Never Forget

 Grandchildren,

Since 2006 I've been blogging at www.northwestladybug.com. Some of the posts on that blog are relevant to this one - so I'm taking the easy way out and simply copying them here. 

Here is the first, originally published on June 7th, 2013, shortly after Dad/Thomas/Opa and his descendants convened at the Marin Headlands hostel, just north of San Francisco. Dad asked us to gather because he wanted to bequeath upon his children and grandchildren some of his most personal, meaningful, and historically significant possessions "mit warmen haenden" (with warm hands - while still alive). 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My 84-year-old father is a German “Mischling” (a half-Jew) and product of what the Nazis called a “privileged mixed marriage.”

By the time Dad was the age of my twins, 23, he had experienced more tragedy, more near-death experiences, more hunger, and more trauma than most people will experience in their lifetimes. 
Dad’s father Carl was Jewish, but my father was brought up in a Christian household.  Carl considered himself a German.  Not a German Jew and not a Jew.  He was simply a German.  And he married another German, my grandmother, Irmgard.

As it turns out, Irmgard, by her sole existence as a Gentile, shielded her family from early persecution by the Nazis because the Nazis really hadn’t decided what to do about the “half-Jewish question,” those Jews who lived among Germans, married Germans, were part of the German communities, but were Jewish “by blood.”   (You can learn more about this topic in the excellent movie “Conspiracy.”)

Irmgard began to have excruciating headaches in the early 1940s.  She assumed it was the pressure of war.  Certainly she must have also felt intense personal pressure, knowing that the survival of her Jewish husband and half-Jewish children depended on her sheer existence.  In January of 1944, Irmgard died of what turned out to be a brain tumor.  At that point, all hell broke loose for my grandfather and his three children, my father and his brother Rainer and sister Ulli.

Ulli was sent to live with her cousin in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the mountains of Bavaria, while my father, only 15, and his older brother Rainer were left to fend for themselves.  My father was sent to a Nazi labor camp.

In March of 1945, just a short month before the end of the war, my father had been allowed to leave the camp by day to work at a warehouse.  As it turns out, the warehouse proprietor had been smuggling cigarettes, chocolate and liqueur and knew he was about to be caught. 

 
On March 5, 1945, my father’s hometown of Chemnitz was bombed.  Total chaos reigned during those last days and weeks of the war and my father was allowed by the kindly  (or maybe just apathetic) proprietor to head home to take care of matters.  (“Just be back on Tuesday,” he said.)  After days of traveling by any means possible (which meant mostly walking, as the German infrastructure at that point was in complete shambles), my father came upon his beloved childhood home.
 

What had once looked like this…

 

…now looked like this:

 

My father, then only 16-years-old, made his way through the rumble and found his beloved father’s body.

Now, in his 84th year, my father passes on two stories and two mementos (though that’s too trivial a word here) from that day to his two grandsons, Peter and Aleks.  

Here is the letter that accompanied his gift to Peter:

 

“Dear Peter,

I have decided to pass on to some of you grandchildren things that mean something to me, and that come with a story that must be told. As “Muttchen,” my pseudo-mother used to say: I want to do so “with warm hands.”

It was in March of 1945, just weeks before the end of the war.  I was 16.  My mother had already died.  I was put into a slave labor camp for “half-Jews,” as they called us.

Now Chemnitz, my home town, had just gotten the same kind of “terror attack,” as the Nazis called it, as Dresden had suffered weeks earlier.   My boss, where I had been assigned from the labor camp, was most understanding, if most secretive, about it.

“Go,” he said.  “Check out what happened.  Just be back by Tuesday at the latest.”  Of course there was no telephone, no other news, no transportation.  Only chaos everywhere.  One just had to make do, somehow.

Our house had been burned out, turned from a burned ruin into mostly rubble.  I found my father’s body in the boiler room, caught in the space between the floor and the furnace, one leg dangling, clearly broken.

