My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  I had no idea what he meant, but it sounded ominous. That’s why Dieter and I turned once again to the German broadcasts of the BBC. We even found another station that had good news. It came in from Switzerland and was called Radio Beromünster. My mother didn’t know what we were doing, nor did Dieter’s parents, but their wonderful radio was just too tempting. In addition, the BBC was then mixing the news with a new type of music, called jazz, which we liked. While listening to Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and, of course, Duke Ellington, these are some of the stories I wrote down in my notebook, none of which appeared on Mr. Barzel’s bulletin board:

  1943

  January

  British Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery defeats Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Africa Corps in Libya, conquers Tripoli

  February

  After fierce winter battle at Stalingrad, German 6th Army capitulates, Russians take 100,000 prisoners, then retake Kursk, Krasnodar, Rostov, Kharkov

  March

  U.S. and British forces occupy Tunisia

  April

  U.S. and Britain officially announce the use of a new weapon, called radar, in war against German submarines, thereby gain upper hand in Atlantic; furious Hitler replaces Navy’s commander-in-chief, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, with Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz

  May

  Last remnants of German Africa Corps driven from North Africa

  One day in May, when I got home from yet another secret after-school session with Dieter, Aunt Martel was there. She had brought a stuffed toy monkey for Helmut and placed a mysterious box on my bed. I quickly stashed away my notebook and read the label.

  “Easy Weaver,” it said in giant red letters at the top and “Hardwood Weaving Loom with Beautiful 100% Wool Yarns and Accessories” was printed underneath.

  “Now you can make scarves, placemats, potholders, and all sorts of nice things for people,” Aunt Martel said, standing in my bedroom door.

  That did sound like fun and I thought of my grandmother’s birthday coming up soon. But I was too tired from a long day of school and play to try my hand at it right then. In fact, I remember lying down on the living room couch right after supper, with Teddy at my side, and only half listening to Aunt Martel’s terrifying news. They probably thought I was asleep and didn’t bother to send me out of the room.

  “Came across another document from Herbert’s office,” Aunt Martel said to my mother. “From last February, a proud report on the successful conclusion of the Fabrikaktion [factory action]. They tallied 7,000 Jews still working in Berlin factories and arrested them all. To make Berlin ‘judenrein’ [cleansed of Jews] in time for the Führer’s birthday. Replaced them with French and Ukrainian workers.”

  “Where do they take them all?” my mother said.

  “Not sure,” Aunt Martel said, “but I do know one thing. They are put on freight trains at the Grunewald Station, nicely away from the center of town, so hardly anybody sees them being shipped out.”

  I heard my mother’s and Aunt Martel’s voices drifting away, as I listened to soft music on the radio in our living room: Es steht ein Soldat am Wolgastrand [A Soldier Stands at the Volga’s Bank] and Tapfere kleine Soldatenfrau [Brave Little Soldier’s Wife] and, longingly, Komm zurück [Do Come Back]. I heard voices, too. “Victorious retreat,” they said and “Anglo-Saxon terrorists” and “now in the air, passing Hamburg, heading southeast ...”

  Teddy and I promised to tell each other our dreams. Strange, looking back at it now, I was a big boy by then, well over 10 years old, but I always regressed at bed time when I met my little stuffed bear.

  I was running across the street, dragging Teddy behind me. My heart was racing. Uncle Herbert was chasing us with a whip. I only had my nightgown on, but Teddy was completely dressed, with socks, shoes, and shirt; leather pants and coat. But I wasn’t looking at Teddy. My eyes were fixed on the whip and then on the big locomotive hissing and screeching and catching up with us and then on a parade of fire trucks racing toward the bridge with their sirens howling ...

  “Wake up, wake up!” my mother shook me. “The alarm! The alarm!”

  I was in my bed, and the dark room filled with the wailing sound of the air raid siren. I heard the door of the cuckoo clock open and I jumped out of bed and into my clothes before the clock had a chance to strike three.

