by Heinz Kohler
“You are all set,” I heard the receptionist say, as she handed my mother a piece of paper, “but you should also see Dr. Dietrich, right through that door.”
“Dr. Dietrich, Mayor,” the sign said. We found him sitting behind a marble-topped desk, his glasses floating at the tip of his nose. A big bottle of black ink sat on one end; a stack of papers lay on the other. A small photograph in a green frame stood in-between. I recognized the man in the picture; he had been hanging on the wall in Mr. Barzel’s class. Baldur von Schirach was his name and he was a leader of the Hitler Youth for many years until he became District Leader of Vienna. I knew all about that, too. As Mr. Eisler had told us, the Führer abolished all the old states–Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and so on– and divided Germany into Administrative Districts, each of which was governed by a District Leader who was directly responsible to the Führer. That thought drew my attention to the picture of Adolf Hitler that hung on the wall. It was a painting, similar to many photographs I had seen, in which he wore a brown uniform, black boots, and a swastika armband. Dr. Dietrich was dressed in pretty much the same way, but I saw three stars on the collar of his uniform, which made him an SA captain.
“Good morning,” my mother said, “we are supposed to see you. Coming from Berlin, just got our residency papers.”
Dr. Dietrich jumped to his feet, clicked his heels, raised his right hand, and said sharply:
“Heil Hitler! That’s how we do it around here. You better take heed!”
He sat down and took the papers from my mother’s hand.
“May we sit down?” my mother asked.
“Of course, that’s what chairs are for,” Dr. Dietrich said, without looking up.
I noticed a framed sign on the wall. “The Jews Are Our Curse,” it said.
“All right then,” