Well, this is awkward!

Dear grandchildren,

It’s a bit…well, awkward for a child – even a grown child – to hear details about their parent’s sexual history. I probably skipped over this little chapter when I read Dad’s book the first and second times. But this time I had to edit it.

And you know what? It’s actually really sweet.

(Except that it’s my Dad. So, ew?)

I was sitting in the waiting room of the medical office, along with maybe twenty other miserable specimens of humanity. Dr. Barbara von Renthe, Nora’s mother, was one of the first doctors allowed to open a medical practice again, and hers was in a large office complex that housed mainly the Russian occupation headquarters.

I had developed a bad infection in my left armpit and my arm was in a sling, the elbow held away from my body by a makeshift contraption Nora had fashioned for me. Rainer and I, along with Ulli and Renate, had planned to leave the next day for München. We expected that it would be a journey of at least a few days and that we would need to use any means of transportation that presented itself at the moment. The trip would require quick decisions, breathless sprints, long hours of waiting on cold train station platforms - and all this with heavy and precious luggage.

Every time a burst of pain shot through the carbuncle in my armpit, my face distorted. Nora was probably right: I was in absolutely no condition to undertake this kind of trip. She had been trying to convince me of it, and now was enlisting her mother’s medical authority to support her efforts to keep me back a little while longer. Now it was looking like Rainer, Renate and Ulli would probably have to leave for München without me.

When it was finally my turn — the last hour had gone by faster because Nora had arrived and was sitting next to me — “Dr. Mummi” took one look at the mess under my arm and proclaimed “You belong in a hospital, but they don’t have room. The next best thing is our house, and Nora is going to be your nurse. And you, Nora, will have a chance to show what you can do as a nurse, since you want to become a doctor!” She cleaned and dressed the nasty infection, gave me some sulfonamides — the new wonder drug from America — and released me into the care of my sweetheart-nurse, with detailed medical instructions to the exuberant apprentice.

Nora basked in her new role. She had been a nurse’s aide before, but never had she taken sole responsibility for a patient.

Once we reached Nora’s home-hospital, I was bedded down in a guest room that connected to a hallway and shared a a common balcony with Nora’s bedroom. It was the only available room in the house, and I was much too miserable to wonder whether it was by design that I got this room - and if so, was it mother’s or daughter’s idea, or both?

I recovered quickly. The antibiotics did their work, the hot compresses and the Ichtamol relieved the pressure of the bursting pus pockets, and after a few days my temperature was almost back to normal. While I recovered, I was alone much of the day, while Nora was in school and her mother was in her medical office, but evenings with Nora were long and beautiful.

One night, I lay awake debating whether I should be bold enough to go through the door and visit my “nurse” next door. We had spent all evening reading love poetry in German, French and English, and torturing each other with our resolve to waituntil we were “mature enough.” But when the lights were out and separation seemed so cruelly final, I decided that I really hadn’t meant all I had said that evening about waiting and all that.

I half thought, half whispered Nora’s name, tentatively, like a question.

The door, which had only been ajar, opened slowly, silently, and the lovely naked figure, silhouetted against the night window, moved toward my bed. “Tes pas, enfants de mon silence...” I thought as my heart pounded in my throat, “Ombre divine...^[1]”

Without a word, Nora slipped under my blanket. I put my arm around her and whispered in her ear:“....Car j’ai vécu de vous attendre, et mon cœur n’était que vos pas...”^[2]

---

^[1] “Your steps, as children of my silence … heavenly shadow….” (Paul Valéry)

^[2] “...for I have only existed on expecting you, and my heart was nothing but your steps…”

Of endings (war) – and beginnings (love)

Dear grandchildren,

Once again, my father’s words need very little commentary – and the commentary that I would leave would be along the lines of the childish and immature covering of my ears, insisting “I can’t heaaar you, Dad!” 

Because in this excerpt, my father explores the sensual pleasures of newfound love.

The war was coming to a close and Thomas’ future was wide open. It must have been an amazing time – exhilarating for a variety of reasons, terrifying for even more reasons, and hopeful above all else. 

Here are Thomas’ words – and my commentary where I just can’t help myself.

The room was a mess. It was only a small attic room, probably a former supply room for the restaurant below. There were two beds, a few boxes, and a chair. The small dormer window was open to let in the breath of spring air - cold, but clean and fragrant. This room would be my home for the next few weeks.

Dr. Jaeger had arranged this hideaway months in advance. It was a place to hide when the steamroller of war would lumber across Germany. Dr. Jaeger had moved here as the two fronts started to approach each other in the center of the country, and he brought with him his extended family - his former nurse with their son Ben, his present wife and their daughter Nora, and his present mistress. He had also taken along a selected group of his friends: my uncle and aunt Buddecke with daughter Gaby and my sister Ulli, and five or six other families. They filled up most of the rooms in this plain little Gasthaus in a dreamy little hamlet called Wernsdorf, lost somewhere in the forested Erzgebirge hills that formed the border between Saxony and Czechoslovakia.

It was an idyllically peaceful setting, and had it not been for the solitary radio — the only link to the world outside — nobody would have guessed that the rest of Germany was shaking in the last convulsions of defeat. There was no evidence of an army, and the sole resident Nazi had long ago vanished, probably to a hideout of his own, so it was now relatively safe to be here. Dr. Jaeger and his handful of dissident friends did not need to fear that some Nazi fanatic would shoot them under the cover of martial law that was now the only law of the land. After all, hadn’t Goebbels vowed that they would slam the door behind them if they ever had to go? The doors were slamming all over in these final frantic days, in the cities, in the concentration camps, in the pitiful remnants of the German army. But not here in Wernsdorf. In fact, the feeling that one could speak without fear of informers, within an enclave of friends, was exhilarating, with the tingle of doing something forbidden and dangerous.

