Bonnie Willemssen

Child of the Heart Bonnie Willemssen

CHILD OF THE HEART is a unique story about the author's two adoptions and her quest to find her birth family. Born in Berlin, Germany in 1948, her birth parents gave her up for adoption immediately, despite having 4 older children. The first person to adopt Bonnie was a divorcee, an American citizen living and working in Germany, Austria and France, as a nurse, helping to eradicate tuberculosis after the war. When Bonnie was four, she traveled on the SS United States with her adoptive mother and her nanny to live in Delaware. In a twist of fate, or possibly fate had a little boost from above, Bonnie and her guardians were seated at the same table on this ship as a couple from Wisconsin who would eventually, despite great odds, become her second adoptive parents. This is not an autobiography. It is an account, gleaned from stories, letters, and documents, about her birth mother and family, her second mother and family, and her third mother and family. It's told through conversation, letters, and in some chapters through a "projection of possibility". In 2000, the author found three brothers and a sister in Germany, all still living. This tale is heartbreaking and heartwarming, sometimes funny, always honest, and full of the kind of introspection that anyone would contemplate in a similar situation - if there were ever a situation equal to this one. And the big question is answered at the end - the author answers it. "Was it better to be adopted and grow up in America with unquestioned freedom and privilege? Or would it have been better to have grown up behind the Iron Curtain with her birth parents and siblings?