Of endings (war) – and beginnings (love)

Dear grandchildren,

Once again, my father’s words need very little commentary – and the commentary that I would leave would be along the lines of the childish and immature covering of my ears, insisting “I can’t heaaar you, Dad!” 

Because in this excerpt, my father explores the sensual pleasures of newfound love.

The war was coming to a close and Thomas’ future was wide open. It must have been an amazing time – exhilarating for a variety of reasons, terrifying for even more reasons, and hopeful above all else. 

Here are Thomas’ words – and my commentary where I just can’t help myself.

The room was a mess. It was only a small attic room, probably a former supply room for the restaurant below. There were two beds, a few boxes, and a chair. The small dormer window was open to let in the breath of spring air - cold, but clean and fragrant. This room would be my home for the next few weeks.

Dr. Jaeger had arranged this hideaway months in advance. It was a place to hide when the steamroller of war would lumber across Germany. Dr. Jaeger had moved here as the two fronts started to approach each other in the center of the country, and he brought with him his extended family - his former nurse with their son Ben, his present wife and their daughter Nora, and his present mistress. He had also taken along a selected group of his friends: my uncle and aunt Buddecke with daughter Gaby and my sister Ulli, and five or six other families. They filled up most of the rooms in this plain little Gasthaus in a dreamy little hamlet called Wernsdorf, lost somewhere in the forested Erzgebirge hills that formed the border between Saxony and Czechoslovakia.

It was an idyllically peaceful setting, and had it not been for the solitary radio — the only link to the world outside — nobody would have guessed that the rest of Germany was shaking in the last convulsions of defeat. There was no evidence of an army, and the sole resident Nazi had long ago vanished, probably to a hideout of his own, so it was now relatively safe to be here. Dr. Jaeger and his handful of dissident friends did not need to fear that some Nazi fanatic would shoot them under the cover of martial law that was now the only law of the land. After all, hadn’t Goebbels vowed that they would slam the door behind them if they ever had to go? The doors were slamming all over in these final frantic days, in the cities, in the concentration camps, in the pitiful remnants of the German army. But not here in Wernsdorf. In fact, the feeling that one could speak without fear of informers, within an enclave of friends, was exhilarating, with the tingle of doing something forbidden and dangerous.

(Wernsdorf today. Can’t you just picture the little farmhouse right here?)

One evening, with much pathos, the announcement came over the radio that Hitler had married Eva Braun. Hitler — married? Married whom? No one recognized her name. We all looked at each other, shaking our heads in disbelief, and then a snicker rose up, a quip, an obscene comment, growing into a roar, a liberating, releasing roar, not so much over the news as over the tragicomic situation, but more the very ability to laugh openly about it. It was the hysterical laughter of someone who had just come out of great pain: mindless, with abandon, the tears of an old pain mixing with the tears of newly found relief.

But it wasn’t over yet. The next big question was, which colossus will get here first, the Russian one from the east, or the American one from the west? The radio news, of course, was unreliable and many days behind the actual events - mere propaganda, sugar pills for a lost and despondent population.

The big news on the radio came during the night of May first after a build-up of rousing marching music that lasted for several hours, then some Wagner (you knew something big was coming when Wagner was played), then snatches of Brahms at his most pompous, and finally Bruckner’s seventh symphony. And then, there it was: the Führer and Eva Braun had brought the final heroic sacrifice for the Third Reich and had met the hero’s death fighting Bolshevism.

This time there was no jubilant reaction, only fury. The bastard was escaping justice! Outrage mixed with frustration, and these people who prided themselves on being cultured and above base emotions like revenge, could not hide their anger at the criminal who had taken the easy way out, who now could not be made to face the world and answer to all of humanity.

“The bastard was escaping justice!” Remind you of anyone? Why is it that the evilest of men – Hitler… Trump – manage to evade justice? Hitler took himself out. Trump continues to be a thorn in the side of American democracy, still helped by his party, still evading justice. If only he’d… oh, never mind.

Still, it was the signal for Dr. Jaeger to break out a bottle, with a solemn flourish, a bottle of the very finest old late harvest wine he had saved for years and brought up here for just this celebration.

There was only a lonely candle on the small round table in this attic. Occasionally, we could hear the rumbling of guns, not so far away now, and conversation would stop for a few moments, until it died away altogether. Then a cynical remark penetrated the silence, flashing like a grotesque mask in the darkness. But no one was able to break the tenseness of the atmosphere.

Suddenly, Dr. Jaeger hit the tabletop with his flat hand.

“I’ve got it”, he said, “Here’s what we do: from tomorrow on, this place is going to be a VD Hospital!”

“What??”

It took a minute or two, but once we understood this ingenious scheme there was no stopping the masquerade. Dr. Jaeger, discovering in himself the gift of stage direction, distributed the roles: he and Nora’s mother, being actual doctors, would play the doctors. All girls and women of rape-able age would be the VD patients, and the men would orderlies and cooks.

“All right now, these four rooms are the wards,” directed Dr. Jaeger. Up went the beds, all in a row. “This is the examination room… put the china cabinet here… take the china out… put in all the medical instruments you can find. Good… now some medicine bottles, too. It looks almost real!”

Dr. Jaeger just loved his new role.

“Nora, use my bed sheet to sew a bunch of big Red-Cross flags to hang outside.”

“Thomas, make a large sign.” So I did.

“Now let’s hope the Russians understand at least one or the other!”

We worked with enthusiasm, and in her hurry to sew the flags, Nora pricked her finger with the sewing needle. “That means I’ll get kissed the same day”, she said, and I wondered whether she had just made up this choice piece of folklore. Since it was only a few minutes before midnight, I didn’t have much time to guess, so I decided that it must be true and saw to it that the prophesy be fulfilled. Nora promptly managed to prick herself again.

The metamorphosis took all night. By morning, the village Gasthaus was, for all but professional observers, a VD Clinic.

Three days went by. No electricity, no radio, no news. Not even false news. News traveled on foot now. Refugees, trickling by in a generally westerly direction on the small country road, carried their own kind of news - rumors, fears, panic, or resignation. They were moving away from the sound of guns, wherever that was. “They’ll be here in the morning,” they said.

“Who?”

“Russians, Tartars, Mongols. They rape the women and torture the men. They burn everything they can’t carry.”

A German soldier on a motorcycle stopped to ask if anyone had seen soldiers. The Americans, he said, had taken Chemnitz yesterday, had just rolled in without firing a shot. No one bothered to defend that pile of rubble.

The soldier roared off, slowed, then returned. He was young, not more than a year older than I was, and spoke with an Austrian dialect. His uniform was muddy, and a layer of caked dust accentuated the lines of sleeplessness in his face.

“You sure you haven’t seen any Russians? No German soldiers either?”

“No, only a few lost refugees. No uniforms of any kind.”

For a few moments he rocked back and forth on the seat of his motorcycle. Then he reached forward, turned off the engine, sat the heavy machine on its stand, and slowly, deliberately, with the tip of his bayonet, started taking off the insignia from his uniform and dropped them on the ground.

“So, there,” he finally said, breaking into a broad grin, “That’s that. He pointed to his rifle and pistol. “And if you guys don’t mind, I’ll get rid of these and I’ll stick around here somewhere until it’s over.”

“Now that takes courage!” I said to Nora. “How does he know we aren’t Gestapo?”

“You sure look like it!” Nora laughed, and ruffled my hair.

The newly converted Austrian civilian swung on his motorcycle and disappeared around the bend in the road. An hour later he came back, this time on foot.

“I left the bike in the forest, too. Didn’t want to get you people into trouble.”

With that he turned toward an empty barn across the street, collapsed in a pile of straw, and fell asleep.

He slept all day, all night, and most of the next day.

Late that afternoon, with the sun already behind the gable of the barn, there was a rumble, a squeaking, a clanking of heavy metal and motor noises. I ran to Nora’s room — the only window facing out to the street — and there it came: a monster, a lumbering box, soldiers around it with automatic pistols at the ready, and on top of the tank two men, black men, two giants with flashing white teeth.

“Americans!” I whispered to Nora, as though anybody could hear me. I couldn’t speak louder, as my heart was beating in my throat. “Those are no Russians! Look, it says ‘US ARMY’ right there on the tank! Do they ever look fierce. But they made it first — no Russians for us!”

They looked fierce and determined, all right. Without slowing down, they had their eyes everywhere, on the inn, on the barn, ahead, right, left, but they didn’t stop. They didn’t shoot; they just kept going. There was no shouting, no sound other than the rumble of the tank tracks, and as it went by under the window Nora spotted a bunch of wilted flowers on the back of the tank, caught between two plates of armor.

They left as quickly as they had arrived. There was no big victorious army behind them, no fanfares, no columns of prisoners, nothing. All night, the adults at the inn waited in shifts, listening, whispering, guessing. Not a sound, not even the sounds of distant artillery anymore. There was only an eerie, pregnant silence all around.

