-The Overture-
It was the end of World War II in Germany and the beginning of a new life for Gisela Krause.
The American opera houses didn't know it yet, but amidst the backdrop of postwar Germany, one of its most passionate advocates and educators was about to begin her journey into the realm of their epic institution.
Like every remarkable journey, however, the road to Oz was fraught with danger, but also miracles, along the way...
-Act I: The Miracle of Cake and Timing-
Gisela had a gift for music. Her mother, father and sister often sang folk songs together as they completed their daily chores. Gisela's family encouraged her to sing and eventually she went on to compete in her first singing competition where she won first prize- a scholarship to formally study voice. An honest-to-goodness chance to become a professional singer.
It would've been idyllic if the war hadn't broken out.
During the last year of the war, Hitler mandated that all high school students needed to fill the vacant positions left in the wake of the male civilians who were drafted. Gisela's studies in music and voice came to a crashing halt and she was eventually assigned to work as a Red Cross Nurse's Aid. The 18-year-old was witness to unbearable suffering and carnage transporting soldiers from the front lines to the hospitals. But it was in the midst of this human wreckage that she discovered the power of singing. She would sing for hours to distract the soldiers from their misery and pain. For some, she was the last sweet voice they heard as they succumbed to death. Schwester Mutti they called her - nurse mommy.
Though the soldiers saw her as family, fate would not be as kind to her own family.
Hitler declared a state of Total War, displacing all economic, industrial, scientific and personnel resources to the service of the war effort. Gisela and her family (and every other civilian in Germany) were forced into supporting Hitler's defenses. The Krause's were scattered and assigned to different posts across the country.
In a pre-cell-phone-pre-text-messaging era where all existing forms of communication were commandeered for military purposes, half-baked cakes proved to be the saving grace that miraculously kept Gisela's family from indefinitely fracturing off.
Gisela got some time off from her nursing work after being on duty for several weeks and, as luck would have it, she was even given extra rations to take home to her family, including a bag of flour- a rare commodity during those lean times. Funny, she thought as she gratefully accepted the flour, to be so thrilled about a bag of flour when there was no oven to bake a cake in.
She ran home in the rain and the cold, since "home" those days was within the half-hour distance she was permitted to travel (those who were lucky enough to get some leave time had to be able to get back to their posts within a half-hour of the raid sirens signaling the arrival of the Russians on the border). In her head, she was mentally preparing the perfect sit-down family dinner they would have with the extra rations she was given.
She opened the door to her family's living quarters.
The quarters remained in tact but the family, unfortunately, did not.
It was a handwritten note, rather than her family, that greeted her when she came home. Her mother and sister left with the Mayor's transport, but wasn't sure where that transport was taking them or how long they'd be gone. At least she still had a handle on where her father was stationed- not too far from their living quarters at that time. At least she could have cake with her father.
Gisela started mixing together the ingredients for a cake with her precious flour. There was no oven in their family quarters, but there was a bakery down the street. So she made a bee line for the bakery and asked to use the oven. The sympathetic baker said yes, so she put her cake batter in the oven. Minutes later, the sirens went off. The cake was only half baked.
Knowing she would have to return to the trains in a half hour, Gisela ran to where her father was stationed. She couldn't find him and time was running out. She left the half-baked cake and word of which train station her medical unit would be leaving from with someone at her father's station.
Somehow, that half-baked cake and word of her whereabouts found its way to her father. Her father, quick to act, asked his superiors to let him see his daughter off at the train station. Maybe it was the sad little cake, full of a daughter's love, that he held in his hands which elicited the sympathy he needed to get him that "yes" to see her off. There wasn't time then to reflect on motivation or fate, only to jump on the chances that came by. And so, he jumped.
He ran down to the train station and got there right as her train was pulling out.
He had just missed her.
Not that Gisela could see, but she always imagined him standing at the platforms, deflated cake in hand, watching her train pull away- but not without copying down the train number she was on and not without eventually getting word to her mother and sister of that train number. Maybe they couldn't get to her, but at least they could track down where she might end up and find her eventually.
Unfortunately, what her family didn't know was that Gisela never got on that train. She experienced what she later would call "a tap on the shoulder" - possibly from God, possibly from her own instincts. The train was returning to the front lines and the Russians were closing in from the east. Gisela, never one to have defied any form of authority, jumped on an artillery train going in the opposite direction. She begged the conductor to hide her, both knowing full well that if he was caught harboring a deserter it would be the end of them. He agreed, so long as she was willing to cook potato pancakes for him and his crew. So she did, and rode that potato pancake train away from the inferno that was about to explode.
