LETTERS FROM OMI: The gifts of Christmas 1945

Dear Grandchildren,

If you were to ask my father about the most influential and life-altering event of his life, I don’t think he’d mention his wedding to my mother or the birth of his four children. No – I think Dad would tell you about the week in December, 1945 when he traveled from Chemnitz in the Russian zone to München in the American zone.

When you read this excerpt, it will become clear to you why this journey so profoundly impacted my father, your parents’ beloved “Opa.” Remember that in December, 1945,Thomas was just barely 17 years old. He had lost both parents in previous past year and a half and, at the age of just 16, had found his father’s dead body, dug his grave, and laid him to rest. Not only was 1945 an incredibly influential year in world history, it was an incredibly influential year in the life of Thomas Heumann. And, based on these words from Thomas, I’d say that the last week in December was the most influential week in the most influential year in the life of my father.

Read on. What do you think?

Rainer and Ulli were already in München and I was determined to join them before Christmas. My arm was well again and “Dr. Mummi” had released me from home-hospital care. In Spring, Nora would go to school in Marburg in the American Occupation Zone anyway, so we assured ourselves that this would just be a brief separation.

At the Buddeckes’ house, the first peacetime Christmas season was already well underway. As Tante Gert baked Lebkuchen, the whole family gathered in the kitchen (the only warm room in the house) to watch the process. It wasn’t true German Lebkuchen – one dare not even hope for that in 1945 – but if we called it Lebkuchen, maybe we could convince ourselves that it had some familiarity. Tanta Gert mixed cold mashed potatoes with some flour and oatmeal, added a couple of spoons of the mysterious cornmeal, a spoonful of coveted brown sugar, a dozen saccharin tablets, dried egg and dried milk from the CARE package, and some baking powder, almond flavoring, and ersatz cinnamon. When it had been baked into hard flat sheets, she spread some jam over it. It didn’t really taste like Lebkuchen at all, but it evoked memories of what Christmas once was, and would be again someday. That was enough.

It promised to be a cold trip. Onkel Heinz presented me with an early Christmas present that proved to be one of my most useful possessions for several winters to come. He had altered his Luftwaffe officer’s coat to give it an almost elegant civilian look. It was long and warm, made from good peacetime wool.

(Photo: ZIB – militaria)

I felt a certain perverse pride wearing it. As long as I could remember, uniforms had been held in high regard in Germany, and everyone’s ambition was to wear some kind of uniform. It started with Hitler Youth, then the colored cap of one’s high school, the armband of the Flak^{^[1]} helpers, and finally the uniform of the German Army or Navy or, most of all, the Luftwaffe. Even bureaucrats got to wear uniforms to show their status, so that the man who tended the railroad crossing barrier looked like at least a corporal. I was never allowed to wear any uniform, save the blue cap of the Humanistische Gymnasium for three years. Now I wore a warm heavy coat that had been stripped of all its militarism, and I was proud that I had never worn a uniform and at that moment I swore to myself that I never would. As I sensed the irony of the fate of this coat, I began to understand the meaning of the word “civilian”: the simple, the real, the civil, which needs no heroes or uniforms, no power or monuments, to establish its dignity.

When my older brother Michael was in fifth grade, he wanted to join the Berkeley Junior Traffic Police squad at John Muir Elementary School in Berkeley, CA. All the cool boys were on “Traffics,” and I remember that they had the coolest uniform. I remember a heated argument between my father and 11-year-old Michael in which my dad referred to this oath to himself that he would never wear a uniform – and apparently at this point he had extended his oath to his children. Michael did join the BJTP and he did wear the uniform.

About 10 years later I, too, defied dad’s “no uniform policy” when I became a cheerleader. I always felt that he asked himself where he’d gone wrong to have children who didn’t feel the same way he did about uniforms. But we were fully American children with American experiences. We had no real understanding of the traumatic origins of my father’s stance came from until much later, when we were adults.

