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!’
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