Unanswered questions and post-war chaos

Dear grandchildren,

At the end of this entry, Thomas introduces a mystery that has not been solved to this day, 76 years later:

Why had Carl, a full Jew, not been deported? Why, after leading the life of a prominent German citizen until he was booted out of his own bank, was he allowed to lead a completely withdrawn life, almost as if living in exile in his own four walls?

I discussed this question with my father many times. I believe that he was truly convinced that Carl was spared because he was such a good person, a man of the very highest ethical and moral standards. This made no sense to me when I heard it and it makes no sense to me today. My father was a rational, intelligent person. He knew that Nazis had no regard for a Jew’s societal standing, nor for a Jew’s impeccable ethical or moral convictions. Dad knew, logically, that Hitler wanted ALL Jews dead – especially the ones who had wealth and societal standing! But somehow, in Dad’s mind - the part of his mind that forever remained Carl’s devoted and faithful young son - Carl was left alone because he was, in his own words, “given a good grade by the people.”

Dad could not have been more wrong, but there was no convincing him – even 70 years after his father’s death – that perhaps Carl had a Nazi protectorate. That would mean that Carl was willing to act nefariously and illegally, and I just don’t think my dad could ever accept that possibility.

I believe that there were two possible people who might have protected Carl – his brother-in-law, Heinz (the same brother who had urged his sister to “divorce the Jew” years before), with whose family little Ulli had lived since her father’s death, and fellow art enthusiast and fellow art museum board member, Waldemar Bellerstedt, the devout Nazi who had met Carl years before the war began (and for whom Carl was even a mentor), who clearly admired Carl, and who insisted in a letter to Rainier written in 1957, after he was released from a Russian gulag, that he had secured a secret apartment for Carl.

This topic deserves an entry of its own, so next,  I will take a break from transcribing The Rim of the Volcano  to focus more on Waldemar Bellerstedt – who he was and the role he played in Carl’s life. I have a few theories of my own!

But first, Thomas’ musings:

And what, we all wondered out loud, had happened to our older brother Rainer? How had he survived the camp and the bombing? Or had he survived at all? Several attempts to send letters to him in München were unsuccessful, which was not surprising since mailing a letter in Germany in 1945 was about as reliable and as fast as dropping a bottle with a message into the ocean.

(It turns out, THIS is where Rainier had been.)

All communication systems had collapsed exactly when they were most needed. Millions of people were displaced and families that had been scattered in all directions were trying desperately to find each other. Prisoners of war returned from Russia, greeted by piles of debris where their homes had been, with no indication as to the whereabouts of previous inhabitants. Millions had fled their homes as the battlefronts approached and the resulting human pandemonium was so chaotic that even the bureaucracy of compulsory registration with the police was no longer functioning.

There was, however, an amazing word-of-mouth communications network. “Have you heard from so-and-so?” “Do you know someone who’s going to Frankfurt who could take a letter?” “Which POW camp were you in? Do you know someone who looks like this picture?”

Rainer was probably trying to reach us via the same tangled web. Would it work?

I visited Nora almost every day. We sat and talked about ourselves, about our future, about the names we were going to give our children (Nora wanted Bärbel – Barbara - just like her mother. I had my mind set on Klaus-Edward — a healthy Anglo-German mix). We went on hour-long walks in the forest and tortured ourselves and each other with unfulfilled longings. “We are not ready, we must wait until we are both mature enough. We have so much to learn!”

The more time we spent together and the more time we spent with Nora’s parents, the more our relationship turned into a family-sanctioned liaison. Although we weren’t officially engaged, we were regarded by family as an openly engaged couple, as it was the proper grown-up thing to do. Nora, probably encouraged by her resolute and revered mama, began to see herself as the successful doctor, the wife of the young man from the good family, the husband who would eventually be able to support his wife in the manner acceptable to both her and to her parents.

Often my visits were cut short by Nora’s self-imposed obligations. Having decided that she will be a great doctor (and soon!), she studied hard to get high school behind her. I would come to see her, bringing a bunch of wildflowers picked in a meadow on the way, or with a book of poetry in my pocket, ready to shower her with my love (as expressed in poems by others), but much to my chagrin, Nora would talk of how she would combine her career with motherhood, how she would have a beautiful wardrobe, and how she would furnish our house. I spoke of my love to Nora; Nora spoke of the role she was going to play in it — in practical terms.

