My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  Based on Article 1 of the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State of February 28, 1933, you are taken into protective custody in the interest of public security and order.

  Reason: Suspicion of activities inimical to the state.

  The remaining papers were letters addressed to my mother and written by my father. Most envelopes had a 12 Pfennig Adolf Hitler stamp on them, but some had two sixes. Each envelope had two rubber stamps, too. One simply said Oranienburg and gave a date; the earliest one was 28 Feb.1937, the last one said 30 Jan. 1940. The other rubber stamp read Postal Censorship Office. K.Z. Sachsenhausen. On the back, each envelope gave my father’s name, his birth date, and Prisoner Nr. 20412, Block 25. Each page of the letters had a printed section, such as this:

  Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg near Berlin

  Excerpt from Camp Rules:

  Each prisoner may receive and send 2 letters or 2 postcards per month. Incoming letters may not contain more than 4 pages with 15 lines each and must be easy to survey and read. Packages with whatever content are forbidden. Money transfers are allowed only via postal money orders, which must indicate nothing more than first name, last name, birthday, and prisoner number and may contain absolutely no messages. Money, photos, and picture inserts in letters are forbidden. Postal items that do not meet the aforementioned requirements will not be accepted. Unclear and hard-to-read letters will be destroyed. Everything can be bought inside the camp. National Socialist newspapers are allowed, but must be subscribed to inside the camp by the prisoner himself.

  The Camp Commandant

  In addition, there were 15 preprinted lines on each page, along with two notations:

  “Only write on the lines!” and “The day of discharge has not yet been determined. Visits at the camp are forbidden. Inquiries are useless.”

  The cover of the Struwwelpeter children’s book, a collection of short stories written to frighten children into good behavior. First published in 1845, the book was still popular during the Nazi era (1933-45) and beyond. Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann presented Struwwelpeter (the Slovenly Peter) as a disgusting and disobedient brat of a child who hadn’t cut his hair or fingernails in a year. The stories showed how bad things happen to such children, whether they play with matches, suck their thumbs, won’t eat their meals, wriggle at the table, or walk in the street with their eyes on the sky. The inscription, which rhymes in the original, says:

  Take a look, here he stands.

  Fie! The Struwwelpeter!

  For nearly a year,

  He allowed no one

  To cut his nails

  On either hand;

  He permitted no one

  To comb his hair.

  Fie! Says everyone;

  Ugly Struwwelpeter!

  2. Shards and Whispers

  [February 1938]

  I told you about my father’s arrest. I remember another event just as vividly. It must have been a year later. Once more, I see myself lying in my bed. The steel braces were gone by then; presumably my X-legs had been cured. But I was still struggling with something: The lace curtains in my bedroom had rows of evil faces leering at me!

  My mother kept saying that I only imagined them, but I knew better. I was always glad when darkness came and chased them away. That particular night was especially bad. I closed my eyes and tried counting sheep, but I just knew those faces were still there. And in the midst of them I kept seeing my mother and Mrs. Meyer, forever whispering, just as they had a year ago after the men had come and taken my father away at midnight.

  Dishes broke in the hallway outside, followed by voices and laughter, and more noise still. I knew this was not a dream, and I jumped out of bed. Just then, my mother appeared in my bedroom door.

  “Don't worry,” she said. “Lotte Wagner is getting married tomorrow. They are just celebrating. Come and see.”

  We walked to the outer door, and while my mother looked through the peephole, I spied through the mail slot below. A new group of guests arrived. They crashed old pottery and plates into the apartment door across from us. I remembered the custom. “Shards Bring Good Luck,” the proverb said. People were always making sure.

  When my mother left, I got off my knees and stood up. That’s when I spotted Mrs. Nussbaum in the kitchen. She lived in an apartment two stories below us and was my mother’s friend. She also ran a grocery store a few houses down the street on our block, where we always got our milk. Mrs. Nussbaum was holding a handkerchief to her eyes and my mother told me to get back into bed and tell no one that Mrs. Nussbaum had been there. She would leave the bedroom door open a crack, she said, but that only made things worse. The light from the corridor brought back those faces grinning at me from the curtains and I saw a big dark figure standing between the tile stove and the far wall.

