Dearest grandchildren,
This is the last entry of The Rim of the Volcano - Growing Up as a Half-Jew in Nazi Germany, the book that my father, your great-grandfather, Thomas Heumann wrote for his children, grandchildren, and, of course, all of YOU, even if you were still stardust when he penned his memoir.
It seems fitting that this post comes on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 😢
I suggested to Dad many times that he publish his book, but his answer each time was stern and resolute. "No. This is for my family. If you want it made public, you can do that after I'm gone." When I asked my father why he was so opposed to his story being made public while he was alive, his answer always contained a bit of fear. "People might think that I'm somehow excusing what happened because I survived it, being 'only' a half-Jew." "Does it really matter to anyone but my own family?" "Strangers don't need to know who I am or anything about my life." I think what he really meant by these answers was, 'I don't want to be found; hiding is safer.' The trauma he felt never really left him -- and I've come to realize that it has been passed on to us as very real generational trauma. I'm working through mine by writing this blog, it seems.
Although The Rim of the Volcano is Thomas Heumann's most detailed and complete work, and what he considered his magnum opus (albeit a private one), he wrote incessantly throughout his life. My plan is to eventually include everything here.
Here is my father's last chapter of Rim:
Of all the
years of my life, 1947 was probably the most emotionally intense and, despite its
constant commotion, the most lonely. It was a year of great hardships of
everyday life, of huge personal decisions, and of endless frustrations. It was
the final year when I could still travel to Berlin and Chemnitz, and the year when
my heart had to find its way between three women who loved me and when I had to
make professional decisions that shaped my entire life.
The latter
was by far the most powerful and the most consuming conflict that was with me
every day of the year.
Nora, who
had been so much of my focus for two years, gradually disappeared from my life,
not as much because of me, but because of her. When I traveled to the West in
the last days of 1945, I left her life. Soon other men, other people, and other
interests began to overshadow the mutual promises we had made to each other. She
discovered “Kurti” again, who she had known before she knew me. Both of her
parents became big shots in Communist Berlin. In her letters to me, her
assurances that she was still “mine for life” began to sound less sincere. She
was being groomed by her mother to be a smiling, attractively dressed, and
properly made-up Red Society socialite in Berlin. After I decided to emigrate
to America, and she to Russia, and after I became more agnostic in my outlook
on life, and she converted to Catholicism, the ties between us gradually
dissolved into nothing. Not amicably, but painlessly apathetic.
Much more
grinding and intensely emotional was the conflict between Gisela and
Ingrid. Not between them -- they even
corresponded -- but within me. I knew
that I had played a vitally important role for Ingrid at a time when her life
had fallen apart, and that I had kept her from drowning. I was ten years her
junior, but I gladly gave her the very love that had ruined her previous life. She
was in divorce proceedings from the great love of her youth, had to flee her
home under the most dire circumstances, and lost her father just before we met.
And just at the time that she became the first “earthly” love of my life, she came
to realize that my most “heavenly” love belonged to Gisela. When I moved to
München, she was desperate for my visits to her, as she and her little daughter
Karola missed me terribly.
My father never told me that I was named after anyone, but you gotta wonder... right? He adored little Karola, the first child to whom he felt "parental." Unfortunately, Dad never indicated what Ingrid and Karol's last name was, so finding her would be really hard - but wouldn't it be great if I could?!
Ingrid took care of my things (she even spent days
to find a cardboard box to send my laundry to München), and I sent cookies to
them (for Karola’s coupons, of course). Yet at the same time, I became fully cognizant
of the fact that our ten-year age difference would ultimately mean a final
separation. She wrote me long, desperate letters asking me to accept her love
without return, telling me that she fully accepted Gisela’s role in my life,
but at the same time warned me of the dangers of committing to my first love
too seriously and too early, as she had done. But for very simple factual
reasons, I had to make her terribly unhappy by leaving her life, as gradually
and as gently as I could.
Despite
Ingrid’s warnings not to commit to my first love too early and too seriously,
my commitment to Gisela, and hers to me, grew and solidified during 1947 in an
overwhelming way. We found each other again as I never had expected, and I still
do not quite understand today.