I’m sorry, Dad. Please continue…

On December 21, I rose at five o’clock, donned my demilitarized Luftwaffe coat, and headed to the Adelsberg bakery to stand in line. I’d heard that the bakers had found enough molasses to make pumpernickel bread, a special treat for their faithful patrons. It was light by the time the shop opened, and the line was long, but the wait was worth it. With our bread coupons for the entire week I bought 4 kg of Pumpernickel bread, half to share with Onkel Heinz and Tante Gert, and half to take with me on my very uncertain venture to the West.

By 9:00 I was on my way. Nora and Mummi picked me up in the old two-cycle DKW (Dampf-kraft-Wagen: Steam Driven car). There was barely room for three of us, two large suitcases containing my father’s salvaged art collection and the family silver, and my rucksack filled with all my worldly possessions, including four pounds of Pumpernickel.

(Photo: Revandshift.com)

In the early afternoon, the train headed to the border at Gutenfürst arrived from the east. It consisted of all freight cars, except for two passenger cars reserved for the disabled refugees and wounded soldiers returning from Russian captivity.

The trip of only 100 km (about 60 miles) lasted until the early morning hours of the next day! What had been a double train track been reduced to a single track because the Russians took one as reparations - ties and all. And what remained was in such a precarious state of temporary repair that trains could only go at a snail’s pace. The train that I sat on was the lowest priority of all transports. Russian trains, freight trains, coal trains, and every other train took priority over our dilapidated refugee train. The passenger car stood for hours on a side track and sometimes we went backwards to let another train pass. I could see nothing of what went on outside. I had placed myself and my two suitcases near the oil drum stove. The suitcase made a decent seat with the rucksack as a backrest, and I was not about to give it up just to go to the door and look outside.

We finally arrived in Gutenfürst. The refugee processing station at the border was an old castle with a square inner courtyard — Schloss Voigtsberg in Oelsnitz. The morning was still dark and cold, and the place was dimly lit by two or three bare light bulbs trying to penetrate the misty melancholy of the place.

(Schloss Voigtsberg in Oelsnitz today.)

Word got around that it would be best to stand in line at a stairway leading to an office where they would start processing people in the morning. I was lucky enough to be near the door leading to that stairway, so I immediately got a place in line inside the building. No one really knew anything for sure, and whoever was supposed to be in charge was surely still asleep.

(Could this be the inner courtyard Dad mentions, with the stairs leading to the processing office on the left?!)

I didn’t really care. I was so dead tired that I could feel the cold moisture penetrate even my heavy coat. It almost felt like a physical relief to give in to the urge to shiver with a mixture of fatigue, cold, hunger, and excitement. I sat down on the cold stone steps, put my arms and head on the suitcases next to me so that I would wake up should somebody try to move them, and before my eyes were closed all the way I was asleep.

A commotion woke me. It was light now, and I felt nauseated with sleepiness.

“Come on, get going, they won’t open today.”

I took the suitcases and rucksack and waited, too drunk with heavy sleep to even ask what was going on. I went outside into a morning which was cold but clear. The air was no longer oppressive, but brisk and biting, and a merciful sun was already shining on the high roof on the other side of the court. I put my luggage down, shook my head as if to shake off cobwebs, ran my hands through my hair and decided to wake up. Two girls were about to make their way into the door from where I had just emerged, trying to maneuver their luggage through the narrow opening.

“Don’t bother,” I said to them, “They won’t even open today.” We were exchanging rumors trying to decide what to do, when a kindly-looking Catholic priest walked by, stopped to listen in, and put his bag down. Obviously, no one knew what was rumor and what was true, so I volunteered to go and find out. And aren’t you glad you have a man around?

“Just wait for me here, I’ll leave my luggage; just watch it, please.” Two innocent-looking girls and a priest. If you can’t trust them . . .

