by Heinz Kohler
I wanted more news than that. So I persuaded Dieter to let me come to his place to listen to the real radio while his parents were still at the vegetable store. It was tuned to Radio Germany when we got there. Wilhelm Furtwängler was directing a concert in Nuremberg, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, they said. We quickly found the BBC and listened to a report on the war in the air.
“In accordance with the Area Bombing Directive issued in February,” the announcer said, “the Royal Air Force is now authorized to bomb industrial, military, and residential targets indiscriminately. And slowly, but surely, it is gaining mastery of the air. In light of diminishing German air defenses, the RAF carried out major attacks on Lübeck in late March….On May 5, during a raid on Kiel, RAF planes achieved a direct hit on the Battleship Tirpitz, while docked in the harbor. On May 30, some 5,000 Avro Lancaster and Halifax bombers rained loads of aerial mines and incendiaries on Cologne. Similar raids followed on Essen on June 1 and on Bremen on June 18….”
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That scary news inspired us to follow our teachers’ advice and use our summer vacation productively by “turning thoughtlessness into discipline!” As instructed on our last day of school, we walked the streets at night making sure they stayed dark. We wore green phosphorescent buttons on our lapels and handed out more to passers-by so we could all see each other on cloudy nights. And we roamed the streets searching for thoughtlessness: Light from a window, a match lighting a cigarette, a flashlight walking across the street–these were the enemies.
“If we keep this place absolutely dark, Berlin will be safe,” Mr. Barzel had said. “Enemy pilots are lost without light. So keep those light switches turned off!”
“And our enemies are lost without spies,” he had added. “You must unmask the spies. They listen everywhere,” he had said, “in the subway, street, and bakery, even at home.”
Like Mr. Eisler, Mr. Barzel welcomed any and all reports. There was one report, however, that he didn’t get. One day, before they took the attic tub away, my mother tried to light the fire under the big copper tub in which she washed our clothes. But the coal would not light. Angrily, she used my wax-coated posters about the Fuel Thief, the whole pile of them. They worked like a charm.
But they had also been Mr. Barzel’s favorites! During the summer, I was to put a poster on every door in our block: A picture of a fat little man dressed in black, with an evil eye, a stubbly beard and a moustache, tight-fistedly holding on to a sackful of stolen coal.
“His stomach growls, his sack is empty, and greedily he sniffs about…” the poster said.
Mr. Barzel never learned that the Fuel Thief, magically, had turned into fuel himself.
The Fuel Thief:
There he is again!
His stomach growls, his sack is empty,
and greedily he sniffs about.
From furnace and stove, from gas burner and pot,
from window, door, and light switch,
he takes with cunning what you waste.
The armament industry is thereby robbed,
it needs even the little bit you have,
he looks for it now in countryside and city.
Catch him!
More about him in the newspapers!
13. The Greifer
[August 1942 – June 1943]
I have been thinking about the time when I learned the English language. It started near my 10th birthday, in 1942, when school reopened after summer vacation. That’s when Mr. Barzel reminded us that we had successfully concluded our studies of German reading, writing, and grammar. He would now teach us a new language, Mr. Barzel said, and he promised to do so in no time at all.
“English is very easy to learn,” Mr. Barzel said. “Using a dictionary and a grammar book, I myself learned it by reading a single edition of the London Times, every single word on every page. It took me a year, to tell the truth, but you can do no worse. When a year is up, you’ll speak English, too.”
He proceeded to hand each of us two books. The first of them was Langenscheidt’s Pocket Dictionary of the English and German Languages, revised by Prof. Edmund Klatt. It was 1,061 pages long, but Mr. Barzel said we should focus on the first half that listed all the English words, along with their German equivalents.
“You will memorize one page a day,” he said “and, by next summer, you will know two thirds of all the words.”
The second book was much thinner. The Summary of English Grammar by Prof. Walter Fröhlich was a mere 97 pages long and was divided into parts that looked just like those in our German grammar book, ranging from articles and nouns to adjectives and irregular verbs and on to the tenses—present, past, future and even pluperfect.
To start things off, Mr. Barzel introduced us to a new version of the bulletin board, all written in English! By the time winter arrived, it looked like this and we could read every word:
1942
July 1
German Army conquers Sevastopol after 8-month siege, soon thereafter takes Voronezh and Rostov, advances into Caucasus
August 19
German forces reach Volga near Stalingrad
September 7
German forces occupy Novorossiysk
November 8
U.S forces under Lieutenant General Dwight Eisenhower land in French West Africa, Morocco, and Algeria
November 11
In response to U.S. moves, and at the request of Premier Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain and Vice Premier Admiral François Darlan of Vichy France, German and Italian forces occupy Southern France and Tunisia
November 19
Russian General Georgi Zhukov, in a North/South pincer move, attempts to trap German 6th Army at Stalingrad; the Führer forbids General Friedrich von Paulus to break out and retreat, orders Field Marshal Erich von Manstein to bring relief to encircled German troops
We were somewhat worried by the November events, but Mr. Barzel explained that temporary setbacks are inevitable in any war and should, in fact, be expected.
