Soon afterward, at seventy-five, Emil passed on, a content, fulfilled man who’d seen his adult life begin under brutal oppression and unfold in poverty and starvation, only to have it end in freedom, blessed with abundance beyond his wildest dreams.
Every morning before and after Emil’s death, Adeline got out of bed in Bozeman and went down on her knees, thanking God for their miraculous good fortune. She ended her day the same way. People who knew her for decades said she was relentlessly cheerful and grateful for every blessing she’d been given in life.
She was also determined never to go hungry again.
Adeline had a big garden in her backyard where she grew bumper crops of vegetables that she canned for winter and huge cabbages she used to make sauerkraut. Emil had dug her a root cellar where she buried potatoes and onions in the winter. She adored the kitchen the boys built for her, and it became a hub of family and friends where everyone was welcome and well fed, especially her grandchildren, whom she doted on.
She attended Lutheran services every Sunday. She loved going to have her hair and nails done at a beauty parlor. And because she’d never had a doll as a child, Adeline amassed a large collection that was her pride and joy.
Walter and his wife traveled to Europe in 1993 and were able to visit Adeline’s older sister in the former East Germany. Malia had lived a hard life but still retained her amused optimism and odd perspective. She died two years later at age eighty-seven and is buried alongside her mother in Falkenberg.
Around that time, Adeline was interviewed by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle as part of its Fourth of July package. In the article, she recounted her suffering and starvation in Ukraine, the ordeals of the Long Trek, the family’s separation when Emil was sent to Poltava, his escape from Communism, her escape from Communism, and her endless gratitude for the country that had finally taken them in.
“God bless the United States of America,” Adeline said. “Only in America is a story like ours possible.”
Indeed, Adeline would live to see Bill driven to success by a small, empty, wooden packing crate he kept outside his office door. The crate once held the last of the Martels’ belongings when they sailed for the United States. Like the little wagon in his memory, the crate was a constant reminder to Bill of how desperately poor his family had been when they sailed into New York Harbor, and how far they’d all come since then.
She watched Bill and his sons build Martel Construction into a vibrant enterprise with residential and commercial projects in the United States and abroad. She also saw Bill and her grandsons give back for their good fortune, partially paying for and building, among other things, an addition to Montana State’s Bobcat Stadium. In gratitude, the school named the stadium’s football gridiron “Martel Field” after Bill.
In her later years, Adeline became more and more homebound, though she would continue to entertain her friends and family in her kitchen, where she would feed them her famous apple cake. If they were lucky, they’d hear snippets of her harrowing adventures on the way to the last green valley or one of her frequent observations about life.
“You know, I used to think life was something that happened to me,” she told one old friend as she was beginning to fail. “But now, I know life happened for me.”
They were out in her garden, and she was smiling at how it teemed with life.
Looking back, Adeline said she could see the entire incredible arc of her journey, how everything that happened to her and Emil had indeed seemed to prepare them for the next, more difficult challenge, both of them learning and adapting the entire way.
More than fifty years had passed since she and the boys escaped the Soviet Occupation Zone and reunited with Emil, but she still marveled at the events of that day.
“If that old woman had given us water from her well, we never would have been warned by the man driving the milk wagon to hide in that shed, and we probably would have walked right into that Soviet patrol,” she said. “And if we hadn’t gone for the border when we did, so close to the patrol passing with the prisoners, the Soviet soldiers in the guardhouse would not have thought we had the correct documents to cross the border and would not have sent that muddy angel of a man to help us get the wagon to the train station. The border guards would have stopped us, and who knows what would have happened?”
After marveling over that story, her friend asked Adeline to describe the most important things she’d learned over the course of her long and remarkable life.
Adeline thought about that for a little while before saying, “Don’t chew on the bad things that happen to you, dear. Try to see the beauty in every cruelty. It sets you free. Forgive hurt if you want to heal a broken heart. Try to be grateful for every setback or tragedy, because by living through them, you become stronger. I see the hand of God in that.
“I also see his hand in every right step and every wrong one we took in our lives, all somehow moving us forward, but sometimes around and around and around like a leaf I’ve always remembered seeing blowing in the wind the first day of the Long Trek. We were blown along like that leaf, dancing, spinning, and rolling toward this life we were dreaming of. And here I am so many years later, still living that dream. It really is a miracle,