Ben was with the people below. Nora and I were upstairs in Nora’s room in the dark, without even a candle. We talked about the day, and from time to time listened out into the night. More and more, our conversation turned to ourselves, to each other, to our dreams, to the future, and as the night wore on, the excitement of the day gave way to a new, much more hidden and intimate tension, to an even more unknown and uncertain excitement, more unsettling than the experience of the defeat of a nation, more mysterious than the patrol of enemy’ troops that had come and disappeared. It was an excitement that neither Nora nor I had felt before, and it made our heartbeats race faster than even the sight of the first American tank. It was a feeling we had heard about, wondered about, had secretly feared and longed for, even more than we had wondered about, feared, and longed for the end of the war.

(Nora, Thomas’ first love. No, not my mother!)

As we talked, I had been sitting in an easy chair across the small room. Nora had been curled up on her bed, her legs drawn up, and a blanket around her shoulders. I was contemplating a bold move, not unlike, it seemed to me, the daring of the lonely American patrol that had explored the vacuum of the no-man’s land earlier in the day. The room had gotten cold. I got up to put another piece of wood in the small stove in the corner, but it wouldn’t catch, possibly because it was still wet from the winter’s melting snow, or maybe because I didn’t really want it to burn. In exasperation, or rather in anticipation of my daring, I took a deep breath and said, in as nonchalant a voice as I could muster, “I’ll never get this to burn — let me share your blanket until it gets warmer, would you?”

“Sure,” said Nora, “Come on over. ‘In my country nobody must be cold or hungry.’ Isn’t that what the Führer himself said? Well, he’s gone, so we’d better start thinking small. No one should be cold in my room!”

No one was cold in that attic room any more during that spring night of 1945. How soft her body felt, sitting close to me in the dark, how much warmth it radiated! I’d sat that close to a girl a few times before, but it had never been like this. There was something more than animal warmth coming from this body. There was a glow, an electricity flowing where our arms, our hips, and our feet touched. Oh, if one could have this forever! No longer did we speak of the past. We spoke of the future, of dreams, of peace, of plans. Nora spoke of the family and the children she was going to have, her own babies and her young patients when she would be a pediatrician ten years from now. I spoke of the first house I was going to build — my very own — and of being an architect ten years from now. And before the fire in the wood stove had burned down completely, our dreams had crossed, had drifted and crossed again, had linked and touched and merged until the words faded away, until we reached for each other in long silences and long kisses.

“This must be our very own secret,” I whispered, “And we must tell nobody yet that we are engaged. Let’s never forget this sixth of May 1945 as long as we live!”

He could hear Nora smile through the dark and she kissed him on the nose. “Except that Mummy knew it long before you or I did! She was only joking yesterday, but she did say it: you’d make a fine son-in-law for her.”

For the first time in my life I knew how soft a woman’s breast was, how firm and how live and how exciting. We promised to wait for each other until we would be ready, whenever that might be.

“Du bist noch so jung!”^[1] Nora said.

And as the sky in the small dormer window turned from black to gray to pink to blue, two tired children, who suddenly felt very grown-up and superior and faintly naughty, and happier and more jubilant than they had ever felt before, were leaning out the window, waving and smiling at the Russian soldiers who were marching by in an endless, noisy procession, wave after wave.

---

^[1] “You are still so young!’

Alone, scared, and brave at the end of WWII

Dear grandchildren,

This post elicits so many emotions for me!

I can’t help but be maternal and really feel for poor 16-year-old Thomas, who is now alone and scared, trying only to stay alive. He must have felt so alone!

I also feel a HUGE amount of admiration for 16-year-old Thomas, as he pulled himself up and did what was necessary to survive. He was no longer a boy, but a man, with very adult responsibilities.

I have no photos for this post, but I promise, your imagination will create your own powerful visuals.

Here are your great-grandfather’s words:

For a fleeting moment I considered going underground, just disappearing. After all, it would only be for a few weeks until the war would be over, and I could re-surface. But I dismissed the thought almost instantly. For one thing, “one doesn’t do that,” as it would have run counter to the integrity my father always insisted on. For another, it would have been unwise since Nazi efficiency, coupled with the powerful and efficient German bureaucratic machinery, was still in place, and martial law was in effect. If I overstayed the time of my documented leave allowance, which had been indicated on my identification papers, and if I were caught, I would probably be shot, while if I returned to the “legitimacy” of my proper station in Meissen, I would not be guilty of any transgression, and would be safer.

So I returned to Meissen.

Even before I walked from the train station to the warehouse, I sent a telegram to Rainer at his camp, not knowing if it would ever reach him, but I thought I should try anyway. “HOUSE DESTROYED STOP BE PREPARED FOR THE WORST STOP THOMAS.”

Telegrams have been gone for a long time, replaced by the immediate communication of texts. Apparently, telegram machines couldn’t use punctuation, so the punctuation had to be spelled out – much like you’d dictate a text today, using the same sort of language, but naming the desired punctuation: “House destroyed, period. Be prepared for the worse, comma, Thomas.

It turned out that my choice of words was not specific enough. When the telegram finally reached Rainer, he applied for a leave from camp because of the death of his father. His Lagerkommandant^[1] wanted something more specific. “So your house is destroyed. Many houses are destroyed these days. Request denied.”

There wasn’t much I could do in Meissen but wait for the end of the war to arrive, probably in the form of Russian or American tanks. The warehouse didn’t have much work or material left and contact with the units it was supposed to supply had pretty much gone silent anyway. Rainer had been notified, Ulli was apparently safe in Wernsdorf with our uncle’s family, and all my worldly possessions -- except for what I had in my rucksack and a cardboard box -- had been destroyed, so I had time to make a wooden cross for my father’s grave with the help of Horst the carpenter. I even found an old sign painter who painted my father’s name on it.

It was night. Neither I nor Heinz nor Horst could sleep. We were listening for the distant sound of heavy artillery. The military front — what was left of an organized front — was that close now. We were agonizing over what had happened, and what was to happen. What would tomorrow be like?

How could we hide? Could we just run away?

Where? And why?

There was a knock at the door. It was only Herr Uckel.

His face was gray, and he was shaking so badly that he had to whisper.

“I am leaving. At daybreak I’ll head for Berlin. I don’t care what you do. Take what you need from the warehouse. You are free and on your own. Don’t get caught. Good luck.”

Horst and Heinz decided to stay, to hide out and let the wave roll over them when it came. I packed the few things I had into my cardboard box and stored it in the warehouse basement. In the stockroom, I packed my rucksack full of cigarettes to have some currency for trading, packed some soup mix, some sugar, a new pair of socks, some crackers, and a bottle of cognac. Then I went to the warehouse office and tore the triangle of Saxony out of the map of Germany that was on the wall.

I lay down on my bunk and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. At four o’clock I put on my rucksack and left, heading southwest toward Wernsdorf, where I hoped to find my sister, my aunt and uncle, and Gisela’s family.

At daybreak, Meissen was behind me and I was on a road. Luckily, I had a small compass and a map that showed the names of the small villages I’d pass through on my way to Wernsdorf. I could find out where I was only by asking; as all signs with town names and all direction signs had been removed in the naïve hope that the enemy army would not know where it was.

By mid-morning I encountered a small group of German soldiers who were heading in the same direction as I. There was no reason to fear them for more than a brief moment, as they were obviously in retreat and without a leader. Their packs were loaded on a horse-drawn farm cart and I joined them for a few kilometers, my own pack dangling from the wagon. No one talked. There were no questions and no answers. Everyone was exhausted and we all seemed to know that the less said, the better.

It was good not to have to carry the rucksack for a while, but I was so tired I almost fell asleep walking next to the cart. When we left the forest through which we had been walking, I stayed behind, lay down in a ditch at the edge of the forest and dozed off.

The ra-tat-tat-tat of machine gun fire woke me up.

I shot up and saw a small plane flying directly toward me, low over the very road I had just left. I couldn’t see what its target was, but it must not have been very important. The plane disappeared over the forest and didn’t come back. Probably just a horse-drawn farm cart and a few weary soldiers....

After that close call I tried to stay away from all roads, using only farm paths or walking across fields, through forests, and over meadows in order to avoid contact with people — any people, of either side. I knew that military patrols were looking for deserters, who were shot on the spot, or for anybody capable of fighting who would be inducted right then and there into the Volkssturm, a ragged army of civilians, old men and young boys, without equipment other than a few rifles and bazookas. I had no papers. I was barely old enough to be in the army. If questioned, I could give no plausible explanation of where I came from or where I was going. The prospect of being forced to fight was hardly any more pleasant than of being shot.

In the afternoon I could no longer hear the artillery fire. This could mean one of three things: 1.) the resistance had collapsed altogether and there was no more shooting, 2.) I was moving faster than the front, or 3.) the Elbe river had momentarily stopped the advance of the Russians. The bridge in Meissen has probably been blown up by now, I thought, as it had already been wired with explosives when I crossed it in the morning. The last thing I wanted to do was get caught in the middle of a battle, so I kept going.

I walked until it was dark and I could no longer see the path in front of my feet. It was too cold and too wet to sleep outdoors so I knocked on the door of a farmhouse and asked to stay overnight. The peasants did not hesitate for a moment to take me in. They even shared their evening meal with me, and I shared my cognac, something they’d never had. Maybe they felt sorry for me, or maybe it was the cognac, but they went out of their way to make me comfortable. Since they had no extra bed, they put some chairs together in the kitchen, placed pillows on the seats for a bed, and gave me a thick feather comforter as a blanket.