  There was no way I could sleep then. In addition, the Wagners made noise on the other side of the wall, Fritz's trumpet played along with the record player, and my mother and Mrs. Nussbaum kept whispering in the kitchen. I went to get my mother and told her I was scared, but she was annoyed. Firmly, she put me back to bed and pulled aside the curtains. My window turned into a black square, sprayed with stars.

  “Count the stars,” she said, “Look how pretty they are.”

  After she left, I got out of bed, tiptoed to the bedroom door, and quietly crawled down the corridor to a spot near the kitchen door. My mother and Mrs. Nussbaum were eating soup. I saw the moon though the window behind them; it was being swallowed by a cloud.

  “So now I am to walk around with a giant J on my ID card!” Mrs. Nussbaum was saying. “Did you know we aren’t allowed to buy soap anymore?”

  “And David, he was told that Jews can’t have pets!” Mrs. Nussbaum continued. “What’s he supposed to do with his dog? He loves that creature! Where will it all end?”

  “I don’t know,” my mother sighed. “But I remember the day it all started, back in ‘33. It was in early April, right on my birthday. I took Hansel to Dr. Weitzman’s for the one-year checkup. And, just as Arthur had predicted, there were SA men out in front of his clinic, shouting ‘Aryans Don’t Use Jewish Doctors!’ One of them spit on me when we went in anyway.”

  Then they whispered a lot and I couldn’t hear what they said, but I saw the moon reappear from the cloud.

  “That must have been the day Streicher let loose the SA. With his ‘Aryans Don’t Buy From Jews!’ thing,” Mrs. Nussbaum said. “How time flies. Almost five years already! I remember Wagner planting his fat self in front of my store, dressed up in his SA uniform, his booted legs spread apart, yelling ‘Judah Perish!’ He smeared it on my store window as well and the police just laughed.”

  “I know,” my mother said softly. “He scrawled a slogan on our apartment door, too, because we were seeing Dr. Weitzman. I can see it now: ‘Every Mark in a Jewish hand, is one less for the German fatherland!’ And now he’s marrying off his daughter to a bastard just like himself. What kind of a life will she have?”

  “Better than ours,” Mrs. Nussbaum said. “You know, David’s in trouble, too. He’s lost half his clients. ‘Aryans don’t use Jewish lawyers,’ they say. But even Jewish clients are thinning out. Just the other day, he had a meeting with the managers at Tietz’s. Can you believe it, they are supposed to fire their Jewish employees! In fact, they are supposed to give up their own jobs in favor of ‘Aryan’ managers. Looks like they are going to lose the store. It’s supposed to become Hertie’s, a ‘purely Aryan department store,’ they call it.”

  My mind wandered; I didn’t comprehend most of what they were saying even if I could hear their words. I tried to count the dried mushrooms that hung on a string above the kitchen stove, but I didn’t succeed. My mother’s white apron blocked half my view.

  “Martel tells me the same thing is going on at the Wertheim brothers’ store,” my mother said. “Some of their workers had joined the boycott; yet Fritz and Guenther were supposed to pay them full wages for the
time they had refused to work! It’s insane.”

  Just then I coughed. Mrs. Nussbaum’s gaze jolted up from her dish to meet my mother’s eyes. For a moment, there was total silence. Then my mother jumped up and I saw her eyes, glassy with tears. She put me to bed once again and made sure I stayed there. But later, I remember, she brought me a bowl of soup and I ate it eagerly to find the pretty flowers underneath.

  “Don’t ever say a word about any of this to anyone,” my mother said. “Not ever.”

  She sat at my bed and she smelled so good. It was the new perfume, called Toska. Of course, she needn’t have worried about my telling anyone. I was just a child after all; it took years before I fully understood what their conversation had been about. In addition, it had been a year since my father had disappeared and I had heard my mother’s warnings every day: “There are bad people out there. Never tell anyone anything!” That night, I ended up sleeping in the big bed. We talked of my father and my mother wept. She always did, even though she tried not to show it. I swore to myself I would protect her from the bad people the moment I was a bigger boy.

