An unexpected visit, a surprise bounty, and a branding of rebellious hope

Dearest grandkids,

In this entry, Thomas describes a happy event in 1945 - a reunion with his brother Rainer, who hadn’t been heard from in a year. Can you imagine? Instant electronic communication, like email and texting (and whatever will be invented after I write this!) not only didn't exist then, but Germany was in complete chaos, so ALL communication had been broken down for months. Thomas feared that his brother had been deported or even killed, which – given that he was a half-Jew – was completely plausible, even probable. 

I’ve spoken previously about “generational trauma.” I could feel it when I read Thomas’ description of his hunger and then of the family's sheer delight upon receiving what we would now be considered mere staples. Although I’ve never been truly hungry, I often heard about hunger from my parents who, like any parents, raised their children with their own experiences serving as their blueprint, and I somehow internalized that. I’ll elaborate on it later in this post.

Here are Thomas’ happy words.

Already the days were getting noticeably shorter and having electricity for only an hour a day was becoming more of a nuisance, but not a real hardship - at least not when compared to the hunger. Yes, there was hunger all over the land. It was not the kind of famine where whole populations are decimated and die in the streets, but neither was it the “oh-dear-I’m-absolutely-famished” hunger of well-fed people. It was the hunger that comes from years of shortages, from occasional days of nothing to eat at all, or maybe only a potato. It was hunger that is not yet agony, but is painful enough so you have trouble staying asleep at night. It was during one of those nights when I got up not long after midnight just to be sure to be among the first in line in the morning at the baker’s shop. In the morning they would bake — if the bakers had flour, that is.

Yes, there was bread that morning, and I got four whole pounds with the coupons from the family. As I approached the house, I heard excited noises – everyone talking at once, not angry, not alarmed, but happy - and before I reached the front door, Ulli called out “Rainer is here, and Renate, and she’s going to have a baby, and they are married!”

(I don’t have a single photo of Renate, the wife Rainer brought to Adelsburg that day! He and Renate divorced when their child, Andreas, was very young.)

After not seeing our brother for a year and wondering silently, with greater doubts and fears as each day passed whether something might be really wrong, here he was  - a grown man, with a mustache - and a wife! Rainer would know better than anyone what had to be done now!

Rainer seemed to know how to get food - or maybe life was just better in München, which was now in the American Zone. He brought us bread that was much lighter than the stuff I had stood in line for that morning at daybreak. And then he surprised us with a slab of bacon, real bacon, almost a pound of it! And then he showed us an incredible treasure from a land where living must be good and easy: nestled in a small box were real American cigarettes! “LUCKY STRIKE” said the bold letters on the protective box. They smelled like no cigarette I had ever smelled before, sweet and rich. Tonight, we would all share one, Rainer promised.

The cigarettes were only the beginning of the unfolding miracles. Rainer and Renate also brought a rucksack filled entirely with two cartons, one of them still sealed. They were not ordinary cartons. “C A R E” it said in big letters on the outside, and Rainer explained that it was from Onkel Willy in America. He teased that inside the box were items that we had heard rumors about, but had never seen. One of the boxes was for all of us, while the other one for two friends of Onkel Willy’s who in Saxony, to be re-packaged and forwarded from somewhere in the Russian Occupation Zone because the Russians would not permit CARE packages to be shipped into the Zone directly.

Everyone in the house gathered around the dining table where Rainer was about to pour out the horn-of-plenty in the shape of a cardboard box. The box itself was made from material so strong and so smooth that it evoked visions of peacetime and luxury.

With relish, Rainer unpacked and displayed the contents, one by one. Bags, boxes, and cans labeled with exotic names and strange titles. Dried egg powder, dry milk that tasted delicious just from a licked finger, flour so white and so fine that it seemed unearthly. A can of shortening (whatever that was), and two cans that contained SPAM, which seemed to be some sort of meat.

Then came the real luxury: a can of coffee, a whole pound of honest-to-goodness coffee, the type that came from coffee beans, not from barley! Very few people in Germany had tasted real coffee in a very long time, and the few who had any coffee at all at this point had saved it from early in the war when there had been special distributions of 50 grams per adult after a particularly fierce air raid. On high and holy days, those lucky people would mix the real coffee with the ersatz coffee, one teaspoon per potful. And here -- here was a whole pound of it!

No one could figure out what the funny looking powder called “corn meal” could be, but there was no doubt at all about the bars of chocolate, or the whole pack of cigarettes. Raisins, dried soup, green peas, rice, even some jam with real fruit in it — all treasures, all exotic because of their origin and the long trip they had behind them. What a great country America must be!

