by Nina Willner
Courtesy of the Willner family
The new neighbors came to welcome them, bringing flowers and potatoes from their gardens. But Opa was in no mood to be friendly and remained sitting on the front stoop of their tiny new house, not even bothering to acknowledge them. Oma thanked them, explaining that he wasn’t feeling well. They nodded and seemed to understand.
The notion of marginalization from mainstream society was a blow to the whole family. Roland, Kai, and Manni came to rally around their father and help Oma and Opa move in. The grown sons tried their best to console their father but saw that he was utterly depleted.
Oma refused to cry about their circumstances. She told her boys that Opa needed time to recover and that, after a while, he would be all right.
“Da müssen wir durch. This is just something we have to go through,” she said. “We will be fine. We are strong. We have each other. Nothing will break us, neither this nor anything else. This family has far too much to be proud of. We are far above all of this.”
The boys moved in Oma and Opa’s belongings, including some furniture and Opa’s books. The tiny dwelling could only accommodate about a quarter of what they had owned, so much of Opa’s study, most of his library, his collections of pressed wildflowers and geologic specimens, and some family treasures like the Heidelberg Castle kit model, were divided up among the children. But framed family photos and albums made it into the inventory. Believing it would help to revive him, Oma had insisted Opa’s Schimmel piano be brought to Klein Apenburg. The rest of the family chipped in to pay for a truck to haul it.
After his sons left, Opa felt lost. Suddenly stripped of his purpose in life, and now physically separated quite a distance from his grown children, he plodded through the next couple of months in a haze.
Oma took charge. She tended lovingly to Opa but wasted no time feeling sorry for their situation and instead set about organizing the new house and creating a new life. With no running water, she shrugged off what she saw as minor inconveniences and set to work. After surveying the topsoil on the plot of land on the side of the house, she began tilling the soil for the foundation of a new garden. She put up pictures of the family all around the house. Refusing to let Heidi dwell on the family’s misfortune, Oma handed her a rake.
“A garden can always change things,” she said smiling as she knelt down and dug her hands into the earth. “With new seeds there are new beginnings.”
By late autumn, Oma was treating Opa with a steady regimen of curative herbal teas, hearty vegetables, and fresh air. She insisted he go outdoors every day and so he sat on the wooden bench at the far corner of their lot. With his blank expression it was hard for Oma to know what was going through his head. She reminded him constantly about his many achievements and contributions to the community as a successful leader and beloved teacher who had selflessly educated and helped so many over the years. At night she put him to bed, gently stroking his head and reminding him, “We have raised a good family. You have been a wonderful father and teacher. We will be fine.”
My grandparents and Heidi learned to live simply in Klein Apenburg. As part of Opa’s retirement, his income was curtailed and they now had to live on vastly diminished resources and a meager state pension, which amounted to only a few dollars a month. What Opa could once upon a time afford for an entire family of eleven, he could now barely afford just for the three of them. Living in the tiny, isolated community they had only the very basics that they could grow themselves or exchange with their neighbors. They lived simply and sparsely in a small, plain, rustic house with a crude outhouse and a rusty water pump outside the kitchen door.
Though Oma had never spent much time on a bicycle, now older and less agile than she once was, she fought off isolation by occasionally riding the old family bicycle to the town of Apenburg, a four-mile round-trip, to see what she could procure for the family.
The high school too was in Apenburg. Heidi made the journey using that bicycle every day that fall, but when winter set in, especially after a heavy snowfall, she had to go by foot, and sometimes showed up late to school even when she had started out early. She worked hard to get excellent grades so that Oma and Opa would have something to be happy about, and so that she would not add to their burden by doing poorly.
On the long, freezing-cold walks to and from school, she had plenty of time to reflect on her circumstances. Heidi’s feelings about Opa ran the spectrum between deep sympathy for him and anger that he had caused their isolation by railing against the regime and losing his temper. She wondered if, outside East Germany, they banished people to remote places when they spoke up against their government.
Occasionally, on her secluded treks to school, Heidi’s mind wandered to thoughts of her oldest sister. The more Heidi thought about Hanna, the more she came to admire her for having had the courage to run, even if it meant leaving everyone behind. Hanna had been a risk taker, unafraid in the face of danger, and had done what so many others inside East Germany wished they had the courage to do.
And so during that first winter in exile, somewhere on the long road between Klein Apenburg and Apenburg, Heidi came to virtually idolize Hanna for her strength and daring. Having physically emulated her sister throughout her childhood, as a teenager Heidi now resolved to pattern her character after Hanna’s. She tried to embody what Hanna would think and feel in every situation, how she would react, what she would or would not say. Imagining her sister would be proud of her, she vowed to carry herself with dignity no matter what might come.
With a renewed sense of direction, rooted in her sister’s courage in having mounted the ultimate act of disrespect and defiance against the regime by escaping, Heidi became emboldened. She catapulted Hanna’s image to new heights and by the end of that desperately lonely year had come to think of Hanna as nothing less than a legend.
