It is doubtful that any of the people Dora Van Vranken meets along the way to the grocery store or Copperfield’s Books know that, when she was 15-years-old, she and her brothers and sisters escaped from a Yugoslavian-Communist Labor Camp. To reach the comparative safety of Vienna, the ethnically German siblings snuck through Romania and Hungary in the dead of winter. Relying on strangers for food and shelter, the group was arrested and imprisoned several times along the way.
Van Vranken’s life reads like a novel, a novel she says is, “Filled with what I would call miracles - if I were superstitious. The history of the region where I was raised is one of constantly changing borders, the agricultural breadbasket of Europe, and a very attractive prize to neighboring countries. Languages changed every couple of years and by the time I was 13, I witnessed two wars fought in my hometown [Vršac, in Yugoslavia]. The Germans occupied it in 1941, the Russians liberated Yugoslavia in 1944, and Marshal Tito’s Socialists “unified” the country by 1946. My father was a Methodist minister, and Tito’s henchmen separated the family and imprisoned us in three different labor camps.”
Van Vranken harrowing tale is only just beginning.
“One day my younger brother says we have to flee … tonight,” she recalls. “He was going to be transferred to the central labor camp and had located guides to take us across the Romanian border. It was pouring rain, which helped hide our footprints, but we had nothing but the wet clothes on our backs. We escaped through three countries and it poured the entire time. When we saw the tiny speck of light that was the guardhouse at the Austrian border, we turned jubilant - laughing, crying, hugging. Then we knelt down and gave a prayer of thanksgiving. When you meet with good fortune, you learn to be grateful.”
Within two years, the whole family had reunited.
But as Van Vranken adds, “The postwar Methodist church had no long-term prospects for my father. Our only option was to head west to the brightest star - the US.” She pauses a moment to sigh and shake her head before continuing. “Of course, that was a different time when people greeted immigrants with welcomes and generosity.”
Learning English by taking evening classes in Pasadena, she earned her BA in comparative literature and German at Pomona College, got married, had two daughters and went to Stanford to earn her PhD.
“One day,” Van Vranken says, “I got a phone call from the President of the University of Redlands. I ended up teaching there for 30 years.”
After retiring, Van Vranken looked for a house near her daughters in Petaluma.
“When I first moved,” she says, “I missed my friends terribly. But every time I visited Copperfield’s Bookstore, with its creaky wooden floors, I would be happy. Within three weeks, I had joined the book club. That was fifteen years ago, and for their August meeting, my memoir, “The Winds of Fortress Kula,” was their featured book.”
“The Winds of Fortress Kula” tells the story of Van Vranken’s breathtaking escape with her brothers from the labor camp. In addition to being available for purchase at Copperfield’s and other stores, the book was recently published, in serial form over several weeks, by “New York Staats Zeitung,” the leading German-English newspaper in the US. The author says she feels gratified by the number of people who came to the book group meeting in August to hear her talk about the pulse-pounding memoir.
“There were lots of new faces - young women filled with questions. ‘Won’t you write about what happened afterwards?’ No, I answered. My next book tells about what happened before we escaped.”
(Contact Gil Mansergh at gilmansergh@comcast.net)
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