by Nina Willner
Opa was lost without Oma and took to spending his days on his “Opa’s resting place” bench, staring the days away or sleeping on the couch instead of in their bed, or just lying awake. Roland came to take care of his father and they spent several weeks together grieving Oma’s passing and trying to deal with their devastating loss. The families came to visit. Cordula sat with Opa, consoling him by reading and singing to him.
After Oma’s death, Heidi occasionally looked over photographs of my mother and Eddie and the six of us children. By now, no one in the family really believed a reunion was possible, but everyone clung to Oma’s hopeful words and her prophecy that they would one day see their sister Hanna again.
17
A SURPRISE FROM AMERICA
INNOCENCE
(1978–1980)
True innocence is ashamed of nothing.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Only one month after Oma died, one day in July, while everyone was still in mourning, the family was jolted by a surprise.
In the United States, I was due to start college in the fall. That summer, my older brother Albert, then an eighteen-year-old college sophomore, decided to take a summer backpacking trip through Europe with a high school friend. As he filled his pack in our kitchen at our home in suburban Washington, D.C., he casually asked our mother for Opa’s phone number in East Germany. If he got a chance, he said, he would try to call Opa from West Germany.
For a couple of weeks the two teenagers explored Europe. In West Germany, Albert and his friend, with no real plan, boarded a train heading east and disembarked near an East German checkpoint. As expected, access into the country was tightly controlled, requiring foreigners to have submitted a detailed itinerary to the East German state tourist office up to nine weeks in advance. Western travelers were required to stay in designated hotels and register with the local police immediately on arrival. But at the security checkpoint, the two young, carefree, and adventurous college students, knowing nothing of the rules of entry into and travel through the country, submitted none of the required documents and simply dropped their passports into the slot.
The border guards behind the one-way mirrored glass, no doubt incredulous at the clearly naïve American teenagers wanting to travel alone in communist East Germany, did nothing in response, leaving the boys to wonder what could be taking so long. With armed guards standing nearby, the boys stood there waiting for twenty minutes until Albert’s friend, whose father was an American diplomat, dropped a second, black diplomatic passport into the slot, to which the border guards immediately jumped into action, quickly processing the boys through.
The two boarded a train. Armed police with German shepherds moved through each car, inspecting it, then got off and the train moved eastward. The boys sat gazing out the window onto the drab gray countryside as the East German locomotive, loudly clanging and laboring, made its way at an excruciatingly slow speed through the countryside. An hour later, they disembarked at a station near Salzwedel. Instead of registering with the local police on arrival in the East as they were required to do, they simply walked into the desolate railway station and, in Albert’s broken German, asked to use the telephone. The lone clerk, startled by the sudden appearance of a couple of foreigners, obliged and Albert called Opa’s telephone number.
Roland answered the phone. Stupefied, he only managed to say, “Ich komme so fort!” (I am coming to you now), before quickly hanging up. Then he dialed Manni, telling him to “gather the family immediately,” with no further explanation given over the likely Stasi-monitored phone line, leaving Manni to believe that their seventy-nine-year-old father was ill. Then Roland grabbed his car keys, ran out the door, and jumped into his car, his heartbeat racing. Not wanting to draw attention from the neighbors, he took a deep breath, tried to calm himself, and slowly backed out of the driveway. Once on the open road, he accelerated as fast as his tiny Trabant could go, smoky exhaust trailing in a billow behind him. Nearly an hour later he reached the train station. Upon seeing the two boys, Roland stopped and emerged from the car. He and Albert embraced, Roland looked around, and they all quickly got into the car and sped off.
By then, as many of the family members as could make it on such short notice had assembled at Opa’s place, and more would stream in throughout the day. Roland parked behind the house, and he and the boys entered through the side door so they could not be seen by nosy neighbors who would surely be suspicious of visitors in University of California T-shirts and American blue jeans.
Once inside the house, Roland closed the door, fell back against it, and breathed a sigh of relief. The family stood up slowly, gazing at the two teenagers.
“This is Albert,” Roland said. “Hanna’s son from America.”
They were in utter shock. They stood rooted in place, staring at Albert as if he were an alien from outer space. How was it possible that their long-gone sister’s son had managed to slip into the country, avoid the attention of the authorities, and was now standing among them in Opa’s living room in Klein Apenburg? Tutti let out an ecstatic wail and launched forward to grab Albert by the face, then pulled him to her, hugging him tightly.
Suddenly everyone was swarming Albert, overwhelmed with emotion, tears streaming down their faces as they reached to embrace him: Tutti’s daughters and her husband, Manni, his wife and children, Helga and her son. It did not matter that Albert spoke only kitchen-table German and the family spoke virtually no English; tears and laughter, animated, heartfelt gestures, and expressions of great elation and deep emotion carried the conversation. Albert’s open personality and easy smile seamlessly connected with Manni’s lighthearted way, Helga’s doting motherly pats, Tutti’s rugged openness. The fact that they had never met seemed irrelevant.
