by Nina Willner
Pushing, stretching, pedaling as fast as they could go, gunning à bloc as they gapped, dropping back an inch, then surging forward, standing out of the saddle, they forced the pace, trying to control their bikes, finally exploding in one last burst of speed until the trainers clocked it out as the athletes streamed in, one after the other, through the finish.
Just a few miles down the road, believing we had not been followed, our intelligence team dropped off the highway in our olive-drab Ford and made our way into the East German forest on a dirt path that had been carefully chosen to conceal our movement in order to reach our target unobserved. We moved deeper into the silent woods, trying to avoid ruts as we drove carefully along the bumpy path, all the while scanning the wood line for any sign of danger.
Then, just as we began to move into position, a single Soviet soldier, weapon raised, stepped directly into the path of our oncoming car. Other soldiers appeared out of nowhere, immediately taking up positions around the car, cutting off any chance of escape.
With soldiers now blocking the path in front and rear, a Soviet officer made his way to the passenger side of the car, brandishing a pistol as he chambered a round.
The muzzle of his loaded pistol tap-tap-tapped against the glass. He ordered, “Atkroy okno.” (Roll down the window.)
When there was no response, the muzzle of the gun now fixed against the glass, he snapped, “Seychass!” (Now!)
PART ONE
Schwaneberg schoolhouse and church
Courtesy of Heimatverein Schwaneberg e.V.
1
THE HANDOVER
END OF WAR
(1945)
A mother’s love knows no bounds.
—Author unknown
Our story started when one war ended and another began.
The day World War II ended, my grandmother, Oma, was one of the first in the village to emerge from the underground cellar and step out into the still and desolate landscape of rural Schwaneberg. At forty years old, her belly swollen with her seventh child, she hoisted open the heavy wooden door and climbed up onto the dry, dusty landing as her children followed, squinting as their eyes met the daylight.
Other village women and children emerged from the cellars of their own homes, wandering about and awakening to what promised to be a new day in Germany. With no able-bodied men around to assist her, Oma directed her children to help her pull up the bedding from down below where they had lived during the last two months of the war, and move it all back upstairs into the living space of the family’s wing of the schoolhouse. There would be no more overhead Allied bombing runs en route to their targets in the nearby industrial city of Magdeburg. Germany had been defeated, Europe had been liberated, and the skies were finally quiet.
It didn’t take long for the village women to meet one another over picket fences to speculate when their husbands and sons would return. They wondered about what lay ahead for Germany and, most important to them, what was in store for their village of some 900 inhabitants.
Oma saw no use in dwelling on worry and set herself instead to getting her house back in order. Though school had been closed for months, she insisted her children return to their studies and get back to their chores, cleaning out the schoolhouse and scrubbing down the desks to prepare for a new school year. With food stocks all but used up and the ground fallow, the once-green potato beds emptied and parched to hard-cracked dirt, she directed the younger children to gather dandelion and nettle greens in the meadows and comb the berry bushes for any remaining fruit while the older children helped her prepare the soil for all the planting they had missed that spring.
When most of the men had still not returned after several weeks, a pall descended on the village. After only a few men came back, Oma began to wonder when, or even if, her husband and son were ever coming home. Opa, my grandfather, a forty-five-year-old schoolteacher and headmaster, and their oldest son, Roland, not even eighteen years old, had been pressed into service in the waning days of the war, when the Third Reich had ordered that every last able-bodied male over the age of fifteen join in the fight to the end for Germany.
As the women waited for their men to return from the front, they became alarmed when stories seeped into the village that, as the Soviets were making their way onto German soil, they were raping and killing German women. Word spread quickly that Stalin openly encouraged rape and pillage as the spoils of war, a reward for Red Army soldiers for their sacrifices and the struggles they had endured against the German army, the Wehrmacht. Refugees passing through Schwaneberg on their way to the West confirmed the reports, recounting their own harrowing stories of savage assaults or telling of others murdered after a rape or when they fought their attackers. One family told a horrific story of their teenage daughter who was raped, then shot dead in broad daylight.