My father’s body was the only one in the big ruin.  I was told later that when the house was on fire everyone got out, including him.  Then he had to crawl back into the basement to retrieve a small suitcase with Romanticist art that he was working on.  His whole life now had been his art collection; he just HAD to get those pieces.  In that moment an explosive bomb hit the house, ending his life, making the three of us orphans.

After escaping the Nazis for a dozen years, now, two short months before the final defeat of Nazi Germany, he was killed by an Allied bomb.  Just what the Nazis had always wanted.  But any war does that: produce tragic ironies like this, a thousand times over, everywhere.

My dad was wearing a suit, vest, and tie.  He was a very formal person and would not be seen in anything but “proper dress,” not even at night in the air raid shelter in his own basement.  When I found him, he still had his metal-rimmed glasses on, one side broken.  His fingers were apart, indicating that he had not suffered.

I knew there must be one thing he was forced by law to always have on him – his ID card, with the big letter “J” to identify him immediately as a Jew, with the forced name of “Israel” added.  I took it and I still have that infamous ID.

He was wearing his diamond tie pin so that his tie would be orderly and in place where it belonged.  I took it.  Years later, in Munich, in peace, I designed a ring for myself and had the diamond of my father’s tie pin mounted in it.

That ring is what I give to you today.  Today, when wearing it, I know that what had meaning to me was not my father’s dying as much as his death.  I knew then that his most romantic, often-quoted motto would somehow follow me: Goethe’s most utopian idea that “life, however it may be, is good.”  He, a Jew under the Nazis, persecuted, with two sons in Nazi slave labor camps, through all the chaos, kept this idealized faith.  And for years it gave me the strength I needed to shape the path of my own life, without parental guidance.

With love,  Opa”

And here is what Opa bequeathed upon Aleks, given to him this past weekend during our family reunion:

Aleks reading the letter from Opa which accompanied his–official papers as a Mischling German-Jew as well as his father’s Nazi-issued ID card, denoting him Carl Israel Heumann.

 

 

This is what Opa wrote to Aleks:

Dear Alex –

I have decided to pass on to you grandchildren things that mean something to me, and that come with a story that must be told. As “Muttchen”, my vice mother, used to say: I want to do so “with warm hands.”

Of all my grandchildren, you have been the one with the greatest interest in history and historical events. Therefore, the papers I treasure most of my historical documents will be yours to keep and pass on, eventually. There is, first of all, my father’s “Kennkarte,” the identification everybody in Germany had to carry at all times. (I still do today, and not only my drivers license. out of habit.) In 1934, the Nazis issued the Nürnberger Gesetze which were really not laws at all, but party dictates. Among other edicts, they ruled that Jews from then on had to be identified by the middle (actually first) name “Israel” for men, “Sarah” for women. Jews were defined by race, not religion. By “law”, my father had to always identify himself, especially in official transactions, as “Israel Carl Heumann”, not as “Carl Heumann” or, as had been most common, as “Konsul Heumann.” That way, the official would know exactly what kind of degenerate he was dealing with. Not identifying oneself as such was a felony. In official papers, he was called “der Jude Heumann”. I took this ID from his body which I found in the basement of the ruin of our house in 1945. Don’t forget: the Nazis were most German, most bureaucratic. In 1938, Hermann Goering, in the second line of the Nazi hierarchy, decided on a classification of “privileged mixed marriages” between Jews and Gentiles whose offspring were not raised in the Hebrew religion. Those Jews were subject to the same mistreatments as other Jews, except they were not deportated into camps, until the end of the War. That’s why both my father and we kids were living ostensibly as Christians.

The “Party” was going to deal with the problems of “Half-Jews” after they “had won the war”. Meanwhile, they needed Half-Jews as workers. The document package you are getting also has a three-language paper, issued in June 1945, my most important ID right after the war, saying I was kept in the Slave Labor Camp until April 1945. Also included are documents showing my dismissal from High School in 1943, and an affidavit that I had been a very good guy all along before being kicked out, and also documentation of my freedom from tuition fees at the Technical University in Munich.