After a few minutes, Roland quipped about Albert being smothered and suggested they back off and give him some breathing room. Still clinging to him, they retreated slightly, and the huddle parted.
Then Albert saw him standing a few feet away. He broke from the group and went to our grandfather. Opa, his nerves bleached by years of punishment, a man not prone to physical contact, embraced his grandson.
The next day, they took Albert and his friend out the back way, for a walk in the countryside, using a circuitous route so they could avoid being seen by the prying eyes of neighbors, which befuddled the boys, who had no understanding of why they wound so strangely around instead of walking directly to the nearby field. After a pleasant walk, they returned to the house along a different but similarly roundabout route.
Later that day, they whisked Albert to the cemetery to visit Oma’s grave, the soil freshly turned from her recent burial. The boys stayed for nearly two days. On their last day, with long embraces and plenty of tears, the family said good-bye.
Roland drove the boys back to the train station, along the way wiping his eyes and imparting words that Albert barely understood but could tell included heartfelt greetings and loving sentiments for Hanna. A short distance from the station, Roland let the boys out and quickly drove off. The two promptly bought a ticket and boarded the train. Close to the border, the train stopped and armed East German police with dogs inspected the cars and checked everyone’s papers. The boys rode to the border and were quietly processed out of East Germany and back into the West.
My mother knew nothing of her son’s travel to the family in the East until Albert returned to the United States two weeks later and told her about it. Shocked to learn what he had done, she paused to let it sink in. Then she praised him for his daring, and asked him to tell her all about her father, her brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, how each of them looked, what they did, what they said. She reveled in every detail and, some days later, lost herself in the photographs he developed and brought to her. (See photo insert.)
By the late 1970s, the East German sports program was the pride of the nation. To the great surprise of the international sports community, East German athletes began racking up remarkable resu
lts in world competitions, including at the Olympics. In the late 1970s and on into the early 1980s, the tiny country of East Germany came in second in overall medals count in three consecutive Summer Olympics, just behind the far larger Soviet Union, and well ahead of a stunned West Germany. The world looked on in awe as East Germany churned out an unbelievable cast of champions, dominating a number of sports, including swimming, gymnastics, and cycling.
Honecker was pleased. His calculated quest to prove to the world that East Germany deserved international prestige, recognition, and respect was really starting to pay off.
Fueled by their successes, sports authorities continued to search out the most physically gifted young people with the potential to be molded into the best athletes in the world. Thousands of talent scouts and physical fitness instructors, coaches, and trainers were brought on board to scour the country to find those they believed would be most profitable to the program and set them on the path to becoming world-class athletes.
Determined to discover new ways to push the human body to new heights, the sports program created and developed cutting-edge, science-based methods they believed would give East German athletes a competitive advantage. Trainers were required to have a keen understanding of anatomy, psychology, physiology, and biomechanics, and to be master tacticians in recognizing optimal strain loads, channeling each athlete’s mental focus, and maximizing their performance potential. Top sports medicine doctors and research scientists created pioneering theories and techniques at the Institute for Applied Training Science, the sports research headquarters, and amassed a 75,000-volume sports library dedicated to the minutiae of sports mechanics. Advanced for their day, East German researchers exhaustively studied their competition from every angle, making video recordings of all the details of each major competition so they could analyze every potential opponent’s strategy and create new tactics to counter them.
In the coming years the state would invest hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue its goal of dominating the world of sports. Besides state security and funding to maintain the Wall, East Germany’s sports program held the biggest slice of the national budget.
In Karl Marx City, Cordula was already proving to be a dynamic addition to her school and Young Pioneer group, especially in her athletic ability. At youth events and sports activities, heads turned when she ran, climbed, or swam. She loved almost every sport she tried and was good at all of them. She had remarkable speed and agility and easily outdid most of the boys. Awed by her natural physical ability, her fitness teacher promptly informed national talent scouts.
They came to observe her in the pool. She was strong, they noticed, and had focus, intensity, and remarkable natural talent. She glided through the water like a fish. The scouts invited her to compete in swim trials. At tryouts she impressed them, showing remarkable promise for an eight-year-old. It was clear to the trainers that she had incredible potential.
Cordula easily passed the physical test, but she would also have to pass an assessment to gauge, among other things, whether or not she might have the potential to be a flight risk should she rise through the ranks and someday be chosen to travel outside East Germany. The sports program simply could not afford to recruit potential defectors and they would carefully monitor and vet each and every athlete along the way. A defection would come back to haunt the recruiter who had promoted the athlete who escaped; the incident would be a huge embarrassment to a regime that was trying so hard to impress the world.
Heidi assumed Cordula would be disqualified during the vetting process once her interviewers learned about Cordula’s family black marks. With Heidi and Reinhard sidestepping membership in the Communist Party, Opa’s numerous run-ins with the regime, and Hanna’s flight from the republic and marriage to a U.S. Army officer, it hardly seemed that Cordula would have a chance.
