Summer, 1945: Adjusting to life under Russian occupation

My dearest grandchildren,

It is almost 100 degrees in Gig Harbor, WA today. Tomorrow is forecast to be about 103, and on Monday the anticipated temperature will be a whopping 109 degrees! The all-time high for the Seattle area is 103 and that has only happened twice in history. Clearly, climate change is a real thing and I shudder to think what kind of world we are leaving for you. I want to apologize for my entire generation – and those before me – for leaving you such a mess to clean up.

I can only imagine that in the summer of 1945, many Germans asked what kind of world they were leaving for their own children and grandchildren. Germany was in ruins, German infrastructure was in tatters, and German citizens were starving. The future must have looked bleak, indeed, and I’m sure many adults wanted to apologize on behalf of their entire generation for leaving their children such a mess to clean up. Literally.

My father speaks in this post about severe food and water shortages and soup made from potato peels in water because no other food could be secured. He speaks of being lucky enough to secure water in a pail and then spending hours heating it over a flicker of a flame because fuel was so scarce.

Dad was just 17 in 1945. My American kids were going to the senior prom at 17, applying for college, enjoying their independence at friends’ parties, and looking forward to a long, prosperous, and secure life. But Thomas was just looking at surviving another day. Can you imagine? Food, water, and a roof over his head – those were his concerns at 17.

In the summer of 1945, we began the process of adjusting to life under Russian occupation.

The initial disappointment over not being liberated, but rather very much occupied, soon gave way to a new resignation. The political conditions were pretty much unchanged; only the polarity was reversed. What had been the far right had flipped to the far left. Now, instead of Bolsheviks being the bad guys, it was the Junkers, the aristocratic landowners. They hardly existed any more in 1945, especially not in Saxony, but they provided a good target. In order to build a new system, like a “Workers’ and Peasants’ State,” one has to provide an enemy. Besides, the Junkers were the best rationale for the land reform in which every land holding, even a modest farm, was classified as a “Junker’s estate” and was nationalized and made a part of a collective farm.

It wasn’t entirely unrealistic of the Russians to expect that in Chemnitz, of all places, Communist ideas would find fertile ground. Chemnitz had never been very sophisticated, but rather was a busy smokestack town, a center of machine tool and textile industries - exactly the reason my grandparents and father had settled there as a banker.

It was the kind of place where the proud emotion of socialism runs deep. That is why of all German cities, Chemnitz would eventually be picked to have its name changed to “Karl-Marx-Stadt.” Not because Chemnitz ever had anything to do with Karl Marx, but rather that it was considered a worthy place for that name of honor.

Chemnitz seems to have always been a politically charged city. In August 2018, less than a year after my amazing trip to Chemnitz, riots broke out there after a German citizen was killed by Iraqi and Syrian immigrants. In response, mass protests against immigration were ignited by groups of German civilians. Many were not surprised that this happened in Chemnitz where right-wing German nationalists are especially prevalent. In fact, protests to “denounce immigrants” apparently still happen in Chemnitz now, on a weekly basis.

Dad never spoke of Chemnitz in glowing terms. I wonder what he’d think of it now. Hopefully he’d denounce the strong anti-immigrant movement there now – though, to be honest, I’m just not absolutely sure.

(But in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 76% of the inhabitants voted to change the name back to Chemnitz!)

Amazingly, even under the “reversed political polarity,” German bureaucracy survived - and even flourished - in Russian-occupied Chemnitz. That’s how it was designed. The procedures and the paperwork of the highly efficient Nazi machine remained essentially the same, and in fact not much different from pre-Nazi Germany. The most visible difference was that on the endless stamps, seals, and forms, the Reichsadler (an eagle with a swastika in its claws, now called Pleitegeier — “bankruptcy vulture”!) was now obsolete. The civil servants who staffed the bureaucratic offices were not important enough to be removed, and the new bosses - now likely to be survivors of concentration camps rather than, as before, Nazis too old to be in the army - were glad to rely on the routines entrenched in the bureaucracy to provide a semblance of order in the chaos.