I had planned to leave at dawn, but the farmer’s wife was up before I was. She was boiling an egg, a real fresh farm egg for breakfast. I hadn’t had an egg for a long, long time!

Just as I left the farmhouse, I saw a military patrol on the road leading to the village, the men standing around an army vehicle trying to keep warm. Very quickly, I turned around and walked toward the forest behind the farm, making a wide circle around the village.

For two more days I navigated by sun and compass alone, hardly ever seeing a person, except for another drifter like me who said he had lost contact with his army unit. Under a bridge abutment, which provided a refuge from a sudden driving snowstorm, we together finished off what was left of the cognac, and when it was gone the lost soldier decided that he might as well not even bother any more try finding his unit, and stayed right there under the bridge for who knows how long.

I went on, my pack a little lighter.

---

^[1] Camp Commander

And now–at sixteen and surrounded by war–Thomas is alone

Dear grandchildren,

Remember as you read this that Thomas was just sixteen-years-old as all this was happening. His mother, the family’s protection, had died suddenly the year before, leaving her Jewish husband and her half-Jewish children alone and vulnerable.  Rainer, Thomas’ older brother, was far away in Munich and his younger sister now lived with relatives. There was no one to dig Carl’s grave except for his young son, Thomas.

When my kids – your parents – were sixteen, they were going to the Junior Prom and getting their drivers licenses. When I was sixteen, I was enjoying the same typically American rites of passage.

But when my father, was sixteen… well, this.

It helped me to remember this when I questioned why my father was so different from all the other fathers I knew.

Once again, very few words from me are needed. Thomas’ story stands on its own:

The old handyman and his horse must have been about the same age, and the rickety wooden cart might have been older than them both. It had no sides, just a well-worn flat wooden bed, four creaking wheels, a seat with a torn blanket, and a holder for the whip, which was essentially useless as it dangled lazily over the horse, who made slow, tired, deliberate steps. Not because he knew that this was a funeral and that his load was a body, but because he just could go no faster.

I did not listen much to the old man’s occasional sighs of how bad the times were, or to his long-drawn-out description of his arthritis. I was working on thoughts of my own. The only dead body I’d seen was that of our beloved Rector Meltzer lying serenely in state. I’d just extricated my father’s lifeless body from the gap between the central furnace and the basement floor, and dragged it inch by inch over the pile of coal and through the small basement window.

I’d enlisted the help of Dr. Koenig, the dentist from up the street, whose house was still standing. It was hard work for the three of us, not only because the old handyman was of little help, but because it had cost me a tremendous amount of self-control to actually touch my father’s body. I was careful to touch only his clothing — a gray suit, of course, complete with vest and diamond tie pin.

(My father bequeathed the diamond tie pin, which had later been made into a ring, to my son, Peter. You can read about it HERE.)

“Try not to touch the skin,” Dr. Koenig warned me, “It can give you the worst kind of infection. See how open his hands are? He did not suffer much pain; he must have died instantly from the pressure of the explosion.”

I tried to believe it. Except for a broken leg there was no visible injury, no blood, and Father’s face was peaceful, with the cracked frameless glasses still in place.

The cart had to skirt the impassable downtown area. It was a long trek back to the Adelsberg cemetery. The March afternoon was beautiful, almost balmy, its peace and beauty in macabre contrast to the wasteland through which we were riding.

The sun was about to set when we arrived at the church. The pastor was waiting. Gisela was there with her family. The service consisted of a very few words.

That night, for the first time, I could cry. I cried myself to sleep, with tears of fear, helplessness, and anger at being confronted with the merciless injustice and brutality of war. It was an atrociously absurd irony: the man who had spent twelve years defending himself and his family from a hostile government, the man who had suffered immeasurably but had maintained his mental balance and kept his optimism alive for the day the Allied victory would liberate him -- that man had been killed by a bomb from those very Allies!

And deeper down there was the unsolvable question about this war, or any other war: why did my father, Carl, the Jew, the peaceful art collector, the Anglophile, the incurably romantic Feingeist^[1] who had survived a dozen years of political adversity and artful dodging — why did this man have to be killed, three weeks before the end of the war, by a bomb from an American airplane, released maybe by some scared but adventurous farm hand from Greenville, Kansas? And why did the boy from Greenville get a medal for his bravery of pulling the lever just at the right moment? Did he, when he was back on the farm, ever consider that in one second “over there” he killed more people than live in all of Greenville? Did he ever think that he destroyed, with that pull of the lever, more of human culture than will ever touch him in his lifetime? Did he? Could he?

I walked back to where my childhood home had once stood majestically at the corner, behind the iron gates, set back from the road.

There was nothing left, just nothing at all. I poked through the ashes and the rubble and found only chunks of bricks, brittle and fired for a second time, along with amorphous shapes of melted glass, like big marbles that a giant fist had squeezed through its fingers. Some were just clear glass melted together with ash and cinders, while others were marbled with veins of color. What had they been? The glass from the clock in the dining room which had been the Heumanns’ wedding present from my grandfather? No, the dining room had been over there. The carafe of Czechoslovakian crystal that always had red Vermouth in it? It had always showed such rich rainbow colors when one held it in the sunlight. I lifted the chunk of glass into the sun: there were no rainbow colors, only bits and pieces of ambers, ragged and cold. I threw it against a basement wall, but it did not break.

I dug and poked and kicked aside chunks of bricks and bent pieces of pipe. Could it really be that nothing was left? Nothing? The foot treadle from my mother’s sewing machine. A beheaded portion of a Meissen figurine that had always been kept under a glass bell to keep it from getting dusty. How absurd, how insanely comical it was. A saucer, finely hand-painted and almost intact. It sailed through the air as I flung it aside. This one did break.

In the basement there was still a small pile of potatoes with white sprouts growing wildly in all directions. I was hungry, I just realized, so I took two of the potatoes to the rubble pile in the front yard and built a fire pit out of bricks, gathered up pieces of splintered wood (which floor had this one been?) and roasted the potatoes. They were delicious, though they were so burned that they looked much like big balls of molten glass around me.

While I was eating I noticed a hexagonal stick, about a foot long, sticking up through the rubble. I knew it was one of the 900,000 incendiary bombs that had rained down during the night of hell in Chemnitz, March 5, 1945. I picked it up and threw it as far as I could. It sailed through the opening that had been the window of the Queen-Anne-Room and down into the cavern of the collapsed basement. It exploded sharply and immediately started spewing out hissing daggers of flames and sparks in all directions. It could find nothing left to ignite.

I kept searching further for something, just anything useful or meaningful or memorable. In the garage below the gardener’s house, my chemical lab remained unscathed. After the big flood in the attic, the lab had been banished to the garage for fear that I might start a fire in the house. I told you, Father, it couldn’t ever start a fire. It wouldn’t even burn when everything around it did!

The ceiling over the wine cellar had not collapsed completely, but what was left of it was twisted and sagging, piled high with debris. I did not dare venture below. There was still a rack with wine bottles that had been collecting their own dust over the years, not in one night. Later that day, an old man came by, dressed in not much more than rags. He said he was a neighbor, who had known Herr Konsul well, but I did not recognize him. He had noticed, he said, that there were some bottles of wine still there, and might he take one or two of them, please?

I wandered around aimlessly, dulled, unbelieving, yet with a strange feeling of adventure, with the sense of relief that I had survived once more. As I stumbled around under the area where the children’s playroom window had once been, I saw something I recognized immediately: “Thomasbäumchen,” a small almond tree that my godfather had planted in the hour when I was born, not much taller than I was now.

Carefully, one by one, I removed the bricks that had bent and torn it, and when I was done, the tree with its pink buds and its tender leaves looked almost as proud as I did.

(When Peter was born, we also planted an almond tree. It has moved with us every time, and someday, hopefully, it will grace Peter’s yard.)

And as thankful.

---

^[1] literally : “fine mind” - a sophisticated, cultured, highly refined person, naïve in a way and unworldly

“I, the living, must bury my father, the dead.”

Dear grandchildren,

This story gets me every time.

I’ll add some of my own words, but my father’s words are plenty powerful enough. I’ll add some photos, but the pictures in your mind as you read this will likely be plenty powerful enough.

The days my father describes here shaped his life and formed the man he was to become like no other experience he’d had, or was yet to have.

As you read this, remember that Thomas was not yet even sixteen-and-a half years-old.

Here are his words:

Horst Reiszmann and I had been on our way for a good eighteen hours now, making our way across Saxony, not by the normal railroad connection through Dresden, but by small spur lines, and by hitchhiking, more than 80 kilometers in all. Herr Uckel, kind and considerate Boss Uckel, had sent us on our way to look after our families and homes in Chemnitz. By late evening the cabbage truck that picked us up had made it to the outskirts of town, to a point where the road was made impassable by a gaping bomb crater. We were on our own now, and soon parted company, each heading in the direction of his own home.