(Wernsdorf today. Can’t you just picture the little farmhouse right here?)

One evening, with much pathos, the announcement came over the radio that Hitler had married Eva Braun. Hitler — married? Married whom? No one recognized her name. We all looked at each other, shaking our heads in disbelief, and then a snicker rose up, a quip, an obscene comment, growing into a roar, a liberating, releasing roar, not so much over the news as over the tragicomic situation, but more the very ability to laugh openly about it. It was the hysterical laughter of someone who had just come out of great pain: mindless, with abandon, the tears of an old pain mixing with the tears of newly found relief.

But it wasn’t over yet. The next big question was, which colossus will get here first, the Russian one from the east, or the American one from the west? The radio news, of course, was unreliable and many days behind the actual events - mere propaganda, sugar pills for a lost and despondent population.

The big news on the radio came during the night of May first after a build-up of rousing marching music that lasted for several hours, then some Wagner (you knew something big was coming when Wagner was played), then snatches of Brahms at his most pompous, and finally Bruckner’s seventh symphony. And then, there it was: the Führer and Eva Braun had brought the final heroic sacrifice for the Third Reich and had met the hero’s death fighting Bolshevism.

This time there was no jubilant reaction, only fury. The bastard was escaping justice! Outrage mixed with frustration, and these people who prided themselves on being cultured and above base emotions like revenge, could not hide their anger at the criminal who had taken the easy way out, who now could not be made to face the world and answer to all of humanity.

“The bastard was escaping justice!” Remind you of anyone? Why is it that the evilest of men – Hitler… Trump – manage to evade justice? Hitler took himself out. Trump continues to be a thorn in the side of American democracy, still helped by his party, still evading justice. If only he’d… oh, never mind.

Still, it was the signal for Dr. Jaeger to break out a bottle, with a solemn flourish, a bottle of the very finest old late harvest wine he had saved for years and brought up here for just this celebration.

There was only a lonely candle on the small round table in this attic. Occasionally, we could hear the rumbling of guns, not so far away now, and conversation would stop for a few moments, until it died away altogether. Then a cynical remark penetrated the silence, flashing like a grotesque mask in the darkness. But no one was able to break the tenseness of the atmosphere.

Suddenly, Dr. Jaeger hit the tabletop with his flat hand.

“I’ve got it”, he said, “Here’s what we do: from tomorrow on, this place is going to be a VD Hospital!”

“What??”

It took a minute or two, but once we understood this ingenious scheme there was no stopping the masquerade. Dr. Jaeger, discovering in himself the gift of stage direction, distributed the roles: he and Nora’s mother, being actual doctors, would play the doctors. All girls and women of rape-able age would be the VD patients, and the men would orderlies and cooks.

“All right now, these four rooms are the wards,” directed Dr. Jaeger. Up went the beds, all in a row. “This is the examination room… put the china cabinet here… take the china out… put in all the medical instruments you can find. Good… now some medicine bottles, too. It looks almost real!”

Dr. Jaeger just loved his new role.

“Nora, use my bed sheet to sew a bunch of big Red-Cross flags to hang outside.”

“Thomas, make a large sign.” So I did.

“Now let’s hope the Russians understand at least one or the other!”

We worked with enthusiasm, and in her hurry to sew the flags, Nora pricked her finger with the sewing needle. “That means I’ll get kissed the same day”, she said, and I wondered whether she had just made up this choice piece of folklore. Since it was only a few minutes before midnight, I didn’t have much time to guess, so I decided that it must be true and saw to it that the prophesy be fulfilled. Nora promptly managed to prick herself again.

The metamorphosis took all night. By morning, the village Gasthaus was, for all but professional observers, a VD Clinic.

Three days went by. No electricity, no radio, no news. Not even false news. News traveled on foot now. Refugees, trickling by in a generally westerly direction on the small country road, carried their own kind of news - rumors, fears, panic, or resignation. They were moving away from the sound of guns, wherever that was. “They’ll be here in the morning,” they said.

“Who?”

“Russians, Tartars, Mongols. They rape the women and torture the men. They burn everything they can’t carry.”

A German soldier on a motorcycle stopped to ask if anyone had seen soldiers. The Americans, he said, had taken Chemnitz yesterday, had just rolled in without firing a shot. No one bothered to defend that pile of rubble.

The soldier roared off, slowed, then returned. He was young, not more than a year older than I was, and spoke with an Austrian dialect. His uniform was muddy, and a layer of caked dust accentuated the lines of sleeplessness in his face.

“You sure you haven’t seen any Russians? No German soldiers either?”

“No, only a few lost refugees. No uniforms of any kind.”

For a few moments he rocked back and forth on the seat of his motorcycle. Then he reached forward, turned off the engine, sat the heavy machine on its stand, and slowly, deliberately, with the tip of his bayonet, started taking off the insignia from his uniform and dropped them on the ground.

“So, there,” he finally said, breaking into a broad grin, “That’s that. He pointed to his rifle and pistol. “And if you guys don’t mind, I’ll get rid of these and I’ll stick around here somewhere until it’s over.”

“Now that takes courage!” I said to Nora. “How does he know we aren’t Gestapo?”

“You sure look like it!” Nora laughed, and ruffled my hair.

The newly converted Austrian civilian swung on his motorcycle and disappeared around the bend in the road. An hour later he came back, this time on foot.

“I left the bike in the forest, too. Didn’t want to get you people into trouble.”

With that he turned toward an empty barn across the street, collapsed in a pile of straw, and fell asleep.

He slept all day, all night, and most of the next day.