Of course, even red tape had to be adjusted. Instead of specific ration cards for specific foods — fats, meat, bread, etc. — there were now cards with numbers only. Depending on local supply, each coupon had a declared value, publicized on the Bürgermeister’s bulletin board, and from there by word of mouth. On Friday, for example, coupon “June E-4” would be good for 250 grams of brown sugar or molasses and “K-3” — only children got it — would buy a liter of milk. When word got out, members of the household (usually children) would take turns waiting for the store to open, and those who were not in line by 6 AM were often left holding worthless ration coupons because the supply had run out.

The main staple, the pillar of existence, was the potato. Potatoes were served in every conceivable form (and in some barely conceivable forms).

The recipe for Fitzfädelsuppe (loosely translatable as “can-of-worms soup”), the staple, went like this:

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add salt. Grate three raw potatoes into the boiling water, using a grater to make long strings. When strings are done, serve.

Or another favorite — potato pancakes:

Press out grated potatoes through a cloth. Collect the settled starch on the bottom of the liquid for soup. Moisten the pan with Ersatzkaffee and spread the dry grated potatoes on it. Fry.

With recipes like this, no one needed to spend long hours preparing a family meal. What took the time and effort was procuring the ingredients.

Starting with the water. Since some of the water reservoirs and much of the supply routes were destroyed, water was a very serious problem and a rare commodity. Luckily, Försterstraße had its own deep well shaft, a leftover from the days when this suburb had been a farm. Luckier still, it was located right across the street from our house. Several times a day, I would take the bucket with a long rope to get water. The well was deep, and there was a trick to filling the bucket: you had to leave the rope completely slack, then drop the bucket upside-down, all the way down the center of the shaft. If it hit the wall or the rope got tangled, it would turn right-side-up and would end up floating helplessly on the water, so you’d have to start all over again. Once carried home, the drinking water had to be boiled, of course, which easily could take several hours because if there was gas at all, the pressure was usually so low that there was hardly a flame.

The ration cards, too, were not always free; often they were issued only in exchange for performing community service. There was virtually no farm machinery available due to the complete lack of fuel, and the only field help available to farmers were undernourished horses and oxen or equally starved people from the community, pressed into service by conscription.

In the city itself, the main chore in exchange for ration cards was brick cleaning - clearing away the unimaginable mountains of rubble (almost five million cubic yards of it) by separating remnants of burned-out houses — whole city blocks of multi-story apartment houses — into cleaned, reusable bricks in one pile and unusable rubble in another. It seemed that, for months on end half the population did nothing else.

In researching this and looking for an applicable photo, I learned that much of this work was done by women – “Trummerfrauen,” or “rubble women”!

        

 

And here is a whole library of 7,348 photos of Germany in 1946, portraying, in ways words alone never could, the struggles my father speaks of here.

In the village center of Adelsberg, there was a completely intact school building. Parents of the children of Adelsberg arranged for two hours per day of instruction in German, Math, and French. Nora and I felt rather sheepish sitting together in a classroom again, convinced that it was somehow beneath our dignity to be back to such adolescent pursuits as learning vocabulary after all the growing up we had done together. But actually, I rather enjoyed it. I had not been in a classroom for three years, and just being an accepted member of a class again made up for everything else.

One afternoon on the way home from school, the world had a strangeness about it that took us a few moments to understand. The sky was a deep, uniform blue, by all appearances it was a hot midsummer afternoon, except that the sun felt cool, and its light was strangely dimmed, like on a summer day when the sun suddenly disappears behind a flying cloud, but there were no clouds in the sky. Being without newspaper or radio, we did not know that there would be a solar eclipse that day. It was the first one I had ever seen.

Not much later, there was some confusing news: the Americans had dropped some kind of super-bomb on Japan which, it was said, reduced an entire city to nothingness in one instant. It was called an “atomic” bomb.

“Oh my God!” Onkel Heinz exclaimed as he heard it. “Now we are all done for — this is it!” And in a mixture of a then-popular science fiction book called “Atomic Weight 500,” his own partially-digested knowledge of physics, and a mistrust of Americans, he proceeded to predict what will happen next: “Now the radioactivity is going to sink down into the water table, and from there it will spread in a chain reaction to every drop of water in the world through the moisture in the soil, through all the oceans, and up all the rivers, right up into our own well across the street. Now we’ve had it!” And he paced back and forth, hands clutched behind his back, his forehead in deep furrows.