I was tired and my feet were sore, but I could not stop. Home was so close now and I knew I’d get there in the dark.

I was still three miles from home when I saw the first completely destroyed house. Its brick walls were intact, but the inside was burned out. It had likely not been hit by explosives, but had been set on fire by flying cinders. The closer I got to town, the more ruins I encountered -- first singly, then in clusters, until I was surrounded by entire blocks of destroyed homes.

There was no moon, no stars, and of course no electric light at all. A flashlight once in a while, a match, a candle, visible through a crack in a basement door. There were hardly any people. Where was everyone? Hidden? Dead? Fled? To where?

The photos in this post (except for the one of the Heumann’s destroyed house) are from this book which was gifted to my father by Tilo Richter, author and specialist on Chemnitz history.

In the areas where apartment houses were lining both sides of the street, I walked very gingerly, one step at a time, in the middle of the street and as far away as possible from the sidewalks which were littered with debris, sometimes piled high with the remains of a collapsed wall. I had to watch for the bomb craters in the middle of the street, even the ones that had already been filled in again with the rubble from the houses around them.

I was now approaching familiar territory, my own neighborhood where the houses were further apart, surrounded by once well-tended gardens. Here there was no rubble in the streets, as the houses stood too far back. Some were still standing unscathed and some looked completely intact from one side, but looking back against the night sky, the other side presented the ragged silhouette of a house completely torn apart. Some homes had completely disappeared, victims of direct hits by high-explosive bombs, erased to nothingness, an entire brick house collapsed neatly upon itself and into its basement, almost level with the ground around it. ‘Some bodies in these houses will never be found,’ I thought, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was surrounded on all sides not only by ruins, but by graves.

My old school was still standing. There was some activity around it, hurried shadows moving back and forth, two men carrying a stretcher through the front portal, and I realized that my school had become a makeshift hospital. If the school was still standing, there was hope — it’s only an eight-minute walk home now. I wanted to go fast, my mind racing, but the fear of what I might find put lead weights on my feet. From here, I knew every step. There, just around the corner, would be the great white house with the fox terrier I’d made friends with. Each day on my way home from school, I’d reach through the iron gate to pet him. The gate had long ago been confiscated to be melted into tanks or battleships, or whatever. That house was gone. Then the Winkler’s house, our next-door neighbors - burned out, just empty walls.

I could almost see our house now.

Oh God, please!

Oh God, no. NO!

I felt myself stumbling and stopped myself against a rock wall. As I fell, the wooden cigarette case in my chest pocket cracked and splintered. Maybe only the top floor was gone, I thought. Maybe. But no, there was no bedroom window, no dressing room balcony. Where the children’s room had been, I could see only sky. There was only an empty, hollow, gaping space. My home now consisted of two walls, two façades, a shapeless mass in the night.

I went around the corner to the front entrance. The bricks from this wall had spilled all the way to the street, but the two rock gate posts were still standing. I lit a match, looking for some kind of note. There was a makeshift sign leaning against the rubble by what had been the front porch, with my uncle’s address in Adelsberg scribbled in handwriting that I did not recognize. But the note said nothing, nothing at all, about my father.

Adelsberg is clear across town, far on the other side. To get there, I’d have to go through downtown. I set off, walking down our street, Reichsstrasse, where every single house had been destroyed. Some of the chestnut trees were still standing, while others had only a few branches left or were decapitated altogether. I made my way past the public air raid shelter, its heavy steel door hanging precariously by one hinge. I later learned that it had been hit by a large bomb, a direct hit, and that everyone who had taken cover there had died.

Everyone. Two hundred people, in one insane moment.

Liesbeth, our beloved household helper, was one of them. At every alert, she had grabbed her small cardboard suitcase, and her bony frame had hobbled down the street to the safety of the underground bunker. This time, there was no safety. 

(Look at the date. 1948, and the city was still in ruins.)

In years past, the shelter had been a storage cellar for a beer brewery. It was located under the garden belonging to my friend Fritz. He and I had often ventured down into it through a vertical air shaft and had pretended we were exploring strange caves in strange lands. Now its armor was crumpled, its dark passageways torn open and collapsed. Now it was a cave more eerie than the fantasies in an adventurous boy’s mind.

The stench became stronger. It was the acrid smell of smoldering wood mixed with drizzle and blood, of explosives and excrement, and terror. The closer I came to the center of town, the more noxious it became, and I had to place my handkerchief in front of my mouth and nose.

It was five days since the fateful night, and small fires were still flickering in the dark. A red glow in a basement here, a burning beam protruding from a wall there, suddenly spewing small yellow flames and red sparks as though it were angry that it, and it alone, had been left behind.

(Again, look at the date! Imagine the immediacy of what Thomas describes.)

An old man stood in a doorway leading to the basement of a house that was burned out to the first floor. The tenement building was old and ugly, in the part of town where the factory workers lived, and where I was never allowed to play.

“How is it further south?” I asked him. “As bad as here?”

“Worse. Poststrasse is all gone, not one stone left on the other. No way can you get through there at night.”

“But I have to get to Adelsberg.”

“Not now you don’t. Come on inside and stay here until it gets light, then you can go.”

Inside, I collapsed into a torn overstuffed chair, yawned, and immediately fell asleep.

After just an hour of near-unconsciousness, I awoke. I tried to find a position between the protruding springs and the worn-through padding of the wooden armrest so I’d have a chance of not waking up hopelessly distorted and aching.

But that was not what kept me awake. Images of the long day persisted in an endless loop in my mind, mixed and dreamlike, distorted with fears of the future and with thoughts I did not dare think. What if father was hurt? Would I be allowed to take care of him? I knew it was possible, even likely, from what I had been able to see of the ruin of the house… but I dismissed the thought before it could take hold. It was just not possible.

Father would be alright, and the war would soon be over.

And yet, the note at the house had not been in my father’s handwriting.

I stared into the darkness. Every time I closed my eyes there was a burning pain that shot up like a breaking wave and subsided. I wished I could cry to wash away the smoke. But I could not cry. I could barely think, or feel any emotion at all. I only saw pictures come and go, the truck full of cabbage heads that gave us a ride, the crazy burning beam sticking out of the wall, the pudgy drawn face of Mr. Uckel in the door frame, the white chest at the foot of my bed at home.

I opened my eyes, wide and wild, but I did not move. I must have been dozing off, dreaming. There was no white chest, no bed, no ceiling with the big brown blotches that had been the result of the mishap in our chemistry lab in the attic above. I almost smiled into the dark at the irony -- the day when a water hose had created a veritable flood in the attic, a flood that ruined the ceilings in the floor below. What of it now?

It was no use. As soon as I could see faint light through the cracks in the boards that had been nailed over the empty window frame, I put boots on my swollen feet, left a couple of cigarettes on the table, and stole outside.

In the faint daylight, the scene was indeed worse than I had expected. Practically every house was either burned out to a shell with gaping window holes or ripped apart into a jagged shape of fire-blackened walls. The streets were piled high with broken bricks, sections of walls, twisted pieces of pipes, and occasionally fragments of furniture.

In some places, the debris was piled so high that no pavement was visible. In other areas, two or three bombs must have hit in the same spot and had laid the guts of the street open. It looked like a nightmarish satire of the cross section of a city street in a grade school textbook -- the brick tunnel of the sewer far down on the bottom, above it the water and gas lines, then the telephone cables, and on top, the streetcar tracks embedded in the cobblestone pavement.

Even eerier were some of the houses that had escaped the fire, or where only one wall had fallen away, exposing three or four stories of habitats. Some looked almost intact with furniture in place, pictures on the walls, like a giant doll house. I felt intrusive looking at them, the bed, the bathtubs, people’s personal lives out in the open. The paraphernalia of the petite bourgeoisie -- the lovingly embroidered bedspread, meticulously sewn curtains of cheap flowery material, the good Sunday china still in the living room cabinet, and the family portrait on the wall, the picture of the oldest son in uniform and, of course, the picture of Hitler.

As the sun came up, the downtown area was behind me, and I had reached the hills outside of town. The sun, rising in a dirty sky beyond the city, was huge and dark red, but it was no longer the red of a spring sunrise with pink and salmon pastel colors. It was the sick blackened red of crusted blood, a color that described the smell of decaying flesh and smoldering cloth.

Adelsberg was completely untouched. By the time I reached Försterstraße, where my uncle’s house was, I was practically running. The anticipation was becoming unbearable now. My heart was pounding, my thoughts were racing. Out of breath, I reached the front door and knocked.

A strange woman answered the door.

“I’m . . . I’m Thomas,” I said, “Thomas Heumann. My uncle . . . you know, Herr Buddecke is my uncle. Where are they?”

“Oh, well, yes. They all went to Wernsdorf, I think. We just were assigned to this house. We were bombed out in town, lost everything, but we’re all alive, thank God.”

“But the Buddeckes? Are they all OK? Who went with them?”

“Well, let me see now. There was their little daughter, and the other little girl whose father was killed, poor thing . . .”

“Who’s the other girl? What’s her name?”

