Home (to a Makeshift Refugee Camp) for Christmas

Dear grandkidlets,

I’ve always struggled to reconcile that the young boy of sixteen in this story (Peter, in the original Longest Year book, and Thomas in the Rim book) is my father. I’ve only known my father as the wise, deeply centered, and mature man who everyone seemed to look to for guidance, but in late 1944, Thomas had lost his mother, his family unit, his home, and his freedom, and he was left to navigate these profound losses by himself. I can only imagine that he felt anything but wise, centered, and mature.

How scary it must have all been for him! Maybe the reason I separate the boy in the story from my father is that, when I read about the boy in the story, I just want to protect him and love him, and assure him that everything will be okay. It’s a role I’m comfortable with – the caregiving, loving mother… but to my own father… as a teenager…? Yeah, it gets a bit convoluted! Maybe that’s why I’ve always read this story at a bit of an arm’s length.

My father continues his story:

The three of us who had been chosen to work at the warehouse still lived at the Munzig labor camp as before, but instead of going to the construction site, we took the train to the city of Meissen, as free as anyone in Germany at the time. Of course, the risk of us escaping was small. Where could we have gone? How far would we get without being discovered in the tight, still well-functioning net of bureaucracy, with its mandatory ID cards, registration, ration cards, and police checks? And why should we have wanted to escape? We had found our own guardian angel in Mr. Uckel, the manager of the warehouse.

Not only were we now free from guards and from exhausting physical labor, we were free from hunger for a while. Now we had regular weekly ration cards that entitled us to a half a pound of meat, 50 grams of butter, an egg (if there were any), bread, skim milk, and sugar. But more importantly, the warehouse always produced (or could easily be persuaded to produce) a leaking sack of lentils or a crushed container of barley soup mix. And sometimes it just didn’t matter if a sack of sugar contained 50 kg or 49.5 kg.

The closer Christmas came, the more difficult it became for Herr Schneider, the second in command, to resist the temptation of having a whole warehouse full of desirable merchandise at his disposal. Schneider was young and tall, with a sharply chiseled nose and steel-blue eyes. One could visualize him on a Nazi propaganda poster, the ever-victorious Waffen-SS man riding his tank boldly into enemy lines. Early in the war, he had lost an arm in the Luftwaffe, and had been relegated to the home front in the Organisation Todt. He had given his arm to the system, and now, by golly, the system could give him something.

“Heinz,” he’d say to the Charley-Chaplin violinist, “Here is a special order from Berlin. Fill it and take it to my room. I’ll see to it that it gets there.”

Everyone knew that the boxes of silk stockings and perfumes were for Schneider’s girl friends, and the cigarettes and cognac were for the black market -  or for Schneider himself. Schneider knew that they knew, but everyone played the game, and the three of us were rewarded for playing the game with a bottle of French wine from the warehouse, or even, if the order was large, with a little bottle of brandy. I worked in the office much of the time and I never saw these “orders” on the ledger, but somehow, obviously, the books still balanced.

A great surprise came two days before Christmas when Herr Uckel summoned the three of us to his office.

“I’m going home to Berlin for Christmas,” he announced. “I don’t care what you do. There are papers for all of you, saying you are on Christmas leave from the Organisation Todt; that’ll allow you to buy railroad tickets. And here’s a Merry Christmas to you!”

He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of wine, a bag of cookies, and a package of cigarettes for each of us. “See you after Christmas!”

Home? Really, home! With wine and cookies and cigarettes!

No one was allowed to travel without special permits, but the train station was still jammed with people. When the train finally arrived (four hours late), it was so packed that getting on seemed hopeless. I was shoved and pushed by the crowd and my rucksack seemed to assume a life of its own, making it almost impossible to move other than with the prevailing tide of the crowd.

(Thank you, Getty Images. Photo by Popperfoto.)

I managed to squeeze myself onto a step on the outside of a platform, between the wall of the car and a young woman who, I thought, was claiming too much of the step. As the train pulled out of the station and into the night, with people hanging like grapes from all doors and platforms, she put her coat around the two of us against the snow flurries, and soon fell asleep with her head against my shoulder.

I had to hold on to the frozen iron handrail and at the same time keep the coat closed over our heads. Every time the train shook and swayed, I’d brace myself to keep both of us from being thrown off into the dark. Until that night, I had never felt the exhilaration of being the protector of a woman. Of a strange woman, much older than I, small and warm and breathing.

