by Heinz Kohler
“Think of the bulletin board as an oracle,” Dr. Neumann said. “What, do you think, it is telling you? Do the math; it’s just a matter of logic.”
When I got home, Aunt Martel was there and I could see that my mother had been crying, but they said it wasn’t because of my father. My mother said Dr. Neumann was a brave man, or perhaps just suicidal, and then I knew what she meant. No one I knew had ever come so close to saying that Germany was losing the war.
My mother insisted I go to bed right away; she wanted to talk with Aunt Martel. I took the box she had brought–it was labeled Spy Science–and disappeared as requested. The box was filled with fun things. There was a booklet about passing on classified information, which explained Indian smoke signals, the Morse code, and more modern encoder/decoder wheels. A copy of such a wheel was included. There also was a bottle of invisible ink, a spy pen, an ultraviolet decoder light, and a message code book. And there were instructions on listening in on secret spy meetings, along with a stethoscope one could place discreetly on a wall.
“Even the slightest voice can be heard distinctly,” it said.
Naturally, I tried, but all I could hear was my mother and Aunt Martel whispering in the next room. Just like my mother and Mrs. Nussbaum had done, just like my mother and Mrs. Meyer always did.
-----
I was still wide awake when the sirens went off. It wasn’t even midnight yet. As usual, we raced down the stairs, across the yard, into the cellar, catching a passing glimpse of the searchlights crisscrossing the sky. Because Dieter was gone, I decided to sit with Helmut on the bench along the far wall, my mother on one side, Aunt Martel on the other. There was a new sign across from us. “No Talking,” it said, “Preserve Your Oxygen,” but nobody paid any attention to that.
In fact, before all the noise started on the outside, Mrs. Wagner said something about the plotters having been brought to justice and that did not go well with Aunt Martel.
“You idiot, you stupid, jabbering idiot,” Aunt Martel hissed.
That certainly got everyone’s attention and, just for a moment, we all sat in stunned silence.
“Hush,” my mother whispered under her breath, but there was no stopping Aunt Martel then. It was as if someone had thrown a switch inside her head and there was no way to put it in reverse.
“What do you know about justice?” Aunt Martel continued. “Nothing, nothing at all! But let me tell you, because I just quit a lifelong job in our great Ministry of Justice. In the 20’s, we used to go after maniacs who cut little boys to pieces in dark cellars and strangled women in abandoned houses. We caught smugglers arriving at deserted beaches with loads of opium, and we prosecuted rich businessmen who never paid their taxes. But how things have changed in the Thousand Year Reich! We turned the Customs Service into secret police, spying on perfectly decent people who sold their belongings to move abroad. They became ‘smugglers’ because they were Jews. And now we look greedily at the elderly, move them into government ‘homes,’ and arrange to collect their savings right after they ‘fall asleep’.”
“Like dogs in a pound, that’s how they fall asleep,” she thundered, “and you all know it. Moabit! Hadamar! Must I say more?”
“Hush, hush,” my mother implored, but Aunt Martel was on a roll. Some engine inside her head was roaring, even accelerating.
“Yes, I’ll say more,” she continued. “Last week, I discovered a metal box in my boss’s desk. ‘Nuremberg Fine Cookies,’ it said. My mouth watered. I lifted the cover. The box was filled to the top with gold teeth.”
Just then, the lights went out; I had never heard such deafening silence.
“And there is this little room,” Aunt Martel’s voice continued in the dark, ever so quietly yet so distinctly, “right in the Plötzensee jail, I see it now: thick, white-washed walls; barn-like rafters in the ceiling, two narrow windows in one wall, close together, tall, rounded on top, like stained-glass windows in a church, but without the colored glass. A wooden beam stretches across the room and there were six meat hooks in the beam ready for the traitors!”
“And there they hanged them with piano wire, do you hear, not even rope, and the film crews were there to make pictures for the Führer and to record the sound.”