“I don’t know. She’s maybe twelve, blond pigtails, sweet girl, I think they said she is a niece…”

“That’s my sister.”

There was no more to be said.

The woman read immediately in my face what news she had just given me. She invited me inside. It was not an emotional moment for me. All night, without being really conscious of it, I had been preparing myself for this minute. And now it was true.

Now the only question that mattered was: what next?

There were no tears, no anger, no frustration, not even fear. In their place, at that moment, was only a survival instinct -- the knowledge that I, being alive and on my own, must now act. There was no immediate sense of loss, only the thought that I, the living, must bury my father, the dead.

I went next door to the Werners, Gisela’s family. They offered me their condolences and treated me with the odd, distant, and somewhat embarrassed awe that people have toward someone who has just seen death up-close. Gisela said nothing at all. Her grandmother was sobbing quietly, and only Frau Werner, a strong and outspoken woman with an exquisite sense for the practicalities of life, addressed the first order of business head-on.

“Your father’s body is still in the basement of your house. I’ve heard that everyone in the house was trying to crawl out because the basement was becoming a real death trap, the house above them was burning so badly. Your father was the last one to leave, and just then a bomb hit and collapsed half of the basement. Your father must have been killed by the blast. He never made it out into the open with the others.”

Frau Werner took me to the pastor of the small church in Adelsberg. Yes, certainly, he could perform the funeral service, and he would assign a plot in the graveyard, but there was nobody, absolutely nobody, to dig the grave.

“We have picks and shovels, though…”

It took me all afternoon and most of the next morning to dig my father’s grave.

Meanwhile, an old carpenter who knew both the Buddeckes and the Werners could be persuaded with a pack of cigarettes to make a coffin out of plain boards that were not good enough for construction.

(“Chemnitz warns Never Again a March 5, 1945.”)

Another Mystery: Why was Carl not on the Final Transport of Jews from Chemnitz (February, 1945)

Dearest grandchildren,

As I began this post, I looked in my photos folder and online for a photo I was sure I had – that of the fiery red sky over Dresden in the distance, over a hillside. I couldn’t find that photo anywhere. Turns out, it doesn't actually exist. It’s a vivid picture only in my own mind, formed when Dad described his experiences on the night of February 13 – 14, 1945.

The bombing of Dresden killed at least 25,000 people. That’s about twice the population of Gig Harbor, where we currently live and about the size of many larger suburbs of Seattle and San Francisco, where you live. It’s still quite unfathomable to me… but so much of the destruction of WWII is.

In this post, Thomas describes that horrible night in Dresden and prepares us for what was to come in Chemnitz. And he again brings up an irony that has impacted generations of our family – the fact that Carl wasn’t deported along with the remaining Jews in Chemnitz.

Here are your great grandfather’s words:

The next few months in Meissen were bearable, not because living was any easier, but because it was becoming obvious, despite all the propaganda to the contrary, that the war was lost and the days of Nazi rule were numbered.

There was a popular quip: “Enjoy the war — peace will be hell!”

I felt I was floating down an increasingly turbulent and treacherous river. No one knew who would survive and who would not, but there was no escape. I’d have to navigate through the rapids as best I could and keep my head — and protect it.

Meissen is a small town about 30 km down the Elbe river from Dresden, and its pride and claim to fame is the manufacture of the fine ancient porcelain known in the US as “Dresden China.” Since there was no other industry, Meissen was relatively safe from air attack, so much so that people would hardly bother to go to the shelter when there was an air raid alert.

One such alarm came on February 13, 1945, a bright wintery day. The “Air Status Report” (given by a system that used the electric power grid rather than the air waves, in order to not provide a radio beacon to the enemy) reported that large numbers of aircraft had entered the air space of Saxony.

It was a spectacular and awesome sight.

Wave after wave of heavy bombers flew overhead -- hundreds of them, in perfect formation, undisturbed by anyone. Their only logical destination was Dresden, the Baroque pride of all of Germany, the “Florence on the Elbe River,” as it was affectionately called. Now, in February 1945, Dresden was the hub for all traffic to and from the east, beyond which lay nothing but the Russian front line. Everyone knew that the city was completely jammed with refugees from Silesia -- hundreds of thousands of people with carts and babies and bundles who were fleeing west in endless treks ahead of the rapidly advancing Russians. At the same time, Dresden was the staging center for troops and materials going east, supplying what was left of the disintegrating German army.

In the afternoon of February 13^th, there could be no more doubt that Dresden was indeed the target. First, there was a column of smoke that rose up in the distance, growing thicker every hour. As night fell, the sky in the direction of Dresden turned color -- first a flickering yellow, then a dirty red, brighter and higher as the night went on. It was a firestorm feeding on itself, consuming everything in its path -- apartment houses, centuries-old churches, medieval books in museums, university laboratories... and ghetto houses filled with Jews.

Hell itself had come to this once proud and cultured city. Air raid sirens, not trumpets, had announced the Last Judgment, and it had come in the form of miles-wide carpets of bombs, incendiaries first, then a wave of explosives, then a wave of phosphorous that ignited anything it touched - roofs, wood, clothes, or flesh. By morning, the column of smoke stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, and the stench stretched 30 kilometers in every direction.

Three days later, on February 16, after serious air raids on Chemnitz, too, Father sent a cryptic message to Rainer and me: “Certainly, there will be many changes soon for both of you. Keep calm, because it all will all depend on the circumstances that are changing from day to day. One thing is clear: in times like these, every single person is on his own. We must try to stay in touch, especially if you are forced to make decisions on your own.”

I believe this was in reference to the last transport of remaining Jews from Chemnitz to Theresienstadt. The transport, according to research by Dr. Nitsche in 2009, consisted of 57 Jews still living in Chemnitz at this late date, just before the end of the war, namely:

• 20 Jews not in privileged mixed marriages, most of whom had no children;
• 26 Jews living in privileged mixed marriages
• 11 “Mischlinge classified as Jews^[1]”

Father was not among these deported Jews. Those Jews were transported to Theresienstadt Camp in Czechoslovakia under the most chaotic circumstances at a time when it was about to be liberated by the Red Army. Every single one of those 57 Jews survived the war!

To this day, I do not know why my father was not included in this last transport from Chemnitz. An expert on the Jewish Mischlinge, Beate Meyer in Hamburg, told me it probably was because Ulli (and I, ironically!) were underage -- yet more than half of the 26 Jews from “privileged” marriages had children under the age of 18.

Was it because my father was widowed? Not at all likely. In fact, my mother’s death would have made my father’s transport more likely, as he was officially no longer married to a non-Jewish wife so he was no longer considered “privileged.” The Gestapo was not known to consider such human reasons.

Did the Nazi Waldemar Ballerstedt have anything to do with protecting my father? Even Ballerstedt himself who, in a 1957 letter to Rainer, made every effort to tell us how he single-handedly protected our father, said no word about this. In fact, he doubted that any such late transport even happened.

Rainer was sure that our father had received an order from the Gestapo early in 1945 that, according to Father’s investigations, could only mean Theresienstadt. On February 21, 1945, Father wrote to Rainer: “On the question of my Dienstverpflichtung (“Work Duty Order”), I haven’t heard a thing in the past three weeks. With all reservations, I can assume that I don’t have to count on that in the VERY immediate future.”

So WHY?

Dad. We talked about this. I have my own theory as to why Carl was not deported. I’ve discussed it before, and we’ll discuss it again today.

Did Father literally buy his freedom from persecution with large sums of money? Very unlikely for the simple reason that it would have been an illegal act, an act of lowering himself to the moral level of the oppressor, and anybody who knew Konsul Heumann knew he would not do that. And anyway, Father simply wasn’t rich enough to buy much of anything, let alone his freedom, after the Nazis confiscated most of what he owned.

I agree that this is unlikely. If it were true, a lot of wealthy Jews would have survived the Holocaust. Nope – wealth just meant more for the Nazis. No way is this the case, Dad. I agree with you.

Did Carl Heumann, being a titular Vice Consul of neutral Portugal, somehow use diplomatic immunity? Would the Nazis have honored this paper status, allowing my father to escape persecution? My only guess in this regard is that the Nazis knew that they would need the good will of neutral nations like Portugal or Switzerland after the war ended. But my father’s life being spared to this end seems unlikely to me.

Hmmm… interesting theory. I think this is a possibility, but also unlikely. I think neither fame nor fortune mattered to the Nazis.

I still think the reason Carl was not deported is because he had a secret protectorate – and I think that person was Waldemar Ballerstedt! 

I do not know why my father was not included on the last transport from Chemnitz in February, 1945, and I probably never will. I only know this: his absence from this transport was the cause for the most absurd irony imaginable: if he had been on this transport, he, like all the fifty-seven others, would have been spared the agony of what was to come. Had my father been on this final transport, my life and the life of many others would have taken a very different turn.

This irony always causes me an existential crisis. These days, writing this blog, I almost feel that I know Carl, my Opa. But HAD he survived, I absolutely wouldn’t be alive. Even if my father had met my mother, I believe Carl would have talked him out of marrying her. My mom wasn’t the type of person Carl would have wanted his son to marry. Mom was spirited, opinionated, feisty, and she lived her life with a  flippant “come-what-may” attitude. Rules? Those are meant to be broken! Carpe Diem! How different from Carl – the careful rule-follower who cared so much about  what others thought -- can you get?!