As winter drew on and snowfalls became heavier, it became too difficult for Heidi to get to school, and since Oma and Opa had no money to board her in Apenburg, she had to drop out of school altogether. She spent the long cold days at home, working around the house, helping Oma and Opa, cooking, cleaning, carrying in the wood and coal, playing cards with them, and having long talks with Oma about life. They did a lot of needlework that winter, crocheting blankets and embroidering the edges of handkerchiefs. When spring came around, having missed too much schoolwork to reintegrate back into her class, Heidi remained at home, splitting firewood, helping Oma work the garden, tending to Opa, and wondering about her future.
For a time, Opa remained morose, often wearing the gaze of a man who had emotionally departed. But after nearly a year in Klein Apenburg, thanks to Oma’s care he became more accepting of their circumstances. He spent his days reading and helping Oma in the garden; from time to time he even chatted with the neighbors. After a while Opa even joined them in their card games. Though he seemed to be adjusting, when Oma tried to get him to play his Schimmel, after several halfhearted attempts he said it didn’t sound right, that it was out of tune.
Turmoil spread around the globe. In Asia, American involvement in Vietnam peaked when the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive, handing the United States a political defeat. Communist China detonated its third nuclear bomb. U.S. forces invaded the Dominican Republic to prevent a communist takeover like the one that had taken place in nearby Cuba.
In Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet, East German, and other Warsaw Pact troops crushed the “Prague Spring.” Like the East German uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian revolt of 1956, the Czechoslovak uprising was another lesson to the people of Eastern Europe not to step out of line or challenge communist rule. And so the leaders of East Germany got the green light to continue unhindered on their path of oppression.
The race for superiority in space continued as both sides spent huge resources to achieve new heights, peaking anew in 1969, when the United States landed a man on the moon.
I was eight years old when I watched in awe along with my parents and 500 mil
lion others around the world as Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the surface of the moon. It was a tribute to perseverance and innovation and a victory not only for Western technological advancement in space, but also for freedom and democracy.
By the late 1960s, the East German leadership realized that they had to do something to improve their country’s reputation with the outside world. Their plan would have to be something so enormous in scope that it would command international respect and put East Germany on par with other leading countries of the world. Thus a massive campaign was launched to dominate the world of sports, including the Olympic Games. East Germany’s goal: to surpass West Germany in every form of competition and compete on the same level as the two world superpowers, each with more than 230 million citizens compared to East Germany’s 17 million. It wouldn’t be long, the regime believed, before everyone would sit up and take notice and East Germany, once considered a pariah, would earn the world’s respect as a leader in international sport, and in the process, gain a platform to promote the achievements of East German communist society.
They launched their campaign with great discipline and fervor.
Propaganda posters and banners suddenly sprang up, compelling children everywhere to outrun, outrace, outswim, and out-throw everyone else. Every city and town, every gymnasium and school, hailed the new future of competitive athletics.
The leadership formed a sports ministry and poured money into athletic programs throughout the country. Suddenly, in schools, at FDJ and Young Pioneer meetings and at summer camps, sports took center stage. Prompted by new standards outlined by a national sports board, gym teachers and coaches set lofty goals for their students that stressed fitness, strength, and stamina. Athletic clubs across the country received lavish subsidies. The regime recruited the best sports trainers and talent scouts in the country and dispatched them to schools and gymnasiums to find and recruit the best young athletes East Germany had to offer: the fittest, the strongest, and the fastest, for swimming, gymnastics, weight lifting, ice-skating, and cycling.
By spring, though Opa had lost weight and had clearly aged, he seemed to finally be adjusting to his new circumstances. With Opa somewhat stabilized, Oma turned to Heidi, now eighteen years old, and told her that she needed to leave Klein Apenburg and prepare herself for life on her own.
Oma and Opa could not afford teachers’ college for Heidi and, given Opa’s outcast status and Heidi’s failure to finish high school, she would not have been accepted for training. So instead, after two years in Klein Apenburg, she went north to Salzwedel to train as a stenographer. After several months, she completed the program and, along with her credentials, was given a chance to join the Communist Party. She quietly discarded the application and set off to find a job.
Prospective employers always seemed to ask the same two questions, even before inquiring about her skills and qualifications.
“Are you a member of the Communist Party? Do you have any relatives living in the West?”
Heidi answered truthfully each time. She was not a member of the Communist Party and she did have relatives in the West. When asked if anyone in her family had fled, she answered in the affirmative. Everywhere she applied, she was rejected.
Heidi returned to Klein Apenburg. Opa was livid. He berated Heidi, telling her that she had no sense of reality.
“Without joining the Party,” he bellowed, “you have no chance at a decent life!”
Always good natured and never rebellious, she mustered the courage to challenge him for the first time in her life. “Were they so good to you?” she asked. “You gave them the best years of your life and look where you are!”
Opa hollered back, “You’re too young to understand! Why are you so stubborn?”
Oma put her hand on Opa’s shoulder, patting him in an effort to get him to calm down. He took in a deep breath, then looked into Heidi’s eyes.
“Do the right thing, Heidi,” he said, struggling to keep control of himself. “Only Party members succeed.” And with complete conviction, he added, “Sign or you will achieve nothing in your life, I promise you that!”