Yes, in 1945 people must have been pretty sure the world was coming to an end. Most of Germany was completely destroyed, other European countries suffered major destruction as well, and now two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had been completely leveled. Millions of people had been killed in all these acts of war. Would anything ever feel normal and whole again?

Thomas, the hopeless romantic

Dearest grandchildren,

Your great grandfather Thomas was a hopeless romantic!

I hadn’t realized when I first read his book, The Rim of the Volcano, how much sappy (sorry, Dad!) romance he wrote about. Surely that’s because I skipped over all those parts back then! But I can’t skip over them now because I promised Dad I would tell the whole story, and that means reading and editing all the schmaltz!

So here you go.

Warm days and peace were back in Germany. In Adelsberg at the Buddeckes’ house, nine people squeezed into a house designed for three, but it was a house, undamaged by bombs or shells. No matter what hardships would await us, peace was the pervading reality now, and summer added some luster. As the realization that we really had escaped alive took hold, timid smiles returned to the gray and fallen faces of people who had worried and cried and feared too much. No other feeling on earth could quite match the elation of knowing that the war was over and peace had arrived. There would be no more bombs and hope could take hold again.

The meter-thick brick wall outside the windows of the basement bomb shelter needed to be dismantled, and Onkel Heinz had no trouble finding volunteers. The whole family worked together. Onkel Heinz and I chiseled the bricks from the wall, and Tante Gert, Ulli, and Gaby hammered and chipped off the old mortar and stacked the newly reclaimed bricks for a later use. Perhaps they could even be bartered for bacon, or a pair of shoes, or bicycle tires.

The basement was returned to its civilian use. No longer would a basement shelter need to serve as a livable space during air raids or, if the house were not habitable, a semi-permanent “home.” Like a groundhog peeking out of its burrow, Germany came out of its basement, “by the skin of our teeth.” Beds, blankets, and candleholders were carried back upstairs, and the fire buckets were returned to the basement, where they belonged.

During the war, a hole had been broken into the firewall between the Buddecke’s basement the Werner’s basement next door to create an emergency exit for each family. Now it was time to rebuild the firewall. I was assigned the job of filling up the hole with bricks — there was no mortar.

What if Gisela, my love from what now felt like so long ago (before I knew of the real love I had discovered with Nora) happened to go to the basement while I was working there? I knew I would have had to tell her about Nora, but I wasn’t ready to face her. Not yet. My own thoughts shocked and even angered me. How could I regard Gisela, who had so recently meant so much to me, in such sober terms?

To my relief Gisela did not show up that day. But it wasn’t possible to avoid her for long. The next morning I saw her in the garden. Although I had no idea of what I would say to her, I called out to her, and we met on the path behind our gardens.

There was no embrace, only a handshake and an awkward exchange of meaningless questions that required no answers. I found out that Gisela had already heard (from Ulli and Gaby, no doubt) enough about Nora to draw some painful conclusions, and all I had to do was confirm what she already knew.

“It’s all so different,” was all I could say by way of explanation or apology. Gisela said she understood.

Or did she? Did she pretend? She, who was so innocent, what did she know of carnal desires? I was so convinced that I now really knew what love meant. The summer of 1944 had been ours, Gisela’s and mine, our very own. It wasn’t without a certain amount of bragging that I now could speak of it in a condescending tone designed to show Gisela how much I had grown beyond that kind of thing.

We walked slowly down the path, being careful not to touch each other and saying very little. Oh yes, Gisela was as lovely as ever, I thought, but what a sweet, innocent child!

Suddenly she stopped and turned. She looked me straight in the eye, and shot out the one question that included all previous questions and precluded all future ones: “And what about the 8th of August?”

I had feared she would ask that. The 8th of August. Almost a year ago now — Augustusburg — the smell of summer and the closeness of Gisela’s hair… the broken shade of the birch tree… her blue summer dress… the blades of grass and wildflowers on both sides of her fresh face… her eyes darting back and forth between my eyes… her hand in my hair… sounds of bees and a distant train. It was so long ago. It was childhood, I thought. We had no right then to promise to wait for each other.

