Maria Talks about Her Life
Sunshine English Course 2 (Heisei 17) pg. 86-89
| Maria Talks about Her Life | |
|---|---|
| ? | |
| Details | |
| Word count | 344 |
| Book | Sunshine |
| Grade | 2 |
| Year | 2005 |
"Please train my children strictly," said Captain von Trapp to Maria.
Maria did not listen to him. She taught songs to the children. He did not like her ways. But slowly their happy songs changed the Captain's mind.
"You changed my life, Maria," he said one day. "Will you live with us forever?"
She thought and thought. The children liked her very much. And so she finally said, "Yes."
One day my husband got a telegram from the Nazis. He said to us, "I must meet them tomorrow. I can't say 'No' to them. We must get out of Austria tonight."
We ran away to Italy over the Alps. I had nine and "a half" children then. In Italy we started to sing for a living. Our hobby was now our business. We sang for parties, birthdays and weddings.
People in Italy were unfriendly to us. They said, "The Trapp family are not Jewish. They're spies for Hitler!"
So we went to France. But again the same thing happened there. They did not welcome us.
We left Europe and went to America. We started singing for a living again, but the Americans did not like us, either.
"Why are they so cold to us?" we wondered. "Maybe we are not good enough yet."
One day, in Denver, when we were singing on the stage, a fly got into my mouth! I was very surprised and I stopped singing.
I stepped forward and said to the audience, "I forgot the song because I just swallowed a fly!" They all laughed. We laughed too.
After that, everything went well. People smiled at us, and we smiled back. Soon we became very popular all over the country.
After the war, in 1950, we went back to Austria on a concert tour. We saw our relatives and friends there.
They told us about their hardships in Austria during the war. And we told them about our hardships. They said, "We lost our children, and you lost your homeland."
In war there are no winners. There are only losers.