“One must not lose sight of the big picture,” he said. “After all, German forces are holding a huge territory, reaching from the North Cape all the way to the Mediterranean Sea and Africa and from the Atlantic all the way to the Volga River and the mountains of the Caucasus.”
Still, when I translated my notes for my mother–she had not been taught English in school–she was far from relieved. She had already read the same stories in the newspaper and she was crying.
“I just hope Vati isn’t involved in this Stalingrad thing;” she said, “we haven’t heard from him in weeks!”
Just then the door bell rang and Aunt Martel appeared. We all hugged and kissed, as we always did, and Aunt Martel promised me that she would stay overnight. I liked her to stay; we always had fun playing rummy till midnight, assuming, of course, that Helmut didn’t steal the show.
“Been crying?” Aunt Martel said to my mother.
“I’m so worried about this Stalingrad thing,” my mother said. “We haven’t heard from Arthur in weeks, you know.”
“And you wouldn’t believe what happened today!” my mother continued. “We got a letter from Town Hall this morning. Our food and clothing rations will be cut, starting next month, they say, and you know why? Because we’ve been sending so many packages to Arthur, which is proof positive that we have more than we need! Also, they say, it’s an insult to the Armed Forces, sending these packages, as if they didn’t take care of their own! Oh, how I hate these people!”
“I’m not surprised,” Aunt Martel said. “You’ll hate them even more when you hear what I’ve to tell…. Later.”
They looked at each other with that strange look I had learned to recognize and, sure enough, Aunt Martel changed the subject by pulling a package from her bag, a gift for me. It was the watercolor box I had so admired in the store window last week, complete with three different brushes, ten colors, and six cardboard pieces showing faint outlines of scenes waiting to be painted. One of the designs
featured a family of tigers in their natural environment; the others showed buffaloes and mountain goats, wolves and otters and deer.
I was elated, but, clearly, the gift was my clue to disappear. I knew from long experience that Aunt Martel always brought the most interesting news, but she was scared to death to relate it. Officially, she was still one of the confidential secretaries at the Customs Service, being so good at shorthand, fast typing, and such, but the Gestapo was running her office now and had moved her over to their headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, where she saw and filed and typed all sorts of super-secret reports. To hear about it, I just had to be patient and listen carefully from behind the kitchen door once the time was ripe.
“I better go and work on my vocabulary,” I said, “but can we play rummy later?”
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“Have you seen Herbert lately?” Aunt Martel said to my mother the moment I was out of sight.
“I see him sometimes,” my mother said. “He’s still strutting around in his SA uniform.”
“Yes,” Aunt Martel said, “but do you know what he really does at his fancy new office downtown? I found out; saw a report he wrote.”
“You don’t say!” my mother said. “A report he wrote?”
“Yes, indeed,” Aunt Martel said and her voice became a whisper. “Ever since the big roundup of Jews last February, he’s been a Greifer [grabber], in charge of catching Jews who’ve gone underground! Some of them manage to hide their identity and aren’t wearing the star, you know. They rely on friends to feed them. They walk in circles all day at the zoo or some big park so that neighbors think they are just regular people who have gone to work….Herbert and his pals play detectives to flush them out!”
“Oh God!” my mother said with a sigh. “Oh my God! What does Liesel see in that man?”
“The sad thing is,” Aunt Martel continued, still whispering, “until not so long ago, Jews could have gotten out of the country. All they had to do was make a tally of their assets for the Customs Service, hand over a big chunk of them to the government, and run.”
Even I had heard about that. I had read an article in Das Schwarze Korps [The Black Corps], one of Mr. Joseph’s newspapers. It had talked about the Reichssicherheitshauptamt [Reich Security Main Office] and its efforts, even in 1940, to “cleanse German soil” by urging Jews to emigrate.
“But that’s easier said than done,” my mother said. “What would we do in similar circumstances? Hope springs eternal! You know Mrs. Nussbaum, before she disappeared, she always said: ‘How bad can things get? This is Germany, the country of poets and thinkers and great composers.’ But that didn’t help her any.”
“Germany is also the country of great criminals,” Aunt Martel said. “I’ll tell you something because if I don’t, I’ll go insane, but, God oh God, keep it to yourself. They would kill me if they knew, literally kill me.”
“You’ve heard of the Heydrich case, haven’t you?” Aunt Martel continued. “Last May, the great Protector of Bohemia and Moravia was ambushed in Czechoslovakia and died soon thereafter. His SS pals gave him a big state funeral; you’ve read about it. What you don’t know is what happened afterwards. The SS surrounded the village of Lidice, where it all happened, and executed every single man! Then they carried off all the others to the nearest KZ [concentration camp]. And then they leveled the entire village, made it disappear from the map! I saw the report.”
My mother gasped.
“Just like the Romans with Carthage!” she said. (She had always been a history buff.)