—

In the early morning hours of Christmas Eve, I arrived home.

(Chemnitz in the early 1940s. It was not a pretty city. From “Chemnitz,” book by Weidlich.)

The front door was locked. I knocked a few times, but there was no answer, so I went around to the kitchen entrance. Two strange women, dressed in winter coats, were busy making a fire in the wood stove, and were as startled as I was. I just stood there.

The women were refugees from the Rhineland where their homes had been destroyed in an air raid, and they had been assigned to the Heumann house as a place to live. They and their countless children, plus a few other people, had taken over the unused rooms in the house -- the music room, the dining room, the Queen-Anne-Room, and even the entrance hall.

Before going upstairs, I looked around downstairs, and although the glass doors were covered up, I could see into the dining room. The large oil paintings, too bulky to store away, were still on the walls, but covered with plywood as a superficial protection. Until recently, they had been unprotected, in defiance of the constant bombing raids, because Father would not and could not part with them. They were the most valuable pieces in his collection, but he felt that enjoying some things is more important than protecting them. “I refuse to sacrifice quality of life to the fears of the moment,” he had said. But now he had done just that. With the encroaching horror of war, the oil painting of lovely Ottilie dropping flowers into a brook must have seemed a bit incongruous, even to him.

Carl Heumann had taken in more refugees than were assigned to him, as much out of charity as out of the desire to be on good terms with the authorities. It didn’t make much difference anymore. In the space between the dining room and the breakfast areas, where in years past the Christmas tree had stood, an iron stove had been installed, its long pipe leading to the outside through a boarded-up window. The massive dining table had been pushed against a wall, and several cots had been set up in its place. Buckets filled with water and sand, as fire extinguishers, were everywhere. The whining voice of a small child was hanging in the cold air, along with the smell of dirty laundry, smoldering wood, and diapers.

I’m surprised that my father described more about how his house had changed than about being reunited with his father, who now lived alone, except for unknown refugees. Can you imagine? The previous Christmas they had still been a family – mother, father, and three teens, gathered around a Christmas tree in their beloved home. Now, Carl was completely alone – and yet surrounded by strangers – in his home. What must that have been like? What was Carl like? Did he and Thomas talk about any of this? I’m sure they did not – both of them alone in their misery. It all makes me so sad.

No, this was no longer my home. It was a refugee camp.

Yet, it was a joyful Christmas because we were together. There was no tree. There were no presents other than the wine, cookies, and cigarettes I had been given, and the knowledge that this evening they were all safe. The candles, which had always been for decoration, were now a necessity during the regular long hours when the electricity was shut off.

On Christmas Day, Father and I traveled by bus to Adelsberg to see Ulli, my sister. We had just arrived when the air raid sirens sounded, which to me was not at all unwelcome just then: I wanted to see Gisela so badly, and this alarm gave me an innocent-looking chance. My uncle’s house, where Ulli lived, was a duplex that shared a common air raid shelter with the house that belonged to Gisela’s parents.

Ever since I went away to camp, I had carried her picture in a leather pouch on a string around my neck, along with a picture of my family and my ID card. Neither parents really approved of our innocent involvement, but now, during the air alert, I didn’t have to sneak away to see her. I could even sit right next to her in the dark of the basement shelter, holding her hand. As we listened for the bombers flying overhead, we could hear the sound of the anti-aircraft guns in the distance.

“Call me ‘Pitt’ once more,” she whispered. I had invented that name for her, and she liked it. It was as though this was our last time together — forever. And if today was not the last day, tomorrow might be, or the day after. Even at the age of sixteen, we lived with the constant thought of death. Not as much from deportation, as from bombs. This knowledge, and even expectation, of death was our regular companion in those years.

It wasn’t our last day, but before we would see each other again, much was to come between us.

Hard Physical Labor and a Serendipitous Decision

Dear grandkids,

Thomas is deep into his story now. No need for me to interrupt!

The next morning dawned cold and clear. The same gray figures shuffled back on the same road we had been on the night before. We felt as dreary as the drizzle that had penetrated deep into our clothing just a few hours ago.

I was cold and sleepy, but not unhappy. This was the first time I was really on my own, away from the comfortable footing of home, and it felt like an adventure of sorts. I was suddenly considered a man -- old enough to work like one and old enough to suffer like one.

