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.
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