Late that afternoon, with the sun already behind the gable of the barn, there was a rumble, a squeaking, a clanking of heavy metal and motor noises. I ran to Nora’s room — the only window facing out to the street — and there it came: a monster, a lumbering box, soldiers around it with automatic pistols at the ready, and on top of the tank two men, black men, two giants with flashing white teeth.

“Americans!” I whispered to Nora, as though anybody could hear me. I couldn’t speak louder, as my heart was beating in my throat. “Those are no Russians! Look, it says ‘US ARMY’ right there on the tank! Do they ever look fierce. But they made it first — no Russians for us!”

They looked fierce and determined, all right. Without slowing down, they had their eyes everywhere, on the inn, on the barn, ahead, right, left, but they didn’t stop. They didn’t shoot; they just kept going. There was no shouting, no sound other than the rumble of the tank tracks, and as it went by under the window Nora spotted a bunch of wilted flowers on the back of the tank, caught between two plates of armor.

They left as quickly as they had arrived. There was no big victorious army behind them, no fanfares, no columns of prisoners, nothing. All night, the adults at the inn waited in shifts, listening, whispering, guessing. Not a sound, not even the sounds of distant artillery anymore. There was only an eerie, pregnant silence all around.

Ben was with the people below. Nora and I were upstairs in Nora’s room in the dark, without even a candle. We talked about the day, and from time to time listened out into the night. More and more, our conversation turned to ourselves, to each other, to our dreams, to the future, and as the night wore on, the excitement of the day gave way to a new, much more hidden and intimate tension, to an even more unknown and uncertain excitement, more unsettling than the experience of the defeat of a nation, more mysterious than the patrol of enemy’ troops that had come and disappeared. It was an excitement that neither Nora nor I had felt before, and it made our heartbeats race faster than even the sight of the first American tank. It was a feeling we had heard about, wondered about, had secretly feared and longed for, even more than we had wondered about, feared, and longed for the end of the war.

(Nora, Thomas’ first love. No, not my mother!)

As we talked, I had been sitting in an easy chair across the small room. Nora had been curled up on her bed, her legs drawn up, and a blanket around her shoulders. I was contemplating a bold move, not unlike, it seemed to me, the daring of the lonely American patrol that had explored the vacuum of the no-man’s land earlier in the day. The room had gotten cold. I got up to put another piece of wood in the small stove in the corner, but it wouldn’t catch, possibly because it was still wet from the winter’s melting snow, or maybe because I didn’t really want it to burn. In exasperation, or rather in anticipation of my daring, I took a deep breath and said, in as nonchalant a voice as I could muster, “I’ll never get this to burn — let me share your blanket until it gets warmer, would you?”

“Sure,” said Nora, “Come on over. ‘In my country nobody must be cold or hungry.’ Isn’t that what the Führer himself said? Well, he’s gone, so we’d better start thinking small. No one should be cold in my room!”

No one was cold in that attic room any more during that spring night of 1945. How soft her body felt, sitting close to me in the dark, how much warmth it radiated! I’d sat that close to a girl a few times before, but it had never been like this. There was something more than animal warmth coming from this body. There was a glow, an electricity flowing where our arms, our hips, and our feet touched. Oh, if one could have this forever! No longer did we speak of the past. We spoke of the future, of dreams, of peace, of plans. Nora spoke of the family and the children she was going to have, her own babies and her young patients when she would be a pediatrician ten years from now. I spoke of the first house I was going to build — my very own — and of being an architect ten years from now. And before the fire in the wood stove had burned down completely, our dreams had crossed, had drifted and crossed again, had linked and touched and merged until the words faded away, until we reached for each other in long silences and long kisses.

“This must be our very own secret,” I whispered, “And we must tell nobody yet that we are engaged. Let’s never forget this sixth of May 1945 as long as we live!”

He could hear Nora smile through the dark and she kissed him on the nose. “Except that Mummy knew it long before you or I did! She was only joking yesterday, but she did say it: you’d make a fine son-in-law for her.”

For the first time in my life I knew how soft a woman’s breast was, how firm and how live and how exciting. We promised to wait for each other until we would be ready, whenever that might be.

“Du bist noch so jung!”^[1] Nora said.

And as the sky in the small dormer window turned from black to gray to pink to blue, two tired children, who suddenly felt very grown-up and superior and faintly naughty, and happier and more jubilant than they had ever felt before, were leaning out the window, waving and smiling at the Russian soldiers who were marching by in an endless, noisy procession, wave after wave.

---

^[1] “You are still so young!’

And now–at sixteen and surrounded by war–Thomas is alone

Dear grandchildren,

Remember as you read this that Thomas was just sixteen-years-old as all this was happening. His mother, the family’s protection, had died suddenly the year before, leaving her Jewish husband and her half-Jewish children alone and vulnerable.  Rainer, Thomas’ older brother, was far away in Munich and his younger sister now lived with relatives. There was no one to dig Carl’s grave except for his young son, Thomas.

When my kids – your parents – were sixteen, they were going to the Junior Prom and getting their drivers licenses. When I was sixteen, I was enjoying the same typically American rites of passage.

But when my father, was sixteen… well, this.

It helped me to remember this when I questioned why my father was so different from all the other fathers I knew.

Once again, very few words from me are needed. Thomas’ story stands on its own:

The old handyman and his horse must have been about the same age, and the rickety wooden cart might have been older than them both. It had no sides, just a well-worn flat wooden bed, four creaking wheels, a seat with a torn blanket, and a holder for the whip, which was essentially useless as it dangled lazily over the horse, who made slow, tired, deliberate steps. Not because he knew that this was a funeral and that his load was a body, but because he just could go no faster.