To this day, she still can't say what prompted her to jump trains. She just knew she had to. And thank goodness for those instincts, because word had finally gotten back to Gisela's mother and sister that the train she was supposed to be on, the one going back towards the font lines, had blown up. Zero survivors.
Gisela's mother (and most likely the genetic wellspring of her life saving instincts), hearing about the train explosion, turned to her other daughter and said, No- she's still alive. I would feel it if she were gone.
OK mutti, her daughter Gertrud agreed, I'll find her then.
So her sister headed, not in the direction of that ill fated train, but the other way. On foot. Gertrud traveled. For seven weeks.
Armed with a photograph of Gisela, her sister went from one town to another - from one hospital to another - asking every person she came across if anyone had seen Gisela. As luck and/or divine intervention would have it, she came across a soldier that Gisela had serenaded and nursed at the hospital. Oh, I know her - he chirped - she never went back to the front lines, she went the other way.
Now, how her sister managed to find the one person in all of Germany that Gisela had confided her plans to desert to, only God can know.
Gisela, now far from the front lines, reported to the nearest Red Cross hospital after learning the train she was supposed to be on had been destroyed. Well, she figured, it was the war and people were always getting lost, especially after attacks. So she reported back in, never letting on that she went AWOL.
Her sister, with confirmation that Gisela was still alive, continued her search moving through the hospitals in the direction the soldier told her Gisela was headed. Through sheer persistence and a little bit of luck, Gisela and her sister were finally reunited.
The Allies were closing in on the west, closer to where their father was stationed, and the
Russians were moving in on the east, towards where their mother was. Germany was shrinking and the only assurance the Krause family had of staying together as a family was to make sure they were all in the same region of Germany once the boundaries were drawn. Their mother became the priority since they'd learned the borders between the eastern-Russian territory of Germany would be redrawn to incorporate part of the western-Allied territory of Germany, shifting the fate of the town where their mother was located from being Allied-occupied to being Communist-occupied.
That was a problem.
It was rumored the Russians had a penchant for raping the local German fräulein, so the Krause family needed to get all their women out of that area as if their lives depended on it - because it did. Gisela and her sister rushed back toward their mother. They knew the border change was going to happen fast and didn't give their mother much time to collect anything other than what she had on her back and what she could throw into her pockets. As the three women hastened to get out of the Russian zone, Gisela felt the bar coming down, just grazing her back. Their timing couldn't have been any less of a miracle. They made it into western Germany just as the border had shifted.
-Interlude-
The Krause women were eventually reunited with the head of their household, Gustav. Gustav was captured as a prisoner of war and eventually released from the British military camp he was detained in. The Krause household was once again in possession of all its precious inhabitants.
-Act II: Cultivating the Diva & Falling in Love-
World War II ended, the country began to mend itself, and Gisela resumed her vocal studies.
The Staatliche Hochschule Für Musik Und Theater in Hamburg reopened and Gisela was accepted and given a full scholarship to the school where she majored in voice, studying under the woman who would define the vocal technique Gisela would one day pass on to her own students- Maya Stein. Gisela took odd jobs to subsidize her living expenses as her studies continued and she fell into teaching music part-time. By the time she was 25, Gisela had earned her voice teaching degree. Two years later she acquired her degree in opera performance.
The West German economy blossomed over the next decade and so did Gisela's musical career. She taught at two different musical institutions, opened her own private studio, gave regular vocal recitals in Germany and toured throughout Europe giving concerts which were all reviewed to much critical acclaim. The European critics heralded her as a "world-class singer" and "the voice of the future."
Europe was in love with Gisela and Gisela found herself falling in love with Woldermar Goettling.
Woldermar was a Russian immigrant whose family fled to Lithuania after the Czar was killed during the revolution. Woldermar's natural gift with languages made him a "useful asset" during war time and became the commodity which offered him safe passage from one country to the next. He eventually found himself in Germany, and in Germany he found Gisela.
Gisela and Woldermar were married in 1956.
Using his law degree and professional contacts in the travel industry, Woldermar helped many refugees work through the immigration process and establish new lives in America. After helping countless transplants, Woldermar could not resist the promise of a new life in America for himself. He had nothing left of his old life in Russia, and Germany was not home to him. Germany, however, was very much home to Gisela.
Gisela did not want to leave Germany, but who could bear the loss of a husband in an era where so many wives were living with the loss of their husbands. So she left her students and singing career behind in Germany "crying buckets", as she put it, on the plane ride to America.
-Act III: Fall of the Diva-
Gisela and Woldermar arrived in New York City in 1957 under the Tolstoy quota, an immigration standard that permitted a limited number of Russian immigrants and their families to enter the country. Woldermar brought with him hopes for a new life in his new country, while Gisela carried the hope of their new family with her to America "under her heart". She was six months pregnant with her daughter Kira.