“Precisely! And there is more!” Aunt Martel continued. “Last January, no other than Reinhard Heydrich had been in charge of a big conference at the Wannsee. That’s where the SD has a guest house, you know. [SD = Sicherheitsdienst = Security Service] Heinrich Müller was there, the Gestapo Chief; so was Josef Bühler, he runs Poland now; and Rudolf Lange, he’s in charge of Jewish transports when they get to the Ostland [Eastland, the German-occupied Baltic States]; and with them were a whole bunch of State Secretaries from the ministries. I filed the report.”
“They wanted to figure out ‘a final solution to the Jewish problem.’ Years of harassment hadn’t worked, emigration hadn’t worked, even recent ‘evacuations’ to Poland and the Baltic provinces had been ‘unsatisfactory.’ Instead of haphazard measures, a scientific solution was needed, said the report. And you know what it is? Jews, along with Gypsies, the mentally retarded, the physically disabled, and other ‘subhumans,’ are to be done away with by gassing them! They’ve already made experiments with Zyklon-B, whatever that is. It’s supposed to be an ‘improvement’ on the euthanasia hospitals!”
There was the longest silence. I thought of my gas mask. And of all the scary things our teachers had told us about choking to death for lack of oxygen. I felt my heart pound and tears well up. I bit my tongue lest I sniffle and be found out.
“Where?” my mother said finally. “At Oranienburg?”
“Maybe there, too,” Aunt Martel said. “After all, it’s Himmler’s favorite KZ. But I read about some place in Poland; Auschwitz, they call it.”
That did it for me. As often as we could, Dieter and I listened to the BBC to hear more about the story. And around Christmas time, our efforts paid off, sort of. The BBC reported mass killings of Berlin Jews at Riga and of others throughout the German-occupied East. But they talked about shootings; they didn’t say a word about the gas.
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When we returned to school in early 1943, after the Christmas holidays, a strange thing happened. There was no talk of war, nor of schemes to rid the world of Jews. Mr. Barzel was so happy: He had found a new way of teaching English! Having used German while drawing maps of all the countries on earth, he said, we were going to use English in our second geography course, dealing with cartography, climatology, and oceanography. Cartography came first.
“To understand cartography, also known as map making,” Mr. Barzel wrote on the blackboard in English, “we must first realize that the earth was viewed as a plane by most people, at least till medieval times.”
We all copied what he had written and then learned to pronounce and understand each of the words. All that was followed with another sentence and another still–day after day and week after week– until the lesson had been learned.
Before long, despite our flat maps, we viewed the earth as a globe, first through the eyes of Pythagoras, who speculated about the disappearance of ships beyond the horizon at sea, as early as the 6th century B.C., then through the eyes of Magellan who circumnavigated the earth in 1519-21, and, finally, through the eyes of “pure logic,” as Mr. Barzel liked to put it.
“Think about it,” he said. “If the earth were a plane, “the sun would reach its highest point everywhere at the same time, but it doesn’t. In addition, there would have to be several polar stars and that isn’t the case either. Elementary, really.”
He shouldn’t have said “elementary,” because I hadn’t understood his points, but I certainly wasn’t about to reveal my stupidity. In any case, Mr. Barzel turned to meridians, “imaginary great circles on the earth’s surface passing through the North and South geographic poles.” All points on either half of such a circle, he told us, have the same longitude. And he told us of other imaginary lines that encircle the earth parallel to the plane of the equator and that are used to determine latitude, “the angular distance north or south of the earth’s equator, measured in degrees along a meridian.”
“While it is natural to count latitude from the largest parallel, namely, the equator,” Mr. Barzel said, “the position of 0 degrees longitude is totally arbitrary. That longitude line goes through Greenwich, near London, now. It went through Paris and other places before that, and it may well pass through Berlin after we win the war.”
We also learned of three different ways of projecting the globe or parts thereof onto a plane, which took us right back to the flat maps we had been studying all along. I liked the azimuthal equidistant pr
ojection best. But Mr. Barzel said that conical and cylindrical projections were just as valid. We were still speaking English at the time.
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It was just about then that the Street Warden paid my mother another visit at home. It concerned me. Although I was too young to join the Hitler Youth, he said, she should seriously consider signing me up for the Jungvolk, which was the kindergarten version of the real thing, although he didn’t describe it in just these words.
“If he joins now,” said the Warden, “he doesn’t have to wait till he is fourteen to have all of the benefits. He can start his athletic training now, go on educational trips, and even get extra clothing rations for the uniform and all.”
My mother told him she would read the brochure, but she told me that I would join over her dead body. That was fine with me; the Hitler Youth guys always scared me. I was equally scared by the speech Dr. Goebbels made on the radio soon after the battle of Stalingrad.
“From now on, there will be Total War,” he said. “Total War means Shortest War. There will be no more ‘bourgeois squeamishness.’ Every German, high and low, must sacrifice for the common cause. Now people, arise, and storm, break loose!”