Yeah, my life (and therefore yours, dear grandchildren) would have taken a very different turn – right into oblivion!

Three weeks later, on March 5, 1945, Chemnitz suffered the same fate as Dresden. Once again, the map of my life – and of so many other lives -- changed.

Now the war was coming home. Chemnitz, a sooty industrial center, was not in the same league as Dresden, but that’s where father was. That’s where my friends were. That’s where my home was. Reliable information was impossible to get now, as the mail service was practically nonexistent and the newspapers reported nothing but the bare minimum, namely that there had been a severe “terror” attack in Chemnitz. Between the lines of the military jargon and the pep talk, it was clear that the attack had been a bad one, a very bad one indeed.

---

^[1] “Mischlinge of the first Degree” who were of Jewish religion, thus were “considered” Jews

The Threshold Year: 1945 (Political Background) Chaos Everywhere

Fear Grandchildren,

I have never experienced war, so I can’t even begin to understand what it was like to live in Germany in 1945. The closest I’ve come to experiencing war is watching movies like Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and Shindler’s List from the comfort of my couch in the security of America (though I sure didn’t feel very secure on January 6th this year!). I fervently hope that neither you, nor Papa and I, nor any of us ever experiences war. My guess is that war will change -- with systems, rather than cities being destroyed and digital infrastructure, rather than people, being killed.

I don’t believe that the world will ever again see something quite like Germany in 1945 – thank God. But that year, in that country, impacted my father for the rest of his life.

Here is Dad’s description of the political environment in 1945:

The chaos of 1945 is almost indescribable. The Red Army was forcing the Germans to retreat in the east and the Allies were fast approaching from the west. By 1945, everyone knew that Germany had lost the war in a big way – even if it was never openly discussed.

(SlidePlayer.com. Published by Darren Dawson.)

The air war, which had already destroyed dozens of German cities, accelerated to a new level in 1945. Berlin alone received many more bombs than Germany had ever dropped on England during the entire war. Air raids continued, day and night. Cologne had only a few percent of its original population left; the rest had been killed or had fled to other cities in Germany, many of which would also be bombed in the first few months of 1945. In all, 3,500,000 German homes were destroyed, 20,000,000 German people were homeless. Very few German cities were spared, and many were 100% destroyed. Food was desperately short and the transportation system, which at one time had been the pride and joy of Germany, was breaking down.

     

 

     

 

Yet, there was no sign of any Allied success of the bombing campaign. Yes, the continuous air raids created a lot of hate in the population, but not (as the Allies pretended) against Hitler, but rather, against those who dropped the bombs on civilians -- mainly women and children -- on medieval churches, on the cultural heritage of a whole country. Of course, there also was increased hatred against the stubborn Nazi regime, but their control apparatus was still in place, and if anything, the punishment for “derogatory” talk was even increasing. Who would have dared? Even in early 1945, as Germany was obviously losing the war, it would have been suicidal to speak up against the regime.

To even imagine anything like Germany in 1945, one must pretend to visualize what a local parallel would be. For you, my California Bay Area children, imagine this: Oakland receives a major bombing once a week. The downtown is flattened; not a single building is spared. Freeways are completely destroyed. After a week, while houses in Oakland are still burning, there is another night-time air raid. Whoever is still alive has fled to Berkeley, to Albany, to Walnut Creek. Those places won’t be bombed because there is no industry to speak of. Every home in Berkeley now houses two or three extra families who have lost their home in Oakland. Men are off at war, except the very old and very young. And then it happens: Berkeley is carpet-bombed “to break the population’s will to resist.” The University is burning, so is Alta Bates Hospital. There is no water to put out the fires, no electricity, no food, no radio. The streets are littered with rubbish from the houses, and BART trains are hanging from the tracks. The tower of the Claremont Hotel and most of the hotel itself is level with the ground; a 4,000 pound bomb has hit it. Every house on University Avenue is on fire.

I remember this exercise by Dad as being very impactful! It really brought the war home, to something I could relate to – in magnitude, scope, and personal impact. But even then… well, I knew that it simply wouldn’t happen in the Bay Area. I was blessed with that sense of security, and of course I took it for granted. I knew nothing else but peace and security. Even the thought of destruction of the scale Dad describes coming to my Berkeley home was almost unfathomable.

Thus, not exaggerated, was the situation in the cities of Germany in 1945. And yet, most of us survived -- somehow.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The only applicable Laws still issued in 1945 (in the general chaos of 1945, only three anti-Jewish laws are listed by Joseph Walk): January 15, 1945: (*13 . pg. 406):

From the RSHA (issued by the “Reichssicherheitshauptamt”)^[1]:

All Jews living in mixed marriages, who are able to work and are either citizens or have no citizenship, (Mischlinge classified as Jews included) are to be sent to Theresienstadt in a closed transport for labor duty. (Note: this is in contradiction to a directive from the Gestapo in Bad Kreuznach just three days earlier, which excluded primarily older Jews from mixed marriages, and Mischlinge below 16 years of age, but not underage Mischlinge classified as Jews).

Sorry, dad. I can’t even edit this one for clarity! I don’t get it!

The law (of 16 February) said that any files that pertain to activities against Jews are to be destroyed unless they can be moved, so they don’t fall into enemy hands.

---

^[1] (National Security Main Office)

Home (to a Makeshift Refugee Camp) for Christmas

Dear grandkidlets,

I’ve always struggled to reconcile that the young boy of sixteen in this story (Peter, in the original Longest Year book, and Thomas in the Rim book) is my father. I’ve only known my father as the wise, deeply centered, and mature man who everyone seemed to look to for guidance, but in late 1944, Thomas had lost his mother, his family unit, his home, and his freedom, and he was left to navigate these profound losses by himself. I can only imagine that he felt anything but wise, centered, and mature.

How scary it must have all been for him! Maybe the reason I separate the boy in the story from my father is that, when I read about the boy in the story, I just want to protect him and love him, and assure him that everything will be okay. It’s a role I’m comfortable with – the caregiving, loving mother… but to my own father… as a teenager…? Yeah, it gets a bit convoluted! Maybe that’s why I’ve always read this story at a bit of an arm’s length.

My father continues his story:

The three of us who had been chosen to work at the warehouse still lived at the Munzig labor camp as before, but instead of going to the construction site, we took the train to the city of Meissen, as free as anyone in Germany at the time. Of course, the risk of us escaping was small. Where could we have gone? How far would we get without being discovered in the tight, still well-functioning net of bureaucracy, with its mandatory ID cards, registration, ration cards, and police checks? And why should we have wanted to escape? We had found our own guardian angel in Mr. Uckel, the manager of the warehouse.

Not only were we now free from guards and from exhausting physical labor, we were free from hunger for a while. Now we had regular weekly ration cards that entitled us to a half a pound of meat, 50 grams of butter, an egg (if there were any), bread, skim milk, and sugar. But more importantly, the warehouse always produced (or could easily be persuaded to produce) a leaking sack of lentils or a crushed container of barley soup mix. And sometimes it just didn’t matter if a sack of sugar contained 50 kg or 49.5 kg.

The closer Christmas came, the more difficult it became for Herr Schneider, the second in command, to resist the temptation of having a whole warehouse full of desirable merchandise at his disposal. Schneider was young and tall, with a sharply chiseled nose and steel-blue eyes. One could visualize him on a Nazi propaganda poster, the ever-victorious Waffen-SS man riding his tank boldly into enemy lines. Early in the war, he had lost an arm in the Luftwaffe, and had been relegated to the home front in the Organisation Todt. He had given his arm to the system, and now, by golly, the system could give him something.

“Heinz,” he’d say to the Charley-Chaplin violinist, “Here is a special order from Berlin. Fill it and take it to my room. I’ll see to it that it gets there.”

Everyone knew that the boxes of silk stockings and perfumes were for Schneider’s girl friends, and the cigarettes and cognac were for the black market -  or for Schneider himself. Schneider knew that they knew, but everyone played the game, and the three of us were rewarded for playing the game with a bottle of French wine from the warehouse, or even, if the order was large, with a little bottle of brandy. I worked in the office much of the time and I never saw these “orders” on the ledger, but somehow, obviously, the books still balanced.

A great surprise came two days before Christmas when Herr Uckel summoned the three of us to his office.

“I’m going home to Berlin for Christmas,” he announced. “I don’t care what you do. There are papers for all of you, saying you are on Christmas leave from the Organisation Todt; that’ll allow you to buy railroad tickets. And here’s a Merry Christmas to you!”

He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of wine, a bag of cookies, and a package of cigarettes for each of us. “See you after Christmas!”

Home? Really, home! With wine and cookies and cigarettes!

No one was allowed to travel without special permits, but the train station was still jammed with people. When the train finally arrived (four hours late), it was so packed that getting on seemed hopeless. I was shoved and pushed by the crowd and my rucksack seemed to assume a life of its own, making it almost impossible to move other than with the prevailing tide of the crowd.