  I grabbed Teddy, my suitcase full of games, my gas mask, and a flashlight. My mother brought Helmut, but Aunt Martel was gone. We ran down the four flights of stairs. In the semi-darkness, we bumped into neighbors coming out of apartments and ran into sandbags and pails full of water standing next to all the doors. It happened every night then.

  Down, down, down the avalanche of people fell––through the hallway, faster across the backyard and toward the open cellar door. The sky was crisscrossed with search lights. There was a bright flash somewhere as we went in.

  Inside, the cellar was brightly lit. All the children raced for their bunk beds, ready to sleep or start their games. Teddy and I looked at our stamps: We loved the ones from Thurn and Taxis, the old Regensburg duchy; we also liked to look at the more recent stamps from the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s with all the big numbers on them.

  All was quiet outside.

  When Dieter reached up the jar of white glue from his bed below, I put the stamps away and took out the Flora and Fauna book. He had won it collecting a hundredweight of newspapers. We were slowly filling up the blank spaces in the stories with the glossy color pictures we got for bringing in copper or aluminum. The first picture was of an elk. He stood in a brook in the forest. The doe pictures were missing, but I had the one of the mountain goat standing at the edge of a cliff. As I looked at it, there was a loud bang, and the lights flickered. The part with all the foxes was complete; one of them had a rabbit in its mouth. I had the Alpine hare, too. It was cute, all white with a pink nose. Teddy helped me glue in the moles and bats, then the turtles and snakes, but the lights went out just when it was Dieter’s turn to do the frogs and salamanders.

  It stayed black and I felt scared when all the noise started, but my mother held on to my shoulder with her hand. Helmut sat on her lap. We heard cracks like thunder, and the earth shook. We heard a shower of broken windows landing on the pavement above. What were people thinking? They were supposed to leave all their windows open precisely so they wouldn’t be shattered by sudden changes in pressure made by exploding bombs.

  The lights came back and I saw Mrs. Meyer sitting in the farthest corner, as usual. She had given up on darning Dieter’s socks. I could hear her pray. Mrs. Wagner screamed when we heard the whistle bomb, and all the women sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the benches across from us brought their heads to their knees at the same time. I refused to duck; it didn’t make any sense. For one thing, they had put new steel plates in the ceiling and set up rows and rows of steel columns to hold them up. If the ceiling caved in, nevertheless, why would one be safer with one’s head on one’s knees rather than held high? Still, Dieter buried his head under a pillow; he didn’t understand. But the explosion was farther down the street. We heard the sound of a building crashing.

  All the women across from us resumed their needlework, as if in unison, just as they had bowed before the whistle bomb. One woman wore a helmet; another one had purple shoes; there were no men. Men fought the war in faraway places or manned the anti-aircraft guns and search lights in the gardens outside. Or they sat in fire trucks on the street corners. I decided to ask Mr. Meyer tomorrow about the whistle bomb. Mr. Barzel had told us that hearing it was a sure sign that it was headed somewhere else.

  “Only when it’s precisely coming towards you, then you can’t hear it,” he had said.

  -----

  During the last weeks of spring that year, Dieter and I and all the other boys played a new game, finding shortcuts on our way to school. So many houses had disappeared, or rather turned into giant piles of rubble, that any enterprising group of boys could make new footpaths through the debri
s and follow a straight line to school, rather than the zigzag paths of ordinary sidewalks. And so we did. Climbing over rubble and around craters filling up with sewage and buzzing with flies, we made our own paths to school. And while we were at it, we collected sacks full of silvery shrapnel, with twisted sharp edges that reminded us of the lead sculptures we made on New Year’s Eve and that some of us made again and again until the future turned out right.

  We also saw how lucky we still were. Other families now lived in drafty bombed-out shells of houses, with plywood or carpets nailed over window holes, or even in cellar holes from which house numbers stuck up like submarine periscopes.

  As for me, I made a point of finding the big signs that, like gargoyles on churches, had once decorated the roofs of tall apartment buildings before they tumbled to the ground. I found the Continental Tires sign, but Dieter was saying Con-TEEN-ental, which was clearly wrong. I also found the broken and twisted ad of the Juno Cigarette Company. I had often noted it, because it rhymed and especially because the verse made little sense:

  Aus gutem Grund ist Juno rund

  “We have good grounds for making Juno round.”

