My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  “But,” Mr. Barzel said, “we are not going to pursue biology today. We are going to consider the industrial uses of phosphorus, its use in the manufacture of matches, fireworks, fertilizers; its use in substances that protect metal surfaces from corrosion and, above all, its use in the making of incendiary bombs.”

  “It is in the latter use that the white/yellow version is most important these days. That wax-like substance is highly poisonous, glows in the dark, and most importantly, catches fire at 60 degrees Celsius. It must, therefore, be stored under water, which brings us to the most crucial lesson of all.”

  “It is a matter we cannot bury and ignore, that we must proclaim out loud,” Mr. Barzel said with a quivering voice. “In light of the Anglo-American atrocities that are visited upon us night after night, we must be on permanent alert for our self-protection. You may well come into contact with phosphorus one of these nights and the only thing that will save you from terrible burns is having a sponge ready and a pail full of water nearby. Or you might drape your heads in wet towels as you sit in your shelters. Always remember: Phosphorus Hates Water.”

  “Actually,” he said, writing on the blackboard as if it were an afterthought, “combustion creates whitish phosphorous pentoxide, P2 O5, which, in turn, combines with water to become phosphorous acid, H3 P O4. Phosphates, in turn, are nothing else but the salts of this acid!”

  And that concluded our last lesson of the year. I showed my notes to my mother when I got home, but she said Mr. Barzel was a sadist, scaring little boys like that, and I shouldn’t give the matter a second thought. But the night came when I did.

  -----

  I was freezing at the time. My mother kissed me good night, and I climbed into my featherbed. There was no heat in the room; our winter ration of coal had long been used up. Yet I knew that I would be warm soon, deep down in my featherbed castle. I snuggled up to Teddy the Bear–it didn’t matter that I was already eleven years old. My Teddy was always ready to talk or play, sleep or growl, helping me to be less scared. That night, we decided to talk.

  “What a waste,” I said, “I walked all that way to school in the snow just to end up spending five hours in the air raid shelter! We should have gone tobogganing instead.”

  Teddy agreed. He always did. So did Ludwig who chirped in the darkness across the room. Some people say canaries are quiet in the dark, but that just isn’t so.

  I couldn’t sleep. My mother was fussing with Helmut in the next room; soon he was going to be two years old. I thought of Dieter and how we couldn’t get the BBC anymore. His radio was just squealing whenever we tried and ours was long gone. Dieter said he had heard his father talk about someone jamming the frequency. I crawled out of bed and checked the last entry in my secret notebook. It was almost three months old.

  “November 6 Russians take Kiev,” it said. I knew about Kiev; it was the capital of the Ukraine and it now had a red hieroglyph on Dieter’s map….

  I heard airplanes droning in my head and machine guns firing and I saw the lieutenant sitting across from me patting his pockets for a book of matches and suddenly lying in a pool of clotting blood. I woke up with a start. That’s why I was wide awake when the sirens screamed.

  -----

  Down in the cellar, someone had turned on Radio Germany. They played martial music and gave a bulletin. A thousand enemy bombers were headed for Berlin, they said.

  “Take cover in the nearest shelter and do so now!”

  Someone got up to turn the radio off. The silence seemed strange, but we all knew it wouldn’t last. I saw Mrs. Meyer praying in her corner; she always did. And she didn’t wear a wet towel around her head; nobody did. Nor did I see any pails of water in the room or wet sponges in everyone’s laps. I found an old newspaper on my bunk bed.

  “December 26,” it said. “Scharnhorst Sunk in Heroic Battle of North Cape. Battleship had crew of 1,800 men. All but 36 lost.”

  I turned to my rug hooking kit, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was trying to put three wooly sheep on a simple blue and green background. One of these days, it would make a fine present for grandma.

  Dieter was toying aimlessly with the wooden blocks he got last Christmas. There were forty-four of them, meant to be made into a crèche. He had Joseph, Maria, and Jesus, the three kings, and all sorts of animals and trees. It seemed odd putting up a nativity scene, it being February. My attention was diverted when I heard Mrs. Meyer talking with my mother about a new kind of incendiary bomb her sister in Hamburg had written about.