I knew that things could have been much worse. We could have ended up hundreds of miles away, in Russia. Or we could have been deported to Theresienstadt, or even to Dachau -- names people whispered when they were in trusted company. No, this was not that kind of concentration camp. The guards here were dour and unapproachable, but not harsh or cruel. Word was that no one was beaten or mistreated. They were just doing a job. Whatever this camp would turn out to be, it was somewhat reassuring that it wasn’t run by the SS, but rather by Organisation Todt, the building and construction arm of the Nazi machinery, whose reputation wasn’t nearly as sinister.

And, I told myself, it would not last forever -- if one could only survive the crescendo toward the inevitable apocalypse. I knew that I must lay low now and remember the Bible quote Pfarrer Hoffmann had chosen for my confirmation (“If God be for us, who could be against us?”), a defiant and courageous statement about some of the positive forces that were fermenting under the surface in Germany. Like many of his colleagues, Hoffmann used the sanctuary of his pulpit to give voice to what was good, decent, and intelligent. These values had not disappeared, but they had become voiceless.

On the first day at Munzig, we unloaded the prefabricated barracks from railroad cars. The wooden spars and trusses were heavy and were crusted with a thick layer of ice. Never had I done such hard physical labor, so I tired quickly. The other men whispered to me to slow down, to remain hidden and faceless in the crowd and only do the bare minimum. So the next day I exhausted myself less.

(The barracks at Munzig)

It took a week to build the barracks and the outhouse which consisted of a long pit with a ten-foot-long tree laid along its edge. Moving into the new barrack from the drafty barn was an event. No longer were we to sleep on the ground on moist straw; now we’d sleep on straw sacks, perhaps even on bunks. Here we were, making a major stride in the development of civilization!

I picked an upper bunk near the oil drum stove. The air would be bad there, but it would be warm. The man who called himself Wagges ended up on the bunk below, and next to him was Heiner, a frail boy my age.

Although they were all Mischlinge Ersten Grades^[1] like me, none of the men seemed to be — or at least professed to be — of Jewish religion. Except for Wagges, who made a fetish of it. He had a particular and coarse hatred for Heiner who never smiled, never spoke voluntarily, and always carried a New Testament with him. Heiner surrounded his bunk with religious pictures, and when everyone around him talked or laughed, he read his Bible and prayed. With glee, Wagges drew obscene pictures over Heiner’s religious ones. One night, when Heiner was in a deep, exhausted sleep, Wagges tied a long string to what he called “that big dunce cap”— the symbol of non-Jewishness, Heiner’s foreskin — so that Wagges could tug on it in the middle of the night.

After the barracks were finished, I rarely saw the place in daylight again. From then on, every day was like the next: before daybreak, we walked an hour to the construction site and worked until noon, when we got our rations of watery soup consisting of cabbage and caraway seeds in water. (We called it “foot rags with flees.”) Then we worked until dusk, walked back to the barracks, and slept like logs.

The evenings were short and were taken up mostly by housekeeping chores. Those of us still lucky enough to own regular socks washed and mended them, while others washed the gray foot rags (square pieces of material consisting of a mixture of recycled textile waste and paper) which had been issued to us. Clothes had to be patched and the barracks had to be swept. Some read, while others wrote letters or smoked cigarettes rolled from peppermint tea, and there were always a few who played cards. But no one stayed up late; sleep was too precious. Besides, once you were asleep you couldn’t feel the constant hunger, nor the cold.

The construction site was a terrible mess. Depending on the weather, the ground was either frozen-hard ice or ankle-deep mud -- sometimes both at once. For the first two weeks, I was assigned the job of laying the rails for the narrow-gauge muck train. It wasn’t exactly like playing model railroad, but it was more varied and less strenuous than the assignment which was to follow -- pushing the loaded cars from the place where the conveyer belt belched rock and soil from the mountain, to a dumping pit.

(Thank you, Google Images. Found with a search for “Organisation Todt” and  “rock work.” This is probably much like the work Thomas did.)

I soon proved too weak for that job, which rightfully belonged to a locomotive, and I was relieved when they put me to work where the conveyer belt was being loaded, inside the huge rock that constituted the whole hill. It was here, in the cavernous bowels of the earth, that I first realized what we were working on: these large underground caverns, hewn and blasted from the rock, were to be some kind of war material plant, away from normal air attack targets, hidden in the solid rock under an innocent-looking hill.