Women throughout Germany now feared for their lives. In Schwaneberg, they hoped that their men would return home in time to protect them should the Soviets enter their village. Oma became especially concerned for her oldest daughter, a pretty, wide-eyed, raven-haired seventeen-year-old—my mother, Hanna.
By spring, American, British, and Soviet units were rolling into cities, towns, and villages throughout Germany to establish command and order. Oma, like most of the women in Schwaneberg, believing Hitler’s denigration that the Russians were a barbaric lot, prayed the Americans or British would take their village. The American commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, some noted, even had a German name, which bolstered their hope that the Americans were more like them than the Russians were.
Then one quiet afternoon in mid-May, their wait came to an end.
Everyone in the house and even the neighbors heard little Kai shriek from the loft upstairs. Her round, pregnant form slowing her, Oma made her way up the staircase of the east wing of the schoolhouse as her other children, Manni, Klemens, Tiele, and Hanna, bound past her. At the top of the landing, she found her little Kai surrounded by his brothers and sisters, pointing out the small oval window to some trucks in the distance. The family perched at the window in silence, anxiously waiting to catch a glimpse of which army was rolling in. The small convoy of three trucks inched closer, then stopped when it reached the edge of the village. Oma watched, her nerves in knots as she braced for a sign. From his window, the mayor unfurled a white sheet. The village mothers jumped to follow his lead, all of them, including Oma, hanging white sheets from their windows.
The trucks approached cautiously and finally came into full view. The children froze and Oma stared in disbelief until the older boys broke the silence with an ecstatic cheer. The first vehicle, marked with a white star, slowly led the convoy as it made its way down Adolph-Hitler-Strasse, and onto the cobblestone square. Down below, the mayor appeared from his house and quickly hobbled onto the street to welcome the Americans. Hanna looked at Oma, who smiled and gave her a nod, the go-ahead to take her siblings out to join the crowd quickly assembling outside.
The Americans stopped their trucks. From atop, they tossed Hershey’s chocolate and gum to the village children, who were quickly disarmed by the soldiers’ cheerful expressions and animated demeanor. As they passed out treats, the soldiers spoke in friendly tones with happy-sounding words that none of the villagers could actually understand. One soldier removed his helmet and hoisted Manni onto his jeep as other little boys looked on with envy. From up in their windows and down on the street, the village mothers watched the scene, waving to one another and raising their hands to the heavens in gratitude.
Over the next few days, nearly everyone became enamored of the American soldiers, their easy, open way, their childlike humor and lighthearted antics. For the first time in many months the women smiled, becoming particularly amused when the soldiers sent their children into fits of giggles when they botched German phrases, saying things like “Hello frowline. Itch leeba ditch,” or calling everyone Schatzi, an endearment reserved for parents or for those in love.
Over the next weeks, the
Americans established calm and control. They clowned around a lot, laughing, taking pictures of themselves with some of the village children, even assembling to get a group photograph in front of the Adolf-Hitler-Strasse sign, which one of them removed afterward to take home as a souvenir.
For the most part, though they endeared themselves to the community, a few vented their anger against the Nazis by taking it out on the villagers, looting and destroying personal property. Oma came home one day to find that the lock on Opa’s desk had been pried open, the contents—a silver letter opener and heirloom box—stolen, and a swastika carved into the seat of his big leather chair. On the seat, like a calling card, lay an American penny. By and large, however, the villagers’ worries began to subside, most of them believing that, under the Americans, their lives would get better.
But their relief did not last long. One day the Americans shocked the villagers with an announcement that they were leaving.
“Germany has been divided into two separate areas of administration,” said the senior sergeant. The Americans and British would take command of the western part of Germany and the Soviets, the East. Looking over the crowd, he said simply, “Schwaneberg will fall under Russian control.”
