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!”