  “They had terrible attacks last July and August,” she said. “Those bombs sprayed some people with phosphorus and they couldn't get it off: Gerda says they jumped into the canal or rolled in the sand to kill the flames, but the moment they stopped, the fire came back.”

  “My brother wrote me, too,” Mrs. Wagner said. “He’s a fireman and he had never seen anything like it. Entire sections of the city turned into a sea of flames, over a kilometer high. The fires blazed so intensely, he said, they couldn’t do a thing.”

  “In fact,” Mrs. Wagner added, “those phosphorous flames suck all the oxygen from places nearby and you’d be stupid to go near them. And worse! About an hour after the all-clear, a huge wind came up, pushing 1,000 degree flames around like a hurricane. They measured speeds of 150 kilometers per hour, he said.”

  There was a moment of silence and then we heard the familiar drone of aircraft, the thunder of guns, someone whimpering in the next room. Our house above us trembled as if in an earthquake and then more silence.

  “Actually,” someone said, “the cellar is the safest place to be, safer than sleeping in bed. Most people die in bed, you know.”

  “Idiot,” said someone else.

  More silence still. I thought of the lieutenant in the train; he hadn’t died in bed.

  “You heard about the zoo?” Mrs. Wagner said, interrupting everyone’s thoughts. She didn’t wait for an answer. “The other day, they damaged some of the cages during the raid. Some of the wild animals got out and the guards had to shoot them as they ran. A crocodile even made it into the Spree. They shot that one, too. But they hushed it all up.”

  “Shut up, just shut up, we don’t want to hear about it,” Mrs. Schmidt shouted, and the lights went out. Darkness and silence…

  I thought of the women in the bakery. They had talked of people being buried alive when their house collapsed on top of the shelter. Hot water pipes burst and some must have boiled alive, they said. But that was no problem here, I thought. We only had cold water in this house.

  But then I had a second thought. In my mind, I pictured the water pipes near the ceiling, now hidden in darkness. What if they burst and the cold water had no place to go and the water covered the cellar floor and started to rise and rise higher until everyone drowned?

  I looked at the gas pipes. What if they burst and our gas masks didn’t work? And what if someone lit a cigarette, just then, and we were all torn to pieces by a giant explosion?

  And again I thought of the women in the bakery who had talked of people burning to death after the phosphorus seeped down from above. I pictured the fire slowly creeping up to them with all the exits blocked. I pictured people pressing against a brick wall, their feet burning first, bubbles forming on their skin and flesh sizzling, just as Mr. Barzel had described it to us….

  Then I decided not to think of anything, to empty out my mind, but, of course, it didn’t work. I pictured Mr. Barzel at school last week, giving us a lesson in the “science of bombing.”

  “If you see an enemy airplane straight overhead,” he had asked, will you be safe?”

  “One may think so,” he had said, “given the scientific fact that the bombs it carries have the same speed as the plane; thus, if they are released over your head, they are bound to continue in the direction of the plane, their path being modified by air resistance and possibly the wind, of course, but they certainly won’t go straight down.”

  “So, standing right undern
eath the plane, will you be safe? Far from it,” he proclaimed triumphantly. “The plane could have released its bombs before it got to the spot above your head and even if it hasn’t, there could be other planes releasing their bombs far away and heading for the very spot you occupy. So, don’t stand there and gawk!”

  So much for emptying my mind….

  Someone sobbed softly when the all-clear siren came on. People dragged themselves back to their feather beds, but not in darkness. When we opened the shelter door, the sky shone brilliant red, like sunset in hazy summer. Two hours left till daybreak.

  -----

  My mother put Helmut in his crib, and we opened the balcony doors. A hot wind had come up, unlike any we had ever felt. To the east, beyond the gardens, we could see the silhouettes of houses in flames. Down the street, sparks shot up above the roofs and rained onto the sidewalks. Smoke billowed through gaping window frames. There was a smell, like tar burning.

