Forty Autumns

by Nina Willner

  Opa was ordered to teach a new curriculum based in Soviet ideology.

  Courtesy of the Willner family

  Eager to mold the community, the communists weeded out teachers they deemed “damaged by Nazi thinking.” The rest were put through a “de-Nazification” process to rid them of any lingering fascist thought and to set them on a new course to spread the word of communism. While the other teachers didn’t pass the test, Opa did and was asked to return as headmaster of the local school. With the Soviets expecting big things from him, Opa returned to his school alone.

  The regime then had to recruit new, “untainted” teachers. Roland, calm and levelheaded like his mother, greatly revered his father and aspired to follow in his footsteps. Choosing to look beyond the harshness of the Soviets and believing in the promise that a post-Nazi Germany future might hold, he signed up to train to become a teacher.

  East German high school classroom with poster of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin

  Courtesy of Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-13735-0006/Photo Walter Heilig

  When school reopened in Schwaneberg, the Soviets directed that communist ideology be taught right from the start. Opa was instructed to portray Germany’s war years as the disastrous result of a failed cult of Hitler’s leadership, abetted by capitalist greed, that had deceived its citizens and led Germany to ruin. Opa’s students, most of whom had been in the Hitler Youth, were now being told to radically shift their belief system and embrace communism.

  Pressured to learn a great deal in a short amount of time, every evening after supper, when he would have preferred to have read poetry or play the piano, Opa crammed to learn Soviet doctrine, Marxist-Leninist theory, and Soviet history, so that he could teach the concepts the following day, knowing there would be a Russian monitor sitting in the back of the classroom making sure he got it right. Responsible for teaching the Russian language as well, Opa could often be found in his study, learning elementary Russian with one of his children sitting on his lap, repeating every word he said: “Okno, stol, pozhaluysta . . .”

  A steady drumbeat of propaganda hailed the new regime’s potential, but the forecast under communism looked dismal, so it was no surprise that people were still migrating to the West in droves.

  By mid-1946, the Soviets were forced to take steps to formally control the exodus by posting Soviet troops along the border and erecting watchtowers, especially at heavily trafficked areas along the perimeter. Undeterred, people simply found ways around the control points, often easily walking out through forests and open fields. The Soviets responded by building up the border areas, then instituted an interzone pass system that required people to apply to travel to the West Zone. Now, by Soviet law, the only legal way to transit out, the application process was long and drawn out, meant to stall people who were determined to leave. Few applications were approved for healthy, able-bodied young adults who the regime feared wanted a one-way ticket out, but the authorities readily granted one-way passage to the aging, disabled, and infirm who they saw as nothing more than a financial drain on society.

  After Opa had spent nearly a year as a teacher under the new Soviet masters, the authorities in Schwaneberg seemed pleased with him. Every day he looked and sounded more the part of the model communist educator. But before long, the man whom Hanna had always known to be proud and confident became unnerved. Oma watched him struggle as he tried to remake himself and appear loyal to the Soviet cause for the sake of the family’s well-being. Despite his concerns about the integrity of his new teachings, Opa promised Oma he would do whatever was necessary to keep his wife and, with the birth of yet another little girl, Tutti, now eight children safe and his family intact.

  One evening, Hanna approached Opa in his study, telling him that they should try to leave.

  “It’s too late,” he said, resting his book on his lap. “And anyway, how would we leave? Where would you suggest we go—such a big family like ours?” Hanna stared back blankly.

  “It will be all right, you’ll see,” he said, picking up his book to resume his studies, his words accompanied by an unconvincing, forced smile. Disappointed that she did not have an ally in her father, Hanna remained standing in place with nothing more to say.

  Just beyond Opa, on his work desk, stood the cardboard kit model of the Heidelberg Castle that, years before, he had lovingly built with his children, with the promise that someday they would be able to see it for themselves. The Heidelberg Castle, which now lay in the American Zone, had never seemed farther away. The model, which had been built as a family project to be a gateway to the larger world, now stood as a reminder of their entrapment. Disappointed, Hanna lowered her head.