(Thank you, Getty Images. Photo by Popperfoto.)

I managed to squeeze myself onto a step on the outside of a platform, between the wall of the car and a young woman who, I thought, was claiming too much of the step. As the train pulled out of the station and into the night, with people hanging like grapes from all doors and platforms, she put her coat around the two of us against the snow flurries, and soon fell asleep with her head against my shoulder.

I had to hold on to the frozen iron handrail and at the same time keep the coat closed over our heads. Every time the train shook and swayed, I’d brace myself to keep both of us from being thrown off into the dark. Until that night, I had never felt the exhilaration of being the protector of a woman. Of a strange woman, much older than I, small and warm and breathing.

—

In the early morning hours of Christmas Eve, I arrived home.

(Chemnitz in the early 1940s. It was not a pretty city. From “Chemnitz,” book by Weidlich.)

The front door was locked. I knocked a few times, but there was no answer, so I went around to the kitchen entrance. Two strange women, dressed in winter coats, were busy making a fire in the wood stove, and were as startled as I was. I just stood there.

The women were refugees from the Rhineland where their homes had been destroyed in an air raid, and they had been assigned to the Heumann house as a place to live. They and their countless children, plus a few other people, had taken over the unused rooms in the house -- the music room, the dining room, the Queen-Anne-Room, and even the entrance hall.

Before going upstairs, I looked around downstairs, and although the glass doors were covered up, I could see into the dining room. The large oil paintings, too bulky to store away, were still on the walls, but covered with plywood as a superficial protection. Until recently, they had been unprotected, in defiance of the constant bombing raids, because Father would not and could not part with them. They were the most valuable pieces in his collection, but he felt that enjoying some things is more important than protecting them. “I refuse to sacrifice quality of life to the fears of the moment,” he had said. But now he had done just that. With the encroaching horror of war, the oil painting of lovely Ottilie dropping flowers into a brook must have seemed a bit incongruous, even to him.

Carl Heumann had taken in more refugees than were assigned to him, as much out of charity as out of the desire to be on good terms with the authorities. It didn’t make much difference anymore. In the space between the dining room and the breakfast areas, where in years past the Christmas tree had stood, an iron stove had been installed, its long pipe leading to the outside through a boarded-up window. The massive dining table had been pushed against a wall, and several cots had been set up in its place. Buckets filled with water and sand, as fire extinguishers, were everywhere. The whining voice of a small child was hanging in the cold air, along with the smell of dirty laundry, smoldering wood, and diapers.

I’m surprised that my father described more about how his house had changed than about being reunited with his father, who now lived alone, except for unknown refugees. Can you imagine? The previous Christmas they had still been a family – mother, father, and three teens, gathered around a Christmas tree in their beloved home. Now, Carl was completely alone – and yet surrounded by strangers – in his home. What must that have been like? What was Carl like? Did he and Thomas talk about any of this? I’m sure they did not – both of them alone in their misery. It all makes me so sad.

No, this was no longer my home. It was a refugee camp.

Yet, it was a joyful Christmas because we were together. There was no tree. There were no presents other than the wine, cookies, and cigarettes I had been given, and the knowledge that this evening they were all safe. The candles, which had always been for decoration, were now a necessity during the regular long hours when the electricity was shut off.

On Christmas Day, Father and I traveled by bus to Adelsberg to see Ulli, my sister. We had just arrived when the air raid sirens sounded, which to me was not at all unwelcome just then: I wanted to see Gisela so badly, and this alarm gave me an innocent-looking chance. My uncle’s house, where Ulli lived, was a duplex that shared a common air raid shelter with the house that belonged to Gisela’s parents.

Ever since I went away to camp, I had carried her picture in a leather pouch on a string around my neck, along with a picture of my family and my ID card. Neither parents really approved of our innocent involvement, but now, during the air alert, I didn’t have to sneak away to see her. I could even sit right next to her in the dark of the basement shelter, holding her hand. As we listened for the bombers flying overhead, we could hear the sound of the anti-aircraft guns in the distance.

“Call me ‘Pitt’ once more,” she whispered. I had invented that name for her, and she liked it. It was as though this was our last time together — forever. And if today was not the last day, tomorrow might be, or the day after. Even at the age of sixteen, we lived with the constant thought of death. Not as much from deportation, as from bombs. This knowledge, and even expectation, of death was our regular companion in those years.

It wasn’t our last day, but before we would see each other again, much was to come between us.

Hard Physical Labor and a Serendipitous Decision

Dear grandkids,

Thomas is deep into his story now. No need for me to interrupt!

The next morning dawned cold and clear. The same gray figures shuffled back on the same road we had been on the night before. We felt as dreary as the drizzle that had penetrated deep into our clothing just a few hours ago.

I was cold and sleepy, but not unhappy. This was the first time I was really on my own, away from the comfortable footing of home, and it felt like an adventure of sorts. I was suddenly considered a man -- old enough to work like one and old enough to suffer like one.

I knew that things could have been much worse. We could have ended up hundreds of miles away, in Russia. Or we could have been deported to Theresienstadt, or even to Dachau -- names people whispered when they were in trusted company. No, this was not that kind of concentration camp. The guards here were dour and unapproachable, but not harsh or cruel. Word was that no one was beaten or mistreated. They were just doing a job. Whatever this camp would turn out to be, it was somewhat reassuring that it wasn’t run by the SS, but rather by Organisation Todt, the building and construction arm of the Nazi machinery, whose reputation wasn’t nearly as sinister.

And, I told myself, it would not last forever -- if one could only survive the crescendo toward the inevitable apocalypse. I knew that I must lay low now and remember the Bible quote Pfarrer Hoffmann had chosen for my confirmation (“If God be for us, who could be against us?”), a defiant and courageous statement about some of the positive forces that were fermenting under the surface in Germany. Like many of his colleagues, Hoffmann used the sanctuary of his pulpit to give voice to what was good, decent, and intelligent. These values had not disappeared, but they had become voiceless.

On the first day at Munzig, we unloaded the prefabricated barracks from railroad cars. The wooden spars and trusses were heavy and were crusted with a thick layer of ice. Never had I done such hard physical labor, so I tired quickly. The other men whispered to me to slow down, to remain hidden and faceless in the crowd and only do the bare minimum. So the next day I exhausted myself less.

(The barracks at Munzig)

It took a week to build the barracks and the outhouse which consisted of a long pit with a ten-foot-long tree laid along its edge. Moving into the new barrack from the drafty barn was an event. No longer were we to sleep on the ground on moist straw; now we’d sleep on straw sacks, perhaps even on bunks. Here we were, making a major stride in the development of civilization!

I picked an upper bunk near the oil drum stove. The air would be bad there, but it would be warm. The man who called himself Wagges ended up on the bunk below, and next to him was Heiner, a frail boy my age.

Although they were all Mischlinge Ersten Grades^[1] like me, none of the men seemed to be — or at least professed to be — of Jewish religion. Except for Wagges, who made a fetish of it. He had a particular and coarse hatred for Heiner who never smiled, never spoke voluntarily, and always carried a New Testament with him. Heiner surrounded his bunk with religious pictures, and when everyone around him talked or laughed, he read his Bible and prayed. With glee, Wagges drew obscene pictures over Heiner’s religious ones. One night, when Heiner was in a deep, exhausted sleep, Wagges tied a long string to what he called “that big dunce cap”— the symbol of non-Jewishness, Heiner’s foreskin — so that Wagges could tug on it in the middle of the night.

After the barracks were finished, I rarely saw the place in daylight again. From then on, every day was like the next: before daybreak, we walked an hour to the construction site and worked until noon, when we got our rations of watery soup consisting of cabbage and caraway seeds in water. (We called it “foot rags with flees.”) Then we worked until dusk, walked back to the barracks, and slept like logs.

The evenings were short and were taken up mostly by housekeeping chores. Those of us still lucky enough to own regular socks washed and mended them, while others washed the gray foot rags (square pieces of material consisting of a mixture of recycled textile waste and paper) which had been issued to us. Clothes had to be patched and the barracks had to be swept. Some read, while others wrote letters or smoked cigarettes rolled from peppermint tea, and there were always a few who played cards. But no one stayed up late; sleep was too precious. Besides, once you were asleep you couldn’t feel the constant hunger, nor the cold.

The construction site was a terrible mess. Depending on the weather, the ground was either frozen-hard ice or ankle-deep mud -- sometimes both at once. For the first two weeks, I was assigned the job of laying the rails for the narrow-gauge muck train. It wasn’t exactly like playing model railroad, but it was more varied and less strenuous than the assignment which was to follow -- pushing the loaded cars from the place where the conveyer belt belched rock and soil from the mountain, to a dumping pit.

(Thank you, Google Images. Found with a search for “Organisation Todt” and  “rock work.” This is probably much like the work Thomas did.)

I soon proved too weak for that job, which rightfully belonged to a locomotive, and I was relieved when they put me to work where the conveyer belt was being loaded, inside the huge rock that constituted the whole hill. It was here, in the cavernous bowels of the earth, that I first realized what we were working on: these large underground caverns, hewn and blasted from the rock, were to be some kind of war material plant, away from normal air attack targets, hidden in the solid rock under an innocent-looking hill.

