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”