This was still very hard labor. Even the instructions on how to use the knee for pushing the shovel into the pile of crushed rock — given by a sensitive and aristocratic-looking gentleman in the group who seemed to know my family — didn’t make it much easier for me. After all, I was only a sixteen-year-old high school kid who knew a lot more about how to fake his Greek vocabulary than about how to get away with the least amount of physical effort in a digging crew. I tried to prove to everybody, most of all to myself, that I was one of the men and could work hard, but many times during the ten-hour days, I had to stop shoveling because my nose would start bleeding uncontrollably.

It may have been no more than a nosebleed which was responsible for one of those bizarre strokes of luck or coincidence — if there is such a thing — that come out of nowhere when everything seems blackest. Perhaps one of the guards was tired of my bleeding nose, or maybe he felt some real compassion for me. Most likely, I was in the way of him making his daily quota of rubble. Whatever prompted him to do it, he picked me as one of twenty people who were needed in Meissen, at the Organisation Todt warehouse, to unload several boxcars of supplies.

It was monotonous work, passing sacks of dried peas and 40-pound boxes of dried barley soup from hand to hand up the stairs for endless hours. Pick a box - swing it up - let it go, pick a box - swing it up - let it go. Strange as it seems, at one point we found ourselves singing. Many years later, when I heard how Negro spirituals developed from the work songs of slaves in the American South, I remembered that day. It was the same repetitive, rhythmical movement that are made easier by singing or humming, even if it has to be marching songs.

After two days, the railroad cars were empty, the warehouse was well-stocked, and the men were sent back to the quarry.

All, that is, but three. Three men were needed to maintain the warehouse and to load and unload future shipments. Herr Uckel, the man who oversaw the operation, did the picking. He was a gentleman in his early sixties who had obviously seen better and more rewarding jobs than running a warehouse.

The first man he picked was the one who would be most helpful to him, Horst Reiszmann, the young carpenter who’d had so much trouble believing he was a descendent of a Jew. Horst was to build the shelving for the warehouse. Herr Uckel’s other two choices were a purely humane deed. His second pick was a short and fragile little man in his early forties with delicate hands and an embarrassed Charlie Chaplin smile, who turned out to be a former violinist with the municipal orchestra of the provincial town of Zwickau. And the third person he picked the rosy-faced high school boy with the dreamy and bewildered eyes: me.

 

For the three of us, this meant a fantastic measure of freedom.

---

^[1] “Mixed Race, First-Degree” (or “Halbjuden” = “Half Jews”)

Summons to Munzig Labor Camp

My dear grandchildren,

I might have skimmed Dad’s story about his first love, but I read with keen interest as he described his summons to the railroad station and his trip to Munzig Labor Camp.

This is the beginning of the tragic journey that I believe defined my father’s life. As you read this, remember that Thomas had just turned sixteen. He entered Munzig labor camp as a naïve teenager, but what would transpire over the next few months would define him as a man.

Thomas writes:

I felt good as I rode my bike home from a private tutoring session with Dr. Piltzer. While in public school, I’d done poorly in math, but now all of a sudden many of the mysteries seemed to fall into place and the cleanliness of mathematics was beginning to leave an impression on me. Anyone could learn the dry formula a2 + b2 = c2, but to follow the simple elegance of Pythagoras’ proof was exciting to me.

“Well, you’ll end up as an engineer yet!” Dr. Piltzer exclaimed when I submitted my assignment, a cross-section drawing of a steam engine. Ever since my older brother had aimed in that direction, the engineering profession had gained a shiny halo for me. Not that I had any particular leaning toward technology, but it had always bothered me that I was less apt than my older brother at anything technical.

Mother had wanted me to become a bridge builder, a romantic, strictly ideological notion, having little to do with structural engineering and much more with building bridges between people and nations. My father visualized me as a Protestant parson somewhere out in the country — an equally romantic and idyllic vision, born out of the daily association with the artist Ludwig Richter -- the good shepherd with staff and dog, contentedly puffing his pipe, sitting on the carved old bench in front of his whitewashed house at sunset. Recognizing the “two souls in my breast,” they may have known me better than I knew myself, but certainly they knew their own unfulfilled dreams.

Ludwig Richter. I heard this name often as I grew up, along with names like Menzel, Winterhalter and Genelli. These were artists in my grandfather’s collection. As we grew up, we were given pieces from Carl’s collection as gifts for milestone events in our lives. For my wedding to Tom Snider in May, 1983, Dad gave us a series of 15 drawings by Ludwig Richter who was one of Carl’s favorite artists.

