by Jack Barsky
“Well . . . Reiner and I overheard the teacher through an open window,” I said.
My father had a way of swirling his tongue inside his lips whenever something I did met with his disapproval or anger. When he spoke, his words were terse and unequivocal. “From now on, you come straight home after your last class. Do you understand?”
I nodded and backed away before he could decide on a harsher punishment. Reiner got a similar tongue-lashing from his father, and we were sufficiently scared not to pursue the subject any further. Every Saturday after that, Reiner and I hurried straight home at noon.
A few months later, I had an opportunity to find out more about the Bible for myself.
We had gathered for Christmas at Opa Alwin’s and Oma Hedwig’s house, which was always my favorite destination for any holiday.
Opa Alwin was the only adult in our family who seemed to like me. He was a kind man, and it sometimes seemed strange to me that my father was his son. Opa’s muscular six-foot frame made him look like a giant to me, but he always had a twinkle in his sparkling blue eyes.
I remember once watching him shovel coal through an open window into the school basement, part of his job as the janitor. He showed me where it landed and where it would be used to heat the school throughout the next winter. As I stared at that enormous pile, I couldn’t fathom how only one person could have done all that work.
“Opa, I can’t believe you finished that big pile all by yourself. How did you do it?” I asked.
“One shovelful at a time,” he said with a proud smile.
My grandparents had an apartment at the far end of a huge regional high school that also included a dormitory. The expansive school facilities included a tennis court, a soccer field, a gym, and a park. Of course, at Christmastime, the entire building was empty because all the students had gone home for the holidays. I had the long tiled hallways all to myself, and I would either bounce a ball off the walls or race up and down on my rubber-wheeled scooter.
Christmas was the biggest holiday of the year for us, yet there wasn’t even a hint of Christ in our celebration. Our traditions were purely pagan, including a meticulously decorated fir tree and an occasional appearance by Santa Claus, whom I easily identified as a neighbor in disguise.
When I was old enough to be trusted with such an important task, I was put in charge of dressing up the tree. First, wax candles had to be placed carefully so as not to be directly beneath an overhanging branch. Heavy tinsel (which contained a percentage of lead to make it hang down straight) was added strand by strand (and also removed strand by strand to be reused the following year), and all other decorations were added last. Presents were opened on Christmas Eve.
Among the several packages with my name on them, there was really only one that was of interest. Socks, shoes, and other articles of clothing were quickly set aside in search of the one box that contained the real present. And whether it was a Tinkertoy construction set, a soccer ball, a toy fire engine, or a model train, there was always only just one.
It was still a few days before Christmas, and I had come inside the house to warm up after playing in the cold, empty halls of the school. My brother rarely joined me in my adventures, and my parents spent much of their time in the kitchen talking with Oma Hedwig.
After a cup of peppermint tea to warm me up, I went to search Opa’s bookcase for something interesting to read. As I scanned the shelves, a title caught my eye: Die Bibel. It was the very book that the Religious Instruction class revolved around. The Jesus fairy tale was within those pages.
Looking around to be certain that no one was nearby, I eased open the cover and flipped through the delicate pages. The words were printed in the outdated and difficult-to-read Fraktur font, just like the Brothers Grimm book I enjoyed so much.
My heart picked up a beat as I turned the pages of this forbidden book and began reading from the beginning. I didn’t see any mention of Jesus. By the time I reached Genesis 10 and 11 and the lineages of Noah and Abraham, I had yawned enough times that I decided to close the giant book.
What could make this book interesting enough for an entire class? And why was I forbidden to read it? I couldn’t ask my parents, or even Opa Alwin, about the Bible, and so I left it behind to pursue more interesting subjects.
I didn’t open another Bible for the next forty-five years.
A FEW INCIDENTS FROM MY CHILDHOOD will serve to illustrate how my parents unwittingly taught me to ignore my pain and suppress my emotions—characteristics that gave me the independence needed for a successful career as an undercover spy but did not necessarily serve me well in my relationships.
When I was about nine, I went to summer camp and had a terrific time—playing soccer and other games with my friends, swimming in an ice-cold river, visiting a local zoo, singing songs, and telling stories—until three days before it was time to go home.
That day, a few of us were out playing soccer in a grassy field. As usual, we all played barefoot. At one point, I went into the bushes to retrieve an errant ball and suddenly felt a stinging pain in the sole of my left foot. I don’t know what I stepped on, but my foot was bleeding like crazy as I hobbled back to the main building and alerted a teacher. She appeared more frightened than I was when she saw the blood streaming from my foot.
With no medical staff at the camp, the teacher retrieved a bandage from the emergency kit and dressed the wound as best she could. For the next three days, I was doomed to stay indoors because my bandaged foot wouldn’t fit into a shoe.
Despite my injury, I remember that the bus ride home was still a lot of fun. We sang all the songs we had learned at camp, and the four hours passed quickly. But when the bus dropped us off at the school building, which was about a mile from our apartment, the teacher was worried about how I would get home.