I read that line, "I still
do not quite understand today," over and over, realizing two things: One, perhaps Gisela, not my mother, was the "one true love" of Dad's life. And two, if that's true, then what does it mean for my existence? This kind of existential thinking can drive one crazy!
With all my work -- mornings at Interpreters’
school, afternoons at Bauer Kompressoren
-- I wrote her almost daily, and she wrote to me as often, although our letters
took anywhere from three to 30 days to reach their recipient, probably because
they had to go through Occupation Force censors. My longing for her occupied me each day, and
for many long nights. It was pure torture, but the absence made our hearts grow
fonder, and we committed ourselves to each other in more serious terms, in
total chastity until we would be “old enough and mature enough,” and had
finished our education - she as a teacher, I as an engineer… or whatever.
But would
she wait? Could she wait? As a virgin? The principal of the school where she taught
had his eyes on her and he applied a great deal of pressure on her to become
his mistress, his wife. Gisela described the details of his desperation for a
relationship with her, yet, she said, she resisted him for two reasons: one,
she really wanted to wait for me, and two, he was too old. Forty years old! Ancient!
She was not about to give into his desires for her “this late in his life”! But
she felt so sorry for the old, lonely man -- what to do?? But then, when he finally had realized the
“tremendous” difference in age between 20 and 40, and he started talking to her
about school, meetings, and union matters, she wasn’t interested. Ah, women! Ah,
men! Finally, after having pursued Gisela for a year, he got married to someone
else, and Gisela was free from the guilty feelings and glad that she had
resisted him.
Meanwhile,
I continued to send her and her family little packages filled with cheese,
chocolate, and sausages, just as Rainer had brought his Western treasures to us
in the Russian Zone in late 1945.
In 1947, it
was still possible to travel between Russian and Western occupation zones, although
a permit was required for each trip. I traveled to Chemnitz and Berlin a few
times that year, sometimes with Rainer and sometimes alone. The reason was ostensibly
to retrieve items we left behind in 1945, or to handle inheritance matters --
but in reality it was to see Gisela, and a time or two even Nora in Berlin. Rainer
was divorcing Renate, and he took up with Inge Künstner, on the surface a
better and classier mate for him. At the end of 1947, the trips had to stop
altogether because, as a result of the bitter London Conference, the Iron Curtain
descended upon Europe. Now the borders between East and West closed
definitively. The prospect of ever seeing each other became practically nil,
and any hope of having her come to the West disappeared.
Fast
forward to 1985: Gisela married before I did in 1951, became widowed (I
believe), and her second marriage ended in divorce. She never had children. She
maintained her dreamy, idealistic, unworldly personality all her life. She
remained best friends with her childhood neighbor, my cousin Gaby. In 1985,
when Gisela was killed by a collision with a bicyclist, Gaby told me: “Na die
hat dich über alles geliebt, ihr ganzes Leben lang![1]”
In Winter,
the engineering program started in earnest, so after absolving my half-year of improvising
plumbing and stoking crushed coal, I got to get my feet wet with serious study
by taking a whole semester of non-engineering courses, without which one could
not graduate. So why not get them out of the way first? Of the 14 units I took, half were things like
Administrative Law, Patent Basics, and Goethe’s “Faust”, but I also took
courses in drawing and Descriptive Geometry.
At the
Technical University in München I befriended Hans
Holzhausen, an upcoming Electronics Engineer, and we became a good friend for
life. His mother, known to us all as “Muttchen,” semi adopted me. Both she and
Hans would play an important role throughout my “third life,” the college
years. And just as I was about to begin my fourth life, my move to America, they
moved to South Africa.
Maybe I’ll
write about my third life (college) and my “fourth life” (emigration and the
first years in America) some other time. It’s a whole other book!
My father did eventually write about his "other lives," beginning with his fourth life, and I will add those to this blog. But as far as I know, he never wrote in detail about the years 1948 to 1950. I asked him once why he skipped those years in his many memoirs, and his answer was that "it might upset your mother." I'm not sure exactly what that meant, but I suspect that it might have read like... well, like some of the swooning chapters of this book, but with a little (or a lot!) less romantic innocence.
Ewww.