Fortunately life has returned to be more normal. Here are a couple of things that we were able to rescue after the war: a silver bowl belonging to my parents, and a set of ice cream server and spoons we used as children at home.

May times like my parents lived through never happen again!

With love, Opa

This is what now belongs to Aleks and will certainly be passed on to his children someday, who will pass it to their own children…
My grandfather’s Nazi ID card.  Note that he is identified as “Israel Carl Heumann.”  The name "Israel” was mandated by the Nazis.

 

 

Affidavit of “total destruction by bombing” of my father’s home:

 

Certificate of free tuition and monthly stipend because of Nazi persecution. 

 

Certificate regarding my father’s detention in a Nazi labor camp.  (In three languages… it reads “Herr Thomas Heumann, born on… was detained in the labor camp for Jewish relatives in-law of Munzig and set free on 27 April 1945. Chemnitz, 27.6.1945. Neues Rathaus.”)

 

Certificate of release from public school in March, 1943, as well as other education-oriented documents:

 

My father has been hesitant about allowing me to post about his past, not wanting to “draw attention” to himself  and his past.  But he has relented a bit recently.  Partially, I think, because he is now looking more at the historical importance of his experience, and partially because… well, I’ve been a pest about it, trying to convince him that the Internet will not “turn on him.”

And, sadly, I think that he is also resigning himself to the inevitability of his own passing and the importance of keeping the story of what happened in World War II alive and personalized to specific human experiences.

Oh, the PRESSURE!

My dear grandchildren,

My father, whose grandchildren called him “Opa,” wrote two books. In 1979, when he was in his 50s, he wrote The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer for his children and future grandchildren. In it, Opa described the very tumultuous year of 1945 in the life of a fictional character, Peter Bauer.

Of course, we all knew that Peter Bauer was actually Thomas Heumann. Telling his story in the third person allowed my father to explore his memories and emotions without entirely re-living them at a proximity he wasn’t ready for.

Thirty years later, Opa finished The Rim of the Volcano, again written for his children, and now also written for grandchildren who had names and faces and personalities. In “Rim,” Opa absorbed the narrative of his first book, but his new book went deeper and wider, to include a discussion of the political environment in Germany that allowed the Nazi regime to take hold and to grow, and especially how that environment impacted the young man in the story – who is now bravely called “I” instead of “Peter.”

I promised my father that, per his wishes, I would bring the story he told only to his children and grandchildren to the public. In the almost four years since his death I have been working through confusion and paralysis as to how, exactly, to accomplish this overwhelming task. My father left me shelves and shelves of books, binders, and documents pertaining to the writing of his story. One large binder is dedicated solely to his thoughts, doubts, and apprehensions about writing what became the “Rim” book.

Unlike the story of Peter Bauer, Opa wanted “Rim” to include detailed, factual information about the history and politics in WWII Germany that played such a big role in his young life. That would require research. All of this felt overwhelming to Thomas – just like writing his story has felt overwhelming to me – and he almost decided not to even tackle what felt to him like a herculean task and to just leave it to his decedents (he made it clear he meant me) to finish the task.

In 2011, Opa did finish writing The Rim of the Volcano, but it took him four years to do so – and it almost didn’t happen. Like me, he must have sat at his desk for hours and days, wondering how to even begin.

Any good writing teacher will say “just write – just start; the rest will take care of itself!” To hyper-organized, type A, bullet-point, outline, and list-loving writers like Dad and me, the thought of just diving in is terrifying. It completely paralyzed my dad for years, as the documents in his “writing process” binder attest.

Just look!

So much self-doubt! So much self-inflicted pressure to “get it right”!

See? I believe that Thomas felt pressure and judgement from his father, Carl, even from the grave…. not unlike the pressure and judgement I’ve felt for four years from Thomas, even from the grave. Why we do this to ourselves for generations on end?!

