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April 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 2
The Other Crossing
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
For those who did not have the means to spend their days in deck chairs and their nights under gently swaying chandeliers, the Atlantic passage had a very different meaning. One such was Karl S. Puffe, who was born in 1858 in a small town in a corner of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire that now belongs to the Czech Republic. He married a childhood sweetheart, Pauline Weidlich, in 1881. A hard time followed. “For the next ten years,” writes his grandson Forster D. Puffe, “my grandmother gave birth to three daughters and five sons, of whom six died in infancy, two in one week. During that same period my grandfather also buried both his parents and his wife’s widowed father. Those heartbreaking experiences coupled with his family’s difficult living conditions made him decide to begin a new life for his family in America.
“On November 12, 1892, with considerable anxiety, Karl Puffe bade his pregnant wife and two daughters farewell and set out by rail to Bremerhaven, Germany. He had with him all his personal belongings and the tremendous sum of sixteen dollars in his pocket. On November 17, along with 2,257 other emigrants, he set sail for America in steerage.”
Karl Puffe kept a journal of the next two weeks in order to help prepare his wife and children for their voyage across when he could afford to send for them. The experiences it records were shared by millions of other emigrants. This is the trip that peopled the United States of America.
7 o’clock in the morning on special train from Bonn to Bremerhaven.
Those days were very hard months. The people sang and the music played God Bless You. We all cried and then the boat started.
As long as I live I will never forget that moment. It left a deep impression on me. Nobody would ever know unless he had that experience.
I got one blanket, one sack of straw, one bucket, one pail, knife, fork and spoon after the boat left. The ocean is quiet and only a little fog.
11 o’clock in the morning. Black bread and butter, black coffee and everybody wanting breakfast, so there is a big line. We are 2,258 people on board, some of them a little seasick, but not too much. Most of the time I am on deck. The people are going promenading, singing, and some are dancing. At night we are seeing the lights from other boats. The white bread is like at home, but the black bread is not! Well, at least we are getting enough. That is important, and with butter. I am sleeping in the first department. It is warm here and I didn’t use my warm shoes yet. Today we had meat, sauerkraut and potatoes. Everybody must wash their own dishes, and