Hope would not prove to be enough to secure the happiness of this immigrant family.
The immigration policy required that anyone entering the country have a sponsor, someone who was willing to be financially responsible for these newest additions to America in case they were unable to financially support themselves because, as Gisela mused, "America didn't want people who were a burden to America." A sentiment she took to heart and forged her unrelenting work ethic. She also signed an agreement promising that she would never ask for any financial assistance or take part of any social services paid for by tax payer dollars- another caveat of the immigration policy to prevent the financial "burden" of postwar refugees seeking to rebuild their lives in the fertile soil of the American economy.
Her husband's company paired the couple with a sponsor in America. Woldermar quickly found work in New York City, while Gisela, with her limited English skills, could only secure work in a suburb one hour outside of New York. It was a lonely and miserable time for Gisela, separated from her husband who worked in the city while she worked as a live-in caretaker for an elderly, alcoholic woman who "drank a bottle of whiskey a day", as she recalls, and mistook her pregnancy for obesity. She lived with her verbally abusive employer for two months before the woman finally realized Gisela was pregnant. Upon discovering Gisela's pregnancy, she was immediately fired.
The Goettling family lived in New York for a year before moving on to Kansas. Stories of the thriving Midwest intrigued Woldermar and he decided that the open prairie plains held more promise for his family than the concrete jungles of New York.
Maybe it was the sudden change in environment, or maybe it was the fact that Woldermar was 19 years Gisela's senior, but despite Woldermar's best efforts to establish a peaceful life for his family, he was thwarted by the onset of a heart attack. Apparently even peace had its price.
Kansas did not hold the economic promise the Goettling's hoped for. They needed to get to more prosperous grounds and Chicago was the thriving metropolis that could pull them out of their quickly deteriorating financial situation. Unfortunately, they didn't have enough money to get there. An old colleague of Woldermar's, however, did.
It turned out that a Jewish man, who Woldermar helped keep safe during the war, was also living in Kansas and heard about their dilemma. He gave the struggling family a car so they could get to Chicago. Serendipitous karma struck again.
The Goettling's settled into Chicago in 1959. No sooner did they make it to the City of Big Shoulders than did Woldermar land a job - and then promptly suffered a stroke in his office.
Partially paralyzed and no longer able to work, Gisela immediately took up the mantle as breadwinner of her family. Woldermar's hospital bills needed to be paid and the agreement she signed when she entered the country prevented her from accessing any state sponsored aid. Too proud to even ask for help from their sponsors, and not wanting to be a "burden" to the great American empire, she took every job she could get.
Gisela worked as a maid, a waitress, a cashier, and a laborer in a paper factory during her husband's stroke year. She worked more than she slept.
It was a life far from the singer's stage she once majestically graced and far from the life her husband imagined for his young family.
-ACT IV: The Diva Resurrected. A Master Teacher is Born.-
It was 1960 and as the calendar turned towards a new decade Gisela's fate, once again, took another turn.
Although the singer's life that Gisela once took so much pride in seemed a distant memory to her now, certain European circles could not forget that magnificent voice that filled its concert halls.
A young vocalist had just moved to Chicago from Hamburg and was looking for a voice teacher in her new city. Her Hamburg contacts overwhelmingly recommended Gisela. Since Gisela had no telephone, she received the news of her prospective student through a letter in the mail. Gisela continued to correspond with Sabina, and soon took her on as her first voice student in America.
The logistics were a little tricky to work out. Sabina lived near 31st Street, on the south side of Chicago, while Gisela lived in the 4000 North block of the city - a long twenty mile round-trip to travel when you have no car. Gisela did not have a piano either, an essential teaching tool for giving voice lessons. Luckily Sabina had a car and a piano. Sabina would drive Gisela to her apartment near 31st Street and they would use the piano in her apartment for their lessons. After many long years without music in her life, music found its way back to Gisela.
It was only a matter of time until one of Sabina's neighbors finally got up the courage to knock on her door after overhearing the astonishing sounds coming from her apartment. Haruko wanted lessons as well, and Gisela found herself adding on a new student to her roster.
Sabina became the gateway not only to Gisela's next student but also to her first legitimate teaching job. The two were walking past the Cosmopolitan School of Music, housed on the 10th floor of the Fine Arts Building, and Gisela had another "tap on the shoulder" moment. On a whim, she walked in and asked if they were hiring for teachers. They permitted her and Sabina an on-the-spot audition. A test to see if Gisela and her student were Cosmopolitan School material. They undeniably were. Gisela was immediately offered a part-time teaching position at the highest rate any teacher at the school made.