     

               

And what did I want? I wanted to work and live with animals. Years ago, when I was only ten, I had made up my mind that I would become a veterinarian, come what may. I had held on to this dream steadfastly, even as Dr. Piltzer made that flattering comment about my rather amateurish drawing of a steam engine.

As soon as I arrived home and took off my coat and my tie, all thoughts about my future profession were cut short by the realities of the day. A postcard had arrived for me:

YOU ARE HEREBY DIRECTED TO PRESENT

YOURSELF NEXT WEDNESDAY AT 5:00 AM AT THE

MAIN RAILROAD STATION FOR LABOR DUTY.

HEIL HITLER!

(Chemnitz train station in the 1940s.)

At the railroad station, the eastbound train steamed through the first wet snow of winter. It was not until late morning that it became clear to me what the fifty or so men who gathered here had in common. I didn’t recognize any of them. I thought I caught a glimpse of Dr. Piltzer in the crowd, but he disappeared into a different car. The men were of all ages. Some must have been at least 60, and I was younger than most, if not all, of them.

There was much conjecture, much guessing, much fear about where we were going. The officials who accompanied us were not wearing a uniform. There was no hint from them about where we were going. All we knew was that we were headed east. Poland? Russia? What for? For how long? Why?

One man in my small group had the face of a veteran street fighter and the body of a thin and frail old man. The corners of his mouth were turned down into a sneer. He called himself Wagges and spoke more and louder than anyone else. He had a devil-may-care attitude about him that was impressive, but his presence was dangerous for everyone. If this guy doesn’t shut up and quit making those derisive remarks about the Party and the war, we’ll all be in a lot of trouble. Him for saying it, and everybody else for not denouncing him.

At one point, Wagges blurted out: “Ich hab’ ‘nen Webfehler^[1] .”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, my old man was one of those dirty Jews.”

“Really? I’m half-Jewish too!”

“Me too, I’m also a Mischling! ”

That, at least, solved part of the mystery, except for poor Horst Reiszmann, a pudgy, somewhat slow young man. “You are all crazy!” he insisted. “I’m German, I’ve got nothing to do with you guys. My Dad is Hungarian, not a Jew!”

“So? It just means you’re a Hungarian Yidd! Look at yourself, you look like a whole ghetto, just like the character on the poster over there.”

Wagges pointed at a poster on the wall of the train, showing a distorted, semitic-looking face behind a door, and the caption “PSST! Feind hört mit!^[2]”

Horst stared out the window, fighting back tears. Then he borrowed a piece of paper and wrote a letter to his mother, with one burning question.

There was a long wait in Dresden, hours of stomping around on the platform trying to keep warm. War songs and marches blared from the PA system, interrupted only by occasional announcements that war news of the greatest importance could be expected at any minute.

What now? The war had been going badly for Germany. Day and night, the radio and newspaper touted a miraculous Final Victory for the Führer, but many knew that the war was already lost, and had been lost ever since Stalingrad last year. It could only be a matter of months now until total breakdown would become inevitable. No one could talk about it, of course, but many saw it, and even more longed for it.

Peace, just peace, any peace.

When the news finally came, there were no cheers from this group. To us, the news could only mean one thing - more uncertainty, and for a longer time. Germany now had its miracle weapon, advanced rockets that were flying at this very moment across the Channel toward London The V-2^[3] was here and the great turn-around of the air war had begun.

Night was falling as we were ordered into two separate cars of a local train, heading north along the Elbe river. Less than an hour had passed when the train stopped again as it had several times before.

“EVERYBODY OUT!”

It was a small rural station without a building and, of course, without lights because of the general total blackout. Through the drizzle, I could make out the chipped paint on the sign:

MUNZIG

(Thank you, Alamy.)

What the hell is Munzig?

We were ordered to form a marching column and moved out into the November night. The landscape had no details, only the trees and bushes along the road.

Thirty minutes. My pack became heavy and the cold drizzle seemed to go right through to my skin. Even the World-War-I gaters Uncle Heinz had bestowed upon me were completely soaked through.

One hour. Everybody was too tired to talk. In front of us we could see the outline of a high fence with the gate open. We were ordered across a wide-open field into an unlit barn.

“Everybody -- find some straw and lie down!”

The straw was wet, the rain was dripping through the roof, and the wind was blowing in from everywhere, but I slept more deeply than I had for many a night.

---

^[1] “I have a weaving defect!”

^[2] “Hush! The enemy is listening!”

^[3] The “V” designation stood for “Vergeltungswaffe” -- the “weapon of revenge”