Longtime Wasilla resident to unveil memoir of wartime survival

WASILLA — A story more than 70 years in the making of a mother and daughter’s survival through war and displacement has finally been told by a new generation of mother and daughter.

On Saturday, Eva Baker and her daughter Margaret unveiled “Martha and Eva,” in a private book party at the Meta Rose Square in Wasilla, two weeks ahead of their public book signing at Fireside Books in Palmer on Aug. 13.

Martha and Eva is a dual narrative account of the longtime Wasilla resident’s childhood growing up in Poland during World War II, her family’s expulsion from their homeland to the north of Germany, where they suffered, but survived, as refugees through its duration.

“The soldiers didn’t tell us where they were shipping us,” Eva recalled of her last night in her homeland. “They put us on box cars — 33 people in a box car. Mother just went crazy. She’d lost the country and everything we had. We were starving; we had no food.”

The memoir is told as two narratives, one of them Eva’s translation of her mother’s handwritten accounts of events in German to Margaret in English, who then typed and edited them.

The other narrative was Eva’s recounting events to Margaret, who also pieced the accounts together in a chronological order.

“Mother died 26 years ago and we started it about 10 years ago,” Eva said. “I looked at it and didn’t want to do it. It was emotional; I was depressed. I cried many times when I translated it and finally, (my husband) David said, ‘let’s do it.’ Then I put it away again, and last year I started it with Margaret, and we said, ‘we’re going to finish this book.’”

With Eva getting set to turn 81, the memoir was becoming a now-or-never proposition.

“I remember everything; I can remember the bad stuff — you keep it forever,” Eva said. “You keep it forever. You won’t lose it; it’s there, but then, it’s done. You need to keep going. I cried so many times writing it, but now it’s done and I’m glad it’s done.”

The starkest difference in the narratives of the same time periods was in the different ways mother and daughter reacted to losing everything, including their homeland. She hopes it’s a lesson readers take away from her book.

“Just enjoy every day and be happy with what you have — this is just stuff,” Eva said Tuesday at her home, a veritable treasure trove of collectibles, including an entire room of items from China, where she visited in the 1980s when her second husband John Shaw (an attorney for whom Shaw Elementary School in Wasilla is named) was part of an Alaskan delegation visiting the country. “Look at what I have after all the years. If Polish or Russian Soldiers came and moved us out I could leave it. Money is nothing, but leave me my husband and my children and I can start over again. But my mother went crazy. She lost everything, but I say, they can have it, it’s just stuff.”

Eva, who has lived in Alaska since 1958, when she moved from California with her first husband, an American soldier she met in Germany, and the Palmer-Wasilla area since 1962, has no desire to return to her native Poland. She finds the scenery of Alaska suffices to feed her childhood memories of her homeland. Martha didn’t feel the same way.

“I’m scared to go back there,” she said. “My mother went back in the mid-1980s and knocked on the door where we used to live. The furniture was changed, everything was changed — it shocked her. She had to go back one more time, but I was happy to be out of a communist country.”

Writing the book proved to be cathartic for Eva, but it may just be the start of a late-in-life career as an author. She has ideas of penning a sequel memoir about the struggles and triumphs she encountered from the war’s end to present day, living comfortably in a beautiful home on the shore of Anderson Lake she and her husband David built.

Eva believes Martha would be pleased with the final product.

“She would be proud,” Eva said. “I don’t know if she’d want it published, but she would have wanted the kids to hear about it.”