  “My God, those poor people,” my mother said.

  I thought of my grandmother. She lived just beyond the mile-long flame to the east. But I didn’t say a word. No one had a phone. We didn't discover it until I had dressed for school the next morning: A molten piece of metal lay on the carpet. There was a hole in the ceiling where it had come through. I noticed the silence and removed the cloth. My canary, in its cage, was dead.

  -----

  Our next walk to school was a somber occasion. There were giant craters in the road and dead bodies floating in the canal. To this day, I don’t know how they got there. Perhaps the stories about phosphorus were true. In any case, when we turned the corner at Stuttgarter Strasse, we saw that every house had burned, leaving only bare walls standing, with black holes where doors and windows had been. At one place, we encountered the smell of charred flesh, animal or human, we didn’t know. It was overpowering. We had smelled it before when corpses were decomposing under ruins because the rescuers hadn’t come in time.

  A policeman told us to move on. A crew of Italian traitors was about to fix the road, he said. I noticed the smoke coming out of their mouths as they were breathing the cold air.

  akg-images, London, United Kingdom/RIA Novosti

  Street repair after air raid

  17. The Birthday

  [April 1944]

  Today I am going to tell you about one of the worst days of my life. For three decades, I didn’t talk about that day at all and, according to my mother, I wasn’t supposed to. “Now, Hansel,” she had said one day that spring, “we will never raise the subject again.” And we didn’t, neither between us nor with any other member of the family…. Of course, my mother wasn’t always right; I know that now. It is better to talk about some things, but it can be difficult, even fifty years after the event.

  The day before it happened, we went to see Uncle Kurt. He had gotten a leave of absence from the eastern front, where he was flying a Messerschmitt ME-109, and we all agreed to meet at my grandmother’s place. That made sense because his parents had long since died and he liked to hang out at my grandmother’s because she was his aunt, which means he wasn’t really my uncle, although I called him that. He was actually Aunt Martel’s and my mother’s cousin, but I couldn’t very well call him that.

  On the way to my grandmother’s place, my mother, Helmut and I stopped at the poster column near the canal. It held only two pieces of news and one of them was three weeks old:

  “March 30,” it said, “Today, the Führer summarily dismissed Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and Field Marshal Paul von Kleist, both for disregarding the Führer’s stand-fast order in the Ukraine. Despite Russian advances, following these acts of disobedience, the German armed forces scored numerous victories during their retreat.”

  The other poster seemed much more recent and looked like this:

  Since November 18,

  the Anglo-American pirates of the air have

  killed 6,100 innocent women and children in Berlin

  and have seriously injured 18,400 more.

  Now, more than ever, the War Fortress Berlin cries out:

  Hail to the Führer!

  Uncle Kurt was already there when we arrived at my grandmother’s apartment. He wore his uniform, and I instantly spotted the new Iron Cross on his chest. In fact, his being a hero was the reason for his being here. A week’s leave was part of the reward.

  Uncle Kurt let me examine the medal and I told him about my grandmother’s Mother’s Cross, which was so much prettier, but I didn’t tell him that part. He also let me read the citation, which he fished out of his pocket.

  “In the name of the Führer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces,” it said, “I hereby confer upon Corporal Kurt Förster, Staff Company II/Fighter Squadron 300, the Iron Cross First Class with Swords. Signed at Division Fighting Position, on April 15, 1944, by Gutemann, Colonel and Division Commander.”

  There was also an official seal depicting an eagle, with wings spread wide, clutching a swastika. When I looked up to return the document, I saw Uncle Kurt holding Helmut in his lap and I read the inscription on the buckle of his Air Force belt.

  “God With Us,” it said.

  Uncle Kurt was rocking Helmut on his knees and reciting an old German children’s rhyme. “Hop, hop, goes the rider---when he falls he cries---if he falls into the ditch, the ravens will devour him---if he falls into the swamp, the rider goes kerplunk!”