To my surprise, my father showed up on a brand-new, shiny black Jawa motorcycle he had purchased while I was gone. Noticing my bandaged foot, he said, “What kind of trouble did you get into this time?” When I explained what had happened, he said, “Well, I hope you learned a lesson about not going into the bushes without shoes on. Come on, let’s go home.”
I climbed onto the back of the motorcycle, wrapped my arms tightly around my father’s midsection, and off we went.
When we arrived at home, my mother and brother were outside the building. Hans-Günther showed immediate concern as I hobbled toward the door, but my mother got right down to business.
“Let’s go upstairs so I can take a look at this mess,” she said.
Once inside our apartment, I dropped my backpack of smelly camp clothes under the kitchen table and sat on a stool while my mother removed the dirty, bloodstained bandage. The last bit stuck to the scabbed-over wound, and I winced as she tugged it from my foot.
“This is probably infected,” she said as she glanced up at the clock on the wall. “You need to get to Dr. Harbers before he closes for the day.”
“Now?” I said. Surely she didn’t mean for me to walk the twenty minutes to the doctor’s office.
“Yes, now. I will put a smaller bandage on your foot so you can fit into your sandals.”
“But—”
I thought about my father’s shiny new motorcycle and how it would take him only a few short minutes to drop me off at Dr. Harbers’s doorstep, but a mixture of guilt for having gotten hurt and a desire to appear tough kept me from asking him—and he didn’t offer.
“Put on a new sock before you go,” my mother said as she returned to her household chores.
I hopped on one foot to my room, carefully pulled a new sock onto my injured foot, and slipped into a pair of sandals. Then I limped out the door without another word to my parents. I felt like a wounded snail making that journey, and every step was more painful than the last.
When I finally reached Dr. Harbers’s office, the waiting room was cluttered with other patients. I sat waiting on a hard wooden bench as my foot throbbed a drumbeat of pain. When my name was
finally called and Dr. Harbers examined the wound, the flicker of concern on his face spoke volumes.
“We need to clean this out. Where is your mother?”
“She’s at home,” I said.
“You walked here?”
I nodded.
Dr. Harbers frowned but said nothing. Instead, he rose from his stool and called the nurse, a strapping, middle-aged woman who barely acknowledged me as she came into the room. No friendly greeting or words of comfort. After a short instruction from the doctor, her vice-like hands pinned me to the examination table.
“Wait, wait—”
Dr. Harbers dug in, and the pain shot through every inch of my body like hot fire. I twisted and fought against the nurse’s hands as the doctor burrowed mercilessly into my foot for what seemed an eternity. There was a brief moment of relief when I thought it was over, but then I saw a solid object in Dr. Harbers’s hand that looked like an oversized tube of lipstick. A moment later, I cried out in pain at the searing heat and the smell of burning flesh as he cauterized the wound.
As the doctor dressed the wound and pushed away from the table, the nurse gave me a curt nod and left to go torture some other hapless patient.
“After you get home,” the doctor said, “try not to walk on it very much while it heals. Come back immediately if it isn’t better in a day or two.”
As the sunlight faded behind me, I hobbled home, alternating between hopping on one foot and trying to walk on the side of my left foot—then the heel, and then just my toes. Every step sent a fresh shot of pain up my leg until I began to feel nauseated. That was one of the longest, and certainly most painful, walks of my life.
As it turned out, that would not be the only time my parents would send me to the doctor on my own for an injury. At the age of fifteen, I suffered a contusion on my left knee, which made the joint completely inflexible and landed me in the hospital. After four weeks there, I was entirely on my own to get home—with a severely atrophied leg.
At seventeen, I developed a severe case of appendicitis. The pain was so intense that I was not able to stand or walk straight. My mother simply advised me to take the bus to the hospital, where a surgeon performed an emergency appendectomy.
Throughout my upbringing, my parents provided me with food and shelter—and they made sure I toed the line—but when pain was involved, I was on my own. I learned early in life not to rely on others for assistance or comfort.
My father’s hard work and his commitment to Marxist Leninist principles finally paid off when he was summoned to an after-school meeting by Principal Panzram. Those meetings were almost never a good thing.
When my father returned from the meeting, my mother and I were doing the dishes—she washed them and I hand-dried them with a towel. My mother turned around and asked, “What did he want?”
“He said there is a position for a principal at the upper Bad Muskau middle school. The district school administration and the party leadership decided I was the best man for the job.
“Will you take it?” my mother asked.
“Of course. It means a promotion and more money—but also, you say no to the Party only once.”
In May 1959, we loaded our belongings on a rented farm truck and made the twenty-four kilometer move to our new home. Twenty-four kilometers (about fifteen miles) was a huge distance in those days of limited transportation options, and I knew that I would never see my old friends again. But the excitement of moving to a much better place overcame the sadness of those final good-byes.
Our new home was an old two-story country school, divided into three sections: the classrooms, where grades 1–4 were taught, and two apartments—one for teachers and one for us. The building was in good shape, even though its dirty gray facade was pockmarked with bullet holes, a grim reminder of the combat action that had damaged much of the town during World War II. On the northern face of the school building, the Russian phrase Вперед на Берлин (Forward to Berlin) was painted in large red letters.