Aunt Martel had just signed her death warrant. Even I knew that. The silence was so loud, we hardly heard the noise. But we felt the plaster in our throats, and the earth shake under our feet. I felt my mother's hand on my shoulder, and she promised we would live.
-----
Someone had a flashlight and we watched its little circle of light move to the ceiling, catching clouds of tiny particles in its beam, examining the iron plates, still holding, probing the columns of steel, still standing, their red paint turned white from all the dust. Wood splintered with a loud crack and we heard the thunderous noise of walls collapsing, taking down another part of our house and stacking another pile of masonry on top of us.
The air seemed acrid, even smoky–I had forgotten the gas mask, I suddenly thought–I felt a gritty mess on my teeth, my nose turning raw. Panic rose within me, choking me at the throat. And a paralyzing thought flashed through my mind: What if they use the flamethrower to kill the maggots and the rats and the flies, as they often did before digging out the dead, when we aren’t dead yet?
Fred Wagner climbed onto the stationary bike that had been placed in our cellar for just this occasion. He started cycling and, as promised, the bike’s dynamo made light in the lantern above his head and I could see his Hitler Youth uniform. It was an eerie scene. Everyone looked like the people inside the wind mill we had visited at the Baltic Sea, as if covered with a thin layer of flour ground from the sacks of wheat kernels the miller was forever funneling into his machine. Aunt Martel wasn’t talking anymore; she was holding on to Helmut, now stroking his hair with her left hand, then blowing off the dust from the top of his head with tiny puffs from her lips. My mother held me to her breasts, saying something I couldn’t understand, in a quiet, reassuring voice.
-----
“Maybe this is the time to use that sledge hammer?” Mr. Joseph asked.
“God no, don’t you dare!” said Mrs. Schmidt. “It would just be our luck to drown in here.”
I knew what they were talking about. Earlier in the year, big holes had been made into all the cellar walls along our street to connect the cellar of each house with the one next door. Then the holes had been closed with a thin layer of bricks, which could easily be smashed with a single sledge hammer blow. That way, it was thought, people buried in one cellar could escape to the neighboring one and easily walk up the neighbors’ cellar stairs. Brilliant.
Except for one thing. What, people asked, if the neighboring cellar was filled with poisonous gas or smoke or phosphorous flames or water from burst pipes? Those who would yield that sledge hammer would be opening Pandora’s Box.
“At least we should be making some noise down here so they know we are alive,” Mr. Joseph said, and everyone agreed to that. Mr. Joseph would be first; others would relieve him later on. He picked up a wrench and started hitting on a copper pipe. A sharp metallic sound filled the room; it would be difficult for rescuers to miss it.
Clank, clank, clank.
Just then the light went out; Fred had gotten tired. Sitting in the dark, I counted my pulse, listened to low murmuring voices, my own breathing. Was I still breathing? I had to pinch myself to prove that I was still there.
Clank, clank, clank.
The air seemed to thicken, my eyes grew heavy. If we could only open that door, I thought, longing for a breath of fresh air. Helmut was crawling across my lap towards my mother; she straightened out our hair right there in the dark.
Clank, clank, clank.
I thought of the time when Dieter and I had played “flamethrower” in the street. We each had a swastika flag, attached to a pole, and with all of our might, we threw the pole into the air, like a spear, again and again. Each time, the red-and-white flag fluttered
in the wind, like a burst of red-hot flames. But then the Street Warden had come and put a stop to it. He had told our mothers, too.
“Your sons are desecrating our nation’s flag,” he had said.
Then I noticed the silence. Mrs. Schmidt did, too.
“Don’t stop! Don’t ever stop!” Mrs. Schmidt cried out to Mr. Joseph. “Let someone else do it for a while. Just when we stop, they listen and decide it isn’t worth it to dig.”
Clank, clank, clank.
The light flickered on and off. Someone was riding the bike again and my mother had to take Helmut to the toilet in the next room. I was scared when she was out of sight, but Aunt Martel was there.
“I am thirsty,” I said and looked at my watch.