I did not listen much to the old man’s occasional sighs of how bad the times were, or to his long-drawn-out description of his arthritis. I was working on thoughts of my own. The only dead body I’d seen was that of our beloved Rector Meltzer lying serenely in state. I’d just extricated my father’s lifeless body from the gap between the central furnace and the basement floor, and dragged it inch by inch over the pile of coal and through the small basement window.

I’d enlisted the help of Dr. Koenig, the dentist from up the street, whose house was still standing. It was hard work for the three of us, not only because the old handyman was of little help, but because it had cost me a tremendous amount of self-control to actually touch my father’s body. I was careful to touch only his clothing — a gray suit, of course, complete with vest and diamond tie pin.

(My father bequeathed the diamond tie pin, which had later been made into a ring, to my son, Peter. You can read about it HERE.)

“Try not to touch the skin,” Dr. Koenig warned me, “It can give you the worst kind of infection. See how open his hands are? He did not suffer much pain; he must have died instantly from the pressure of the explosion.”

I tried to believe it. Except for a broken leg there was no visible injury, no blood, and Father’s face was peaceful, with the cracked frameless glasses still in place.

The cart had to skirt the impassable downtown area. It was a long trek back to the Adelsberg cemetery. The March afternoon was beautiful, almost balmy, its peace and beauty in macabre contrast to the wasteland through which we were riding.

The sun was about to set when we arrived at the church. The pastor was waiting. Gisela was there with her family. The service consisted of a very few words.

That night, for the first time, I could cry. I cried myself to sleep, with tears of fear, helplessness, and anger at being confronted with the merciless injustice and brutality of war. It was an atrociously absurd irony: the man who had spent twelve years defending himself and his family from a hostile government, the man who had suffered immeasurably but had maintained his mental balance and kept his optimism alive for the day the Allied victory would liberate him -- that man had been killed by a bomb from those very Allies!

And deeper down there was the unsolvable question about this war, or any other war: why did my father, Carl, the Jew, the peaceful art collector, the Anglophile, the incurably romantic Feingeist^[1] who had survived a dozen years of political adversity and artful dodging — why did this man have to be killed, three weeks before the end of the war, by a bomb from an American airplane, released maybe by some scared but adventurous farm hand from Greenville, Kansas? And why did the boy from Greenville get a medal for his bravery of pulling the lever just at the right moment? Did he, when he was back on the farm, ever consider that in one second “over there” he killed more people than live in all of Greenville? Did he ever think that he destroyed, with that pull of the lever, more of human culture than will ever touch him in his lifetime? Did he? Could he?

I walked back to where my childhood home had once stood majestically at the corner, behind the iron gates, set back from the road.

There was nothing left, just nothing at all. I poked through the ashes and the rubble and found only chunks of bricks, brittle and fired for a second time, along with amorphous shapes of melted glass, like big marbles that a giant fist had squeezed through its fingers. Some were just clear glass melted together with ash and cinders, while others were marbled with veins of color. What had they been? The glass from the clock in the dining room which had been the Heumanns’ wedding present from my grandfather? No, the dining room had been over there. The carafe of Czechoslovakian crystal that always had red Vermouth in it? It had always showed such rich rainbow colors when one held it in the sunlight. I lifted the chunk of glass into the sun: there were no rainbow colors, only bits and pieces of ambers, ragged and cold. I threw it against a basement wall, but it did not break.

I dug and poked and kicked aside chunks of bricks and bent pieces of pipe. Could it really be that nothing was left? Nothing? The foot treadle from my mother’s sewing machine. A beheaded portion of a Meissen figurine that had always been kept under a glass bell to keep it from getting dusty. How absurd, how insanely comical it was. A saucer, finely hand-painted and almost intact. It sailed through the air as I flung it aside. This one did break.

In the basement there was still a small pile of potatoes with white sprouts growing wildly in all directions. I was hungry, I just realized, so I took two of the potatoes to the rubble pile in the front yard and built a fire pit out of bricks, gathered up pieces of splintered wood (which floor had this one been?) and roasted the potatoes. They were delicious, though they were so burned that they looked much like big balls of molten glass around me.

While I was eating I noticed a hexagonal stick, about a foot long, sticking up through the rubble. I knew it was one of the 900,000 incendiary bombs that had rained down during the night of hell in Chemnitz, March 5, 1945. I picked it up and threw it as far as I could. It sailed through the opening that had been the window of the Queen-Anne-Room and down into the cavern of the collapsed basement. It exploded sharply and immediately started spewing out hissing daggers of flames and sparks in all directions. It could find nothing left to ignite.

I kept searching further for something, just anything useful or meaningful or memorable. In the garage below the gardener’s house, my chemical lab remained unscathed. After the big flood in the attic, the lab had been banished to the garage for fear that I might start a fire in the house. I told you, Father, it couldn’t ever start a fire. It wouldn’t even burn when everything around it did!

The ceiling over the wine cellar had not collapsed completely, but what was left of it was twisted and sagging, piled high with debris. I did not dare venture below. There was still a rack with wine bottles that had been collecting their own dust over the years, not in one night. Later that day, an old man came by, dressed in not much more than rags. He said he was a neighbor, who had known Herr Konsul well, but I did not recognize him. He had noticed, he said, that there were some bottles of wine still there, and might he take one or two of them, please?

I wandered around aimlessly, dulled, unbelieving, yet with a strange feeling of adventure, with the sense of relief that I had survived once more. As I stumbled around under the area where the children’s playroom window had once been, I saw something I recognized immediately: “Thomasbäumchen,” a small almond tree that my godfather had planted in the hour when I was born, not much taller than I was now.

Carefully, one by one, I removed the bricks that had bent and torn it, and when I was done, the tree with its pink buds and its tender leaves looked almost as proud as I did.

