by Nina Willner
“The world is infinitely vast and full of wonder,” he had said. Then, paraphrasing Mark Twain, his favorite American author, he told them to “träumen, entdecken, erforschen”—explore, dream, and discover it. That day Hanna came to view the Heidelberg Castle as a symbol of the extraordinary world that lay beyond the lovely but ordinary provincial village of Schwaneberg.
Oma gazed down at Hanna, who continued to sleep deeply and soundly, and then she left the room.
Before sunrise, Oma got up, went to the kitchen, and filled a small burlap sack with a sweater, socks, and a few potatoes. Then she sat and waited.
Just before daybreak, when she heard the Americans starting up their trucks, she woke Hanna, told her to get dressed, and took her outside in the dark to the cobblestone square. A few villagers had already gathered to bid the Americans farewell. Then, in an instant, before Hanna even knew what was happening, Oma pressed the sack into her arms and, with a shove, turned her around and presented her to the American sergeant in charge. Jarred wide awake, Hanna realized what was happening and broke free, but Oma caught hold of her and pushed her decisively into the arms of the sergeant. Stunned, Hanna turned to reach back for Oma, but Oma took a few steps backward and stood resolute.
Soldiers atop the truck quickly pulled Hanna up and wedged her in between two others seated in the truck bay. She sat frozen, silent, staring down at Oma, but when the trucks began to move, she cried out. Oma did not react and said nothing as she held her daughter’s gaze, trying to appear strong.
Hanna, age seventeen
Courtesy of the Willner family
The Americans drove away slowly, their tires kicking up a din of dirt and gravel. Jostling with the movement of the departing truck, Hanna looked back through the dusty swirl to her mother, who stood rooted in place in front of the other villagers. As the convoy rumbled out of the village, tears rolled down her face as she watched Oma, her figure diminishing with the growing distance. The other villagers remained standing there, astounded at what they had just witnessed.
As the sun rose that morning, casting an amber hue over Schwaneberg, Oma watched Hanna disappear. She prayed that she had made the right decision and asked God to give her strength. Then she turned around and walked home without looking back.
The convoy continued on its way, reaching the next village and picking up more army vehicles to join in their retreat to the west. In the truck bay, the soldiers tried to console Hanna, telling her that everything was going to be all right, but despondent, she sat silent, finally burying her head in the burlap sack.
Her mind wandered until it settled on the first time she almost lost Oma. She had been six years old. Oma was well into her last month of pregnancy with her fifth child. Hanna and her brothers had come home from school to find Oma collapsed on the kitchen floor. Opa had come bounding in with the doctor, shooed the children away, and hoisted Oma up and onto their bed. Minutes later the doctor emerged, telling the children to go into the bedroom and say good-bye to their dying mother. She was pale and seemed barely alive. The baby did not survive, but fortunately Oma did.
Several miles down the road, Hanna’s thoughts began to race. Oma had given her a gift, a chance that would not come again, to safely escape life under the Soviets. Hanna envisioned Oma’s face. Suddenly she panicked. Without warning, she catapulted herself over the side of the moving truck and hit the ground with a thud. The soldiers scrambled, shouting to the driver to stop the truck, but by the time the vehicle came to a halt, Hanna was already up and running home. Several hours later, she walked through the front door.
2
AN IRON CURTAIN DESCENDS
COLD WAR BEGINS
(1945–1946)
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
—British prime minister Winston Churchill
By the time I arrived in Berlin to work for U.S. Army intelligence in the 1980s, East Germany was well established as a hard-line communist state. Because of its location on the Warsaw Pact’s westernmost frontier, the Soviets had amassed a force of some twenty divisions inside the country, making it one of the most militarized places on earth. The Red Army sent its most lethal forces to East Germany to stand face-to-face against its NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) enemies, the United States and her Western allies, located just over the border in West Germany.
But in 1945, East Germany was in its infancy. Known in its early years as the Soviet Zone, the nascent state had yet to be defined and so the Red Army descended on the eastern territory with a plan to reshape the face of the East. The first challenge the Soviets faced was to change the mind-set of the almost 19 million German citizens who, long before World War II, had been led to believe that communism was the greatest threat to the Western world. Stalin demanded the transition be swift, and the approach uncompromising.
The first hours of occupation would set the tone for the birth of a new nation.
In the early-morning hours before dawn on the second of July, the Soviets announced their arrival through a bullhorn, in a tinny echo that startled the villagers awake. Speaking German with a heavy Russian accent, a voice boomed over and over again, “Achtung, achtung, achtung . . . The Soviet Army comes in peace.”
Russian soldiers in field uniforms dismounted the vehicles and set to work establishing a small command post in the village square.
At daybreak, many of the villagers were peering out of their windows, nervously watching the Russians from the safety of their homes. Curiously the mayor was nowhere to be seen, but this time the villagers did not need their mayor to tell them what to do. They already understood by instinct to stay indoors until they were instructed to do otherwise.
Several hours later, another bullhorn squelch sounded and the voice continued.
“The Soviet Army comes as friends and brothers to help build a new Germany.”
He informed the villagers that, in the coming days, there would be many new laws and important changes. He imposed a curfew, requiring the villagers to be in their homes from nine at night until six in the morning. A slew of frightening directives followed:
All food is to be relinquished to the Soviet Command immediately.
Anyone found hoarding food for himself or his family will be shot.
Anyone who attacks a Soviet soldier will be shot.
Anyone resisting or disobeying any law, order, or regulation set forth from this day onward, will be severely punished.
“Under orders from Stalin,” the voice concluded, “any Soviet soldier who causes violence against German women will face serious charges. So,” he concluded, “there is no reason to fear us.” It was in essence a promise that Schwaneberg’s women would be left alone so the Soviets could get on with the business of taking control and the villagers could focus on adjusting to change.
Most villagers dared not venture from their homes in those first days, but by mid-July they were beginning to accept their fate and emerged to face their new lives. They began to go about their business, carefully avoiding the Soviets as much as possible. The Soviets kept to themselves, not mingling with the Germans unless they were giving orders. They directed people to check the bulletin board at the local Gasthaus (tavern) to keep abreast of all new orders.
The change in the village was jarring. The entire village cleared out what was left of their wartime stores, bringing forth their food to the drop-off point, which was staffed by armed guards: Oma sent her children into the cellar to collect and turn in their last stocks of potatoes and jars of pickled vegetables, items that had sustained the family through the final days of the war. At the depot, the Soviets promised to redistribute the food equally to the villagers, which they were slow or altogether failed to do.
Then the Soviets installed a new mayor. The man who had held the job for as long as anyone could remember was pushed aside. Herr Boch, the seventy-year-old barber, a man who had kept his communist leanings to himself through
out the war, became the mayor and mouthpiece for the Soviets. He strutted around the village showing off his new status, proudly wearing a red shirt his wife had sewn from an old Nazi flag.
Those first inchoate weeks under Soviet occupation saw a rapid ideological transformation in the East Zone. In Schwaneberg, Mayor Boch’s zeal for communism took the villagers by surprise. He showed up everywhere, talking up the virtues of Marx and Engels, trying to invigorate the community to come together “for the greater common good,” and promising a new future after Hitler had miserably failed them.
In Washington, the United States started to develop plans to improve conditions in the West Zone. In the East, as reparations to the victors, the Soviets stripped the land of everything they could cart away and send back to the Soviet Union. Entire cities and towns were gutted of anything of value, including industrial equipment, farming machinery, tools, building materials, furniture, bathtubs, even toilets, and hardware accessories as well, such as light fixtures and doorknobs. Railroad tracks and whole factories were dismantled and transported eastward to be reassembled in the Soviet Union. As the East was being plundered of its resources, people began to walk westward.
Ukrainian and Polish forced laborers who worked the farms for the Germans during the war were released to go home and Schwaneberg’s women and children were made to take their place. Along with other villagers, Hanna was put to work in the fields.
One afternoon, after a long day of laboring in the carrot field, having gone several days with little food, Hanna became dizzy. Tempted to eat a single carrot, she looked around and, seeing only other village workers, decided against it for fear that the authorities would somehow find out and she would be shot. Despite Mayor Boch’s assurances to the villagers that things would soon get better, when their children started passing out from hunger, the village women began to secretly pocket small bits of food and vegetables from the fields, taking their chances on being shot.
By late summer, when there was still no sign of Opa or Roland, Oma, now in her seventh month of pregnancy, knew she had to find a way to get food for herself and her children. She put Hanna in charge of watching over her siblings and traveled by train to her parents’ farmstead in Seebenau, a small, rural community on the edge of the East–West border line.
There, Oma found her parents, Kallehn and Ama Marit, struggling to adapt to the new changes that the regime was imposing on farmers and their crops. While Oma worried about the toll the harsh new laws would have on her aging parents, Kallehn worried about his daughter and her many children.
Upon her arrival, he consoled her with a grin and a gleam in his eye as he showed her his “forbidden stash” he kept hidden under the cold-store floorboard in the storage house. Soon Oma was on her way home with a pack of treasures including a block of butter, a goose, sugar, and flour, thinking about the sumptuous roast with gravy she would make that would delight and reinvigorate the family. But her luck was not to last. At the train station in Salzwedel, a guard confronted her. Unapologetic even after noting her pregnant form, he simply confiscated her packages, shaking his head while condemning her for “depriving fellow citizens of essential food.” Eventually she was released and arrived home with empty hands.
By now Oma had made up her mind about the Soviets. She watched, disguising her worries as they stripped everyone of the things they owned, including their personal dignity. She was alarmed when she saw those who resisted Soviet authority taken away. Inasmuch as she feared the new regime, she knew they would all have to adjust.
