LETTERS FROM OMI: And now–at sixteen and surrounded by war

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.