We finally reached the bottom of the box. We went to the kitchen trying to figure out what we could do with corn meal. Ceremoniously, Rainer opened one can of SPAM as one would unveil a new piece of art, and they passed it around to smell.

Interestingly, I never had corn meal muffins or pancakes, or anything made with cornmeal as a child. Even when I was an adult and had fallen in love with buttery cornbread, making it for my parents a few times, they were not fans. Only quite late in life did they begin to appreciate Mexican food, which uses a great deal of corn meal. I guess this one experience really affected my dad.

I also never had sweet potatoes as a child. Only a few years ago, as I cooked Dad a dinner recipe that included roasted sweet potatoes, did I ask him why. He explained that regular potatoes become sweet as they age and that, with the severe food shortages during the war, he often had no choice but to eat old, sweet, potatoes. Of course they had no relation to the delicious American sweet potatoes that we eat now, but my father simply couldn’t even try something called “sweet potatoes” once he left Germany!

The fried SPAM was supreme, and there was enough so everybody could have a whole slice. The corn meal looked like Cream of Wheat, so we cooked it like Grießbrei. It turned into a thick, almost hard solid which, even when salted and sugared, tasted bland. What little one could taste was new and strange. But all of us all ate it with delight because if it came from America it must be good. We decided that we probably just didn’t know how to cook it right.

After dinner, which concluded with a whole cigarette for each of the men, Rainer and I went to the little attic room where we tackled the problem of distributing the still unopened box into two smaller boxes for mailing to the lucky and unsuspecting recipients. We had two boxes of about equal size. Since the CARE package contained either two of each item, or at least equivalents, it wasn’t hard to separate. We even used the original shredded newspaper material to carefully fill the voids. (They shred the paper, Rainer said, because they don’t want us to read it.) But no matter how cleverly we arranged the coffee on its side, how hard we stuffed the dried apricots in the corners, it simply wouldn’t all fit. At last, we hit upon a particularly clever arrangement that stowed everything neatly, except one O’Henry candy bar. A mighty moral struggle with inevitable outcome ensued. “How, oh Henry, can we fit you?” “Henry, oh Henry, you are too fat!”

Henry lost. So did our morals and ethics. But, Oh, Henry — was it delicious!

I am overweight and have been for much of my life. I have an odd relationship with food, consuming it mindlessly until my plate is clean, with no regard for appetite. In fact, I don’t think appetite has ever played any role at all in my eating. I just eat until the food is gone. This is how I learned to eat. Not “eat till you are no longer hungry,” but “eat everything on your plate; you’re lucky to have this food and not be hungry like we were!” I’ve been on a variety of diets and have gone to conventional therapy and even hypnosis therapy to address my deep-seated issues with food. Ironically, the method that seems to be working now is to actually make myself hungry – intermittent fasting! I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t really explain it, but I have a feeling there’s a connection here somehow to what I learned as a child, possibly rebelling against it, or maybe embracing and reflecting my father’s experiences with hunger in his youth. Big difference, though – I get to eat when the clock says I can. Dad couldn’t.

Later, Rainer showed off a scar on his arm with the flair of a war hero displaying his wounds. Rainer’s and Renate’s pride of that scar said something about why they were now married.

During the last year of the war, until Rainer was shipped off to labor camp, they were both closely involved with the München underground student movement of which the Scholls — the executed brother-and-sister instigators of a brief but bloody student uprising — were the most visible members.

Renate was an art student and Rainer was working as a machinist at BMW. They saw each other almost daily, although it carried great risks, because for each of them these dates only compounded their crimes. As if being a Mischling was not enough of a strike against Rainer, now he was associating with the dissident underground! And Renate aggravated her own sin of association with revolutionary elements by committing Rassenschande (sleeping with a Jew).

On the 20th of July, 1944, they were both at the University with lots of strangers around them when the announcement came over the radio that there had been an assassination attempt on the Führer.

What does an impulsive girl, who is equally in love with the man next to her as with the idea of being a revolutionary, do when she hears news that sounds like the revolution has begun and she will soon be allowed to openly date (and possibly marry) the half-Jewish man she loves? What does she do when she must not give herself away, must fear everyone around her, when she must put on a somber face, when all she really wants to do is let out a jubilant scream, jump for joy, and dance?

She bends down, buries her face in her boyfriend’s arm and bites it - hard, to prevent herself from opening her mouth in a liberating scream that’s in her throat and wants desperately to escape!

For the rest of his life, Rainer had the scar to remind him of that moment of joy and hope, disappointment and agony.

Obviously I have no photo to depict this event, but in my mind’s eye it’s a movie that I’ve watched over and over since I first heard the story from my father when I was a young adult.