Eventually, I needed to look after my own future. How was I going to finish school? The improvised classes at the Adelsberg school were certainly not the answer. I needed to talk to teachers from my old school. How much credit would they give me for the private lessons I’d had? What grade would I start in? Would I be in my old class? What would my former classmates say? They all, without exception, had been in the Hitler Youth (albeit with greatly varying degrees of enthusiasm), but now would they all be newly converted anti-fascists, or even Communists?

Being German, I knew that the first thing one needs is something official, an affidavit attesting that the bearer is certified to be politically clean and racially impure, that he was a persecuted Jew under the Nazi regime, that he was in a slave labor camp, and that he is not one of those recent converts.

I borrowed the bike from Onkel Heinz and rode to Chemnitz, which was easy because most of the 8 km trip was downhill. It was my first return to town in several weeks, and it became immediately apparent that I had been living in a vacuum — again. Very little of the rubble had been cleared away yet, except where collapsed buildings had blocked streets, but the closer I got to the center of town the more frequent were the façades of ruins that were covered with huge pictures of Lenin, Marx, and Engels, much larger than Hitler’s pictures had ever been, somewhat more heavy-handed in their pictorial message. Surrounding them were immense red banners with slogans that had a faintly 1930’s ring to them: UNITY OF THE PROLETARIAT! STATE OF WORKERS AND PEASANTS! CRUSH THE FASCIST JUNKERS! Gone were the statues of German war heroes, and in their place were blood-red obelisks, made from plywood, draped with red flags and topped by cardboard stars, erected under Russian supervision, bearing the inscription WE SALUTE THE VICTORIOUS RED ARMY! Some of them were already falling apart from last week’s rain.

Surprisingly, in the very center of town, much of the Rathaus was still standing, all of its windows blown out, much of the roof gone, but at least partly usable in the midst of an ocean of destruction. On the third floor I found an office for Victims of Nazism, and without really knowing exactly what I was after, I spent two hours in line with what I realized must all be former inmates like me.

Looking around in the line, I felt that I wasn’t in the best of company. While most of these people just looked ragged and emaciated, some looked rather scary. Besides, they talked more like underworld figures than like liberated political prisoners. It seemed rather incongruous to me that I had to distance myself again. Some of these people now were playing recent resistance fighters against the Nazis, but in reality they had only recently thrown away their Nazi Party buttons. Others undoubtedly were escaped criminals who now found it useful to masquerade as political victims.

To my surprise, I found behind the desk one of the people from my own barrack, a repulsive bully, who had been a loudmouth even in camp. Although we had never spoken to each other in camp, the personal recognition made it easy for me to get my trilingual certificate without a lot of witnesses and formalities, and as long as I got this official identification paper it didn’t bother me much to be greeted with a raised fist and be addressed as “comrade.”

(Certification that Thomas had been a victim of Nazi persecution and that he had been interned at a Nazi labor camp.)

Next stop: Dr. Epping. I found him in high spirits. The apartment house where he lived had not been bombed, he was once again principal of the girls’ high school, the Russians were his occupiers, and, at long last, he could freely and proudly advocate his Social-Democratic ideals. He, too, gave me a certificate about all the private schooling I had received after I had to leave school.

(And here, in addition, is a certificate of “total destruction via bomb” of Thomas’ childhood home in Chemnitz.)

On my return from Chemnitz, I experimented with a travel technique that I would perfect on future trips. Just beyond the hospital, Zschopauer Straße to Adelsberg started its long, steady climb with a short, steep section of road. The Russian gasoline-driven trucks and the few propane-driven cars had no trouble negotiating this short stretch, but the German trucks that had been converted to run on producer gas (generated from wood chips in a big stinking cylinder behind the cab) would invariably sputter to a near halt after a short run-up, and if a bicyclist placed himself just at the right spot, he needed only a short sprint of uphill pedaling to get up to the speed of the coughing truck, hang on with the left hand (the tailgate latch usually made a well-designed handle!) and be pulled up all the way to Adelsberg at a leisurely pace unless, that is, the truck gave up altogether and the driver had to stop halfway up the grade to stoke the wood chips in his smoldering generator.

I visited Dr. Epping and other friends of the family several times during the next few weeks, partly because I was fascinated by Herr Epping’s socialistic enthusiasm and partly because I wanted to find an answer to a nagging question:

How could it be that, in this town of 350,000 people with a formerly sizable Jewish population, my father was one of (I assumed) only a few Jews who had survived? Why had he not been deported? Much of his property had been confiscated, but how did he manage to live in his own house, a house he hardly ever left? Why, after leading the life of a prominent German citizen until he was booted out of his own bank, was he allowed to lead a completely withdrawn life, almost as if living in exile in his own four walls?