  That was the occasion to part his knees and let the child fall to the floor–ever so gently, to be sure–amidst great laughter all around. Helmut couldn’t get enough of it.

  “One more time, one more time,” he kept begging.

  Just then, my mother called us to the table for our evening meal and I noticed Uncle Kurt insisting on the same ceremony that my father had taught me. We men had to stand at the table until all the ladies were seated, and then we sat patiently with our fingertips on the table’s edge until all the ladies had taken their first bite, and then we ate our sandwiches, always using fork and knife and never touching any food by hand, and later we cleared the table and washed the dishes in a big enamel basin in the kitchen with water brought to a boil on the gas stove, and then we dried the dishes with a towel, while the ladies chatted in the living room. To Uncle Kurt, as for my father, proper etiquette was very important.

  “The ladies of the house did the cooking,” he said to me. “It is only right that we do our part by cleaning up afterwards.”

  Uncle Kurt was equally gallant later when he insisted on walking us home in the dark along the canal, but we weren’t quite ready to go as yet. I first had to inspect my latest gift—Aunt Martel never failed me on that account. This time, she had bought me a fingerprint kit, complete with dusting powder, dusting feathers, a magnifying glass, 32 classification cards, and a booklet explaining the entire procedure. Naturally, I took everybody’s fingerprints before the evening was spent.

  I also took a few more minutes in Aunt Martel’s room. She thought I was studying her jewelry case, as I often did, filled, as it was, with a treasure of glistening brooches, ear rings, and pearls. On this day, however, I do not know why, I had another plan. I knew the key was in Aunt Martel’s purse and the purse was in her room. I took the key and opened the glass door to her secret cupboard. I didn’t care about her love letters; everybody knew about those. I wanted a closer look at the chocolate hussar!

  He sat on a magnificent horse which was chocolate, too. And he had been sitting there for twenty-six years, ever since 1918. I was surprised how heavy he was. He seemed to weigh a pound, and he made my mouth water. Nothing was left out, not one button on the uniform, not even a nail on the horse’s hoofs. I thought of biting off a leg, but knew it would be too obvious. The horse wouldn’t stand straight. I bit off the soldier’s head instead!

  Aunt Martel didn’t notice a thing, at least not on that day, but when I went to bed later that night, I told Teddy the Bear what I had done. We worried about the next day when Aunt Martel would come for a visit, and we had
trouble falling asleep.

  Two fierce-looking Chinamen, in flowing gowns, came through the balcony door. They bound me, hand and foot, to the four posts of Aunt Martel’s bed. They tied up Teddy, too. “Pleasant dreams,” one of them said, and he attached a strange-looking gadget above my head. As in the movies we had seen at school, he took a puff from an opium pipe.

  A drop of water hit me in the middle of the forehead, followed by another and another still. I heard a thousand drips, in a thousand places; water upon forehead, water upon water; I saw dark Bedouins on camels racing through the dunes carrying off blonde slaves; water upon forehead, water upon water; black men in the jungle danced around a boiling kettle filled with white explorers; water upon forehead, water; I saw the sky become a burning fire, and it fell into the water. Water became blood!

  I woke up with a start. I saw the cuckoo clock and heard rain. All the pots on the floor were filled to overflowing. The entire ceiling was dripping, because half the roof had burned some weeks ago and the shrapnel made new holes every night.

  -----

  The next day was going to be special, in a strange sort of way. Mr. Eisler was sick and we had been told that the 7th and 6th grade boys would all be joined together in Mr. Barzel’s room. Thus, I was slated to be in class with Dieter for the first time since the middle of 2nd grade when I was skipped to grade 3 and he wasn’t.

  Dieter and I took the long way to school that day, east through the gardens and later across the canal on the trolley bridge. We could find more shrapnel that way. Our teachers always told us not to touch the stuff, but we knew perfectly well what was and wasn’t dangerous. We had seen the demonstrations in the school yard. Mr. Barzel and Mr. Eisler, certainly, always exaggerated, even told us not to pick up toys and pencils lest they explode in our faces.