  The next morning, when we went to get our hot buns from the baker, we ran into Mr. Wagner. He was carrying a large box of shards down to the garbage bins.

  “Shards Bring Good Luck,” he said. He was laughing.

  The names of Jewish-owned department stores above a skeleton hand (presumably Jewish) grasping Fritz Schulze's grocery store (presumably non-Jewish). The caption, in line with the Nazi habit of treating Jews as non-German:

  Therefore: Germans!

  Shop Only in German Stores!

  3. Aryans All

  [February 1938]

  My Aunt Martel came to visit us the day after the Wagners’ pre-wedding celebration. True enough, I didn’t keep a diary of events in those days, as I did in later years, but I figure the timing must be correct, because weddings were always scheduled for the day after the pottery smashing and Aunt Martel had seen the bride on her way in. She had arrived, she told us, just as Lotte Wagner, dressed in a fancy white wedding gown, followed her family down the long set of stairs to the level of the street where a white carriage, with two white horses in front, was waiting for her. Aunt Martel had let the entourage pass, had watched them leave towards the Neukölln town hall, and then had made her way up, slowly and out of breath, to the fourth floor. I opened the door and jumped into the arms of my favorite aunt.

  As usual, she brought me a package of Leibniz cookies. As usual, too, she wore a fur muff, held around her neck by a cord. She also had fleece-lined boots and a matching fur coat. I confiscated the muff and the boots. They were perfect toys.

  Aunt Martel was my mother’s oldest sister. She had come, my mother explained, to help with an important family project. In preparation, my mother had pushed aside her new Pfaff sewing machine that had recently replaced the old Singer and opened up the bookcase behind it. The top three shelves held my mother’s favorite books; the drawers underneath were crammed with old letters, hundreds of photographs, and all sorts of documents.

  “The story of my life,” my mother said with a sigh. She pulled out the top drawer and placed it on the living room table.

  “I can’t believe we are doing this,” my mother said to Aunt Martel. “Those bastards! But unless we comply, Hansel won’t be able to go to school next year. I hate this, I hate this, I so hate this!”

  She inspected one item at a time, while Aunt Martel took notes on a pad of paper, which gave me time to explore my mother’s books. While I couldn’t yet read any lengthy text, my mother had taught me the alphabet and I could decipher the names of most of the authors. On the top shelf, there was Walther von der Vogelweide, followed by Hans Sachs, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Gottfried Herder. Several volumes, all bound in red, said Wolfgang von Goethe; several others, all in blue, featured Friedrich von Schiller.

  I took the books out of the next shelf, where I found Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, someone simply called Novalis, and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. They sat right next to Hermann Hesse, Arnold Zweig, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Gottfried Keller, and Gerhart Hauptmann.

  Aunt Martel took another sip of Himbeergeist, her favorite raspberry liqueur, and then she helped me read the names on the last shelf: Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Jakob Wassermann, and William Shakespeare. I had trouble reading the last one and pronounced it with five syllables, like Sha-ke-spe-a-re. Aunt Martel didn’t notice; she was suddenly preoccupied.

  “Trudchen,” she said to my mother, holding up Erich Kästner and Kurt Tucholsky, “some of these books can get you in big trouble, you know. They have been banned from bookshops and libraries and have been burning in the streets. You’ve got to be more careful!”

  “I still get upset when I remember the bonfires I ran into at the Opernplatz,” Aunt Martel continued. “There they were, a horde of thugs, really, standing right next to the statue of Alexander von Humboldt, ‘Germany’s shining exemplar of the Enlightenment,’ it said on the pedestal. But nobody noticed that. Nobody thought of Humboldt University just a short distance away. Everybody was much too busy throwing Nathan the Wise into the flames, all the while making fun of Lessing’s pleas for racial and religious tolerance. A scary bunch they were; you don’t want to fight with them. Think of Arthur, always think of Arthur. You want to maximize the chances to get him out of there.”