My children will inherit Opa’s many binders filled with research, letters, memories, plans, doubts, starts and re-starts, and finally, two finished books. I hereby give them permission to break the cycle. It pains me to say this, because I am my father’s daughter, but keep what’s meaningful to you and toss the rest.

Except Opa’s original Nazi-era documents. Keep those.

Also, his personal journals and stories. Shouldn’t you also keep those?

Sigh.

Father Ghosts

During a visit with my father a few months before he died, we spent a great deal of time talking about his father, Carl. The closer Dad came to the end of his life, the more he seemed to want to talk about his own father.

My father was only 16 when he found Carl dead in the furnace room of the home to which he had been relegated for years, left alone with only his beloved art collection. His non-Jewish wife who, by her sheer existence had protected him from Nazi evacuation, was now dead and his half-Jewish children had been sent to labor camps or to live with relatives. Orphaned by 16, my father never had an adult relationship with his own father. In my opinion, Thomas remained forever Carl’s child, looking for his approval.

At one point, Dad asked me to follow him into his office. We’d been talking about Carl and he wanted to show me where I could find more information “when the time comes.” Dad’s gait was slow and unsteady and he leaned heavily on a cane that he had recently begun to use.

I remember vividly that as I walked slowly behind my father, I asked him somewhat nonchalantly, “Dad, do you ever feel that your father is still watching you now, seventy-five years later, aware of everything you do and everything you even think – and that he’s still judging you?” It had become obvious to me, as Dad began to open up more and more about his past, that this was true. Unlike our children, who had quite appropriately shed the need for constant parental approval as they grew from children to teens to adults, the sudden death of Carl when his son was still young, prevented this natural, healthy transition and, as a result, my dad was forever “stuck.”

Dad stopped suddenly and stood motionless in front of me, his back hunched over, looking from behind like an old, frail man. He turned slightly toward me so I could only partially see his face, which which now looked especially gaunt and pale. He paused and stared silently at the floor for an uncomfortably long time, then took a deep breath.

“Yes, Carol, I do. I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but I think you might be right.” Now he looked directly at me. “Yes… yes.” I realized then that this had never occurred to my father. This was a revelation for him.

He slowly walked into his office and sat in his chair, ruffling a few papers on his desk. “I forgot what I was going to show you,” he said.

In 1996, my father was asked to contribute to a book about the neighborhood in which he grew up in Chemnitz, called Der Kassberg. That book now sits on my shelf. This is what I found folded and inserted into the pages of the book.

And here’s the book and the essay Thomas wrote about Carl (photos added by me).

    

 

“Remembering My Father Carl Heumann

Can memory be trusted? Having lived for  a half century on another continent, I find myself today in a twilight where memories are beginning to fade, but where legend has not yet turned into myth. In March 1945, at the age of sixteen, I had to bury my father before I had had a chance to understand him as a human being. Since then, I have created for myself a picture in which some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces fit tolerably well together, but which has not yet matured into a totally satisfying portrait.

He was, in all his humbleness and simplicity, too complex a person for that.

Both of my parents were Romanticists. My mother wanted me to become a "bridge builder,"  a purely ideological thought for her; she had no idea that a Structural Engineer is something considerably more prosaic than her idealized image of building bridges between people and nations. My father would have liked to see me as a pastor somewhere out in the country. Visualize, it you will, an idyllic engraving by Ludwig Richter: sitting on a wooden bench in front of the house, a dog by my feet, smoking a pipe, sunset time. It was probably this leaning toward the idealistic which led my father to collect German Romanticist art.

Imagine the irony: a cosmopolitan businessman, a banker, born as a Jew, chooses the most German of all German periods in art - Romanticism! One has to have lived abroad for a while to become aware of the specific "Germanness" of this art: precise in its mannerism of "the jagged oakleaf and rounded beech leaf technique,” esthetic without exception, idealistic, but  also well-behaved and sentimental, pedantic and confined. One becomes more cynical.