(When Peter was born, we also planted an almond tree. It has moved with us every time, and someday, hopefully, it will grace Peter’s yard.)

And as thankful.

---

^[1] literally : “fine mind” - a sophisticated, cultured, highly refined person, naïve in a way and unworldly

Another Mystery: Why was Carl not on the Final Transport of Jews from Chemnitz (February, 1945)

Dearest grandchildren,

As I began this post, I looked in my photos folder and online for a photo I was sure I had – that of the fiery red sky over Dresden in the distance, over a hillside. I couldn’t find that photo anywhere. Turns out, it doesn't actually exist. It’s a vivid picture only in my own mind, formed when Dad described his experiences on the night of February 13 – 14, 1945.

The bombing of Dresden killed at least 25,000 people. That’s about twice the population of Gig Harbor, where we currently live and about the size of many larger suburbs of Seattle and San Francisco, where you live. It’s still quite unfathomable to me… but so much of the destruction of WWII is.

In this post, Thomas describes that horrible night in Dresden and prepares us for what was to come in Chemnitz. And he again brings up an irony that has impacted generations of our family – the fact that Carl wasn’t deported along with the remaining Jews in Chemnitz.

Here are your great grandfather’s words:

The next few months in Meissen were bearable, not because living was any easier, but because it was becoming obvious, despite all the propaganda to the contrary, that the war was lost and the days of Nazi rule were numbered.

There was a popular quip: “Enjoy the war — peace will be hell!”

I felt I was floating down an increasingly turbulent and treacherous river. No one knew who would survive and who would not, but there was no escape. I’d have to navigate through the rapids as best I could and keep my head — and protect it.

Meissen is a small town about 30 km down the Elbe river from Dresden, and its pride and claim to fame is the manufacture of the fine ancient porcelain known in the US as “Dresden China.” Since there was no other industry, Meissen was relatively safe from air attack, so much so that people would hardly bother to go to the shelter when there was an air raid alert.

One such alarm came on February 13, 1945, a bright wintery day. The “Air Status Report” (given by a system that used the electric power grid rather than the air waves, in order to not provide a radio beacon to the enemy) reported that large numbers of aircraft had entered the air space of Saxony.

It was a spectacular and awesome sight.

Wave after wave of heavy bombers flew overhead -- hundreds of them, in perfect formation, undisturbed by anyone. Their only logical destination was Dresden, the Baroque pride of all of Germany, the “Florence on the Elbe River,” as it was affectionately called. Now, in February 1945, Dresden was the hub for all traffic to and from the east, beyond which lay nothing but the Russian front line. Everyone knew that the city was completely jammed with refugees from Silesia -- hundreds of thousands of people with carts and babies and bundles who were fleeing west in endless treks ahead of the rapidly advancing Russians. At the same time, Dresden was the staging center for troops and materials going east, supplying what was left of the disintegrating German army.

In the afternoon of February 13^th, there could be no more doubt that Dresden was indeed the target. First, there was a column of smoke that rose up in the distance, growing thicker every hour. As night fell, the sky in the direction of Dresden turned color -- first a flickering yellow, then a dirty red, brighter and higher as the night went on. It was a firestorm feeding on itself, consuming everything in its path -- apartment houses, centuries-old churches, medieval books in museums, university laboratories... and ghetto houses filled with Jews.

Hell itself had come to this once proud and cultured city. Air raid sirens, not trumpets, had announced the Last Judgment, and it had come in the form of miles-wide carpets of bombs, incendiaries first, then a wave of explosives, then a wave of phosphorous that ignited anything it touched - roofs, wood, clothes, or flesh. By morning, the column of smoke stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, and the stench stretched 30 kilometers in every direction.

Three days later, on February 16, after serious air raids on Chemnitz, too, Father sent a cryptic message to Rainer and me: “Certainly, there will be many changes soon for both of you. Keep calm, because it all will all depend on the circumstances that are changing from day to day. One thing is clear: in times like these, every single person is on his own. We must try to stay in touch, especially if you are forced to make decisions on your own.”

I believe this was in reference to the last transport of remaining Jews from Chemnitz to Theresienstadt. The transport, according to research by Dr. Nitsche in 2009, consisted of 57 Jews still living in Chemnitz at this late date, just before the end of the war, namely:

• 20 Jews not in privileged mixed marriages, most of whom had no children;
• 26 Jews living in privileged mixed marriages
• 11 “Mischlinge classified as Jews^[1]”

Father was not among these deported Jews. Those Jews were transported to Theresienstadt Camp in Czechoslovakia under the most chaotic circumstances at a time when it was about to be liberated by the Red Army. Every single one of those 57 Jews survived the war!

To this day, I do not know why my father was not included in this last transport from Chemnitz. An expert on the Jewish Mischlinge, Beate Meyer in Hamburg, told me it probably was because Ulli (and I, ironically!) were underage -- yet more than half of the 26 Jews from “privileged” marriages had children under the age of 18.

Was it because my father was widowed? Not at all likely. In fact, my mother’s death would have made my father’s transport more likely, as he was officially no longer married to a non-Jewish wife so he was no longer considered “privileged.” The Gestapo was not known to consider such human reasons.

Did the Nazi Waldemar Ballerstedt have anything to do with protecting my father? Even Ballerstedt himself who, in a 1957 letter to Rainer, made every effort to tell us how he single-handedly protected our father, said no word about this. In fact, he doubted that any such late transport even happened.

Rainer was sure that our father had received an order from the Gestapo early in 1945 that, according to Father’s investigations, could only mean Theresienstadt. On February 21, 1945, Father wrote to Rainer: “On the question of my Dienstverpflichtung (“Work Duty Order”), I haven’t heard a thing in the past three weeks. With all reservations, I can assume that I don’t have to count on that in the VERY immediate future.”