  Throughout the East, Germans became leaders in their communities and in local government as mayors, teachers, border guards, security officials, and as policemen in the newly organized police force, the Volkspolizei, or VoPo, the People’s Police. They signed up to serve the Socialist Unity Party, a communist political party with a Marxist-Leninist ideology. A Stalinist-style single-party dictatorship, it closely resembled the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  From the start, the regime made it clear that opposition to the Communist Party was outlawed and would be persecuted, so, along with scores of others, including the majority of village men who had recently returned from the war, Opa joined the Communist Party.

  In Schwaneberg, the family’s situation deteriorated. While the older children somehow managed to get by, all too often when supper was finished, the younger ones, including four-year-old Kai, often lingered at the table, waiting for more. In particular, Kai missed the taste of milk, which was now so heavily rationed that it amounted to just enough to feed the village babies, so Oma shared Helga and Tutti’s baby rations with Kai.

  With so many little mouths to feed, in an effort to alleviate their hardship, Oma and Opa sent several of their children to live temporarily with other relatives. Hanna, now eighteen, was sent to live with her grandparents, Kallehn and Ama Marit, in Seebenau, in the Altmark district of Saxony-Anhalt, on the edge of the East–West border, and just a dash away from the British Zone.

  3

  “IF YOU WANT TO GET OUT, DO IT SOON”

  CLOSE CALLS AND ESCAPES

  (1946–1948)

  Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.

  —Robert Louis Stevenson

  Kallehn sat waiting at the train station atop his rickety old farm wagon drawn by two horses. A serene old man with a shock of white hair and a weathered, whiskered face, his eyes lit up and he smiled when he saw his granddaughter. Delighted that she had arrived safely, he took her hand and helped her climb up to take a place beside him. As they rode, he did not talk much, but every so often turned his face to her, his eyes softening into slits, his whole face turning into a big grin.

  Hanna settled in with Kallehn, whom, for some reason, no one knew why, everyone called only by his last name. He and Ama Marit, Hanna’s grandmother, who preferred carrying the appellation of her Old Norse ancestry, were happy to have Hanna’s company. Hanna attended the local high school and helped Ama Marit with the household chores and helped Kallehn in the fields on the weekends.

  Kallehn (standing at left) in Seebenau on his farmstead

  Courtesy of the Willner family

  Kallehn’s farm had been in the family for almost two hundred years. A proud man and dedicated farmer like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, he had spent his life cultivating his land to provide the harvest that helped sustain his community. He was a deeply happy man whose greatest passion was to sink his hands into the rich earth and bring forth what nature had produced to supply life-giving nourishment. He worked hard and never complained. But now he faced the reality that one day soon, the regime would likely take away his land, would strip him of his livelihood, his heritage, and all that had ever mattered to him.

  One day, as Hanna helped Kallehn and his farmhands harvest the fields, she discovered how
being forced to hand over his crops had already begun to affect him. Though he hid his dismay in the creases of his weather-worn face, she could see that he was bothered that he would no longer be able to make his own decisions about his farm.

  As the sun went down on that long day of hard work, Kallehn leaned back against a freshly packed bale of straw and sighed, “Today we have done our part for ‘the People.’” With a smile and a wink, handing Hanna a small empty burlap bag, he said, “The gleanings are for us.” Then he got down on all fours and, with his nicked and gnarled fingers, combed around the stalks, searching for tiny husks of leftover oats. As Hanna watched her grandfather hunched over and scrounging for the little bits on the ground, she wondered how long he would manage to keep that twinkle in his eye.

  On Saturday afternoons, Hanna went to the local Gasthaus. It was not much more than an old building that had been turned into a place where young people could socialize before curfew, drawing classmates, farmhands, neighbors, even newly minted German border guards.

