Four Blue Stars in the Window

Book excerpt: Fifty years ago, a young girl opened a cardboard box in her basement. Long forgotten, it contained her father's World War II uniform, vintage photos, semaphore flags, and other WWII keepsakes. The box opened up a world of pain and joy to author Barbara Eymann Mohrman as she set out on a personal journey to trace her family history and inadvertently, unspoken Eymann family secrets. This is the story of hard-scrabble life in rural Oakdale, Nebraska (population 851) starting in the heyday of the 1920s. Chriss Eymann, a newly arrived Swiss immigrant and his wife, Hattie Mae, raised ten children on the Dust Bowl-ravaged plains during the 1930s in the depths of the Great Depression. But their greatest sacrifice was yet to come-when they sent four young sons off to war in the South Pacific and Europe. The mother's flag with its four blue stars proudly displayed the family's precious contribution to the war effort. The story traces in detail and vintage photos from 1930 to 1947 the anguish, danger, and their everlasting hope with some surprising family news that brings the story full circle.