Maria von Trapp

Chelsea

By the time I was five years old, I’d watched The Sound of Music dozens of times. It was my go-to when I wasn’t feeling great, or if it was my turn to choose our family Saturday-night movie. From the opening scene, when Julie Andrews as Maria is twirling about the hills, to the von Trapp family’s escape over those same hills to freedom, I was mesmerized. By first grade, I knew all the words to every song and would often sing “So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight” before going to bed. My dramatic flair wasn’t confined to home. Playing on the playground at school, I would sometimes speak in an affected Maria/Julie Andrews voice. Thankfully, my best friend, Elizabeth, told me in the nicest possible way that I sounded silly. She probably saved me from untold amounts of teasing. I didn’t stop imitating Maria—I just started to do it by myself, in my own backyard. (I still know the words to “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi.”) The more I learned about the real-life Maria, the more I looked up to her.

In the movie, although free-spirited Maria is committed to her life as a nun, the Mother Abbess suggests she might prefer life outside the walls of the abbey, and recommends her as a governess to Captain Georg von Trapp, a widower with seven children. Maria throws herself into her new job and life, bringing joy back into the children’s lives and music back into their home. She stands up to Captain von Trapp, telling him that his children need fun and his love. And she fights for his love, too. Shortly after their beautiful wedding, filled with music from the nuns and smiles from all the children, the newly married von Trapps refuse to support the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria. Though most Austrians supported their new occupiers, the von Trapps did not.

With every viewing I was on the edge of my seat. I don’t think that’s a metaphor—I remember actually being perched on the edge of our couch. I knew that in the end, the von Trapps would calmly sing their final concert, then hide in the abbey; that the sisters would take the oil out of the Nazis’ cars; and that Rolf (erstwhile boyfriend of the oldest von Trapp daughter, Liesl) would do one right thing in his Third Reich uniform by not immediately exposing their hiding place. But I worried every time, hoping that this time, too, every member of the family would reach safety. Each time I watched the movie I thought of my friends whose grandparents had survived the Holocaust, and their family members who hadn’t.

Inspired by Maria’s bravery and the courage of the von Trapp children, as a child, I wrote President Ronald Reagan a letter in 1985. I had just turned five when I learned he was planning to visit a military cemetery in Bitburg on a trip to West Germany, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. I strongly believed an American president should not pay his respects on behalf of the American people at a place where Nazis were buried. So I wrote him a letter sharing my views, respectfully telling him that I knew the Nazis were “not very nice people” because I had seen The Sound of Music. (I also included a couple of my favorite rainbow and heart stickers on the letter and an entire additional sheet of my favorite stickers with the letter as a gesture of goodwill.) President Reagan never responded. I went to our mailbox every day for weeks to see if he had. I was so disappointed that no one wrote me back, but I was much angrier that President Reagan went to Bitburg. Afterward, he tried to justify his visit by explaining that he was there for only eight minutes. One was too many.

HILLARY

Because Chelsea didn’t receive an answer, I made sure when we lived in the White House that we had a team of staff and volunteers dedicated to answering children’s letters. I didn’t want any other child to be disappointed like Chelsea had been. In fact, when Bill and I asked Chelsea in late 1992 what she hoped for from our move to Washington, the only thing she asked was for every child to get a response if they wrote to the president, the first lady, or the White House.

When I got older, maybe the summer after sixth grade, I read the real Maria von Trapp’s book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. In some ways, the true story was even more dramatic than the movie. The book described their unexpected encounter with Hitler while visiting Munich, and then their decision to flee. “We learned the shocking truth that ‘home’ isn’t necessarily a certain spot on earth,” she wrote. “It must be a place where you can ‘feel’ at home, which means ‘free’ to us.” There was one development in which reality was slightly more mundane than the movie, though just as heroic: They left Austria not by trekking over the Alps but by boarding a train to Italy. “We did tell people that we were going to America to sing,” said one of Maria’s stepdaughters, coincidentally also named Maria. “And we did not climb over mountains with all our heavy suitcases and instruments. We left by train, pretending nothing.” From the book, I learned that Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s head of the SS—the Nazi’s elite paramilitary unit and the unit of some of those buried at the Bitburg cemetery—had later used the von Trapps’ home as his local headquarters. Himmler also founded Dachau, the Third Reich’s first concentration camp and the site where tens of thousands of Jews, homosexuals (as LGBTQ people were labeled then), political prisoners, Communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were held and murdered.

“One of the greatest things in human life is the ability to make plans. Even if they never come true—the joy of anticipating is irrevocably yours. That way one can live many more than just one life.”

—MARIA VON TRAPP

The von Trapps’ lives weren’t all singing and heroism. In the book, Maria shared their family’s financial struggles. “We are not poor,” she wrote. “We just don’t have any money!” Her children would later share that the real Maria wasn’t always as sweet as Julie Andrews’s character; in fact, she had a temper. “But we took it like a thunderstorm that would pass,” said her stepdaughter Maria. “Because the next minute she could be very nice.” The real-life love story was different from the movie, too. When Georg asked Maria to marry him, she was torn about whether to abandon her religious calling, until the other nuns urged her to follow what they saw as God’s will and say yes. “I really and truly was not in love,” she wrote. “I liked him but didn’t love him. However, I loved the children, so in a way I really married the children… [b]y and by I learned to love him more than I have ever loved before or after.”

My memories of Maria are now an amalgam of the movie, her memoir, and the time when Mom and I visited Salzburg the summer I was seventeen. In kindergarten and first grade, when I needed courage, I thought of Maria standing up to the Nazis, boldly risking so much in order to do what she knew was right and protect those she loved.