I did not answer Gisela’s question. I never answered it that day, nor all that summer, nor the next summer. I did not answer her, nor did I answer myself. The question sank to the bottom of my consciousness, was forgotten, neglected, pushed back down into the dark whenever it gently reminded me that it needed to be answered. For two years it lay hidden, alive, wounded but growing stronger all the time, until the spring of 1947 when ...

But that’s the story of another year.

Read on, dear grandchildren. You’ll never guess what happened in 1947!

Love and war through the eyes of a no-longer-innocent young man

Dearest grandchildren,

In this excerpt, Thomas describes the transition from the carefree innocence of a boy to the ominous obligations of a young man.

As I read my father’s description of his first real sexual encounter with Nora as a “madonna,” I had two immediate responses. My first response, as his daughter, is the proverbial childish, “Ew, Dad…!”

But that quickly gives way to an appreciation of my father as a deep romantic. Later in his life we spoke of him – and he also spoke of himself – as “an engineer with the soul of a poet.” And yes, he wrote a lot of poetry in his early adulthood – unfortunately, almost all of it in German. (Perhaps I’ll need to explore those more?!) I can only imagine that my father longed for the passionate intensity of those days with Nora for the rest of his life. Not only had he fallen deeply and intensely in love, he had experienced this love during some of the most tumultuous and intense weeks and months in history!  He alludes to this ongoing longing in some of his later writing, which I will hopefully include on this blog sometime in the future.

My second response is the rekindling of a memory from my own life, in which my father seemed to recognize my own transformation from innocence to womanhood.

I had come home for Thanksgiving break in fall of 1975, during my freshman year of college at UC Santa Barbara. Like my father decades before, I had recently fallen madly in love. And like my father, I had experienced my own “loss of innocence.” As we sat down for dinner that evening, my father insisted that something about me looked different – that my eyes had “lost their innocence.” He wasn’t teasing or belittling me, just pointing out a subtlety that he had noticed. I was embarrassed… but also impressed. Was my father really this perceptive and sensitive? It was only many decades later, when I read my father’s description of his sexual awakening with Nora that I put two and two together.

In looking for photos for my father’s description of his and Ben’s encounter with Russians during the final days of the war, I came upon many descriptions (and photos) of the horrendous atrocities that were committed by the Russians upon the Germans. I cannot even fathom what life must have been like during those months – and even during the first two years in Germany after the war ended. But certainly, the saying “Enjoy the war; peace will be hell!” came to be true.

My father’s words continue:

By day, the foursome of Nora and me, and Ben and Ulli usually stayed together in Wernsdorf. The world now seemed safe enough again to risk short excursions away from the inn, just to leave the confinement and the eyes of the Gasthaus for a while. Nora and I would have liked to have gone alone, but Ben and Ulli usually tagged along. We tried to buy or barter food from the surrounding farmers. After the “Russian breakfast” we knew that somewhere around here there were eggs to be had. And bacon!

Nora and I encouraged our close-knit double-pairing of the two brother-sister couples, as it had a particularly romantic appeal. But Nora and I, being older and wiser in the understanding of love (or so we thought), looked down on the puppy love of our younger siblings with good-natured contempt. How could those two kids, mere little sister and brother, possibly have any inkling of the depth of emotion and passion we two were feeling for each other? We were sure that we had uniquely discovered a love that was much deeper and more profound than the “love” that other people talked about.

One late evening that week, we had lost all sense of time, growing ever bolder and closer in the search to discover each other. When the time had come to reasonably part for the rest of the night, Nora said: “Just wait a couple of minutes — I’ll kiss you good-night when I come back,” and when she returned, wearing her long blue robe, her arms not in the sleeves, but holding the robe by the collar from the inside, I got up, cradled her face in my hands and kissed her, and as we kissed I could feel the robe slipping from her shoulders and fall to the floor. There she stood in the light of the candle, with a small smile playing around her lips, and I stood looking at her, curious at first, then more and more bewildered. It was the first time I had seen a woman’s body, and images flashed through my mind, images of drawings and paintings from my father’s art collection. So women really looked like that, with full round breasts and wide hips, and although my hands had touched the body in front of me, to have my eyes see it as one continuous, unified picture startled and unsettled me deeply. What took me aback, almost in disbelief, was that by the simple act of revealing a little more of her body than she did every day in her bathing suit, the impish, sometimes flippant girl Nora had been transformed into a woman, like the women in the pictures, mysterious somehow, almost solemn, and even the familiar smile in her face had lost all girlishness, all playfulness, and had assumed a new dignity. Almost like a madonna, I thought for a split-second. No, not like the madonnas I had seen, more like the faces of Eve in Father’s art collection, always inseparably linked with the image of an apple and a snake. It occurred to me that this sudden revelation must be what the Bible meant when it said ‘...and their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked.’