As quickly as her life unraveled, was as quickly as her success began to snowball. A year later, Sabina referred Gisela into another position teaching general music at the Harris School. With her jobs at the Cosmopolitan School and Harris School secured, Gisela decided to rent out a studio space for the private lessons she was giving in addition to her teaching jobs. She jumped on a space at the Fine Arts Building when one of the teachers at the Cosmopolitan School vacated her studio space there. She did not know it then, but over 40 years later she would find herself one of the longest standing residents of the Fine Arts Building.
The Cosmopolitan School went bankrupt and closed in 1962. Gisela, not one to sit idle, took up another teaching position and began to teach voice and general music at the University of Chicago Lab Schools, where she would work for the next 28 years.
With her growing base of private students at the studio demanding more of her time and attention, she left her general music job at the Harris school. Inevitably, the voices Gisela was cultivating in her studio were heard wafting through the halls of the Fine Arts Building and caught the ears of the administration at the American Conservatory of Music. They were so impressed with what they heard, they offered Gisela a job. She took the position and gave up her private studio to teach at the Conservatory for the next 16 years. She reopened her private studio at the Fine Arts Building after leaving the Conservatory over a dispute with the administration. Shortly after she left, the American Conservatory went bankrupt and closed its doors.
She averaged about three to five hours of sleep a night, juggling all her students and teaching commitments. Finding the physical and emotional reserve to maintain her work schedule and take care of her husband and small child was a feat of sheer determination.
Two years after accepting the position with the American Conservatory, the stages of Europe beckoned once more. Gisela went on what she would later decide would be her last set of concert tours. She took a short leave of absence to tour Denmark, Sweden, Germany and France. Again, her performances met with glowing reviews. It had been twelve years since her last professional appearance and she was as glorious as ever.
She returned to Chicago at a crossroads. Now knowing it was possible to return to a life on the stage, she had to choose between a career as a singer that would constantly have her on the road, or a career in education that would keep her grounded and close to her young daughter and sick husband.
She chose to stay.
A year later, her beloved Woldermar passed away.
-Encore-
In 1971 Gisela remarried.
She and her new husband, Baldwin Ford, jumped into the American dream with both feet and bought a house in the suburbs. Gisela recalls that there was no real impetus for her to relocate to the suburbs and attributes that decision to "God's hand" pushing her toward her destiny.
Shortly after moving to Hoffman Estates, Gisela once again felt that "tap on the shoulder" while she was standing in line with her husband at the local community college waiting for him to register for a class. Bored, she began browsing through the catalogue and scanned the pages for their music classes. Gisela decided to send a note to the department chair and asked if she could teach lessons there. It turned out that a colleague from the Lab Schools was teaching there and enthusiastically recommended Gisela to the department. She was immediately hired as the newest addition to Harper College.
Gisela was in demand, but life would soon be demanding more than any newlywed should ever be asked to give. After only living in their new home for three months, Baldwin died in a car crash. Somehow her daughter, who was also in the car with Baldwin, survived - the tragedy and miracle of life clashing once again.
The next three decades would solidify Gisela's standing in the world of classical music. Her students would go on to study at institutions like Julliard, the Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. She would see them rise to perform in venues like the Metropolitan Opera House, the White House, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony. Some would even go on to singing careers in Europe, bringing back echoes of Gisela's brilliance to the audiences that lauded her decades ago.
Moving to the suburbs, it turned out, became her solace as age brought on the deterioration of her joints and impaired her mobility. Once again, chance brought her new next door neighbors who became "her angels", as Gisela describes them. Byong, a practicing chiropractor, would administer her in-home physical therapy while his wife, Seong, would help Gisela get ready every day by assisting her with bathing and getting dressed.
Never one to be daunted by limiting circumstance, the 80-plus years young Gisela (now retired and teaching only from her private studio) is taking on her newest musical venture as the Artistic Director of the Michigan Avenue Cantori. A labor of love, the Cantori showcases her professional and semi-professional students in an ensemble led by her student of 38 years - Conductor, Martha Swisher.
On July 7, 2008 the Village of Hoffman Estates and its Mayor declared it Gisela Goettling Day. The Village Hall was filled with generations of her students, friends and family who acknowledged her latest accolade with a standing ovation.
Grateful for the acknowledgment, grateful for the decades of cherished relationships that saw her through life's difficulties, grateful for her life - Gisela bowed deeply and simply said, "Thank You."
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Writer, Czerina Salud, and photographer, Sandra Wong-Geroux, explore the immigrant experience in this blog series.