The villagers were stunned. It was as if the bomb they had feared during the war had finally exploded in the village.
“There is nothing to fear,” the sergeant continued, assuring them. “The war is over and the Russians will come not as fighting troops, but as a peaceful occupation force.”
The crowd became agitated. Someone muttered about fleeing before the Soviets arrived. Hanna turned to Oma and suggested the family pack up and go, but Oma dismissed the idea. It was not a reasonable plan in the first days after a war for a pregnant woman with so many young children to flee, without food or shelter, without men for protection, facing chaos and uncertainty on the road with thousands of other refugees disappearing to places unknown.
“And besides,” she said, “how awful if Papa and Roland came home to find that we had abandoned them.”
Oma’s attention was drawn back to the sergeant, who concluded with one last announcement.
“Should anyone have a compelling reason to leave,” he said, “we are authorized to take a few villagers with us to the West.” The women now looked at one another. Some fidgeted, some stepped back, most shook their heads, not willing to consider breaking up their families. They returned to their homes trying to console themselves about what the future might hold under Soviet occupation.
That night marked one of the most difficult decisions Oma would ever have to make. Sometime after midnight, she went into Hanna’s bedroom and quietly sat on the edge of her bed. As she watched her daughter sleep, she studied Hanna’s face and reminisced about her childhood, taking stock of her life, starting with the very night of her birth.
Hanna had come into the world on a bitterly cold, dark winter night in Trabitz, a tiny hamlet on the Saale River. Outside the schoolhouse that night the winds had kicked up enormous snowflakes that had wildly flown about all evening long and never seemed to settle. The rooftops and trees had been covered in a thick white blanket of snow and the rooms inside were ice cold. In the wooden-slatted garret of the one-room schoolhouse, Oma, not much older than her oldest daughter was now, prepared to give birth alone. Opa, a schoolteacher in his mid-twenties, had run off into the night to try to find the doctor. Their firstborn, ten-month-old Roland, slept soundly in a wooden cradle a few feet away. Then, in the stillness of the night, the new baby came into the world, its cries echoing throughout the hollow room. Oma cleaned the baby with her blanket and looked to see that she had given birth to a girl. Holding her newborn against her skin, she calmed the baby, who settled easily into the soft folds of her exhausted body.
As a little girl, Hanna had wanted to grow up quickly. While Roland had blossomed into an ideal child, his precocious little sister had been difficult. Roland was a parent’s dream: obedient, smart, a natural-born leader. Hanna, however, the little curly-haired firecracker with steely blue eyes that constantly scanned the scene for any sign of adventure and mischief, was playful and impish, a rabble-rouser with endless energy who made her own rules, falling in line with her father’s discipline only when it suited her.
By the time Hanna was four, Opa wondered why, unlike other children, she could not manage to sit still. Too young for school, Oma would hand her a hoe and set her to help in the garden. When Hanna grew bored with that, Oma put her in charge of feeding the rabbits grass and hay, which often ended with Hanna purposely failing to properly close the gates, then gleefully chasing the rabbits until they were caught and accounted for. In an effort to calm her restless spirit, Oma taught Hanna to knit but she quickly lost interest in that as well and asked Opa to teach her to read. At five years old she could read the newspaper. Opa occasionally brought her along to his Saturday-night card games at the pub and made her read words aloud like Nationalsozialistische Bewegung (national socialist movement) and Demokratisierung (democratization), enjoying it when his friends laughed in disbelief. Wanting badly to go to school, every day she sat outside Opa’s classroom window crying, then wailing until Opa emerged from the schoolhouse and chased her away, ordering her to go home. At home she would cry some more but was always back the next morning outside the window to repeat the scene. At her wits’ end, Oma pleaded with Opa to take Hanna into the classroom and let her sit in the back. Unable to see her father from the back row, where she sat with the oldest and tallest children in the one-room schoolhouse, she remained quiet as a little mouse, stealing glances at her older, endlessly fascinating neighbors. After that, Oma bought her a slate board and tied a sponge and a drying cloth to the hole in the wooden frame and Hanna happily carried the board with her wherever she went, practicing letters and writing words whenever she saw them.