How deeply-felt was my father's conviction that, contrary to the Nazis, he was a good German? In 1938, when the intentions of the Regime became obvious to anyone, my father's two younger brothers fled to the USA and tried to convince him to join them. Tragically, his German way of thinking joined his idealism which, in retrospect at least, seems almost naïve: I have served in the World War and earned a Distinguished Service Medal, I am a Christian, highly respected in the community, I have never done anything illegal, I am married to an Aryan and therefore live in a "privileged mixed marriage” - they can't touch me! Not much later, this man, who in his innermost being was a German Romanticist, was branded a "Jewish enemy of the people" by the Nazis along with all other Germans born to Jewish parents.

He remained in “his" Germany, spoke "his" language, remained true to "his" culture and education, and disrupted the daily life of his family as little as possible.

After the Nazis forced him out of his bank, he undertook veritable pilgrimages to the places in Italy where, 150 years earlier, a group of friends called "Romano-Germans" had spent so much time and created so much of their art, from Olevano, to the Campagna, to the Abruzzi. As his freedom of movement was more and more curtailed, and as his dignity was subjected to increasing insults, he retreated more and more into the sanctity of his study. The more he became isolated from society, and the more people shunned him (or he them, so as not to endanger them through contact with him), the dearer the past became to him. The artists, the painters, the watercolorists of old became his daily contacts. He lived their lives and thinking, their style and even their friendships.

Always dressed in a white collar, tie, and vest, Carl buried himself in the card file, the art cabinets, and the research library, meticulously sharpened pencil and huge white eraser in hand. Or at least so it looked to us children. But we also knew that there was something very uneasy about all this, because he often quoted the fervent refrain from a poem by Clemens Brentano: "Build a wall around us..."

To be on the safe side, he proclaimed himself "a totally apolitical person" to the few people he continued to see or could see. He was not about to become involved in incriminating political discussions. Toward us children, his instinct of self-preservation told him to keep completely quiet about anything political. He probably did not want to burden us with the decisions as to what was OK to repeat "on the outside ,” and what was not. My parents exercised the greatest care to protect us from even knowing about the worries and hardship which they suffered daily, as we learned much later. It is for this reason - and perhaps in contrast to everything that was yet to come - that I remember my childhood in the thirties as a secure haven. I recall vividly the enthusiasm with which my father showed and explained pictures from the collection to us children; the way he would open the huge picture Bible by Schnorr von Karolsfeld, usually in the Old Testament section, to tell us the stories which he believed form an important part of the core of knowledge of an educated person. I also remember the embarrassed curiosity with which we children eyed figure drawings of nudes, but the thing most alive in my memory is the thoughtfulness with which pictures were framed and hung throughout the house. My parents knew that the atmosphere of the pictures, the Biedermeier furniture, the ever-present music, and the library, must shape not only the taste but, in the final analysis, even the outlook on life for their children.

The idyll could not last. Soon the realities encroaching upon the home from the outside became overwhelming. My older brother was not allowed to attend university. My younger sister was not even allowed to start high school. I myself was thrown out of high school halfway through. My father became more and more housebound. Friends and acquaintances either disappeared or stayed away. Soon, loyal and courageous Parson Hoffmann remained the only faithful visitor to the house at ReichsstraBe 10. He, too, was a collector of German Romanticists and an expert on one of their exponents, Ludwig Richter.

The tighter the Nazis wove their web around Jews, the more circumspect my father became. On the one hand, he carefully familiarized himself with the details of the "legal" limits which were imposed on him, and he was meticulous in his care never to violate them. On the other hand, he knew very well which rights remained for him, and he made use of them. He transferred the ownership of the collection to my non-Jewish mother. Holding the office of Vice Consul of the neutral Portugal, I suspect he also exploited the limited amount of protection that office may have afforded him, but I don't know that. In any case, he succeeded in remaining one of the Jews living in "privileged mixed marriages" in Germany who escaped deportation. I like to think, maybe naively so, that his integrity and his incorruptible correctness elevated him somehow above the baseness of the persecution.