Heidi continued to protest: “What does it matter, Papa? Everyone in the Party still has to look over their shoulder and watch what they say and do. What does it matter?”
“It matters! It matters!” Opa yelled. Raging now, he shouted, “People succeed because they play by the rules! Can’t you understand that?”
Now shaking with anger, his wild expression boring through her, he said, “You are a troublemaker, just like Hanna!”
Oma and Heidi spent that evening lingering on the stoop outside, which looked out over the dirt path entrance to the hamlet and on to the old, decaying church across the way.
“You’ll be all right,” Oma said, her comforting words belying her concern that Heidi’s decision not to join the Party would indeed affect her last child’s future.
“You always told me to do the right thing, to be true to myself,” Heidi said, looking at Oma for guidance.
“Do what you think is right,” Oma reassured her. “You will be fine.”
An idealist by nature, Heidi, determined to prove that the caliber of character she had and quality of work she could produce were far more important than mere membership in the Communist Party, returned to Salzwedel and set off once again to find work. For months she looked for a job, hoping to find some office that needed a stenographer, but time and time again she was rejected.
During those months, Heidi began to understand what Opa had tried to tell her. Lack of Party membership would limit her opportunities. At some point, feeling distressed and wanting to make contact with Hanna, at the risk of drawing even more negative attention to herself, she braved a short letter. Like Heidi, everyone in the family figured that they might have a better chance of a letter making it to Hanna if they kept things vague and even flattered the regime.
“My dearest Hanna,” Heidi wrote, “We are well and happy. Our parents have moved to a smaller place. Life for us here is good. Here is a picture by which you can remember me. Please do not forget me.” That letter and photograph made it out.
In the United States, I turned nine years old. My father, Eddie, retired from the army, ending his career as a major, and went on to work as a civil servant for the U.S. government. My mother, Hanna, was a housewife and part-time German language teacher.
By now there were five children in our family, born one after the other, the product to a large degree of my parents’ intent on replacing the families they had both lost. We were a close-knit family. Albert was the oldest, then me, Marcel, Maggy, and Sachi. At home, my parents spoke German to each other. There was no expectation to learn German but if we wanted to know what our parents were talking about, we worked harder to pick it up. We had a happy American childhood, attended public schools, took piano, violin, and art lessons, played sports in school, went to Jewish Sunday school, and spent every day during the summer months at the local swimming pool. Like other American families, we took road trips to other cities, and occasionally went camping and canoeing on the weekends.
Oblivious of the strife engaging the world, we knew very little about our relatives in East Germany, and knew nothing about the repression they endured. Only occasionally, when I passed by my parents’ bedroom, would I glance at the photograph of my aunt Heidi and the framed photograph of the whole family together marking Oma and Opa’s silver wedding anniversary, a picture in which only my mother was absent. And I would wonder how all my relatives were coping behind what I had by now learned was the Iron Curtain.
After several months, the tide suddenly turned for Heidi. At the age of nineteen, she met a twenty-three-year-old conscripted NVA soldier who was finishing his mandatory tour in the East German Army with duty at a casern near the East–West Inner German border, as an electrical technician.
They met at the local dance hall, Der Schwarzer Adler, the Black Eagle. Dressed modestly in a beige blouse and black skirt, she s
at quietly at a table with a few classmates from her stenography class. After a while, an affable, sandy-blond-haired soldier in uniform came and asked her to dance, and she accepted. He could dance well, she couldn’t, but they found a way, albeit a little clumsily on her part. After the song ended, Reinhard introduced himself. They talked a bit, then she thanked him and rejoined her friends. Though he was immediately smitten, they parted ways without any further plans to meet up, but by the next weekend they were both at the dance hall, happy to see each other again. Unbeknownst to Heidi, as no buses ran from his garrison to Salzwedel, Reinhard had made the hour-long trip by foot hoping to see Heidi once more. After that, they met up at the dance hall regularly, by then Reinhard having had his parents send the family bicycle so he could make the trip more quickly.
Reinhard was a well-intentioned, honest soul, with an optimistic outlook and a quiet, steely-eyed determination. Like Heidi, he was not a member of the Communist Party and never intended to be one. He thought she was his ideal match; she had a lightness of spirit yet an understated resolve to live life on her own terms. He was enchanted with her zest for life and her independent streak.
Heidi found in her new love a kindred spirit. After a short courtship, the two married. With at least a two-year wait for non–Party members to get an apartment, they moved in with Reinhard’s parents, who lived in Stollberg, the picturesque valley that lay at the base of the Hoheneck Castle Women’s Prison.
In nearby Karl Marx City, Heidi set out once again to find work. After several more months of searching, she finally found a job as a secretary with a state auto part design and engineering firm. To her surprise, without even asking if she had family members in the West or if she was a Party member, the office leader, Herr Meier, hired her.
Grateful to Meier for giving her a chance, Heidi threw herself into her job and became a model worker. Within a month, she became indispensable to her boss, who quickly learned to rely on her consistent productivity and strong work ethic.