Greencastle’s Eliane Ambrose shares her life story in ‘Lily’s Saga’

The cheery greeting on Eliane Ambrose’s answering machine says, “Hello, bonjour.”

The fit and fashionable 86-year-old almost always has a smile on her face and a gleam in her eye.

Beautiful oil paintings, the product of a talent she uncovered in her 50s, are displayed in her home.

And she even lives on Joy Drive, outside of Greencastle.

It’s no wonder some of the stories in her self-published autobiography “Lily’s Saga” have moved people to tears.

“It’s not a pretty story, but it’s moving,” said Ambrose, who grew up during World War II in Toul, France, where her nickname was “Lily.”

She figures it is good to let the demons out, her story may give others strength and her children and grandchildren need to know what she went through.

“Lily’s Saga” also contains laugh-out-loud moments, insights into how art unleashed her soul and messages about the faith that helped her survive, thrive and forgive.

“One thing,” she said, “God was always with me through it all.”

Learn more about her:Artist Eliane Ambrose opens her studio to the public

What was her young life like in France?

Ambrose was raised by grandmothers and other relatives after being abandoned by her mother and father, at least the man she thought was her father. Much later in life, she would learn her real father was one of the people she hated so much for what they did to the Jewish people and her native France – a “highly decorated German soldier with an iron cross on his chest.”

“Lily’s Saga” tells of wartime hunger, air raids and neighbors looking out for neighbors. Ambrose remembers American soldiers liberating France in 1944 and her first taste of Hershey’s chocolate.

At 12 she was nearly raped and killed by a soldier, who fled leaving her bloody and muddy as other soldiers heard her screaming “au secour,” French for help.

On exhibit:Gallery 7: Regional artists display work

Coming to America

She was 15 when she met and shortly thereafter married Harry Ambrose, a 21-year-old American serving with the Army peacekeeping force. The first of the couple’s six children was born not long after she turned 16.

When they moved to the United States and his hometown of Greencastle a few years later, she was a 19-year-old mother of three.

Before leaving France, Ambrose remembers her grandmother telling her, “You’re marrying an American, you’re marrying his country.”

She took those words to heart, explaining, “I love this country. I still love France, but I could never live there.”

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Adjusting to life in small-town Greencastle was a challenge, from new foods like corn on the cob to learning the language.

Ambrose’s English is self-taught. She remembers the uproar when she said she put her brother-in-law’s bowling shirt in the commode – which in France is a dresser and not a toilet.

Her husband’s Army career took them to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. When he was sent overseas to Germany, she found herself alone with five children. She had little money and lots of responsibility. Some people looked out for the young family and others tried to take advantage of her.

It was in Missouri that an older woman got her and the children to attend a Baptist church, and a few months later Ambrose accepted Christ as her savior.

“I think because I have God’s spirit within me … He was always there for me, even when I didn’t know it,” said Ambrose, who has been a member of Greencastle Baptist Church since the 1970s.

“If I had a flat tire and Harry was overseas, it was always in front of the garage or in front of my house,” she said. “An angel was watching over me or the holy spirit was in me.”

What about family life?

Her husband returned from Germany and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where their sixth child was born. Harry Ambrose loved baseball and was known to everyone as “Yogi” after the great Yogi Berra.

He would go on to serve two tours in Vietnam, and they moved back to Greencastle in 1972 after he retired from the military. He died in 2009.

“Yogi was a great soldier, just not as a husband,” Ambrose wrote.

“Lily’s Saga” does not sugar-coat their marriage or the challenges as their children got older.

How did she become a painter?

It was a painting of an orange, simple but “so well executed that you could see the juice jumping off the canvas” that inspired her at age 52 to approach the artist about taking lessons from him.

Since the age of 15, “I had taken care of everyone else and never thought about whom this woman was,” Ambrose wrote. That woman didn’t know her primary colors and had never touched a paintbrush, but burned the midnight oil to become an award-winning artist.

Working only in “oil, the Cadillac of all paint,” Ambrose found a new purpose for her life.

“My children said mom took up painting and this wild woman emerged,” wrote Ambrose, whose works hang in many homes and offices, both in the U.S. and overseas. She periodically opens the doors of her home studio, where the walls are lined floor to ceiling with her paintings.

Ambrose also is a poet, who published the poetry book “From the Heart” about 10 years ago and shares her poetry once a month with the Tuesday Night Music Club at Lilian S. Besore Memorial Library in Greencastle.

“Today my life could not be any better. I can live my final years of life gracefully, enjoying my large family, my beautiful friends and I thank God for every moment (past and present); the past made me the strong woman that I needed to be and the present is yet to be,” the book concludes."

“Lily’s Story,” 83 pages with a smattering of photos, costs $20 and is available on Amazon.