(Venus – Sandro Botticelli)   

One day many years later, when I looked back trying to remember whether there was one instant in my life when I turned from a boy to a man, I recognized the precise moment. It wasn’t the time I had to work with the men in the labor camp, nor was it the hour when I buried my father. It was when both the contrast and the unity of “woman,” the every-day one and the naked one, first revealed itself to me.

Word had reached Wernsdorf that the US Army, which indeed had originally taken Chemnitz, had pulled out again, and the Russians had followed on their heels and had occupied the town. And it seemed that rail service (of sorts) had been reestablished to the point where maybe one train per day would run on the small local line from the Erzgebirge through the foothills to the vicinity of Chemnitz. No train could travel to the Hauptbahnhof in Chemnitz, though, as those tracks had been destroyed.

A council was held at the Wernsdorf Gasthaus and it was decided that Ben and I should try to get to Chemnitz in a few days, or rather to the Adelsberg suburb, to assess the situation. After so many weeks of being incommunicado in the seclusion of Wernsdorf, everyone who was from Adelsberg — which was most of us — was dying for a report on how their homes were faring.

Ben and I set out very early in the morning for the train station located a half-hour walk downhill from the Gasthaus, but it wasn’t until mid-morning that the little train came chugging along. It looked just like little local trains had always looked, except that now two blood-red flags were attached to the locomotive, extending up and out on each side, like wings on an angel of revolution. It took hours of stop-and-go, wait, crawl, and wait some more, to travel the 40 km to the end of the line where a huge bomb crater in the tracks put an end to the journey. At that point, we disembarked and began to walk the rest of the way.

There were Russians all over the place, but they didn’t bother us until, when we were almost home, two Russian officers motioned us over to one of the wealthy-looking villas that apparently had been commandeered as living quarters. We first tried to ignore them, but that didn’t work, and after the Russians tried to make us understand with gestures that they needed someone to sweep and chop wood, Ben and I tried valiantly to put up an argument which, with not a single word of language common to arguer and arguee, proved to be a rather hopeless endeavor. French didn’t work, and neither did English. A hastily drawn sketch of a locomotive and a watch face (“we don’t have time; we have a train to catch!”) was either incomprehensible to the Russians or they had simply lost patience. In any case, we two scouts who had been sent out to explore the territory ended up spending the rest of the afternoon chopping wood, carrying coal upstairs, and sweeping the house that once belonged an obviously well-to-do family but was now occupied by a bunch of rather good-natured Russian officers who did not see why they, the victors, should have to chop wood while two strong bourgeois boys of the defeated country had obviously nothing better to do than to ride railroad trains.

It was dark by the time we were dismissed and finally reached the Buddecke’s’ house where, much to our relief, no Russian officers had settled in. The two refugee families who lived there welcomed us and put us up for the night. The next morning, we found a similarly happy situation at the Jaeger’s home and returned to Wernsdorf like the dove with the olive branch who returned to Noah: “Leave your ark, oh people of Adelsberg, and return to your homes, for the flood is receding and there is peace in the land!”

On the Precipice–Who would liberate Chemnitz, the Russians or the Americans ?

Dearest grandchildren,

Look at the date of today’s entry. My last entry of Thomas’ writings was on February 25th, over three months ago.

As I mentioned in my last post, I took a break to have a prophylactic surgery that would result in a 3 - 5% risk of breast cancer instead of an 80+% chance of breast cancer, due to my inherited (from whom, though – Dad or Mom? I still don’t know!) BRCA2 gene mutation. I’m happy to be back, but there is a chance I’ll need to take another break for a few weeks after my next surgery (reconstruction), which will occur this Friday. I’ll try to not stay away so long this time.