In the administrative offices of the Karl Marx City sports complex, with her mother waiting in the hallway, Cordula knocked and entered the room alone. She was directed to take a seat. The officials looked her over. Then one of them gently asked, “Would you like to travel to America to see your aunt?”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “No.”
“Do you love your parents?”
“Yes.”
Satisfied, he smiled. They congratulated Cordula and instructed her mother to withdraw her daughter immediately from her regular school in order to enter a specialized sports school to begin intensive training.
At her new school, training and competition took priority over academics. Runners ran, gymnasts tumbled, swimmers swam. Within a year, Cordula was already winning at local and regional junior competitions. At nine years old, she was selected for the East German national junior swim team, joining the ranks of the country’s finest young female swimmers.
As Cordula advanced into the junior swim program, I was a freshman at James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I studied Russian and in history class I learned more about the Cold War, about escalating U.S. and Soviet tensions, battles between communism and democracy around the world, and the dangers of Soviet communist influence. By the late 1970s, détente had fizzled out and superpower tensions had returned. Nuclear confrontation was once again a real threat.
Once again, letters from the East to the United States slowed to only a few a year. Few made it out, and few made it in, and my mother, Hanna, had to face the reality that the family had once again disappeared from her.
Because there was still so little firsthand information about what was going on behind the Iron Curtain, stereotypes abounded about godless, brainwashed, automaton-like trapped souls with a near-alien ideology. The closest we got to any definitive information about the people in the East was through the eyes and words of Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, books smuggled out of the Soviet Union.
The world’s most reclusive country, at best, we knew it was a repressive police state with an appalling human rights record, and that it had extraordinary athletes.
As Cordula trained among the best young athletes in East Germany, she was getting her own education about a much-revered and powerful Soviet Union and, in complete contrast, a hostile and corrupt United States. Propaganda films drilled into people’s heads the notion that America was a diseased country, rampant with crazies, criminals, and unemployed, destitute citizens. It was, she was told, an economic disaster zone and NATO a raging force of great destruction. East Germany, on the other hand, was a loving, peaceful nation, with a government that truly cared about its people and provided them everything they needed, and had built a safe and secure environment far removed from all the dangers of delinquency and chaos.
Top East German Olympic athletes trained on state-of-the-art equipment imported from the West, had the best in sports attire, and enjoyed many perks and privileges unavailable to the rest of the population. Those just entering the system at the junior level, however, had fewer resources and had to earn their way up. They trained in regular gyms, community sports centers, and in local Schwimmbads, community swimming pools, using whatever was available.
Every day at swim training, Cordula donned her standard-issue navy blue swimsuit. After months of use, the poor-quality material became thin and transparent; when they were wet they stretched out and sagged awkwardly on the little athletes’ bodies. Eventually the girls’ chests and bottoms were exposed. When the swimsuits reached their expiration for wearability, buttons were simply sewn onto the shoulders to keep them from slipping off completely.
One day, my mother received a letter from Heidi saying that the family was fine. Mari had entered school; not wanting to jeopardize Cordula’s standing in the East German sports program, Heidi wrote simply that Cordula liked to swim. Several months later a package arrived from America, postmarked from West Germany: a new dress for Mari, and for Cordula a fancy new swimsuit that Hanna had bought at the Fort Myer Army Post Exchange, just outside of Washington, D.C.
To Cordula everything about the American swimsuit was exotic and beautifully different from anything available in East Germany. With a mod, flower-power design, it was colorful: pink, orange, and yellow on a striped background and, best of all, it was made of high-quality fabric that held its shape. Cordula was overjoyed.
Cordula continued to wear her saggy blue suit to practice but when she came home, she put on her American swimsuit and privately admired herself in the mirror, twisting to see from behind, from the front, how it looked when she dove from the side. At practice she continued to excel and before long had earned a bronze medal in her first national junior competition. Emboldened by her win, she toyed with the idea of wearing her American swimsuit to practice. One day, desire won out. In the locker room, she changed into her swimsuit and proudly walked out to the pool and joined the other girls.
Her trainers were distracted, too busy hopping around trying to accommodate a visiting East German media team, so, to her delight, no one seemed to focus any attention on her. But suddenly a trainer called out to Cordula. She swallowed hard and ran over, landing in a gymnast’s stick in front of him. Lowering her gaze, she prepared to be admonished for wearing such unorthodox attire that clearly did not come from East Germany instead of wearing the standard team suit. But he was in a hurry and did not even look up at her. Several other girls were called out and all were told to hastily retrieve their medals and immediately report to the camera crew outside. An official medal-winner team photograph was taken with Cordula standing alongside her teammates while wearing her American swimsuit, along with an innocent, slightly impish expression, feeling pretty and proud. The photo ran in the newspaper the next day alongside a feature story about up-and-coming superstar East German athletes. (See photo insert.)
In the late 1970s, the two superpowers resumed feuding on a major scale. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and in protest, the next summer, America boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow.