by Heinz Kohler
4. The Acacia Tree
[July 1938]
As I told you earlier, in those terrible days preceding the Second World War, getting a “clean” Ancestor Passport was a precondition for entering first grade in Berlin. For me at least, that time was fast approaching, but I looked upon my first day of school with mixed emotions. In my case, the dreaded date was to be January 1, 1939, and not, as you might imagine, the day after that! But that bit of Prussian compulsiveness was not what was bothering me. The truth is, I was afraid to leave my mother for any length of time and you will understand the reason once I tell you about my last spring and summer before school when I slowly emerged from the safe cocoon of our apartment and became acquainted with the world outside.
When I think about that time, strange as it may sound, I keep picturing an acacia tree. It stood in front of our house and was huge, reaching all the way up to the fifth floor. On the typical spring day, the sweet smell of its flowers drifted through the open glass doors of our balcony. On hot summer afternoons, thousands of its tiny leaves cast trembling shadows on the white-washed inner walls of my balcony playroom. Sometimes I crouched in its far corner and let my imagination run free, watching the shadows of tigers and lions, of kangaroos, gazelles, of Indians and trappers, Snow White and her dwarfs.
When my mother wasn’t looking, I climbed on the balcony bench and, through the boxes of flowers, looked at the world below. I tossed bread crumbs to the sparrows on the sidewalk, four stories down; and when I was lucky, their fighting attracted seagulls from the canal. They circled above the geraniums and caught every piece of food I tossed into the air.
But everyone said hiding on our balcony and feeding gulls was for little kids. I had become a big boy, they said, ready to go to school in half a year. I should get out more, they said. I suppose even my mother agreed with the neighbors and various aunts and uncles. Presumably, that’s why she urged me to go down to the street and play marbles with Dieter. Marbles---what a beautiful collection I had! There were the ordinary ones, made of clay; painted brown, red, or purple. But I also had others made of glass, some as small as a pea, but one or two as large as a plum. All of these had swirls of colors reaching to their center: yellows, pinks, and greens.
We met at the foot of the acacia tree, and there was a playground there as well: some twenty square meters of real soil. We had to share it with the soot-blackened trunk of the giant tree, and had to fight off an occasional dog, but pretty soon we looked upon the spot as our home away from home. There we could dig shallow holes to play marbles the right way; and that beat the concrete floors of balconies or the ribbons of cobblestones everywhere else.
One day, though, everything changed. We were playing the second round of our tournament when they came. They just stood there, looking down at us. All six of them wore identical shoes, made for hiking. All six wore black corduroy shorts, black leather belts with big knives attached, the same brown shirts, the same black ties, and red-and-white swastika armbands. I was crouched to the earth, and it seemed that the giant tree had sprouted a dozen little trunks, planted firmly, and also reaching to the sky. A boot lifted off the ground, returned to my mound of marble-wealth, turning, crushing.
“This place belongs to us,” someone said, “it looks like we have to teach you a lesson.”
They dragged us through the portals of our house, down the hallway, out the back door, into the yard. The yard was laid out in the form of a square, with five-story buildings on three sides, known to the postman as the front house, the side house, and the rear house. Half a kilometer of open space stretched to the east where hundreds of weekend gardeners tended their weedless tiny plots of land, each crammed full of lilac trees and trees of many fruits, bushes of gooseberries and red currants, rows of carrots, kohlrabi, and parsley. Using my father’s binoculars, I had seen all this many times from our front-house balcony, but I could see none of it from the backyard. A two-meter wall of concrete stood between the yard and the gardens, and hundreds of sharp pieces of glass, from broken beer bottles, had been placed along the top of the wall while it was being built and the cement was still wet. Although I didn’t know it then, these types of walls were standing all over Berlin in those days, designed to keep undesirables out. Just as did the builders of the Berlin Wall some twenty-three years later, Dieter and I quickly noticed, of course, that such walls were just as useful for keeping people in. We watched the sun play, almost mockingly, with the shards of green and brown and knew there was no escape across that backyard wall.
The yard itself was filled with garbage bins, a few goldenchain trees, an old oak, and a lot of dust. Our captors had a rope, and they tied me to the oak, arms and legs spread out and bound together on the far side of the tree. Three of them emptied the marbles from Dieter’s pail, took Dieter by the neck, and passed out of sight. The others pulled out pocket knives and, standing two or three meters away, hurled them at the tree as close to my body as they could. To the right of my head, under my arm pit, between my legs, the knives came––and missed.
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When Dieter returned, I was sitting on the ground between two garbage cans rubbing my wrists and trembling like the acacia leaves way up in front. Dieter carried his pail, but there were no marbles in it. He had been forced to gather horse apples near the pub down the street where teams of horses every day delivered barrelsful of Berliner Kindl brew. Then he had been asked to eat a horse apple and, with three knives next to his head, he had eaten it and chosen to keep his ears.
They told us not to breathe a word to our mothers, and we never did.
“Remember,” one of them said, “pretty soon you will walk to school with us, and it’s a long way along the canal. People drown in it all the time.”
“But you may play under the acacia tree,” another one said, “as long as you pay for it.”
Over the coming months, all of my favorite toys passed hands: my suitcase full of racing cars, my submarine that dived under water and surfaced again, my World War I soldiers in their colorful uniforms, and even the tank car that sprayed water on dusty city streets.
“Obey and you’ll be safe!” they said. “Heil Hitler!”
They were right. We played a lot of marbles that summer. And we watched the big boys who soon owned the rubber tires and the batteries for my erector set, Dieter’s wind-up white convertible with remote control, and, finally, my roller skates.
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I remember something else. Shortly after we had moved our playground from our fourth-floor balcony to the sidewalk in front of our house and had made our deal with the Hitler Youth, Dieter and I began to explore the neighborhood. At the corner, near the pub, we ran into the organ grinder who was collecting coins for the concerts he gave. He had a monkey with sad eyes who was tied to the organ with a chain. Dieter and I figured he wanted to be free, but there was nothing we could do. In the other direction, among the garden plots, we met the man with the small pickup truck who was forever exchanging “kindling wood for potato peels.” He had a shed where he kept two pigs and a cow. He let us watch when he fed the potato peels to the pigs and gave hay to the cow. He also told us to stay out of the other gardens and never to climb the little fences that surrounded each and every one of them. “Read the signs!” he said.
Dieter and I couldn’t read much, but we made a copy on my writing pad and Mrs. Meyer explained one of the signs to us.
“Trespassers Beware!” it said. “Automatic Bullets!”
“They have trip wires in the gardens,” Mrs. Meyer explained. “If someone climbs a fence to steal the cherries off a tree or pull a carrot from the ground, such a person can be killed by a bullet that is automatically released.”
When my mother heard this, she became very upset. She told us never to go near the gardens again. She suggested a different adventure instead. We could stand outside the tobacco store and ask customers to give us the coupons hidden in their newly purchased boxes of cigarettes and cigars.
“Re
member,” she asked, “how my Grandma, a hundred years ago, made your pretty picture book after collecting coupons from cans of Liebig’s Meat Extract? Tobacco coupons allow you to do the same thing.”
Before long, Dieter and I were engaged in new projects. I was determined to create a beautiful book of German Fairy Tales by trading coupons for colorful photographs and filling in all the blank spots in the book that my mother got for me. It had 120 pages full of printed stories and precisely 100 gaping picture holes. The cover showed a magical scene of a dwarf playing the flute under a large fir tree. He had an attentive audience, including an owl, a squirrel, a rabbit, a hedgehog, a frog, a mole, a spider, a butterfly, and a pretty yellow bird with a blue head. There were 51 stories inside and my mother said she would teach me to read them all. I knew some of them already: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and The Emperor’s New Clothes. There were just as many others that I had never met before: Doctor Know-It-All, The Fisherman and His Wife, The Princess on the Pea, The Courageous Little Tailor, The Flying Suitcase, and The Wild Swans.
Mrs. Meyer got a different book for Dieter, entitled Of Forest and Field. That’s why he was looking for different kinds of photographs. On the title page of his book, we counted 20 different animals, and there were 128 pages inside. Exactly 122 pictures were missing and were needed to complete the stories. Before long, Dieter exchanged his first coupon for the picture of a huge elk, standing in a pond by the edge of a forest. Soon thereafter, he got the Alpine ram, and I gave him the wild boar and the fox with the rabbit in his mouth in exchange for pictures of the flying suitcase and rat king Birlibi.
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One evening during our coupon campaign, Dieter and I invented a new game. Upon entering the main door of the front house, we found the stairwell to be pitch-black. But we also discovered the little phosphorous button next to the door that would turn on the lights on all the floors–temporarily. By the count of ten, we noted, everything would be dark again and we challenged each other to race up the stairs to push the button on the next landing before everything got dark. We were quite out of breath when we got to my place where my mother and Mrs. Meyer were waiting for us.
The radio was giving the news. Adolf Hitler had given a speech at the Sports Palace, to 15,000 people, about Eduard Benes and Czechoslovakia, “a state conceived as a lie and conducted as a swindle for twenty years.” A four-power conference would occur in Munich in three days, it said. Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain, and Edouard Daladier would deal with the Sudetenland crisis…
None of this made sense to me. At the time, of course, I was too young to have noticed that Germany had annexed Austria a few months earlier; nor could anyone know that the German army would soon march into the Sudetenland, the Czech region coveted by Hitler, and would even occupy Prague a few months after that. But the grown-ups must have sensed what was coming.
“Arthur always knew,” my mother said, “Hitler means war.”
As if to answer her, Zarah Leander was singing on the radio, Yes, Sir!
“Talking about war,” Mrs. Meyer said, “did you hear what your upstairs neighbor did?”
“Captain Rosenzweig?” my mother asked.
“The very one,” said Mrs. Meyer, “changed his name to Schiller yesterday. Thought a ‘Jewish’ name would ruin his navy career!”
My mother just sighed. She was looking at Dieter’s Of Forest and Field book.
“Did you read this Preface?” she asked Mrs. Meyer.