So WHY?

Dad. We talked about this. I have my own theory as to why Carl was not deported. I’ve discussed it before, and we’ll discuss it again today.

Did Father literally buy his freedom from persecution with large sums of money? Very unlikely for the simple reason that it would have been an illegal act, an act of lowering himself to the moral level of the oppressor, and anybody who knew Konsul Heumann knew he would not do that. And anyway, Father simply wasn’t rich enough to buy much of anything, let alone his freedom, after the Nazis confiscated most of what he owned.

I agree that this is unlikely. If it were true, a lot of wealthy Jews would have survived the Holocaust. Nope – wealth just meant more for the Nazis. No way is this the case, Dad. I agree with you.

Did Carl Heumann, being a titular Vice Consul of neutral Portugal, somehow use diplomatic immunity? Would the Nazis have honored this paper status, allowing my father to escape persecution? My only guess in this regard is that the Nazis knew that they would need the good will of neutral nations like Portugal or Switzerland after the war ended. But my father’s life being spared to this end seems unlikely to me.

Hmmm… interesting theory. I think this is a possibility, but also unlikely. I think neither fame nor fortune mattered to the Nazis.

I still think the reason Carl was not deported is because he had a secret protectorate – and I think that person was Waldemar Ballerstedt! 

I do not know why my father was not included on the last transport from Chemnitz in February, 1945, and I probably never will. I only know this: his absence from this transport was the cause for the most absurd irony imaginable: if he had been on this transport, he, like all the fifty-seven others, would have been spared the agony of what was to come. Had my father been on this final transport, my life and the life of many others would have taken a very different turn.

This irony always causes me an existential crisis. These days, writing this blog, I almost feel that I know Carl, my Opa. But HAD he survived, I absolutely wouldn’t be alive. Even if my father had met my mother, I believe Carl would have talked him out of marrying her. My mom wasn’t the type of person Carl would have wanted his son to marry. Mom was spirited, opinionated, feisty, and she lived her life with a  flippant “come-what-may” attitude. Rules? Those are meant to be broken! Carpe Diem! How different from Carl – the careful rule-follower who cared so much about  what others thought -- can you get?!

Yeah, my life (and therefore yours, dear grandchildren) would have taken a very different turn – right into oblivion!

Three weeks later, on March 5, 1945, Chemnitz suffered the same fate as Dresden. Once again, the map of my life – and of so many other lives -- changed.

Now the war was coming home. Chemnitz, a sooty industrial center, was not in the same league as Dresden, but that’s where father was. That’s where my friends were. That’s where my home was. Reliable information was impossible to get now, as the mail service was practically nonexistent and the newspapers reported nothing but the bare minimum, namely that there had been a severe “terror” attack in Chemnitz. Between the lines of the military jargon and the pep talk, it was clear that the attack had been a bad one, a very bad one indeed.

---

^[1] “Mischlinge of the first Degree” who were of Jewish religion, thus were “considered” Jews

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.

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”

Fall, 1944: Thomas' First Love

My dear grandchildren,

My father wrote Longest Year (his first book’s nickname) in 1979. My feeling is that, unlike Rim (his nickname for his second book, The Rim of the Volcano), which he researched incessantly and which he insisted be politically and historically accurate, Longest Year just flowed out of him because it was simply his memoir. Dad’s approach to Longest Year is much more natural and engaging because he takes on the role of a storyteller, which came naturally to him, whereas with Rim, with its factual political climate sections, he seemed to be more of a history professor, a role a bit less comfortable for Dad.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Dad originally wrote Longest Year in third person, telling the story of Peter Bauer, a Mischling (half-Jewish) boy who is forced to grow up far too quickly in WWII Germany during the Holocaust. When Dad merged Longest Year with Rim, he switched back to first person, but I think Peter’s personality still shines through.

I grew to really love Peter Bauer as I read Longest Year – which makes sense, since I’m positive I would have loved young Thomas Heumann!

What do you think?

 

Here we go!

Tuesday morning.

Tuesday was the day when Lippmann’s Butcher Shop sold beef broth. Watered down, but broth it was. Broth was one of the few items the butcher could sell without ration coupons. You had to get there early, though; the line began forming just after five o’clock, and there was no hope of getting any broth at all if you didn’t get in line well before seven.

I did. There were only twenty or thirty people in front of me.

Getting broth on Tuesday mornings was one of my housekeeping jobs. Since my mother died early in the year, I had to accept more of the duties around the house. Chores to exist, to survive. The simple business of living took so much time, so much attention and alertness, plus a certain amount of cunning.

We had been good customers at Lippmann’s for many years before the war, and Frau Lippmann was particularly fond of me, as she had watched me grow up from a carefree toddler to the serious boy I now was. It was only natural that the job of getting broth would fall on me. Who knows, Frau Lippmann might just slip me a small package of kidneys or a piece of liverwurst when no one was looking. For her, it was just good business to do that for some long-time customers. Eventually, at some time in the future, things would be normal again in Germany, and then one could not afford to lose customers like the Heumanns. Some time. Right now, anything normal seemed so long ago, and so far in the future.

There was no little package this time. I pushed my bicycle up Friedrich-Schlegel-Straße so I wouldn’t spill any of the bouillon from the aluminum pitcher hanging from my handlebar. By now, the sloshing liquid had formed a thin skin of cold fat, like miniature floes of ice. What a ridiculous thought: ice! I knew from the heavy smell and the texture of the dawn air that today would be another one of those warm late-fall days, the days of grace before the long winter set in.

