My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Nobody can possibly know. This is our family secret.”

  “Punishable by death…” I thought. “Would they kill all three of us or just one?”

  I felt my heart racing, as if I had run up all the stairs without resting. I was determined to be brave and hold back my tears, but a few squeezed out anyway, running down my cheeks like the sap from the acacia tree. I turned away so nobody would know.

  -----

  Things got better the very next day when my parents, my grandmother, Aunt Lotte, and I took the train to the Baltic coast. Aunt Lotte told a funny story about Hermann Göring. Responding to rumors that British bombers had reached the Ruhr and even Potsdam near Berlin, the German Air Force Chief had said that no foreign planes would ever get to Berlin; if they did, everyone was free to call him Meyer.

  “A nice name, Reich Marshal Meyer,” my father said, but my mother told him to stop it.

  We ended up in a small fishing village where my parents had spent their honeymoon. I had seen the pictures. Two dozen little houses, most of them recently whitewashed and covered with thick roofs of straw, were stretched out along a single dirt road paralleling a kilometer of beach. There were no streetcars shrieking, no buses honking, no church bells ringing, no swastika flags flapping in the wind. But there were hundreds of sea gulls circling, just as outside our balcony at home, inviting us to scale the dunes and look at their beach. And what a beauty it was! It was made of pure white sand and stretched out as far as the eye could see. I couldn’t take my eyes off the waves, as they rose and crashed and rose again, revealing a million shades of ever-changing whites and black, of emerald green and the deepest blue…

  We played for days at the beach. Always, my father and I got up real early to find the best spot. I helped him build our fort. We dug a big hole, half a meter deep and three meters square, with walls of sand all around. We collected large stones and used them to spell my name on one of the walls of sand:

  H–A–N–S

  Our little windmills and the red-and-blue flags went up on those walls as well. We placed the wicker seat with the tall back and roof in the rear and our blanket in front of it. All day, my grandmother sat on her shaded basket-chair doing her needlework.

  My father and I made mud pies at the edge of the sea, went wading at low tide to look at the crabs and jelly fish, and played catch with the rubber disc. We gathered sea shells and looked for amber that was so plentiful that we could make a long necklace for my mother. Once, my father pretended to be a new kind of sea creature. With the rubber disc clutched between his teeth and me clinging to his back, we rode out of the sea and up the beach to surprise Aunt Lotte and my grandmother. My mother took a picture of us.

  Evenings we stayed inside and played games. I liked playing “Hansa” the most. It was a board game with a map of Europe on it and the inscription 1245-1669. We rolled a pair of dice in a leather cup and moved colorful tokens of crystal, each representing a different ship of the famous merchant league. From Riga to Danzig and Stockholm, from Bremen to Antwerp and Venice we carried our wares, fighting pirates as we went. That’s when my father told me the legend of Klaus Störtebecker, the most infamous pirate of them all. He sailed the oceans with his 12-man crew in a tall ship that had scary black sails and an even scarier black flag, showing white skulls and crossbones on it. For years, Störtebecker and his men terrorized the Hansa’s merchant ships, stealing their cargoes and killing their crews. Then, finally, after a joint effort by all the members of the league, the pirates were caught. They were tried and sentenced to death by the axe in 1401. But Störtebecker was granted one last wish. So he made this request:

  “Let all my men stand in a row. Once I am beheaded, if I can walk past any of them, let those go free.”

  The wish was granted and after the axe had fallen, a headless Störtebecker walked past one, past a second, a third, and a fourth comrade of his, apparently ready to go on--- when a furious executioner threw a tree limb in front of his feet! That was the end of the other eight….

  The day before we had to go home, we all took a horse-and-carriage ride to the next town. We found a toy store where my father bought me a pirate ship that came in a big box, labeled “Anchors Ahoy!” From stem to stern, not a single detail was missing: There was a crow’s nest and there were cannons, there were sails and rigging and hatches, there even was an extendable plank and there were all sorts of figures representing pirates and their prisoners. I was so happy! And then we even went to a movie. It was a comedy, called Quax, the Crash Pilot. It featured an overeager Hitler Youth, played by comedian Heinz Rühmann, who wanted to learn to fly but who was incredibly inept. Thus, he always did precisely the wrong thing at a crucial moment–throw the stick out the window just before a stick-and-rudder landing approach or lose the landing gear on takeoff or forget to put enough gas in the tank. Although he caused his instructor’s hair to turn gray prematurely, and although he crashed into many a barn, chimney, or tree, somehow Quax always managed to survive. My father and I died laughing, but my mother, Aunt Lotte, and my grandmother saw nothing funny in any of this.

  That evening, black clouds moved in. Thunder rumbled by the time I went to bed in the little house with the thatched roof. Lightning flashed and crackled all around us. Then the earth seemed to shake underneath us; there were screams down the street. My father picked me up, and we ran out of the house. The cottage next door was all ablaze. People huddled in the middle of the street. Nothing could be done. In a few minutes, the house turned into a hissing pile of rubble. And then my father said a strange thing to me.

  “That's what the tyrants would like to do to the whole world,” he said.

  I looked at him, and I saw the rain mingle with his tears.

  “But you know what?” he asked. “The spirit of black, red, and gold, like the water running down our faces, is stronger than they. In the end, they cannot win. Water is stronger than fire.”

  ----

  By the time we got back to Berlin, everyone else seemed to be thinking of fire, too. In many apartment houses, boxes of sand had been placed on all the landings in the stairwells, precisely thirteen steps apart, and even more boxes had appeared in the attics. And the Street Warden told everyone to keep pails of water outside each apartment door to fight firebombs should the need arise.

  And later that summer, on the first day of school, we were given a special demonstration in the yard. We all made a big circle around a fireman with a red helmet on his head. He held a red metal cylinder that was about 1 meter long and was called an incendiary bomb. When he pulled on a wire, the whole thing burst into a huge flame and he showed us how it could be put out with a single pail of water or a few shovels of sand. Nothing much to worry about there.

  Something else seemed much more serious. The fireman told us of a “new secret weapon” the British were about to use. It consisted of an innocent-looking, chemically-treated piece of cardboard, he said, known to the experts as a “self-igniting leaf.” Made of nitrocellulose, also known as guncotton, and mixed with phosphorous, the item was to be dropped from planes in a moist state. As it dries out, it bursts into flame unexpectedly, he said. To induce curious children to pick it up, the fireman warned, the piece carries a printed message. What we had to do or rather not to do was obvious.

  Back in class, further training occurred. To everyone’s surprise, each one of us was fitted with his very own gas mask, made of tight-fitting green rubber, giant glass eyes, and a silver canister filled with charcoal and such. The masks made us look like an army of scary ghosts. Someone took a black-and-white picture of us.

  Mr. Eisler told us to carry our masks with us at all times. “And, just for practice,” he said, “you should wear the mask for at least 4 hours a day and you should sleep with it all night at least once a week.”

  “The hell you will,” my mother said when I got home. “That man is insane.”

  But I wondered.

  “What about the Mont
evideo mustard gas attack?” I thought. “And why was the man who owned the street corner pub outfitting his horses with canvass masks?”

  Nobody seemed to answer questions such as these, but when I thought about such matters and then remembered how Mr. Eisler had demonstrated the way people might choke to death during a gas attack, my eyes would well up with tears. I hated that.

  I was even more concerned once I read the newspapers that were then delivered to our apartment door. According to the Völkischer Beobachter [People’s Observer], British Wellington and Hampden bombers had reached Berlin on August 25 and again on September 4, only to be driven away by violent anti-aircraft fire. On September 11, however, the same paper said, British bombers hit the Reichstag and other inner-city targets, including the Brandenburg Gate, buildings along the Unter den Linden Avenue, the Academy of German Art, the House of German Engineers, and even the Catholic Saint Hedwig’s Hospital. The German Air Force retaliated with a massive raid on London. Said Dr. Goebbels:

  “Warsaw and Rotterdam have clearly revealed what effects our heavy caliber bombs have. If London wishes to taste a similar fate to the full extent, then let Herr Churchill and his criminal clique continue to send pirates at night to Germany!”