Compared to the tight space in Rietschen, our new apartment was huge: It had a kitchen, bedroom, living room, and study downstairs, and the bedroom for us boys was upstairs. The bedroom was not heated, and when the indoor temperature dipped below freezing, as it often did during the winter, my brother and I depended on the heavy, ten-inch-thick German feather beds to keep us snug and warm. Only our noses got cold.
Though the building had cold running water, we still had no in-house toilet facilities, and the trip across the backyard to the outhouse was often a scary adventure, particularly during the dark and bitterly cold winter nights. Toilet paper was not widely available, so we used square sheets cut from old newspapers. Still, by East German standards at the time, this was a luxurious place.
That fall, I entered the Bad Muskau middle school where my father was the principal and also taught biology and English. It required only a minimal effort for me to excel at my studies, though I was up against more than just the curriculum. I once overheard my father tell a neighbor, “The only student who deserves an A in biology is Albrecht, but as his father, I can’t give him that.” That bothered me quite a bit.
As the school year wound down, I started counting the days until summer recess, which began the first week of July and ended promptly the last week of August. I couldn’t wait for summer camp and a long visit to Opa Alwin’s. He always smiled whenever he saw me, and we shared an emotional connection that I had with nobody else in my family.
When I visited, Opa Alwin would show me what he was growing in his garden that year, and I would stuff myself with luscious ripe strawberries. Or he would take me to a quarter-acre wheat field and let me watch him mow the golden stems with a sharp scythe, just as the peasants had done for hundreds of years.
But the most excitement came when he would stampede his four pigs from their muddy daytime pigpen into the sty where they spent the night. I’ll never forget the first time he asked me to help by planting myself in the middle of the path to prevent the pigs from bolting into the street and forcing them to turn toward the sty instead.
“Opa,” I said. “What if they run me over? They are much bigger than I am.”
“Just be brave,” he said with a gleam in his eye. “Pigs respect people, but only if they stand their ground.”
Taking a deep breath, I prepared myself for the onslaught. However, just as my grandpa had predicted, when the lead pig saw me, she made a sharp left turn and ran into the sty. Opa came over and softly tousled my hair with his calloused hand.
“Well done,” he said. “Well done.”
I beamed with pride at my glorious achievement and the rare words of encouragement.
One brisk autumn day in 1960, I was playing outside when my father called me in. I followed him into the kitchen and sat down at the table. He did not say anything for quite a while, but from the swirling motion of his tongue inside his lips, I knew he was uncomfortable.
Finally he said, “Opa Alwin is in the hospital. He had an operation, but don’t worry. He is a strong man and will be well soon.”
I knew this was true. My entire life, I’d seen just how strong Opa was.
But two weeks later, the news was disastrous. Again, I was summoned into the kitchen. But this time we did not sit down. My father had a somber look on his face, and he gently touched my head—something he very rarely did.
“Albrecht, I am sorry to tell you that your grandfather passed away yesterday.”
I stood confused as my father broke down and cried. It was the only time I ever saw him cry.
“What do you mean, ‘passed away’?” I asked after a respectful pause.
“He died, Son.”
“But, but . . . you told me he was strong and would be well soon,” I said with tears welling up in my eyes.
“I was wrong.”
As my father turned and walked out into the garden, I ran to my room and cried for a long time. Nobody followed. Nobody came to console me.
When th
e small funeral party gathered around the freshly dug grave, I stood between my father and mother, desperately wanting to hold one of their hands. But I was conditioned not to ask. As we waited for the hearse to arrive, I felt chilled to the bone, partly from the cold wind and partly from the loss to my soul of the one person who had affirmed me and encouraged me.
When the casket had been lowered into its final resting place, an official said a few words and ended his eulogy with the customary “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” Then each person walked forward and tossed a ceremonial shovelful of dirt into the grave.
When my turn came, my father nudged me and I went forward, staring down at the cold ground. As I dropped a little more dirt into the hole, I saw my hero laid to rest “one shovelful at a time.”
Back at my grandparents’ home, Oma Hedwig and her sister-in-law served a meal, and the beer and wine soon lightened the mood and loosened the tongues of the mourners. This was unbearable to me, so I left the living room and mourned in solitary silence. I wanted to understand life and death, but there was no one to talk to. Once again, I was on my own, and once again I buried the pain as deep as I could—a habit that, sadly, I would perfect into adulthood.
BY THE TIME I WAS TWELVE, our standard of living had improved significantly. Food was no longer rationed, and meat was much more common, even in school lunches. Teachers were treated well in East Germany, and my parents’ combined incomes produced a stash of savings available to acquire items that not long before had been unattainable luxuries.
I was playing outside one day in the spring of 1961 when a shiny dark-green car slowly entered our yard. It was a Wartburg 311, the best passenger vehicle produced in East Germany and a prestigious automobile indeed. I had never gotten close enough to a car to even touch one, much less ride in one, so you can imagine my shock and surprise when my father emerged from behind the wheel.
“Vati, wow, what is this all about? Did you borrow this thing?”