  At the Gasthaus, Hanna met Sabine. Sabine had once lived and attended high school in what was now the East Zone, but, with postwar zoning changes, her house now fell in the British Zone. Always armed with the proper documentation to be sure she could get back home, Sabine occasionally crossed from West to East just to mingle with old school friends. Lucky her, Hanna thought, that she could move back and forth freely. The two quickly became friends and, before long, Sabine began smuggling in little presents for Hanna, passing them off when no one was looking: a piece of chocolate, a box of sugar, a pair of leggings, none of which were available in the East and all of which were readily available on the burgeoning black market in the West.

  By now, at points all along the East Zone perimeter, wire fencing and guard posts were installed and roving patrols dispatched. With border guards now firing at will if they suspected a breach of the border under way and harsher prison sentences imposed for trying to get out without the proper paperwork, opportunities for crossing into the West diminished. On the Seebenau border, in light of the greater numbers of people fleeing, police presence increased and security tightened. More and more Germans signed on to augment the Soviet border guard force.

  In Seebenau, the authorities kept a close eye on young people. Curfews were enforced, started well before sundown and ended after dawn. Punishments were now levied on not just those who attempted to flee, but also those who were suspected of having had knowledge of an escape and had failed to report it. Words against the regime were enough to have one escorted to the town Commandatura, the local makeshift Soviet headquarters, a converted stable, where they were interrogated and, afterward, often hauled off to prison.

  It took some longer than others to get the message.

  One day at school, as students were milling about at the back of Hanna’s classroom during a break, Dieter, a likable but sometimes mischievous boy who sometimes had a tendency to talk too much, went a step too far.

  “How can they teach us this slop,” Dieter scoffed. “Can you believe it, teaching us that Stalin is ‘the Great Leader.’ Two years ago, the same teacher was teaching us that Stalin was ‘the Great Demon,’” he said, putting his wiggling fingers to his head and sticking out his tongue in a silly mock-devil gesture. As the other boys guffawed and snickered, Dieter looked up to see the school’s Communist Party minder staring at him with a penetrating glare. He approached the boy, seized him by the scruff, and hauled him out of class. Dieter was not seen again.

  The day that Dieter disappeared, something in Hanna changed. She was alarmed the people seemed willing to accept the changes without fighting back. That very day, as she walked home from school on the path that led back to her grandparents’ farmhouse, for the first time she took a close look at the border frontier. Scanning the horizon, she spotted a lone uniformed Soviet guard with a rifle who stood some distance away, smoking a cigarette, watching her. Not wanting to attract undue attention, she turned away and continued along the path the mile or so back to Kallehn’s farm.

  In the kitchen, Kallehn and Ama Marit listened to Hanna tell them about the boy who had been pulled from class.

  “Where do you think they took him?” she asked.

  “Maybe to prison,” said Kallehn.

  “What do you think about that, Kallehn?”

  “What do I think?” he repeated. “I believe times are changing.”

  With that he simply went back to sipping his scavenged ersatz rye and oats coffee, his sun-chapped hands curled around the steaming cup filled with the mixture that he had made from his gleanings.

  Now, in her most private thoughts, Hanna began to think more about, as Sabine had called it, “life on the other side.” Telling no one, over the next weeks, Hanna probed the border, started to take note of guard shift changes, patrolling practices, trying to detect the differences between East German and Soviet border police procedures. Careful not to be noticed, she surveyed paths, tree lines, guard posts, paying particular attention to areas where she had heard someone had attempted escape.

  In the East, Germans stepped up to take over positions in the government, signing on with security forces, staffing the newspapers, and administering schools, factories, and Communist Party and youth groups. In their efforts to show allegiance to the new ideology and to become catalysts for hard-line change, many approached their tasks with even more ferocity than the Soviets, cracking down ruthlessly on their own people. Scores of citizens applied to leave. Everyone knew the interzone pass was the ticket to freedom but they also knew the likelihood of being granted approval to transit was slim. As a result, hundreds of thousands took their chances trying to flee any way they could.

  With the exception of Berlin, where travel between zones was still relatively unrestricted, essentially uncontrolled as a result of the Four Powers—the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—agreeing to administer the city together, security along the entire length of the border separating East and West Zones was tightened. In Seebenau, the border authorities rolled out barbed wire, erected more warning signs, and increased the presence of border guards. Only two years after the Soviet Zone had been established, detention centers and prisons were already processing prisoners for escaping, charged with what the regime called “trying to deprive the state of its labor force.”

  One evening at the supper table, Kallehn looked troubled. He rubbed his temples and told Hanna that someone had been murdered at the border on the south side of Seebenau.

  “She tried to leave with a guide who said he could get her across,” Kallehn sighed, “but this so-called guide took her money, her belongings, and then he killed her. Times are crazy, Hanna,” he warned. “Don’t go near the border. This is not a game.”

  Like a leaf blowing around in a wild storm, Hanna spent the next weeks anguishing over whether to succumb to a stifling life in the East or make a run for it. The day Kallehn showed her where the Soviets had dismantled railroad tracks that had once been connected to the rail line heading west, she decided the time had come.

  She set out on a Monday afternoon after school. One of Kallehn’s farmhands had told her about a border area just southwest of the rye fields, where guards paid little attention and, he said, even slept most of the time. Just to the north side of that post, he explained, one could easily cross.

  She dropped off the dirt path and wound her way in toward the border. Once in the grassy pasture, she crouched, looking for any sign of activity. The border was quiet. The coast clear, she dropped her book bag, then moved to the edge of the forest, taking up a position behind a copse of pine trees. She panned the perimeter one last time and, seeing no one, slowly advanced. Careful not to snap a twig or rustle the leaves beneath her feet, she kept watch, her senses keenly sharpened to every possible movement and noise around her.

  Suddenly a shout, firm and commanding, cut the ari: “Stoi! Strelyat’ budu!” (Stop or I’ll shoot!)

  But she didn’t stop. She bolted like a de
er who knows it is prey in the sight of a determined and steadied hunter. Carefully he tracked his target, a teenage girl, with long, dark braids flapping wildly on the back of her blue and white flowered dress, as she darted into the woods. Pitching crisscross like a rabbit to avoid the sentry’s aim, her breaths short, her heart pounding, she pushed past gnarled branches and bore through brush and briers that sliced her arms and scraped her legs.

  “Stoi!” he shouted again, louder, emphatically.

  Powered by fear and driven by the simple belief that she knew she could make it, she tore through the woods.

  Then a crack. A bullet whizzed by her head and she dropped facedown into a ravine. Within seconds, a Soviet border guard was standing over her, his boots inches from her face, his rifle pointed down, directly at her head.

  Kallehn was summoned and, after his profuse apologies, the guard released Hanna into Kallehn’s custody with only a stern warning.

  Now Kallehn worried constantly about his granddaughter. No longer willing to take the responsibility for her being killed at the border or banished to prison while in his care, he contemplated sending her inland, back home, to her parents in Schwaneberg. Hanna implored Kallehn to keep her escape attempt a secret from Oma and Opa, which he did.

  Then one early winter evening, as she helped him heat bricks in the oven to warm the beds, he asked her what she wanted for her future.

  She stopped and looked into his eyes.

  “I want to be free, Kallehn,” she said.

  He looked at her sympathetically.

  “What would you do?” she asked. “What would you really do if you were me?”

  Kallehn dropped his gaze. He knew what he would do. Had he been younger, quicker on his feet, and not had the farm and Ama Marit to care for, he would have fled by now.

  Looking up he said resolutely, “If you want to get out, do it soon.” Then, reaching for another brick, he continued, “In less than a year, this place will be one big prison.”