  No one said a word about Reich Marshall Meyer, but I was worried, especially when the Street Warden came back and told everyone in no uncertain terms to black out all windows at night, lest we give aid to the enemy.

  “We will have patrols in the street,” he said to my father, “and I assure you: If we see the slightest bit of light coming from one of your windows, we will shoot into that window without warning!”

  The Enemy Sees Your Light!

  Blackout!

  10. The Prophetess

  [September 1940 – May 1941]

  Because I was such a “talented and gifted child”, as Mr. Eisler had put it, I moved directly from the middle of the second grade to the middle of the third when school resumed after our trip to the Baltic. As luck would have it, Mr. Eisler did the same. Thus, he was still my teacher in the late summer of 1940 when everyone’s attention was focused on Operation Sea Lion, the distant battle for the British Isles. Naturally, Mr. Eisler had plenty of news to post on our bulletin board.

  1940

  September 4

  German Air Force hammers South England airports and naval bases

  September 11

  German Air Force pounds London for 8 hours

  September 27

  Germany, Italy, and Japan sign Tripartite Friendship Pact

  November 14

  Five hundred German bombers destroy Coventry

  November 20

  Hungary becomes our ally

  November 23

  Romania becomes our ally

  While German bombers pounded British cities, we learned that there were 8.41 million people in London, but only 1.11 million in Birmingham. Mr. Eisler used the occasion to show us how two numbers could be multiplied and he was so proud of himself when his superb teaching enabled me to show instantly that 8.41 times 1.11 equaled 9.3351. If the truth be told, I had learned the method a long time ago from my mother, but I didn’t tell Mr. Eisler about that and let him think that he was the one who had awakened my innate ability. In addition, I knew, of course, that it was never wise to do or say anything that might spoil his good mood.

  That day, Mr. Eisler was so happy about all the new friends Germany was making throughout the world. To learn about them, we drew maps of Italy and Japan, of Hungary and Romania. We learned that Rome had 1.66 million people and Milan 1.29 million, while Tokyo had 5.38 million and Kyoto only 1.10 million. Mount Aetna was 3,274 meters tall, topped by Mount Fujiyama’s 3,778 m.

  We also had a new subject, Chemistry, and it was quickly put to use in practical ways. Thus, Mr. Eisler brought in a blue bottle, labeled Oxygen, and, in no time at all, we knew everything anyone would ever want to know about “this wonderful colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas.”

  “Oxygen,” Mr. Eisler said, “was first isolated in 1773 by a German pharmacist, Karl Wilhelm Scheele. The English claim the deed was done by an Englishman, Joseph Priestley, but that is an outright lie.”

  “At a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius and at a pressure of 760 millimeters of mercury,” Mr. Eisler told us, “one liter of oxygen weighs 1,429 grams. That makes it slightly heavier than air, which itself is a mixture of mostly nitrogen and oxygen, plus trace amounts of other gases, and one liter of which, under the same conditions, comes to 1,293 grams.”

  “Ordinarily,” Mr. Eisler continued, “oxygen makes up about 21 percent of the air, but what, do you think, will happen when the British attack us with incendiary bombs and poison gas? Picture yourselves trapped in a smoke-filled room or in an air raid shelter, with, say, mustard gas leaking in. Before long, the percentage of oxygen declines and once it’s gone below 15, you are dead!”

  “Unless, unless,” Mr. Eisler concluded triumphantly, “you attach one of these little blue bottles to your mask. Then you’ll be just fine for an hour or two.”

  He grinned, as we packed our gas masks and satchels to go home.

  -----

  My mother met me at the school gate that day and she was furious when I told her what I had just learned.

