Artist Johanna McCloskey
Johanna Mccloskey , is an artist and author.
In the late 1930s, as military forces reshaped Europe and the world braced for World War II, Johanna Cotter McCloskey lived a wonderful and privileged childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). With her parents, Helene and Georg, and her sister, Kiki, Johanna enjoyed many luxuries, attended school and celebrated the wonder of being a little girl in an exciting city. However, as Russian troops moved closer and the siege of Breslau began in 1945, everything changed for Johanna.
In the pre-dawn darkness of a cold January morning, she embraced her father for what she thought might be the final time and fled the city to save her life as the war approached. She had already lost her mother to illness when she was 10. For nearly a year, Johanna lived as a refugee and dodged the Russians as they moved across Europe.
She left her only remaining possessions in a suitcase by the side of a road because she grew too weak to carry it and continued along with only the clothes on her back and a small journal in her pocket. Her coat became “a house, bed, blanket and pillow” while she endured seemingly endless months of hardship. By the end of her ordeal, her journal overflowed with details of a life transformed from luxury to extreme poverty. Recently, sitting in the afternoon sun at her home near Lake Norman, Johanna removed that same journal from a small memory box. After 60 years, its pages were yellowed with age and the ink had faded.
“I had no need or desire to ever look at it,” Johanna said. “But from this journal, the idea for a book began to grow.” After attending a book signing in Davidson by fellow German author Christa Blum Mercer, and sharing small bits of her story with others that day, friends and family began to encourage Johanna to write her story.
“Writing about yourself and your misery after 60 years is very tough. I never planned to write a book,” she says. “I didn’t want to think about the experience because it was so painful, but people told me I owed it to my children and everyone to write it. My boys knew almost nothing of my flight.” “Flight from the Russians, A German Teenager’s World War II Ordeal” vividly details Johanna Cotter McCloskey’s life from growing up in Breslau and fleeing the Russians to coming to America to build a new life. She writes about sleeping in burned-out buildings, eating whatever she could find and wondering if her father and sister had survived the siege. “We looked at Johanna’s journal and, suddenly, we had history,” says Margaret Bigger, an editor and author who worked with Johanna. “We had history that we could verify.” The book was published as she turned 80 last year.
Johanna now speaks freely about her love of painting and the experiences of her life. She speaks about coming to America with her first husband, Charlie, an American she met while he was in the Air Force serving in Germany, raising three sons (Tom, Robbie and Peter), going back to school for bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts and moving to North Carolina with her second husband, Buddy.
“The book created a lot of pain for me in my paintings, and they became dull and not colorful anymore,” Johanna says. “It became miserable for me to paint, but it is now coming back to me.”
Johanna was reunited with her father and sister in December 1945. Her sister, Kiki Skiebe, now lives in Davidson. Some of her memoirs are included in the book. For some Americans, it might seem difficult to accept a book written by a German in World War II. “You must realize we have this story because Johanna married an enemy,” Margaret Bigger says. “It says a lot about our culture because we don’t hold grudges. Americans are willing to move on, and that says a lot about our society today and who we are.”
She is currently pursuing her love of painting.