This was still very hard labor. Even the instructions on how to use the knee for pushing the shovel into the pile of crushed rock — given by a sensitive and aristocratic-looking gentleman in the group who seemed to know my family — didn’t make it much easier for me. After all, I was only a sixteen-year-old high school kid who knew a lot more about how to fake his Greek vocabulary than about how to get away with the least amount of physical effort in a digging crew. I tried to prove to everybody, most of all to myself, that I was one of the men and could work hard, but many times during the ten-hour days, I had to stop shoveling because my nose would start bleeding uncontrollably.

It may have been no more than a nosebleed which was responsible for one of those bizarre strokes of luck or coincidence — if there is such a thing — that come out of nowhere when everything seems blackest. Perhaps one of the guards was tired of my bleeding nose, or maybe he felt some real compassion for me. Most likely, I was in the way of him making his daily quota of rubble. Whatever prompted him to do it, he picked me as one of twenty people who were needed in Meissen, at the Organisation Todt warehouse, to unload several boxcars of supplies.

It was monotonous work, passing sacks of dried peas and 40-pound boxes of dried barley soup from hand to hand up the stairs for endless hours. Pick a box - swing it up - let it go, pick a box - swing it up - let it go. Strange as it seems, at one point we found ourselves singing. Many years later, when I heard how Negro spirituals developed from the work songs of slaves in the American South, I remembered that day. It was the same repetitive, rhythmical movement that are made easier by singing or humming, even if it has to be marching songs.

After two days, the railroad cars were empty, the warehouse was well-stocked, and the men were sent back to the quarry.

All, that is, but three. Three men were needed to maintain the warehouse and to load and unload future shipments. Herr Uckel, the man who oversaw the operation, did the picking. He was a gentleman in his early sixties who had obviously seen better and more rewarding jobs than running a warehouse.

The first man he picked was the one who would be most helpful to him, Horst Reiszmann, the young carpenter who’d had so much trouble believing he was a descendent of a Jew. Horst was to build the shelving for the warehouse. Herr Uckel’s other two choices were a purely humane deed. His second pick was a short and fragile little man in his early forties with delicate hands and an embarrassed Charlie Chaplin smile, who turned out to be a former violinist with the municipal orchestra of the provincial town of Zwickau. And the third person he picked the rosy-faced high school boy with the dreamy and bewildered eyes: me.

 

For the three of us, this meant a fantastic measure of freedom.

---

^[1] “Mixed Race, First-Degree” (or “Halbjuden” = “Half Jews”)

Summons to Munzig Labor Camp

My dear grandchildren,

I might have skimmed Dad’s story about his first love, but I read with keen interest as he described his summons to the railroad station and his trip to Munzig Labor Camp.

This is the beginning of the tragic journey that I believe defined my father’s life. As you read this, remember that Thomas had just turned sixteen. He entered Munzig labor camp as a naïve teenager, but what would transpire over the next few months would define him as a man.

Thomas writes:

I felt good as I rode my bike home from a private tutoring session with Dr. Piltzer. While in public school, I’d done poorly in math, but now all of a sudden many of the mysteries seemed to fall into place and the cleanliness of mathematics was beginning to leave an impression on me. Anyone could learn the dry formula a2 + b2 = c2, but to follow the simple elegance of Pythagoras’ proof was exciting to me.

“Well, you’ll end up as an engineer yet!” Dr. Piltzer exclaimed when I submitted my assignment, a cross-section drawing of a steam engine. Ever since my older brother had aimed in that direction, the engineering profession had gained a shiny halo for me. Not that I had any particular leaning toward technology, but it had always bothered me that I was less apt than my older brother at anything technical.

Mother had wanted me to become a bridge builder, a romantic, strictly ideological notion, having little to do with structural engineering and much more with building bridges between people and nations. My father visualized me as a Protestant parson somewhere out in the country — an equally romantic and idyllic vision, born out of the daily association with the artist Ludwig Richter -- the good shepherd with staff and dog, contentedly puffing his pipe, sitting on the carved old bench in front of his whitewashed house at sunset. Recognizing the “two souls in my breast,” they may have known me better than I knew myself, but certainly they knew their own unfulfilled dreams.

Ludwig Richter. I heard this name often as I grew up, along with names like Menzel, Winterhalter and Genelli. These were artists in my grandfather’s collection. As we grew up, we were given pieces from Carl’s collection as gifts for milestone events in our lives. For my wedding to Tom Snider in May, 1983, Dad gave us a series of 15 drawings by Ludwig Richter who was one of Carl’s favorite artists.

     

               

And what did I want? I wanted to work and live with animals. Years ago, when I was only ten, I had made up my mind that I would become a veterinarian, come what may. I had held on to this dream steadfastly, even as Dr. Piltzer made that flattering comment about my rather amateurish drawing of a steam engine.

As soon as I arrived home and took off my coat and my tie, all thoughts about my future profession were cut short by the realities of the day. A postcard had arrived for me:

YOU ARE HEREBY DIRECTED TO PRESENT

YOURSELF NEXT WEDNESDAY AT 5:00 AM AT THE

MAIN RAILROAD STATION FOR LABOR DUTY.

HEIL HITLER!

(Chemnitz train station in the 1940s.)

At the railroad station, the eastbound train steamed through the first wet snow of winter. It was not until late morning that it became clear to me what the fifty or so men who gathered here had in common. I didn’t recognize any of them. I thought I caught a glimpse of Dr. Piltzer in the crowd, but he disappeared into a different car. The men were of all ages. Some must have been at least 60, and I was younger than most, if not all, of them.

There was much conjecture, much guessing, much fear about where we were going. The officials who accompanied us were not wearing a uniform. There was no hint from them about where we were going. All we knew was that we were headed east. Poland? Russia? What for? For how long? Why?

One man in my small group had the face of a veteran street fighter and the body of a thin and frail old man. The corners of his mouth were turned down into a sneer. He called himself Wagges and spoke more and louder than anyone else. He had a devil-may-care attitude about him that was impressive, but his presence was dangerous for everyone. If this guy doesn’t shut up and quit making those derisive remarks about the Party and the war, we’ll all be in a lot of trouble. Him for saying it, and everybody else for not denouncing him.

At one point, Wagges blurted out: “Ich hab’ ‘nen Webfehler^[1] .”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, my old man was one of those dirty Jews.”

“Really? I’m half-Jewish too!”

“Me too, I’m also a Mischling! ”

That, at least, solved part of the mystery, except for poor Horst Reiszmann, a pudgy, somewhat slow young man. “You are all crazy!” he insisted. “I’m German, I’ve got nothing to do with you guys. My Dad is Hungarian, not a Jew!”

“So? It just means you’re a Hungarian Yidd! Look at yourself, you look like a whole ghetto, just like the character on the poster over there.”

Wagges pointed at a poster on the wall of the train, showing a distorted, semitic-looking face behind a door, and the caption “PSST! Feind hört mit!^[2]”

Horst stared out the window, fighting back tears. Then he borrowed a piece of paper and wrote a letter to his mother, with one burning question.

There was a long wait in Dresden, hours of stomping around on the platform trying to keep warm. War songs and marches blared from the PA system, interrupted only by occasional announcements that war news of the greatest importance could be expected at any minute.

What now? The war had been going badly for Germany. Day and night, the radio and newspaper touted a miraculous Final Victory for the Führer, but many knew that the war was already lost, and had been lost ever since Stalingrad last year. It could only be a matter of months now until total breakdown would become inevitable. No one could talk about it, of course, but many saw it, and even more longed for it.

Peace, just peace, any peace.

When the news finally came, there were no cheers from this group. To us, the news could only mean one thing - more uncertainty, and for a longer time. Germany now had its miracle weapon, advanced rockets that were flying at this very moment across the Channel toward London The V-2^[3] was here and the great turn-around of the air war had begun.

Night was falling as we were ordered into two separate cars of a local train, heading north along the Elbe river. Less than an hour had passed when the train stopped again as it had several times before.

“EVERYBODY OUT!”

It was a small rural station without a building and, of course, without lights because of the general total blackout. Through the drizzle, I could make out the chipped paint on the sign:

MUNZIG

(Thank you, Alamy.)

What the hell is Munzig?

We were ordered to form a marching column and moved out into the November night. The landscape had no details, only the trees and bushes along the road.

Thirty minutes. My pack became heavy and the cold drizzle seemed to go right through to my skin. Even the World-War-I gaters Uncle Heinz had bestowed upon me were completely soaked through.

One hour. Everybody was too tired to talk. In front of us we could see the outline of a high fence with the gate open. We were ordered across a wide-open field into an unlit barn.

“Everybody -- find some straw and lie down!”

The straw was wet, the rain was dripping through the roof, and the wind was blowing in from everywhere, but I slept more deeply than I had for many a night.

---

^[1] “I have a weaving defect!”

^[2] “Hush! The enemy is listening!”

^[3] The “V” designation stood for “Vergeltungswaffe” -- the “weapon of revenge”