  “I’ll have a talk with that dreadful man,” she said angrily. “What does he think he’s doing, scaring little kids like that!”

  “I am not a little kid,” I said, “and I’m not scared about anything.”

  We waited a minute for Dieter. He came from another room because he was still in the second grade. On the way home, we stopped at the hardware store and my mother bought a sun dial for our balcony. It was made of shiny brass and, just like my cuckoo clock, had Roman numerals on it, which pleased me to no end. It had an inscription, too.

  “I only mark sunny hours,” it said.

  I could hardly wait for my father to come home and help me put it up with his magnetic compass. In fact, we met him in the street and he looked different. He wore a light gray uniform and a hat with a black visor that looked just like those worn by the streetcar drivers. He had an emblem above the visor, too, but it wasn’t the Berlin bear. It was a big red cross!

  “Vati has volunteered for the Red Cross,” my mother said. “He’ll work at the hospital on Saturdays and some evenings.”

  That explained that, but I wondered whether he knew about the oxygen problem. Maybe he should pick up some of those blue bottles at the hospital, I thought. On the other hand, oxygen did scare me, my protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Mr. Eisler had said that things burn much faster and with a much brighter flame in pure oxygen than in ordinary air. So why would one want to run around with oxygen bottles when there was a fire nearby? In any case, I didn’t get a chance to talk with my father about it, nor did we have time to put up the sun dial that day.

  “Why don’t you meet Eddy at the U-Bahn,” my mother said to my father. “I’ll stay home and wait for Rachel. Martel is coming over, too.”

  “Uncle Eddy and Aunt Rachel are coming to visit in a bit,” my mother said, turning to me, and that was big news.

  Aunt Rachel, I knew, was my father’s sister and she lived in a faraway village in the district of Magdeburg where we had never been. Uncle Eddy used to live there, too, but now he was away, somewhere in France. They used to have two children, my cousins Hartmut and Gisela, but several winters ago, they both had died on the same day while skating on the frozen Elbe River. Ice fishermen had made a big hole and my cousins had sailed right into it and had never come back up. Being a big official in the Lutheran Church, Uncle Eddy himself had presided over the funeral service for his children.

  “But today,” my mother said, as if she were reading my thoughts, “is going to be a happier time. Uncle Eddy has to come to Berlin on some Army business, but he can’t go anywhere else before he must return to Paris. So he and Aunt Rachel are meeting here for a few hours. We just arranged it all this morning.”

  Unfortun
ately, things didn’t quite work out that way. Aunt Rachel never came. And Uncle Eddy—I remember only his horn-rimmed glasses, his jowly face, his green-gray captain’s uniform, and heavy boots––Uncle Eddy only came by for about five minutes until my father told him to “get out and stay out.” That night, I spied on my parents and Aunt Martel to gather up the information I needed to solve the mystery.

  One part of the story was simple enough. Aunt Rachel, who had long and thick black hair, had been mistaken for a Jewish woman who had the gall to sit down in the double-decker bus on her way from the railroad station to our house. Before long, she had been dragged to a police station, where she had insisted that she was not Jewish in the least and that, moreover, her husband was Superintendent of the Lutheran Church in the district of Magdeburg, and was, at this very moment in our history, an officer of the Reich and as such deputy to no one else but the Commandant of Paris! A policeman was duly dispatched to our house to verify the story and that’s where he ran into Uncle Eddy storming out just as Aunt Martel arrived.

  The next part of the story was much more complicated and, as usual, involved a lot of whispering. Nevertheless, over the years, I managed to put together the big picture. Way back in 1933, it seems, the new Hitler government had picked an obscure naval chaplain, Ludwig Müller, and made him head of the country’s Lutheran Church with the title Reich Bishop. Other officials of the Church had quickly ratified the decision and a victory party had been held at the Sports Palace in Berlin, featuring a speech by Adolf Hitler, Luther’s hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, and the SA’s favorite Horst Wessel song, The Flag Held High…