  And behind the gutted Geyer Works, across the street from us, I found a giant version of a sign that was also pasted to every store window and bus and streetcar and subway train across town: “Hush! The Enemy Listens In.” And further down the street, a group of women was cleaning up the mess left behind by a house that had collapsed. They didn’t have any tools, just picked up the pieces, one brick at a time. It seemed so futile.

  Just then I spotted Uncle Herbert coming around the corner near the pub. He was walking with a German shepherd by his side and swinging a whip with his right hand.

  Cleanup after an air raid

  14. Christmas Trees

  [July 1943]

  By the summer of 1943, just as Mr. Barzel had once predicted, I could read and speak quite a bit of English. My Aunt Martel, I remember, surprised me with a special gift, an English-language copy of The International Cloud-Atlas, published in 1896, which I could easily decipher. The atlas featured the work of Luke Howard, an early 19th century Englishman who had created the system for classifying clouds using Latin names. He described the three most common shapes as cirrus (curl of hair), stratus (layer), and cumulus (heap). He also defined four compound cloud forms that derive from the three primary shapes, using terms such as nimbus (rain) to create words such as nimbostratus. But receiving my new atlas was only the first of several pleasant surprises.

  Just before school let out, on my grandmother’s birthday to be exact, a delegation from Town Hall appeared at her doorstep and presented her with the silver edition of the Mother’s Cross. I know because I was there, and just about ready to put whipped cream on top of my favorite gooseberry cake, when they rang the bell. I suppose Aunt Martel wasn’t too happy about the interruption either, lest her coffee get cold, but then it wasn’t real coffee anymore; hers was Ersatz, a common substitute made of barley. In any case, the men read a citation, honoring my grandmother for having given birth to six Aryan children and even citing the Führer on the subject: “Each mother who has given birth to a child has struck a blow for the future of our people.” The men also gave my grandmother a brochure written by District Leader Dr. Goebbels and stating that as of June 19, 1943, Berlin was free of Jews.

  That was supposed to make us happy, I suppose, along with other bits of information, such as these: If she had had 8 or more children, my grandmother would have been eligible for the gold version of the Mother’s Cross, but even the silver edition carried great privileges. When wearing the cross, my grandmother was entitled to going to the head of any queue, being served first at government offices, on public transport, at mass events, and, of course, grocery stores. Moreover, she had to be greeted with a snappy “Heil Hitler!” by all members of the Hitler Youth.

  In fact, my grandmother was glad when the men were gone. She tossed their brochure into the wastebasket and let me examine the medal. It looked similar to the iron cross awarded soldiers, but my grandmother’s cross was dark blue rather than black and the lower section was longer than the other three. A swastika in the center of the cross was surrounded by a burst of silver sunrays. My grandmother said I could take the medal home and keep it, for all she cared, but my mother wouldn’t let me.

  ----

  Another surprise yet came on our very last day of school.

  “This spring, you've done exceptionally well with the raw materials campaign,” Mr. Barzel said, “The nation is proud of you and that is why Mr. Werner is here.”

  “Thank you, thank you, at ease,” Mr. Werner said when we jumped to our feet. “First, I have a gift for each one of you. Then, the three best collectors will get a special reward.”

  He opened a box and handed each of us a Swiss Army knife, complete, as I later found out, with thirteen attachments, including, besides the obvious, a saw, a toothpick, tweezers, and a wire stripper. And then he read off three names–names rather than numbers, mind you–mine included.

  “I have a special surprise for you three,” Mr. Werner said. “As you probably know, the Strength-Through-Joy organization has been doing wonderful things for people for many years. Using the beautiful steamship Wilhelm Gustloff –named after the Swiss National Socialist leader who was assassinated by a Jewish student in 1936–we have organized marvelous ocean cruises for those who have worked faithfully for the fatherland–cruises to Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, and South America. With the war going on, we can’t go that far anymore. For the time being, the majestic fjords of Norway, the sunny Atlantic islands of Madeira and Tenerife, and such exciting foreign cities as Montevideo, are equally out of reach. But we can go to nearby places–not by ship, of course, but certainly by train. And the three of you, along with some boys from other grades, are going to go to the Spreewald!”