Her teenage daughter, however, naïvely unafraid and unable to quiet the storm that brewed inside her, became irate and her anger boiled over when her mother came home without the food. With the other children, pale and weakened, looking on, Hanna stormed about the kitchen, railing about how anyone could take food from a pregnant woman with so many hungry children or shoot someone for eating a carrot. Oma hushed her, telling her to keep her emotions in check, warning that her rebellious behavior would get them all into trouble and lead to grave consequences for the whole family.
“We don’t need to attract any negative attention,” she reminded her children. “There’s nothing we can do, so let’s not complain or have any more speeches.”
Despite her mother’s call for calm, the idea had already started to take root in Hanna’s mind that the new communist system was not something that she planned to be a part of.
Oma’s words of caution to her children not to attract attention were indeed wise. Just days later, in a neighboring village, a teenage girl and her cousin were picked up by Soviet soldiers as they sat by the roadside in a lethargic stupor at the entrance to their village, asking for food. Weak from hunger, they had propped up a homemade poster made from a battered piece of cardboard, which read, “Dear Communist Party of Germany. Please give us food.” This was clearly not the image the new authorities wanted to project, and the Soviets removed the girls from the street and carted them off to prison.
Throughout the East Zone, from big cities to country hamlets, the Soviets took control drafting German citizens to help in the administration of the new order. As near famine spread in the East Zone, the Soviets and their new German helpers established firm control and imposed new authoritarian governance.
While rapes continued in other parts of the Soviet Zone, owing to the strict orders of the Soviet commander in Magdeburg, none of the women in Schwaneberg was believed to have been raped. In fact, the Soviets kept their distance from the Schwaneberg population, establishing a clearly defined occupier-occupied relationship and conducting themselves in a strict, businesslike manner.
For the most part, the Soviets sowed fear in the villagers, but there were exceptions. Lieutenant Ivanov, a local commander, always behaved honorably, even gentlemanly, to the Germans he came across, occasionally giving them rides in his horse-drawn carriage and sometimes even giving them food, all without expecting favors in return. But the cost of real fraternization was harsh for both parties involved, as in the case of one sixteen-year-old girl who was arrested along with her mother. Both were given sentences of twenty-five years hard labor after the girl became pregnant by a Soviet soldier. The soldier was executed, the child taken from its mother, who was imprisoned.
In September, Roland walked back into the village.
His unit had surrendered to Red Army troops, and he spent nearly a month in a Soviet prison camp. There, the commander ordered his German prisoners to count off by tens. Every tenth man was released to return home to help rebuild the East Zone, the other 90 percent set on the long path to join the thousands of German POWs already making their way to the Soviet Union to serve as forced laborers.
Oma saw that the horrors of war had changed Roland, but he had matured and she believed he would become the new man of the house.
But a week later, just days before Oma gave birth, Opa too came home, having been released from Bad Kreuznach, a notoriously harsh American internment camp where, given the lack of food and exposure to the elements, hundreds if not thousands of German prisoners died. He arrived in Schwaneberg haggard and dazed. Having listened to Nazi propaganda demonizing the Soviets for over a decade, he was troubled to find his family living under Red Army control.
Despite the apprehension that had taken root in Schwaneberg, Oma was relieved to have her husband and son home. The family was fortunate: seventy of the village’s men and boys never came back. With her family once whole again, Oma poured herself into guiding them to lead as normal a life as possible. With the assistance of the village midwife, she gave birth to her seventh child at home, a little girl, Helga. Though Opa could not help but think the timing for another child inopportune, the birth brought new optimism and he took the baby to show it to the rest of the children, who ogled over their new little sister.
Before long, the family began making preparations for a traditional christening, the baptism to be held on a Sunday in the village church, the way the community had always celebrated every b
irth. But that idea was dashed when Mayor Boch showed up to inform Opa that the building formerly known as the church was no longer available for such ceremonies, adding, “Communism is our religion now.”
It was a shock to the family but, still hoping to get his job as a teacher back, Opa quietly accepted the edict. Oma kissed Helga on her little forehead and said a silent prayer for her infant daughter, the first of her children to be denied a proper church christening.
In any small German village of that era, besides the mayor, teachers were the most revered figures, a status that Opa was proud of and took very seriously. At six feet four inches tall and large-framed with ramrod posture and penetrating gray eyes, Opa cut an imposing figure. His commanding presence, coupled with his ability to organize and unite the villagers, made him a natural leader. Ten years after he first arrived in Schwaneberg, the villagers regarded him as their de facto leader. One of the most influential people in the village, he was also the tallest, traits that did not go unnoticed by the Soviets.
Opa defined himself by his profession. He took his role as teacher very seriously, believing it a sacred calling to shape the youth of the village to be enlightened citizens of the world. He was also a strict disciplinarian who held himself, his family, and his students to a high moral code. He despised lying and cheating and harshly punished his students and children for such lapses. The community greatly respected him, even turning to him on matters beyond education, asking for his assistance on community or even personal issues and helping to resolve village disputes.