Twenty-one hours had passed; it didn’t seem possible. The sun must be setting, I thought, and I tried to picture the rescue workers on the outside, getting too tired to go on. I also remembered Mr. Eisler’s oxygen lesson and wished I could make time stop before there was nothing left to breathe.
Clank, clank, clank.
Maybe time did stand still or I did fall asleep. I remember Aunt Martel handing me a bottle of green soda, with woodruff, just as I liked it, and my mother and Helmut coming back. And then I remember a big crash near the door, waking me up with a start, turning my blood to ice, as I was sure that now, finally, Death was knocking at the door. But it wasn’t Death. It was Air and Light rushing into the cellar with a big bang and announcing that there was another day.
When they dug us out, fifty-five hours had passed and the sun was rising. It promised to be a fair day; the clouds were so pink. And I could see the clouds because our house and the acacia tree were gone, as if a giant eraser had rubbed out their places against the sky.
But down the street we saw the most ghastly of sights: piles of corpses being cremated right there in the open where would-be rescuers were still delivering them. Helmut and I were clinging to my mother and didn’t say a word. Aunt Martel stated the obvious.
“That could have been us,” she said. “Adolf has certainly kept his promise: ‘Give me ten years and you will not be able to recognize Germany!’ ”
akg-images, London, United Kingdom
Cremating corpses after an air raid
20. Cricket Song
[September 1944]
Let me tell you what happened after the bombing of our house and also what did not happen. Nobody, it seems, reported Aunt Martel’s outburst to the Gestapo; she got away with it. In retrospect, this is truly surprising; she certainly tried her best to commit suicide that night in the cellar and everybody knew it. As for the rest of us, the Red Cross people said we were lucky to have sustained a 100 percent loss rather than a partial one. This way we were eligible for the special ration of Rhine wine, oranges, and chocolate. I made sure not to tell them that I still had my little suitcase with Teddy the Bear, my postage stamps, the inflatable rubber ball, and lots of secret notes. Yes, I was still very good at regressing: I still clung to my bear, even at age twelve.
And no, they said, my father could not get a week’s leave, as was customary in such cases, because he was on the eastern front and all leaves there had been canceled until further notice. In addition, being in a penal regiment, they didn’t think he would get a leave anyway.
However, they said, there was also good news. Because my mother had such a small child, and they were talking of Helmut rather than me, a wonderful new home was waiting for us at Elbing in East Prussia. They gave us railway tickets, but my mother had other ideas, although she was more than ready to get us out of Berlin.
“No way are we going east,” my mother said to Aunt Martel. “By the time we get there, the Russians will be there, too.”
Aunt Martel said she would stay to take care of my grandmother; we should come along for at least a day or two until we had made our plans. We agreed, but first my mother went to the public phone booth at the street corner and called Aunt Rachel in Ziesar, which was pronounced tsee–ay–zar with the stress on the second syllable. When measured by a straight line on the map, Ziesar was about 80 kilometers to the southwest, rather than 440 km to the northeast, as Elbing was. Aunt Rachel agreed to let her brother’s family join her at the parsonage, at least as long as Uncle Eddy was still at the western front. He wasn’t in Paris anymore, she said, but had moved on to Lyons last she knew.
On the very next day, we said a teary goodbye to my grandmother and Aunt Martel. Then we traded in our Red Cross tickets at the railroad station and stood in line for the train to the west. Things certainly had changed since the day some years ago when my father had come home from the concentration camp. Most of the outer station walls stood there as before, but all the windows were broken and the giant glass dome had long since been blown to bits. The big clock near the roof was dead, too. The hour hand was pointing to 11, the minute hand was gone.
When the Magdeburg express finally inched its way along the platform, the train whistle shrieked and the locomotive hissed as before, but otherwise things looked very different, indeed. For one thing, the train was a curious mixture of freight and passenger cars. For another, there were hundreds of people not only inside it, but also clinging to every available spot on the outside. Some people lay on the roofs, others perched on running boards; others sat in the open sliding doors of box cars, with their feet dangling in the wind.