Roland, age three, piloting, with Hanna, age two, in 1929
Courtesy of the Willner family
(Clockwise from upper left:) Klemens; Hanna, age ten; Tiele; Manni, in 1937
Courtesy of the Willner family
When Opa was promoted to become the headmaster at a bigger school, the family moved to the larger village of Schwaneberg (the Village of the Swan) in the district of Schönebeck in Saxony-Anhalt.
A storybook country village with stone buildings and half-timbered houses with red clay–gabled roofs surrounded by farmland, Schwaneberg had its own fresh bakery, a small dairy, two churches, a schoolhouse, barbershop, and horse stables, which surrounded the cobblestone square and dotted the main street. Mostly self-sufficient, it was supplemented by fresh vegetables and dairy from local farms, cheese from the Jewish door-to-door vendor, and pots, pans, and glittering trinkets sold by colorful, exotic Romany who traveled through the village twice a year.
Once the family had moved into the teacher’s quarters in the east wing of the now two-story schoolhouse, Oma had decided that Hanna needed to be prepared for life and taught her what young village girls needed to know: how to plant and harvest a garden, to sew, to help with household chores and tend to younger siblings. But Hanna detested domestic work and often disappeared in the middle of a task; she would later be found hiding under a table with a book or running around outdoors, taking on the boys in street races or scaling the massive stone wall that separated the farm fields from the backside of the schoolhouse.
Oma came from a long line of farmers, proud salt-of-the-earth folk who had only ever known the labor of the land. Opa, on the other hand, hailed from an academic family and was the most educated man in the village. He played the violin, the harmonica, and the organ, but most of all he loved playing his Schimmel piano, a family heirloom he had been gifted by his parents upon graduation from teachers’ college. He had insisted each of his children play an instrument, if not the piano then the recorder, the flute, the accordion, or the mandolin, all of which he kept in his office, propped up against his books on the shelves. He also taught his children to sing in harmony and showed off his si
nging troupe to anyone who would listen.
Over the years, Opa had amassed a large private collection of books. Dozens of tomes on art, history, geography, astronomy, wildlife, religion, science, and foreign lands and cultures, some in French and Latin, lined the walls of the family home. Inspired by his interest in the world beyond their village, his children and students alike learned about the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, the Pinakothek in Munich, and the Hermitage in Leningrad. Hanna read books about America, becoming especially fascinated with Native Americans.
One day, when she was about eleven years old, she discovered a book in Opa’s study about a famous fortress in western Germany. The magnificent Heidelberg Castle, nestled into the Odenwald Mountains high above the deep, green Neckar Valley, had once been one of the most opulent palaces of the European Renaissance. Built in the thirteenth century, the great castle had been home to powerful kings and other preeminent German royalty of the day. Hanna and her siblings instantly became infatuated with the fortress, imagining lots of exciting details about what lay hidden in its endless great hallways and dark dungeons, dreaming up stories of brave, sword-wielding knights rescuing princesses from winged, fire-breathing dragons, magical fantasies that no child could resist.
Not long thereafter, the children were thrilled when their father brought home a kit model of the Heidelberg Castle. Opa and his children spent every afternoon over the next few months meticulously piecing together corrugated boxboard parts, constructing the castle higher and bigger as they tended to every detail in its elaborate ornamentation, the precise emplacement of stone columns and gate porticos, properly positioning battlements and turrets, the drawbridge and even the iron ring door knocker, as their father regaled them with a captivating history of the city of Heidelberg. When the model was finally finished, Opa praised his children, then stood back and called it “a masterpiece.” Some of the younger children, still believing the castle just a make-believe fantasy, were surprised when Opa assured them it was not a fairy tale, that the castle actually existed, and that there were many such marvels throughout the world.