Today I myself am a father and grandfather. I have lived a decade longer than he did, and I find myself trying to imagine how painful his last year after the death of my mother must have been. I can't. I cannot identify with the state of mind of a man who lives in an idealized past while the world around him collapses in chaos. I cannot visualize how a man, too impractical to know how to brew a cup of tea, could cope with the improvisations of sheltering a dozen refugees in his house. I try in vain to guess at the anguish of knowing that his two sons were being held in Nazi Labor Camps , their fate becoming more uncertain every day, while normal communications were almost impossible.

On the other hand, I can fully understand that the pictures he kept in the house, even during those climactic final months of the war, were an absolute necessity for his sanity. He had long ago stored the bulk of the collection in bank safes, but he just could not bring himself to take the largest oil paintings off the walls as well.

He also kept one small suitcase at home which held smaller pieces he was working with at the time. That suitcase accompanied him down to the basement shelter during every air raid alert. Eventually it became his fate. During the raid on March 5, 1945, when the house was already in flames and all inhabitants had fled to the outside, he crawled back through the furnace room window to rescue the suitcase. He never reached it. A direct hit of an Allied bomb ended the life of a man who had survived years of humiliation by the Nazis, and whose liberation now finally seemed within reach.

    

A week later I found him dead in the furnace room.”

By Thomas Heumann 

Ashland, OR.

August, 1996

Mind-mapping Carl Heumann

Grandchildren mine,

Back when I was planning to write a book… or bring Thomas-Opa’s books to the public… or however it is that “the book” was going to manifest itself, I worked with a book coach to help me get started.

For all my father’s impeccable qualities, he had one that persisted beyond his death – in fact, it strengthened after his death. My father held very high expectations, not only for himself, but for those around him – especially those he loved. After his death, that manifested for me in my complete paralysis in regards to writing “the book.” Eventually I hired a book coach, but what I actually needed was a book coach who was also a therapist!

I wrote about this paralysis and associated mental health challenge on my Northwestladybug blog, here. This blog is my answer to said paralysis. Fingers crossed!

Kate, my book coach (but not my therapist) recommended that I create a mind map for each potential character in my book. A mind map is a great tool to help hone in on important topics and themes of any writing exercise.  All my mind maps resulted in THIS one – centered on my grandfather, your great-great grandfather, Carl Heumann.

No matter where I start telling the story – whether with the wedding of Carl and Irmgard in 1919, or with my father’s written memories at the turn of the next century, or even with my own associated experiences in recent years – everything somehow comes back to Carl.

Can you see the story web?

I’ll try another little writing exercise right here on our blog. I’ll try to give a short synopsis of Carl as the center of the story, and the point from which every sub-chapter emanates. Let’s see…

Konsul Carl Heumann, a prominent German banker and art collector, was a Jew who, about 20 years before the beginning of WWII, married a non-Jew, Irmgard. Carl and Irmgard had three children who they raised as Protestant but who were officially deemed by Nazis as Mischlinge (“half-breeds).

As Hitler came to power and politics in Germany began to focus on anti-Semitism, being married to a Jew became more and more dangerous for “a good German,”  and Irmgard's family – especially her Nazi-sympathizing father and brother -  urged Irmgard to divorce Carl “for your own safety.” She steadfastly refused, well aware that her sheer existence was all that stood between her husband and certain death in a concentration camp, at which point their Mischling children would be guaranteed to meet the same fate.

In the early 1940’s, after her Jewish husband had been striped of his profession and his basic rights as a member of society and had been relegated by law to the confines of his own home, Irmgard began to experience mysterious physical symptoms which she assumed were stress related. In 1944, she died suddenly of a brain tumor.

At this point, all hell broke loose for Carl and his children. The older boys were sent to a work camp, the youngest daughter was taken in by her uncle, and Carl prepared himself for the worst.

But it never came. Carl was never taken, prompting a mystery that, to this day, has not been solved: why was it that in this town of 350,000 people with a formerly sizable Jewish population, Carl was, to his knowledge, the only Jew who had survived? Did he have a protectorate?