  I had heard of the place. The area, many kilometers south of Berlin, was the birthplace of the Spree, one of Berlin’s two rivers. My parents had been there when they were young; I had seen pictures.

  At first, I didn’t like the idea of going away all by myself, or rather with a bunch of scary Hitler Youths, and, furthermore, Dieter and I already had other plans. But I changed my mind on the way home from school when I found out that Dieter had won the trip as well. He had helped me carry that ton of newspapers from Mr. Joseph’s apartment and had thus been equally productive. The deal was sealed when our mothers agreed.

  “Being away from the city for a couple of weeks will do you both a world of good,” my mother said.

  “It’ll be exciting!” Mrs. Meyer added. “Haven’t you just studied the Florida Everglades? They say the Spreewald is just like that!”

  And thus began our trip to the magical land of shallow waters and tall trees. For days, we gathered right after breakfast at the launching site. We got into the flat-bottomed, square-ended boats and punted our way through an endless labyrinth of slow-flowing waters–brooks and ponds, covered with forest growth so dense that it had to be parted to let us through. A woman in colorful costume stood at the end of each boat. She pushed a long pole against the bottom of the shallow waters and thus propelled us toward ever-changing mysteries: We were explorers, going through the swamps of Georgia. Saxon vines turned into Spanish moss, and the protective cries of mother storks into the battle-cry of Indians. On we pressed, from Georgia’s swamps to Florida’s Everglades, from the jungles of the Amazon to the steaming world of the Congo. Lizards sunning themselves on stones were crocodiles out to devour us. Tiny fish became sharks, gentle winds turned into mighty hurricanes…

  At night we slept. No sirens wailed.

  On some days, when thunderstorms lingered, we stayed in our youth hostel and did other things. Naturally, I studied my cloud atlas. “Thunderstorm clouds (cumulonimbus incus),” it said, “form when rapid updrafts within cumulus congestus clouds rise into the upper atmosphere and spread out into mushroom-shaped anvils. They always produce lightning,
heavy rain, and large hailstones; sometimes even tornadoes.”

  Dieter had a jigsaw puzzle of the Amazon rain forest. There were 1,000 pieces, waiting to be turned into a colorful scene filled with strange wild plants, exotic birds and butterflies, monkeys swinging from vines, and snakes, frogs, and creepy crawlers wherever one looked.

  We also played with my rubber stamp kit, a brand-new gift from Aunt Martel. It had multi-colored ink pads and lots of rubber stamps for different Egyptian hieroglyphs. Using a booklet with a key, we practiced writing and deciphering secret messages in the ancient, mysterious language of the pharaohs.

  The other boys played “Scapa Flow.” It was a board game that I once owned myself; a gift from Uncle Herbert, but my mother did not want me to play war games and had thrown it out. It had a map of the North Sea and the British Isles, similar to the one we once drew in school for Mr. Eisler. There were lots of submarine tokens and battleships, bombers and fighter planes in the game. The idea was to make Anglia submit to Teutonia.

  -----

  On the day we were slated to go home, I wrote in my diary that I had had the most wonderful time of my life and that I had actually seen cumulus humilis, cumulus congestus, and cumulonimbus incus. It was dark by the time we climbed onto the Dresden-to-Berlin express. In the third-class compartments with all the wooden benches, every seat was occupied, mostly by soldiers heading home for a brief respite from some faraway front. Some soldiers were sitting on suitcases in the aisles; others were standing, holding on to ceiling straps.

  But we didn’t have to stand. We were led to the second-class compartments where all the seats were covered with upholstery and that were reserved for military officers and, occasionally, for travelers with special tickets, such as those given to us by the Strength-Through-Joy people. Unfortunately, Dieter got the last seat in one car and I was told to move on to the next one, closer to the front of the train.