“Just listen to this,” my mother continued, not waiting for a reply. “Our love and respect for all creatures is a valuable inheritance from our ancestors, it says. History shows the Aryan race to have been close to the world of nature always, right back to prehistoric times. This animal-friendly attitude is in our blood, in German genes. We are born into it, it’s deeply rooted. What we love, we want to preserve and protect. National Socialists realize that precious treasures of nature are part of blood and soil to be protected. No people on earth has better laws for this…To protect each and every creature from want and pain, man must listen to the cry of creatures and improve their lot. Their fate is our fate… What we do for the animals ennobles us.”
“Right back to prehistoric times, eh?” Mrs. Meyer said. “How would they know?”
“If the Sudetenland is ceded, Germany will have no more territorial demands in Europe,” the radio announced.
As I said before, Dieter and I understood none of this. Nor did it occur to us at the time that Mrs. Wagner’s silver fox coat was surely responsible for the deaths of countless little animals.
Hitler’s SA
Hitler youths saluting SA “brownshirts,” while “money-grabbing Jews,” as the Nazis put it, wring their hands in despair over the new order. [SA = Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers)]
5. Crystal Night
[November 1938]
The events of some days are etched into my memory so indelibly that they seem no farther away than those of yesterday. Such is the case with November 9, 1938, which began innocently enough.
It was our wash day and my mother had reserved the attic for us. Early in the morning, we carried kindling wood and brown-coal briquettes to the washroom two flights above. My mother filled the giant copper tub with cold water, right up to the halfway mark, and made a big fire under it. Then we carried our dirty clothes up, one wicker basket at a time, and took a break while the water heated up.
I ran down to the baker to fetch a dozen crisp little buns, still hot to the touch. By the time I returned, I could smell the coffee my mother had brewed. I didn’t care for the coffee; much more to my liking were the eggs she had boiled. They sat on the table in their separate receptacles, each properly covered with one of the knitted caps my grandmother had made. Her tablecloth was there, too, the one she had decorated with the pretty flowers in the four corners and the mushrooms and butterflies in the center right next to a baby deer. As my father had taught me, I stood by the table until my mother sat down and even then I didn’t reach for the butter and my favorite plum jelly until she made the first move.
“You must always show respect to your Mutti,” my father had said, “she is the most precious being on earth.”
After breakfast, we returned to the attic, where my mother poured the clothes into the tub and I added just the right amount of detergent. “Persil, White as the Snow,” it said on the label. My mother also let me help her stir the clothes with the giant wooden ladle, while she worked the scrub board, but I had to be careful not to fall into the tub when the water got to the boiling point. My mother also made sure I didn’t touch the cast iron doors which slowly turned from black to gray and then to red as we fed the fire underneath.
When the clothes were done, my mother wrung them out as best as she could over a nearby sink. I hung up all the small pieces on the clotheslines that were strung throughout the rest of the attic. Later, we took all the big pieces—bed sheets, tablecloths, and the like—down the stairs to the ground floor and then to the soap store diagonally across the street. My mother had reserved the big steam press in the back room and, while she made everything look like new, I explored the new devices being sold in the front room.
They were called washing machines, and I had never seen anything like it. There was a large wooden tub with an agitator in the middle, also made of wood. One was supposed to boil one’s clothes in a copper kettle, as usual, then throw them into the machine, which would do the work previously done by knuckles and scrub board. After that, one could guide each piece of clothing through a pair of wooden rollers sitting on top of the machine and obeying a hand-held crank. How neat! What would those Miele people think of next? They even had an advertising jingle attached to the front of the machine. It rhymed, of course, this was Germany after all; and I sang it for my mother when we were ready to leave the store:
“Nur Miele, Miele, sagte Tante,
die alle Waschmaschinen kannte.”
; [“Only Miele, Miele, said the aunt, who knew all the washing machines.”]
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When we came out of the store that early afternoon, the world had changed. It seemed there were a million people in the street and the noise was deafening. At the corner, the street cars had come to a standstill, while hundreds of SA brown shirts marched along the tracks in the center of the street, playing trumpets and singing their special song. There were companies of Hitler Youths as well and even two groups of BDM girls. I knew who they were; Dieter had told me. If you were old enough and a girl, you couldn’t be a Hitler Youth, but you could join the Bund Deutscher Mädel [League of German Girls] and do handicrafts and sports.
On the sidewalks, people were gawking at the endless procession, raising their right arms in salute to the passing flags and yelling “Heil! Heil! Heil!” My mother asked me to hurry to get back to our house, but there was no way we could cross the road. We stopped in front of the Geyer Works, the big factory facing our house, and my mother made me stand in front of her so she could rest her pile of sheets on my back. I got scared when a man yelled at her for not joining in the festivities, but before she could answer, a trumpet sounded and a disembodied loudspeaker voice drowned out all else.
“The National Socialist citizens of Berlin,” the voice said, “are demonstrating against world Jewry and their black Monarchist and red Bolshevik allies. They are demonstrating for the freedom and security of the nation and all Germans throughout the world. Tonight, in response to the killing of Ernst von Rath, come and hear Adolf Wagner and twenty other Party speakers! Come and express your outrage over another heinous murder by a cowardly Jew!”