Still, somehow we made it onto the train and then on to Potsdam, Brandenburg, and, finally, Genthin–the ‘Home of Persil,’ a detergent ad said–where we switched to a much smaller and almost empty train for our journey’s final leg. The land we passed was flat, covered with pine forest or recently harvested fields or meadows filled with sheep, and crisscrossed now and then by sandy roads.
When the train stopped, my mother, Helmut, and I were the only passengers left. We still seemed to be in the middle of fields–from our window, I saw cows grazing and wagons being drawn by horses–and, when the conductor asked us to disembark, I looked in vain for the kind of arrival hall I had seen in Berlin. There was hardly even a platform, just a short strip of gravel next to a small, red-brick station house, which had a big round clock sticking out from its side. That one was working. Near the front of the train was a pump, where the locomotive took on water, and that’s where I also spotted the sign.
“Ziesar, Founded in 948,” it said. Wow.
We walked to the front of the station house and stared at the long sandy road leading away from it and towards a distant grove of trees above which three towers could be seen. Two of them looked like they belonged to some ancient castle, the kind I had seen in my fairy tale books; the other one was almost certainly part of a church. The conductor saw us hesitate and offered to help. He knew Aunt Rachel, he said, although he called her ‘Mrs. Superintendent,’ and he told us what we had to do.
“Just follow the sand road along that row of chestnut trees,” he said. “When the trees end and the cobblestones begin, you are on Breite Weg; that’s the main street. Follow that one past Castle Street on the left, past School Street on the right, till you reach Cloister Street, also on the left. That takes you right to the church and the old monastery. You can’t miss it; it’s not far, one kilometer at most.”
And thus we made our way to Cloister Street Number 3, through a sleepy little village filled with tiny, look-alike houses, all precisely two stories tall, with walls made of weathered oak beams surrounding squares of red brick, with flowers dripping from window boxes, with steep roofs covered with tiles of red clay, and not one of these houses had burned down! We walked past a bakery store on the right, a shoe store and grocery on the left, a pharmacy with a giant black eagle above the door and a butcher shop with the sign of a fat pink pig, both on the right, a tobacco store on the left and the Town Hall on the right, and we saw no ruins anywhere! Children played in the middle of the cobblestone street, where horses pulled wagonloads of harvested loot and all the farm houses sat side by side, each with a giant gate offering a passing glimpse of crowded
backyards, filled with hordes of chickens and geese and even an occasional ox, and nowhere did we see a single car!
Aunt Rachel, it turned out, lived all alone in an ancient monastery, right next to the church. The place had long ceased to be inhabited by monks and nuns, and it had been thoroughly remodeled just before the war to create a respectable home and office for Uncle Eddy, Superintendent of the Lutheran Church. For the purpose, two large buildings had been joined together and no fewer than thirty rooms had been outfitted with modern conveniences, ranging from electric light and telephones to central heating and indoor bathrooms, complete with running water, cold and hot. There was also a giant garden behind the remodeled mansion, filled with row upon row of apple, pear, and cherry trees, peach, plum, and walnut trees, along with bushes of gooseberries and red currants and beds of strawberries, carrots, cabbages and so much more! Naturally, all this called for lots of help, and the Church had provided its Superintendent’s wife with three full-time servants, seven days a week.
But we knew none of this as we approached our new home. What we did see, before all else, was the massive tower of the church, probably 40 meters tall, and constructed in a most peculiar way. The lower three quarters of the tower consisted of a rectangular structure, made of large field stones encased in mortar and capped by a steep two-sided slate roof that rose to a central pinnacle from each of the rectangle’s two longer sides. As a result, the rectangle’s two shorter sides were somewhat taller, each rising to meet the line of the roof and a cross at the highest point. Just below the slate roof, four tall openings, rounded at the top, appeared on each of the structure’s longer sides and two such openings appeared on each of the shorter sides. But a second and much smaller tower, this one made of metal and round and housing a bell, was embedded in the center of the slate roof and rose, perhaps another 10 meters, past a circular series of columns to a steeply pointed roof of its own.