I ran up the steps to the office, and indeed the door was locked, but through the frosted glass I could see people move about. I tried the door to the left — locked. The next door was ajar, and I was about to knock when I overheard someone inside say, “In ten minutes go out and tell all the new people to form a line at the corner tower to register — we’ll just have to put them up there, but don’t make any promises about when they can go.”

I had my hot scoop. I turned on my heel and raced down the stairs and out of the building and — nobody! They were gone! The collection! My father’s art collection! The silver!

I frantically looked around. There were people everywhere, but no priest, no two girls, neither the blond one with the blue coat, nor the dark one in the dirty white parka. There were no suitcases, just miserable, confused, lost people all around. I raced toward the tower, hoping that somehow they already knew. Not there. I tried to calm myself, then ran back to the wall where I had left them - and suddenly, there they were, my suitcases, the girls, and the priest, not twenty paces from where I had left them, standing in a long line that was forming rapidly.

“Haven’t you heard? The border will be closed until after Christmas, maybe until New Years, and we’ll have to stay here until then. You need to register in here before you can even get food coupons.”

I blushed — some fine scout I was! Two girls and a priest had the real information, and all I had to offer was just another hot rumor!

Eva-Maria, the petite brunette, had bright eyes and a mischievous smile. Something in her face was always in motion, and well, just maybe, it wouldn’t be all that bad to be stranded with her for a few days. Anneliese was tall, blond and much quieter than her big sister. “She’s my little sister but my big conscience,” Eva-Maria told me when we formally introduced ourselves. I would be happy to be stuck here with these young women, I decided.

Brother Antonio was another story. There was absolutely no choice to be made; he was with us to stay. I was afraid that if I separated myself now, Brother Antonio might tag along with me, without the girls, and that looked like the far less attractive alternative.

And so it came to pass that chance had thrown us four people together to spend the first post-war Christmas in a neglected castle in an insignificant corner of Saxony, in the middle of Europe. The castle would have dreamed on for a few hundred more years toward its eventual decay, had it not been for the fact that months ago some English, Russian, and American military aides had drawn a line on a map right where this Cinderella castle happened to stand, and the Big Three at Yalta had seen the map and found that it was good, and American tanks had rolled right by it, deeper toward the east, until somebody pointed out where the line on the map was, and the American tanks withdrew just to the west of it, and the Russian tanks filled the void.

And on the raging river of post-war migration, four pieces of flotsam had become entangled in the swirling currents. They would float downriver together for a bit, one may drift away and others would hook, some may sink, most of them would eventually find a piece of dry land somewhere - maybe not. They may drift apart and encounter each other again downstream, and one would not know the other, and the river would not know. Nor care.

Yes, the rumor, for once, had been true: the border would be closed until after Christmas and, for better or for worse, we were stuck.

By mid-afternoon we were standing in line at the corner tower again, this time to get some food coupons and be assigned a dormitory for the next few nights. The assignment of quarters was strictly arbitrary, housing bodies to a room until it was full, then on to the next room and the next list of names. They were not really rooms, but rather large halls with low ceilings and fat columns, stretching all the way across the width of the buildings. The ones on the ground floor, which in better times may have served as storage for carriages and farming tools, had stone or dirt floors and cots with straw mattresses. On the upper story, where there was a wood floor, the mattresses were put directly on the floor, practically wall-to-wall. It was there that I wound up with my new friends.

We were lucky to get a row of straw sacks along a wall, and we immediately collapsed into them, desperate for rest - rest from carrying, rest from standing, rest from walking, rest from waiting. Immediately, my arms and the legs became as heavy as my eyelids, so that lifting any of them became an effort. How quickly one can become thankful for a place to call one’s own for the moment, even if it is two square meters of flea-infested straw!

The peaceful solitude didn’t last long. When we heard that soup was being offered for the price of one food coupon, Eva-Maria and I volunteered to take the four aluminum mess bowls (who would ever go on a trip without one?) and get everyone’s ration while Anneliese and Brother Antonio stayed to watch our belongings.

