One moment he was flying in the air above a forest, the next he found himself lying on the ground at the side of the road.
Dizzy but unhurt, Klaus got up and looked around. The sun was high up in the blue sky, accentuated by a few puffy white clouds. The temperature felt cooler than it should be for July. The land was mostly flat as far as he could see. There were fields and rows of trees separating them. The road he found himself on was muddy and seemed to go on forever in either direction. All in all his surroundings felt very different, alien.
He spotted a farmhouse in the distance, nothing else as far as the eye could see. No church towers or other signs of people. He figured he’d head for the house and try to get directions to go home.
The farm looked very different from anything he had ever seen. It was a wooden building, not stone, and the barn was much higher than he was used to. The buildings were all painted white. Klaus collected his courage and knocked on the door. A young girl about his own age opened and said something he didn’t understand.
“Gutentag,” he said in his best proper German. The girl shrugged her shoulders and called back into the house. A woman appeared behind him also speaking the foreign language.
“Gutentag,” he repeated, and tried to explain his name was Klaus and he didn’t know where he was.
The woman seemed to understand him just as little as he understood her.
“Deutsch?” she asked tentatively, pointing at Klaus, who nodded eagerly.
“Ja, Deutsch. Lindow, Brandenburg.”
The woman just shook her head, and said something to the girl, who ran out and down the road. She then motioned Klaus to come into their single-room house.
It looked like a small family lived here. There was a bed on one side of the room, with a fresh straw mattress and some heavy wool blankets, a table on the other side and a cupboard against the wall. There was also a smaller table next to a cast iron wood-burning stove, where the woman seemed to have been preparing a meal.
She motioned Klaus to sit down at the table and gave him a mug of fresh water, which he eagerly accepted. “Danke,” he said, suddenly realizing how thirsty he was.
He sat on the chair while she continued preparing food. Klaus realized he was hungry as well as thirsty, but he didn’t know how to explain that.
Just as he was starting to wonder how long he would be sitting there he heard a carriage draw up in front of the house. A moment later, the little girl came running back into the house, followed by an older boy.
The boy asked him, “you speak German?” Klaus almost cried out from happiness. The accent was thick but he could at least understand the words.
“Yes, yes I speak German. I am from Lindow. I don’t know how I got here, but could you please show me how to get home?”
The conversation that ensued was long and, at times, confusing. The boy, whose name was Gustav, did his best to translate back and forth.
The farmer’s wife introduced herself as Mrs. Wilder. She explained that her husband and her sons were working on the fields, and they would be back later in the afternoon. Gustav lived on a neighboring farm, the oldest in a family that had come from Germany. He and his father had been working with Mr. Wilder to plow the fields. Gustav explained that the Wilders had a plow but his own family had a draw horse, so the two families would often work together.
Klaus asked for the way to Lindow, and Gustav replied he had never heard of a place called Lindow in Michigan.
“What is Michigan?” Klaus asked. “Lindow is in Brandenburg.”
“What is Brandenburg?” Gustav countered. “We’re here in Michigan, close to Ann Arbor, in the United States.”
None of these names meant anything to Klaus, but he started to understand that he was much farther from home than he had ever thought possible. As the realization that he might not be seeing his family for a long time sank in, he started to cry.
Mrs. Wilder, who had been wondering about the strange boy who had showed up on her doorstep, took him into her arms and set him on her lap.
“It’ll be alright,” she comforted. “It’ll be alright, we will find your family. It will be fine in the end.”
The soft strokes on his back and the soothing voice helped quench Klaus’ panic and he looked up at her.
“What am I going to do? I don’t know anybody, can’t even understand anybody except Gustav.”
“We will figure out something. I think, first you will want to eat something. After that, we will go over to Gustav’s place, and we will figure something out.”
She put Klaus back in a chair at the table and got him some bread and butter, and another mug of water to drink. After that, Gustav took all of them in his buggy back to the Adler’s farm house.
Mrs. Adler listened to Gustav’s rapid explanations, and gave a questioning look at Mrs. Wilder.
“I don’t know what to do, Heidi,” Mrs. Wilder sighed. “He really just knocked on the door out of nowhere. And he doesn’t seem to speak any English at all. So I figured I’d come to you, at least you will be able to talk with him.”
Heidi Adler looked at Klaus, and back at her neighbor.
“Well, I suppose he can stay here for right now. I’ll talk with Manfred tonight, I’m sure he will know what to do.”
With that, Gustav and Mrs. Wilder left and Mrs. Adler asked all kinds of questions of Klaus. Although he could understand the words, in many cases he didn’t understand the meaning of the questions.
He explained that he was playing in the woods with his brother, and that he got turned around, and suddenly found himself on the road here in Michigan.
Mrs. Adler didn’t believe that he was from a place in Brandenburg. She figured he must be suffering from some kind of memory loss, maybe he had had an accident. She also did not believe at all his claim that he had been born in the Year of the Lord 1527.
“It is 1855, my dear,” she explained patiently, “and you can’t be more than ten years old. More like eight or nine, if you ask me. But don’t you worry, my husband will figure out what to do.”
Klaus realized nobody would believe his fantastic story, so he decided not to explain how he had gotten here anymore. He wasn’t going to give up trying to understand it himself, but he wouldn’t struggle to make anyone else understand.
Manfred Adler, when he got home, agreed with his wife to let Klaus stay while they tried to find his family. That Sunday when they went into town for church, he asked the other German families in the area but nobody had heard about a lost boy. And so it came to pass that Klaus stayed with the Adler family, eventually getting formally adopted by them as their second son.