Do you want to read on? Good. Stand by…

The story that begs to be written

Dearest grandchildren,

My father, your great grandfather, Thomas Heumann was the first man I loved and my first teacher. His honesty, dignity, and integrity still shine today in my life, and in the lives of many who knew him. He was a guiding beacon of light and an anchor of stability and morality to just about everyone who knew him.

I’m not just saying that. At Dad’s memorial in March, 2017, everyone, it seemed, spoke of Thomas’ steadfast trustworthiness and his absolute determination to always do the right thing – and of his expectation that others would, as well.

My father could do no wrong in my eyes and I knew that I could pretty much do no wrong in his.

     

 

         

Thomas’ grandchildren, your parents, called him “Opa.” They loved him as much as I did, and dare I say that, although he loved me to pieces, he loved his grandchildren to smithereens!

I never knew my own Opa, Thomas’ father, Carl Heumann. Or rather, I should say that I never met him.

Until the last years of his life, Thomas didn’t talk much about the grandfather I never met. As a child, I knew that my parents emigrated to America a few years after the end of WWII. I knew that Carl died during the last days of that war in the basement of his home in Chemnitz, Germany, clutching a few pieces from his beloved art collection. I knew that an Allied bomb had made a direct hit on the house to which he had been relegated for years because he was a Jew. 

But I knew little else – and learning even those few facts about my grandfather was the result of a few family road trips from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe, when my father couldn’t escape the incessant questioning from my three brothers and me.

As my father got older and he had time to reflect on his past, he began to write. He wrote and wrote, hiding for days and weeks at a time with his memories until he had finished two full books, multiple essays, and hundreds of pages of journals and diaries.  Thomas dedicated his first book, The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer, to his children and wrote in its forward:

“These memories were originally written down for you: Michael, Stephan, Carol, and Christopher, who were both spared and denied a 1945.

The time when you grew up in America is now called "the tumultuous '60s and'70s.” Compared to the Europe of 1945, they were peaceful and tranquil years. 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 purgatory. All over the world it was a watershed year between old and new. It was the first year of the atomic age.

Whether you know it or not, you, too, have much of 1945 in your veins because all of its terror and all of its beauty left such deep marks on my own life at that most impressionable age of sixteen. Think back to the year when you were sixteen; the difference between that and me in 1945 may help explain some of our idiosyncrasies, and maybe even excuse your parents for sometimes being a bit embarrassing when you were children by being “so ... so ... so different.”

Everything in these pages is essentially true — "essentially" and not "completely" because some events had to be left out, changed in time sequence, or simplified to make the story less confusing (yes, it was in reality even more chaotic than it appears here!). But all of the events are based on personal experiences, with the single exception of the American tank patrol, which is based on hearsay from someone else, but it probably happened about as described.

Beyond that, living for more that half a century in a different world can play funny tricks on a man's memory, but that may not be altogether bad. In the process of evaporating details, the mind distills out the essence of a period. And that's really the main thing I am trying to convey.

I wrote about Peter and not about myself because it’s so much easier to step outside and look in from a distance. And when you talk about someone else you have more freedom to make the truth truer by adding some “retrospective imagination” to details without having to feel guilty of lying. Last but not least: Peter is strictly a fictional character — I’m sure I wasn’t half as likable!”

I’ll be quoting my father’s words often on this blog, partly because these are, after all, his experiences, partly because he was an excellent writer, and partly because he asked me to tell his story after he’s gone. He wanted to tell his story to his children, but as he made clear to me in the last months of his life, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways, he wanted me to tell his story to the world.

    

 

    

That‘s too big a task and too much pressure for me, which is why I have yet to get started on that book I told him I’d write, but this I can do. Blogging is familiar territory for me, so this is the format I’ve chosen to use to tell my father’s story – and just as his children were his audience when he wrote, you – my dear grandchildren – are mine.

Maybe someday one of YOU will finally write “the book.” No pressure.