In today’s entry, Thomas describes an encounter with soldiers from the Red (Russian) Army. As I edited this entry for grammar and punctuation, as I’ve edited all Dad’s writings, I had to resist the temptation to edit my father’s obvious xenophobia.

My father was a kind, loving, and devoutly moral man. But if I am to be honest with you and with myself, I must acknowledge the fact that Thomas was also a xenophobe, an elitist, and a bigot. My guess is that he learned these attitudes from his parents and from the elite German society of his younger childhood.

To a certain extent, Dad carried these attitudes with him throughout his life. It usually manifested as “educational elitism” (‘we’re better than them because we’re more educated than them’), but Thomas’ prejudice is something I still grapple with – especially during the current “Black Lives Matter” movement. What would my father have made of this critical cultural shift? In spite of living in hyper-liberal Berkeley, CA during the tumultuous 1960s, when my mother was a student at Cal and my brother participated in the creation of People’s Park, I believe that my father remained a cultural, racial, and intellectual elitist. I challenged him on some of his attitudes during the last decade of his life, but my challenge was always met with some defiance and defensiveness – ‘but some people ARE better than others!’

I adored so very much about my father, but I did not adore his elitism and bigotry.

Again, Thomas writes about Nora, his first great love, with whom he experienced “commotions and emotions that few people are privileged to experience simultaneously, with such intensity, and so closely intertwined.” I believe that, throughout the rest of his life, Thomas yearned for the return of such emotional intensity, and that he never really found it again. Not with my mother, not with his life in America, and not within himself.

But could anything ever match the intensity of a half-Jew experiencing first love during the most turbulent first months of 1945 in Nazi Germany?!

Once again, here is Thomas’ story:

 

The time had come for Nora and me to rejoin the real world.

We went downstairs where everyone was now assembled in the “ward,” each in a costume, ready to play their assigned roles, if needed. The long column of military troops had dwindled to intermittent small groups of soldiers who rumbled through and quickly disappeared. When everything was quiet for a while, one could venture outside to see whether the world had changed, now that we were on the other side of the front.

But what front? At that point, our world hadn’t yet changed. The sun was warming up for another fine spring day and dogs were still running in pairs along the road, sniffing here and there. Only the sparrows were more excited than normal because of the unexpected feast the army horses had left behind for them.

The next contingent of the Red Army was more of an unorganized band than an army patrol. We all scrambled inside again and braced ourselves for whatever would happen next. Suddenly the front door flew open and two young Russian soldiers stood firmly, submachine guns drawn and at the ready. “STOP!” one of them shouted as he saw the medical staff inside, probably larger than he had expected. Our arms instinctively flew up and stayed there while the two Russian soldiers inspected the “hospital ward,” keeping their eyes solidly on us as they moved about and yelling at each other – and us - in Russian. Were they buying into our ruse? What if they weren’t?

(https://www.reddit.com/r/wwiipics/comments/k539of/russian_soldiers_outside_the_reichstag_berlin/)

While one soldier intentionally intimidated us with his submachine gun, the other soldier apparently had found what they were looking for - the kitchen.

“Yitsa!” he commanded repeatedly, drawing blank stares from his audience. Then they motioned the innkeeper and grandma Wacker, who were dressed up as cooks, to the kitchen, put a huge frying pan on the stove and left no doubt that they wanted it filled, and NOW! The cooks sprang into action on command, slicing boiled potatoes into the frying pan, then cutting some of the gooey bread, and spreading margarine on it.

“Nyet” said one soldiers, dumping the contents of the frying pan on the floor and demanded “Yitsa!” But there were no yitsa - no eggs, keine Eier by any name. Eggs had hardly been seen at all in the village for weeks, though everyone knew that some of the farmers had some chicken that must be laying eggs.

In clear disgust, the two soldiers left - but not for long. They quickly returned, accompanied by some of their comrades, one of whom carried a whole load of eggs, two or maybe three dozen of them, in a sling made from the bottom of his uniform shirt. It was an unbelievable sight. Nobody had seen such a mass of eggs since the beginning of the war six years ago! Where had the eggs been all this time? Another soldier was carrying an equally nonexistent treasure - a whole slab of bacon! We watched in fascination as all the eggs went into the frying pan, accompanied by big chunks of bacon. As the Russian rolled up his sleeves, he proudly displayed two arms full of wrist watches all the way up to the elbows. And several of the watches were women’s.