We dined on our dilapidated mattresses, sitting tailor-fashion. For a fleeting moment, I thought of the sterling silver place settings in the suitcase against which I was propped. The engraved silverware, the platters and serving dishes, the porcelain-handled fruit knives.

For one crazy split-second it occurred to me that I could use one of those knives just for fun, but instead I pulled out my rusty pocketknife and shared the pumpernickel, a treat my friends found hard to believe. If one chewed it long enough it even tasted sweet. To crown the peaceful communal meal, Eva-Maria cut a brown-skinned apple into four neat sections, one for each of us. By the time we finished our shared meal, we had become a cell, a unit, a separate entity, no longer four disconnected individuals, but a group which, by virtue of nothing other than having spent the better part of a day standing in lines together, set itself apart from the ordinary crowd.

We talked all evening. It was no longer the normal exchange of survival tips. Now the conversation turned to ourselves, to past nightmares and future dreams, to past dreams and future fears, former beliefs and newly realized realities. And, most importantly, beliefs that were so deeply held and so important that, all better knowledge notwithstanding, they had been kept alive, in spite of the war’s terrible toll on everything we knew, in ourselves and in our world. Giving up these beliefs, with everything else we’d lost, would have been too painful. My favorite sayings, “Pour quelque chose malheur est bon^{^[2]}” and “Wie es auch sei, das Leben, es ist gut^{^[3]}” definitely fell into that category. But no one knew - least of all I - that I wore those beliefs like life vests, without which I would have sunk.

When others around us fell silent, we started to whisper. Soon, Anneliese fell asleep, but the communication between Eva-Maria and me continued, not on a verbal level, but rather by timid reaches in the dark, by feeling close, warm, and secure. I was lying between Eva-Maria and Brother Antonio, and while I was interested in the closeness and warmth of Eva-Maria, she was interested in my being interested in her, and Brother Antonio, if he was interested in anyone, I realized, it would have been me. Although the small wood burning stove had gone out long ago, neither I nor Eva-Maria were cold during that December night in 1945.

The next day things resolved themselves rather conveniently. Brother Antonio found (or maybe was found by) two other priests and a Protestant pastor and his wife who somehow had managed to arrange — not an easy feat in a Communist country — to secure a small room in the living quarters of the castle set aside for clergy. After the clergy had withdrawn to chambers, Eva-Maria and I (Anneliese was too young for such conversation) speculated for quite some time on the technical details of that living arrangement. I began calling the girls my two new sisters, and that seemed to be just fine with them.

In the morning of the second day, we sat on our straw mats solving crossword puzzles and — good Germans, we! — reading Goethe’s Faust. As the day wore on without much else to do, the dormitory grew into more of a community. This, after all, was Christmas Eve, and if we were going to be here over the holidays we might as well make the best of it. It wasn’t long before someone found a scraggly little tree outside, and everyone in the room was busy all afternoon decorating it with anything they could find, make, improvise, or imagine. In the evening we even tried Christmas carols, sung in all the different German dialects, and the only ones who were silent were those who were too choked up to sing, and a group of orthodox Jews, bearded and with curled locks, who looked grim, mistrusting, and indescribably sad.

I can’t help but wonder how these Orthodox Jews survived the war and how they came to be part of this group. There must be a story there!

There are Christmas Miracles after all! On Christmas Day, by mistake or grace or overcrowding or Russian sentimentality, the border opened. The paper processing was very quick;, there wasn’t even time for inspection of luggage. Before midnight we found ourselves on the other side of the border, in the Moschendorf camp which was not a castle, but somber barracks, with new rumors, just as many people, better soup, and, surprisingly, an open gate.

When my “sisters” and I heard the announcement that we would have to be de-loused the next morning and then stay for three days in quarantine, we made a very quick decision, aided by the unlocked gate.

OUT! Out we ran, into the night and across the field toward the lights in the fog - the train station.