I kicked the leaves in the gutter as I shuffled uphill, hoping to find a few freshly fallen chestnuts, dark brown and still with that smooth grain of highly polished wood, before they were all scuffed up, run over and shriveled. I collected chestnuts for no reason in particular, just to feel and enjoy their smoothness when I put my hands in my pocket. Neighborhood kids competed fiercely for chestnuts because the schools held war effort collections to ship to the soap factory.

When I opened the kitchen door, Liesbeth was already up, hobbling through the large kitchen in small, shuffling steps, making Ersatzkaffee^[1] for breakfast.

Liesbeth was a leftover from old times, the only household help the Nürnberg Laws would allow Jews to have. According to the Laws, female household help had to be over 45, so there would be no danger of racially impure offspring in case master and servant forgot themselves and committed “Rassenschande.”^[2] Rudolf, the butler — the other kind of permissible domestic help — had long ago been drafted into the army and was now somewhere in Russia. The Heumann kids had always whispered and snickered about Rudolf and Liesbeth, good souls, having a rather cozy “Aryan” arrangement up there in the servants’ quarters in the attic. No more.

Rudolf was no longer needed. The household had shrunk to where it consisted only of Father and me, now that Rainer, the oldest, was away in München, where he worked in a machine shop. He was serving the apprentice year he would need to become an engineer -- later, after the war, when they would admit half-Jewish people to universities again. For now, it was good to be a machinist because workers got somewhat higher food rations, and for the moment that mattered most, certainly more than pay or status.

My younger sister Ulli was living with our cousin Gaby in Adelsberg, on the outskirts of Chemnitz. It was lucky that Uncle Heinz and Aunt Gert could take her in. Living with them, Ulli escaped the constant threat of air raids and could be with Gaby, a much better companion than a big brother. And Gaby’s family was certainly a more suitable habitat for the 12-year-old girl than a household managed by a sickly spinster housekeeper and a solitary, grieving, and very impractical father.

(Ulli and Gaby, c 1944.)

So it was that Carl Heumann lived a withdrawn life, alone at home, alone with me, with his art collection, and with his relentless thoughts of present and future. If his thoughts were desperate, he did not let on. Sad, serious, guarded — yes, but he was too much of a romantic to admit to himself, let alone to me, how bleak their situation really was.

While the Nazi system tried to fit all the young kids into the Nazi mold in Germany, Father gave me the confidence that one could remain above the baseness of persecution simply by living a life of uncompromising integrity and correct behavior. Although he never talked to me about it, I began to understand that striving for this sense of superiority could make or break a character when the chips are down.

In a way, I believe Father repressed many of the events that he saw around him. In the early Nazi years, he was convinced that the Nazis could not last long. That is why he had not followed his brothers to America in 1938, when public intimidation and abuse of anything Jewish had accelerated to a pitch where one could foresee what lay ahead. After all, he reasoned, Konsul Heumann was a respected and law-abiding German citizen and “they just couldn’t do that to me.” He clung to this belief to the end.

Our house had lost much of the joy that I had known when I was a small boy, when these walls had been alive with warmth and music, and when well-groomed people who smelled good and spoke of things I didn’t understand came to visit. Now the air was cold, except in what used to be the children’s playroom. In other rooms of the large house, a thick dust, like the frost of a winter morning, had settled on the Biedermeyer furniture.

I hurried up the steps to my room because I still had to do some homework to finish for the Latin lesson at 9:00. I didn’t like Latin, I didn’t like Dr. Epstein who taught me, but I had come to like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I was in the process of reading. There was so little that was stable or consistent in our lives, and here was Ovid who seemed to accept -- even embrace -- a constant flow and change, and do it with a twinkle in his eyes. I liked that.

Dr. Epstein was just one of my tutors. For more than a year now, ever since the Party had decreed that Germans classified as “Mischling Ersten Grades” were no longer allowed to get a high school education, I had been given private lessons by teachers who themselves were barred from teaching school, either because they, too, were racially not acceptable, or because they had been Social Democrats or had other subversive ideas. There was now a completely withdrawn elite underground intelligentsia whose only means of support was tutoring.

It was Herr Epping who introduced me to a much wider field of thought and of art than I would have been taught in public schools. While the high school muddled on under a new uniformed Nazi as Principal, while my former classmates spent the mornings in crowded classrooms and afternoons at mandatory Hitler Youth meetings, I, the outcast, received a broad, humanistic, and liberal education -- exactly the kind of thing the Nazis were trying to prevent!

Herr Epping was also the one who taught French to me and to two of my former classmates. These weekly French lessons were the only means of keeping in touch with my old friends from school, or, for that matter, with anybody my own age. Of course, I was also spared (or not permitted, as they saw it!) membership in the otherwise compulsory Hitler Youth, so the only other young people I ever talked to were Ulli and Gaby and, sometimes their neighbor children.

One of those neighbor children, Gisela, was the reason why, on this day, much of Ovid went in one ear and out the other. Last night, she and I had sat hand-in-hand way up there on the balcony, listening to Haydn’s Schöpfung. The melodies were still swirling around in my head, along with the memories of her sweet sideways glances when I had walked her home in the moonlight.

How could Ovid compete with that?

      

Last week, Gisela and I had spent a whole afternoon at the Stadtpark.  We rented a boat on the lake, and I rowed it across to where the big willow tree hung its branches all the way down into the water. We hid from the eyes of the world there and sat by the park aviary until it was dark.

The aviary was no architectural beauty, but to me it was more glorious than all of the Austrian Baroque Herr Epping kept talking about.

One day, as I left the house to see Gieslea, Father was ill at ease. “Um … er … Thoooomas,” he finally said, “there will be no such thing as kissing or things like that, OK?” Little did Vati know that smooching was exactly what I was going for, and we (at least I) were much too innocent and romantic for “things like that.”

