Shoes for Thought

Several pairs of shoes help to trace the melancholy history behind the house...

Poland, 1939.

A young girl was walking to school. A truck full of soldiers pulled up, plucked her off the street, and forced her onto a train bound for a Nazi work camp.

Somewhere along the way, she lost her shoes.

Helena spent the next six years in the camp doing hard labor in the fields, translating for patients and doctors in the camp hospital, and enduring sexual abuse from Nazi guards. As a reward for her compliance, Helena finally earned a pair of shoes: patent leather soldier's boots (pictured right).

Helena entered the camp at age fourteen. When she was twenty, the camp was liberated. Any family or friends she had were gone, killed or lost in the war. Helena and some fellow prisoners decided to take free passage on a steamship bound for the United States. They arrived in New Orleans on the Fourth of July. Eventually Helena made her way to Southern California, married another work camp survivor, had one son, and settled in a little white house in Vista. The details of her life are not yet clear, but from the artifacts we have unearthed, it's evident that Helena and her husband were collectors, tinkerers, and gardeners.

And then there are the shoes.

I have not been able to count them all, but there must be more than a hundred pairs stacked in the old trailers, tucked in the crawlspace under the house, and buried in the yard. Every color and style you could imagine, but all of them size 6 1/2 and very uncomfortable-looking. The fact that we found several plaster casts of feet in a special fabric-lined case might indicate an obsession with finding the perfect pair. A perfectly understandable obsession, if you lost your shoes on a fateful day in 1939 and then had to wear your abuser's boots in order to survive.


[My thanks to Vikki, a neighbor who shared Helena's story and photos with me before I even bought the house.]