That page, covering her first years of life, had some historic context - the dislocating horror of World War II - but very little detail.
Over time, bits and pieces have fallen into place for the 64-year-old Missoula woman who was born in Rostock, Germany, during the war and constantly uprooted until she became an adult here in the United States.
“That was the first time that I really had the feeling that I would be able to fill this hole in my life's history,” Wenger said Friday.
This was the hole: In the early 1940s, Wenger's father was forced to fight for the German army against his wish. He eventually went AWOL. Wenger's mother died about four months after she was born and little Lilly was taken in by her Aunt Anna and Uncle Otto Namnick, who was serving in the German navy.
When Otto got some time off, Anna went to see him, leaving Lilly in Rostock with a friend. The war intervened again, though, and Anna couldn't return to Rostock, a principal German port on the Baltic Sea.
The family friend who'd taken Lilly in was then evacuated from Rostock and sent south by truck to Zwickau. But with three children of her own, the friend couldn't afford to take care of Lilly as war ravaged the country.
In November 1944, the mayor of Zwickau met the refugee trucks coming from the north and found himself with the dilemma of placing the 1-year-old girl from Rostock.
He finally found a family in nearby Stollberg and Lilly started life anew. She spent five years with that family - the first family she perceived as her own - before her Aunt Anna found her when the war ended.
Very much against her little-girl will, Lilly left with Anna, feeling forsaken by the woman she knew as “Mutter.”
She left not even knowing the name of the family that had raised her.
Wenger's life continued its meanders as her aunt eventually brought her to America, where Anna eventually suffered a mental breakdown, sending Lilly into a life of foster homes.
During her adult years, Lillian married, had a child, moved to Montana and divorced. She eventually married a well-known Missoulian, Roy Wenger, who was involved in a national civic group known as Friendship Force.
Roy Wenger died after 12 1/2 years of marriage, but Lillian stayed involved with Friendship Force. And it was that affiliation in 2007 that began the unraveling of the mystery of her young life.
In part, the group promotes international peace through travel, and in the summer of 2007 a couple from Germany was looking for a place to stay in Missoula. Lillian had had a busy summer, but agreed to take on the visitors based on one bit of information - they were from Zwickau.
Over the course of Ingrid and Gert Pohlman's Missoula visit, they heard the story of Lillian's years in Zwickau. When they went home, they told the story to the hometown newspaper, which wrote a story that asked a question: “Who Recognizes Little Lilly?” The paper also published a picture of the young girl.
An elderly woman named Siegried Schuster saw the story and immediately recognized the picture. After all, Schuster had been there when it was taken.
The phone lines were soon ablaze and Lillian was in touch with Herta Reim, the now 85-year-old daughter of the woman who'd taken Lilly in. Lilly had essentially been Herta's little sister for five years.
A year later, in late September, Lillian Wenger traveled to Germany to meet what was left of the family that took her in the midst of war.
“It was a very heart-warming time, because they all remembered so much about those years,” Wenger said. “This was a time that I had very few memories of, but they were able to fill them in for me.”
The woman she knew as her mother was dead, but Herta Reim and her family still lived in the same home, and Schuster, a cousin who lived at the house during the war, was still close by.
“I think the thing that was most important to me was learning how much I meant to them,” Wenger said. “And the biggest part of that was understanding how upset they all were when my aunt came to get me.”
Wenger had always assumed the Reim family just gave her up. In fact, they were extremely upset to see Lilly go, and distraught about the way it happened, with the girl being tricked into a big black car and driven away.
“It was clear that I was part of the family and that it was very hard on them when I left,” she said. “It also turns out they tried to find me later, but couldn't because we had left the country.”
During the trip, Reim's son Erich showed Lillian the sights around Zwickau, and she met the many extended relatives of her wartime family.
“I remembered very little about the place, but I had recalled that the house was a two-story and that there was a fence around part of the yard,” Lillian said. “And that was still true.”
But the past lived on in the stories the Reim family told her of the little girl from Rostock. Wenger spent six weeks in Germany, traveling to the place of her birth in Rostock, where she picked up a copy of her original birth certificate.
She came home with much more than a certificate, though. She came back with a life made whole and full by love's enduring force through the years.
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.
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