For the rest of the cold night, we hid in an equipment shack in the freight yard, bundled up against the cold in anything we had and huddled together in a gray mass of suitcases, pounding pulses, steaming breath, blankets, and excited whispers, in the unsure light of a switchyard lamp shining through the only windowpane that had not been boarded up.

We were awakened by a locomotive huffing and hissing right outside our hideout. It was still dark, but there were some railroad workers around now. I went out and called up to the engineer in the steam engine: “Where are you headed?”

“Marktredwitz, after we get some more cars,” he answered. And even before the engineer could blow his whistle again, the three of us had clambered aboard the completely empty, dark passenger car right behind the engine. The car shifted back and forth a few times and was then uncoupled and re-coupled so the engine was now on the other end of the car. The lights came on, the steam heat began to fill the cabin. The three of us fell into each other’s arms as though we were waking up from a dream: we were in a real train, a passenger train with light and heat, going south toward Bavaria!

(www.bahnausbau-nordostbayern.de)

We were in a country that was different from all we had ever known - different from wartime Germany and different from the Russian Zone. Here, for the first time in many, many years, peace could be felt. And all it took was a warm, uncrowded passenger car running on (unremoved) double tracks to give us a sensation of luxury and a new standard of normalcy of life.

The new normal lasted until just before Marktredwitz. A bridge was still out and that automatically meant the end of the line. Everybody out, and into a bus to town. Or rather: almost to town.

“Next stop - Hospital!” the conductor called out, and a moment later a flash of mischief flickered in Eva-Maria’s eyes.

“That’s where we get off”, she said with a matter-of-fact voice which betrayed the wink in the corner of her eyes. It allowed no serious questioning.

“Wait. What do you mean? Why . . .?”

“It’ll take too long to explain, never mind,” and we wiggled our way through the jammed bus to the door, heavy suitcases and all.

In the next two minutes, in front of the desk at the hospital, I saw easy-going Eva-Maria put on an air of urgency, almost panic, that was so well acted out that even I was tempted to believe it myself.

“Look, we just escaped from the Russian Zone and we are absolutely filthy, probably disease-ridden. You can’t possibly let us spread whatever we may be carrying further into Bavaria. Please,” — there was despair in her lowered voice — “Please let us have a hot bath!”

(Can I just say… this Eva-Maria was kind of a bad-ass!)

And so, instead of several days of quarantine at the camp, instead of the de-lousing sprays, we three got hot tub baths, soap, and even clean towels. Without even asking for it, we got some food from a redheaded nurse who had taken a liking to us and who seemed to have a boyfriend in the kitchen who slipped her some bread, cheese and hot milk.

How conquerable the world looks after a hot bath, a hunk of bread and cheese in the stomach, and someone flirtatious alongside! Did it matter at all that the day was bitter cold? Did it matter that Germany had just lost the war? Did anything matter as long as we had found this ride on the back of a truck, standing on a pile of coal, leaning over the cab? What mattered was that I had my arms around my “sisters,” that we kept each other warm, and that the truck was going south, toward the low sun of the hazy midwinter noon, toward a freer country, toward family, into a new year.

And there behind us, teetering on lumps of coal, was a badly scuffed suitcase, containing the peaceful portrait of Sophia Hauber with her dreamy eyes, and a Baroque cookie box badly in dire need of a polishing job.

The portrait of Sophia Hauber which, in December, 1945, sat in the badly scuffed suitcase that teetered on lumps of coal, now lives on the merlot-colored wall of our music room in Gig Harbor, Washington. Leo, my first (and so far only) grandchild loves Sophia and when he stays with us, he insists on saying good morning to her when he awakes and goodnight to her before he goes to bed. If only Carl could see his beloved Sophia and his great-great-great grandchild!

And that Baroque cookie box is still in dire need of a polishing job as it sits on the kitchen shelf in Michael’s house. Dad gave the cookie box to Michael for his 50th birthday. I expect and hope that it will continued to be passed down in Michael’s family.