  “Yes, indeed,” my mother replied with an air of sarcasm, “that’s why we are here, aren’t we? To obey the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, to protect German blood and honor, to trace the family tree all the way back to January 1, 1800, to show there was no Jewish blood, to show that we are worthy of being called ‘citizens of the Reich.’ It makes me sick!”

  For the longest time, Aunt Martel said nothing, leafing through The Collected Works of Heinrich Heine and sipping her liqueur.

  “Here it is,” she said finally, “A quote from Heinrich Heine: ‘Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.’ He said that in 1823. Over a hundred years later, nobody has learned a thing!”

  Then she opened the cast-iron door of our dark green stove, added a couple of brown-coal briquettes to the glowing embers, and went back to drawing the family tree. Silently, too, my mother kept handing her pieces of paper from the drawer on the table. I stood with my back against the hot glazed tiles, warming up Aunt Martel’s boots and muff. I tried my best not to think of Pauline burning up in Dieter’s Struwwelpeter book.

  -----

  Decades later, I discovered the Ancestor Passport that had been issued in my name way back in 1938, presumably the result of all the research put into motion on that night. Relevant laws were reproduced and commented upon on pages 2-8. Instructions on finding valid documents followed on pages 9-13. My name, birth date and place, the names of my parents, and my baptism in a Christian church were listed and certified on page 14, complete with signature and swastika rubber stamp. Similarly, certified entries for each of my parents, going back to 1906 and 1907, respectively, appeared on pages 16-17. My father’s parents, born in 1865 and 1870, followed on pages 18-19, those of my mother, born in 1872 and 1871, on pages 20-21. Later pages, and similarly impressive rubber stamps, certified the Aryan blood of eight great-grandparents (variously born between 1816 and 1847), of sixteen great-great grandparents (born between 1732 and 1822), of thirty-two great-great-great grandparents (born between 1759 and 1790), and even of sixty-four great-great-great-great grandparents (with only death certificates available). According to certificates of birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage, and death, there was a blacksmith, a bricklayer, a carpenter, a farmer, a gardener, a laborer, a leather worker, a Methodist preacher, a miller, a policeman, a royal guard, a tailor, a salesman, a shoemaker, and a weaver, but—lucky me—not one Jew.

  My mother had several Jewish friends besides Mrs. Nussbaum. In retrospect, it is easy to see why she was so upset on the day she had to trace the family tree. She was even more upset th
e next morning when the bell rang in the street and the man in the pickup truck called upon all to exchange “kindling wood for potato peels.” I fetched the pail full of potato peels and we went down together to make the exchange, only to run into Mr. Wagner who was beside himself.

  “Look at this, look at this,” he said to all who would listen, “the marriage officer gave Lotte a copy of Mein Kampf ! Personally signed by the Führer.”

  My mother turned away.

  The Ancestor Passport

  A multi-page document required by the Nazis as proof of a citizen’s Aryan ancestry. According to the document, “any person is of Aryan ancestry (= German-blooded) if he is free, from the point of view of the German people, of the blood of a foreign race. In this connection, foreign is defined above all as the blood of European Jews and Gypsies, of the Asian and African races, and of the aborigines of Australia and America (Red Indians). On the other hand, an Englishman or Swede, a Frenchman or Czech, a Pole or Italian must be treated as Aryan, as long as he is free from the above-noted foreign blood, regardless of whether he is living in his own country, in East Asia or in America, regardless of whether he is a citizen of the USA or some South American free state. It goes, of course, without saying that for purposes of marriage a German citizen, a girl of pure German ancestry, is closer to us than some other Aryan….”

  “Naturally, adoptive parents, as well as stepfathers and stepmothers, do not belong in the ancestor passport. With respect to blood and race, they have no influence on the genetic make-up of the person in question. It is important to remember this fact when dealing with foundlings or persons born out of wedlock. In all such cases, it is crucial to determine the real birth parents and to enter their ancestors into the document. There is no room here for false shame. No reasonable person nowadays will consider a citizen less worthy if he or one of his ancestors was born out of wedlock….”