This sight, and the realization of where the watches must have come from and how they must have found their way onto this Russian peasant’s arms, was a tremendous shock. Sure, everybody had heard it over many years of Nazi propaganda: Russians steal, plunder, and rape their way across the subdued land. But we had not believed it, dismissing it as just more war rhetoric to whip the people into a will to fight. Could it be that, for once, the Nazis had only been exaggerating a truth? Here it was, right before our eyes, damning evidence and with it, a profound disappointment in what we hoped would be an army of liberators. We ardently wished that this would not be the wave of the future. We’d hoped that the Americans or, even better, the British would be our occupation army in Chemnitz, that the American unit we saw yesterday was not a mirage, but the harbingers of a more civilized reality.

I studied the cook carefully. His uniform jacket — a smock rather than a jacket, the bottom hanging loosely over the pants, held with a belt on the outside — was dirty, almost grimy. It could have been a farmer’s shirt had it not been for the huge epaulettes. His helmet was pushed back into his muscular neck, revealing a low forehead and a messy bush of bright blond hair, so light that even in its present state of weeks of neglect it looked like bleached straw. He had large, healthy-looking teeth, displayed not in a smile, not laughter, but an empty grin as he joked with his comrades. He did not look brutal, just coarse and primitive, almost like a little boy, a street urchin who was up to some childish mischief.

The Americans we’d seen yesterday had looked like a well-disciplined, efficient military unit. By contrast, the Russian contingent had the frightening look of the steppes of Central Asia, there was something of Djinghis-Khan, something of the 30-Years’ War about them. Not a single word, not a sound of what they spoke, sounded in any way familiar or related to a ‘civilized’ language. Did the refugees who streamed west ahead of the approaching Red Army know something about the Russians that our group of intelligent people, living in voluntary semi-underground internal exile, did not know?

The spectacle of the Red Army band was repeated a few more times in the next few days, with some variations. For the most part, the soldiers were so scared of VD that they bought the hospital story, or at least didn’t want to take the chance of testing it. The primitive, child-like, bewilderingly foreign character of these people became particularly clear late one night when an already half-drunk gang demanded shelter for the night. Luckily, they had only seen the old innkeeper, and none of the women. In the morning, the only damage was a hopelessly drunk innkeeper, who was not used to the vodka they poured into him, a broken chair, and a few broken glasses and bottles.

The next morning, Nora, Ben, and I wondered aloud whether the Nazi’s stories about the Americans were equally true.

“Remember,” I asked, “The movie called Rund um die Freiheitsstatue^[1]?”

“I sure do,” said Nora. “I thought it was very funny, the wrestling match where they were smeared with lard, or when they swallowed the live goldfish!”

“That’s not what I mean,” I replied. “I mean the slaves they showed, the slums, the cruelties, the poverty, the vulgarity of Hollywood — do you believe all that?”

“Oh, it may be true. It probably exists somewhere, but that can’t be the whole story of America.”

“What is democracy anyway?” Ben wondered. “It can’t be all like that movie.”

Neither Nora nor I had an answer. The only connection in which we had ever heard the word “democratic” was in phrases like die demokratischen Verbrecher im Weißen Haus^[2] , or the Jewish-democratic world conspiracy.

“My Dad was in America before the war,’ Ben said. “From what he told me, I guess “democracy” just means that people can basically do what they want.”

And that - the absolute antithesis of the propaganda of the dictatorship we had known all our lives - was the most meaningful definition we three children of Nazi propaganda could muster - or, for that matter, would understand in regard to our future for quite a while, at least until the next definition came along: communism under the label of ‘Volksdemokratie.’

1945 had been a year of death and rebirth, a year of ferment. Nor and I experienced commotions and emotions that few people are privileged to experience simultaneously, with such intensity, and so closely intertwined. We had survived for the time being and, during the critical hours of that very survival, had experienced the birth of a new romance that grew deeper and more passionate as the weeks went on.

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^[1] “All Around the Statue of Liberty”

^[2] “The democratic criminals in the White House”