That one sentence from my father comprised the total sex education I ever received from home.

In my mind, every moment of this relationship had grown into a major event, central to my whole being. After all, ahead of us was a whole life together. Last August we had promised to love each other as long as we lived — how could it ever be different? I even immortalized our whole romance in a tongue-in-cheek “Epos” (in hexameter!) which I brought to the vegetable nursery where Gisela worked as part of her war-time labor duty. I could see absolutely nothing unusual about a parody of Homer being recited right there, between cabbages and compost heaps. Gisela was so much a part of every minute of my waking day that, say, even reciting the passé composé of sentir in French class would quite naturally recall for me the scent of Gisela’s hair.

You know how I said that I devoured Longest Year when Dad gave the book to me for Christmas in 1979? I did – except for the “love scenes” – because that wasn’t… well, my mom! Silly, I know. But editing Dad’s words today was the first time that I carefully read my father’s memories about his first love. That’s just a plugging-my-ears thing, right? You’ll do it about your own parents, I’ll bet!

---

^[1] “Coffee replacement” - the stuff made from roasted barley that didn’t taste like coffee, but was called coffee because it looked like it.

^[2] “Racial Defilement” the worst crime possible: sex between an “Aryan” and a Jew or other race the Nazis chose to consider inferior

The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer – an Introduction

My dearest grandkids,

My father wrote The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer (which focuses on 1945), in 1979, thirty-two years before he wrote The Rim of the Volcano (which focuses on the years between 1928 and 1945). In 1979, I was in my senior year of college and completely immersed in (what felt like) the complexity of my own life. I read Dad’s book immediately upon receiving it for Christmas and I was completely immersed for a few evenings – but I read it with the same third-person detachment with which it was written. I felt a deep connection to the character of Peter Bauer, but that connection didn’t necessarily translate into a deep emotional understanding that it was Thomas Heumann, my father, who experienced such profound chaos and trauma. And by writing the book in third-person, Dad, in a way, gave me permission to distance myself.

Or maybe that’s just generational trauma speaking!

(Our family, c 1978. Dad was deep into the writing of Longest Year. I was deep into… well, being me.)

Here are my father’s words:

I originally wrote what follows - about the end of 1944 and all of 1945 - about a fictional character named Peter Bauer. I chose that alias because “Peter” means “rock” in Greek (strong and solid) and “Bauer” means builder in German. I’d need to be strong and solid to build my future life after enduring the life-altering chaos of 1945 Germany. I wrote this book in third person because it’s easier to step outside and look in from a distance, and it allows more freedom to make the truth truer by adding some “retrospective imagination” to details, without having to feel guilty of lying. In 1979, when I began to write The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer, I found third-person to be the best approach.

(Thomas at about 16, circa 1945, the age of Peter Bauer in Longest Year.)

I’m sure I wasn’t half as likable as I made Peter Bauer!

I wrote The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer for Michael, Stephan, Carol, and Christopher, and for their children. In my original Forward, I suggested that they had been “both spared and denied a 1945.”

“Spared” because their teenage lives in the U.S. were so much easier than my teenage life under persecution in a war environment. My kids never had to deal with forced exclusion from friends, with the loss of personal freedoms, or with persecution for their grandparents’ religion. Neither did they have to count on being exposed to death -- their own and that of others – at the sound of constant air raid sirens.

But my four children were also “denied” my greatest opportunity. They were not orphans, alone at the age of 16, in a most challenging world, nor were they faced with the necessity of growing up quickly, simply to survive. At the age of 17, I was solely responsible for every decision I made. My kids were rarely put to the test of having to find out for themselves “what one is made of” and to test the values they learned in childhood.

The Heumanns around 1974. We teenagers were both “spared and denied a 1945.” It hadn’t been said like that yet, but we definitely felt it.

We didn’t yet know Dad’s whole story, but we did know that, compared to him at our age, we lived a life of carefree luxury. And I believe that all four of us kids felt some guilt around that – but we wouldn’t have been able to identify or admit that at the time. I was so busy being a typical American teenager – friends, school, cheerleading, dates – that I had little time or incentive to even try to understand my father’s (and mother’s – she also experienced wartime in Germany!) perspective. Our family was different, and I hated it. My parents had strong German accents and listened to Mozart instead of Sinatra. Our lunch bags held liverwurst sandwiches on brown bread instead of PB & J sandwiches on white bread, and dinner consisted of Leberkäse or sauerbraten instead of tacos or hamburgers. Unlike my friends’ parents, who were active in PTA and in their kids’ social lives and friendships, my parents played very little role in my early school or social life – until, that is, my mother became a beloved German teacher at my high school, which I actually liked because she got to know my friends and had the opportunity to finally see what being an American teenager was like. My boyfriend was even in her class, and more than a few times my friends and I spent lunch hour in her classroom!

The 60s and 70s were tumultuous years in America, but they were peaceful and tranquil compared to Europe in 1945. Only a few years in all of history were as turbulent as 1945 in Europe. In Germany, especially, it was a year of death and birth, a year of demarcation of one age from another. All over the world, 1945 was a watershed year between old and new. It was the first year of the atomic age.

Whether my children and grandchildren know it or not, they, too, have much of 1945 in their veins because all of its terror and all of its beauty left such deep marks on my own life. The difference between the 1980’s in the US and 1945 in Europe might help explain some of my idiosyncrasies and maybe even excuse my being a bit of an embarrassment to my children by being (as they put it) “so ... so ... so different.”

In my next post, we’ll start in on The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer, which my father basically “inserted” into The Rim of the Volcano, changing Peter’s words back to his own.