed history, mathematics, and mechanical drawing. He had a thirst for knowledge; he loved to learn and read.

Like millions of boys both before and since, however, Willy was not a fan of the rules and rigidity imposed by school or parents. He recalled, I could not tink of anyting more useless den sitting indoors at school on a beautiful day. But, he said, Ve did it for Ma. Then, as an afterthought, he quipped: And if ve didn’t, ve heard about it from Pa!

Willy recalled that the winters were long and bitter; and the summers, warm, muggy, damp, and full of mosquitoes. He fondly recalled the frogs that proliferated in the ponds and marshes. During the summer days, he chased them, and during the warm, summer nights, their croaking lulled him to sleep.

Kucura was a hardworking, industrious community. Michael worked the farm and did electrical work and woodworking. Magdalena ran the village house and helped on the farm. Willy’s uncles were tradesmen in the village: the butcher, the postmaster, a carpenter, and among others. They joined the baker, shopkeeper, shoemaker, weaver, miller, veterinarian, blacksmith, teacher, and doctor in providing the goods and services that were needed by the people in the village. Everyone was always busy except on Sunday, which was the day of rest. In later years, Willy would chuckle and shake his head when his grandchildren wanted to laze around and watch cartoons on a Saturday morning. He thought it was just plain stupid to watch a coyote try to drop an anvil on the head of a roadrunner, especially on a warm, sunny morning when you could be outside. Ve vas alvays vorking, he would say, dere vas alvays someting to do. Even as little kids ve had to help. Ve had to sweep de floors, bring in de vater, and feed de chickens. And as he grew older, he was required to spend an increasing amount of time during the summers and holidays doing chores; he had to do real vork. In the extended Reidl clan, that meant helping wherever help was needed—whether on the family farm, the village house, or elsewhere.

Willy didn’t care much at all for tending the livestock, pigs, chickens, or geese, or for sweeping the floors in an uncle’s shop or bakery. He also didn’t care much for tending the orchards or working in the wheat or cornfields. He preferred to work in the vegetable or flower gardens around the village house. Tending the garden allowed him to be outdoors under the warm sun, unfettered by the four walls of the classroom, the store, or the barn. He was fascinated by the cycle of life; of taking seeds and nurturing the sprigs, fighting the weeds and insects, and producing food or beautiful flowers. Then it was time to rest and restore the land so that next year’s crop could be planted. He shared his mother’s love for the flowers he grew. He recalled that Magdalena always had flowers from the garden on the supper table and in the parlor during the summer.

He vividly recalled the postharvest ritual in the cornfield:

Vhat dey do in Europe, dey cut de corn stalks about 18 inches above de ground. Den dey leave de bottom of de stalk down in de ground until it snows. And after it snows and everyting, vell, den dey go out dere and dey pick dem, dey pull dem right out of de ground, and dey shake dem off, you know, and trow dem into a pile. And de vagon comes along, and he loads dem up and brings dem down into our barn. Ma used dose to bake bread.

He also recalled how his back and hands would ache from the hard labor of pulling the cornstalks, but the aroma and taste of the freshly baked bread smeared with homemade butter or jam made it worth the effort.

With a farmhouse and a city house, a large farm, a sister being educated in the United States, a well-respected father, and a mother with her own inheritance, Willy was in the highest social and economic stratum in the village. He was not of peasant stock or of the laborer or tradesman class. His family was well-off financially and wanted for nothing. They were surely considered to be rich.

Willy’s future and social status were secure, and yet he did not view himself as rich or privileged. He had been taught the values of a close-knit family, education, industriousness, piety, humility, social responsibility, and manners. He learned that the role of a father was to be the strong head of the household and provider for the family. The mother’s role was to be the nurturer, teacher, and homemaker. Perhaps more importantly, he learned a sense of balance; industriousness was a virtue that must be balanced with time for fun and enjoyment. He had an idyllic village life, the kind that was known only to a small minority of well-to-do families. He looked forward to the day when he, too, would go away to boarding school and pursue his own education and career.

Then, suddenly and without warning, his life changed forever. On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina—a mere 125 miles away—Gavrilo Prinzep fired two pistol shots into the carriage of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, and his wife Sophia Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg. Both were killed.

Although Willy did not know it, those bullets also killed his idyllic village life.

World War I had begun. He was nine years old.

Chapter 2

War and Peace

The people of Kucura knew that the archduke and his wife had been shot by a Serbian nationalist, and they knew it meant war with their southern neighbor, Serbia. But they had no idea of the magnitude of the diplomatic unraveling that was triggered in the capitols of Europe. Few people did. As far as Willy was concerned: ve lived in de empire, our army vas de strongest in de vorld, and dey vould punish Serbia. He believed that the war would be over quickly and end in the total destruction of their tiny neighbor.

The Austria-Hungarian Empire certainly saw it that way. It blamed Serbia for the assassination even though there was little evidence that it had been orchestrated by the Serbian government. After making a list of demands on Serbia that it could not possibly meet, the empire declared war on July 28, 1914. This triggered a cascade of war declarations throughout Europe based on the many mutual defense treaties. By October, the war in Europe was in full bloom and the empire’s army had crossed the Danube into Serbia. The Serbian army was smashed in a series of horrifically bloody battles. It is estimated that nearly 30 percent of the Serbian population died during the war.

Willy recalled that the news of the war was accompanied by an order for all men of military age to report for military duty. His father, his uncles, and most of the other men in the village left to fight the war. He thought this was a temporary thing, and he expected them to return soon. In the early days of the war, he watched long columns of soldiers marching south along the dusty dirt roads: guns, artillery, horses, and carriages—all smartly turned out. He recalled thick clouds of dust thrown into the air and the clanking, rattling, and rumbling of the equipment. The horses neighed, snorted, and clomped their way south, accompanied by cracks of the whips and the clucking of the drivers. He reacted as would any nine-year-old boy: It vas a grand adventure. He was proud of the troops and certain of their victory.

Even though it was in a border county, Kucura was protected from Serbia by the broad, fast Danube River that formed a natural barrier to invasion from the west and the south. The river barrier coupled with the quick collapse of the Serbian army meant that there was no fighting in the Batschka. But life’s routine was still disrupted. Pa and his uncles were gone. Food supplies were short because the army had taken the men who tended the fields and the horses who pulled the plows and other farm equipment. Supplies of other goods were short as well. Willy knew Pa was at the front, and he suspected that there might be bullets flying around him and everyting, but the experience was romanticized in Willy’s mind as a great and glorious crusade to right the terrible injustice that had occurred to the emperor and his family. He had nothing against the Serbian people personally, after all he had Serbian friends in the village, but the assassination had to be avenged, as he said years later, Dey shot de duke and his vife; ve had to punish dem for dat.

And so it was through the winter and into the spring, through the harvest, and into 1916. He missed Pa and his uncles, and had no idea when they might return. There was not much news available about the war. After all, there were no televisions, radios, satellite communications, internet, e-mails, or embedded reporters providing real-time coverage from the front. The official word was that everything was going well, but there was a lingering concern that it was taking far too long for the army to dispatch the Serbs. His extended family got by because his mother, grandmother, aunts, and cousins all pitched in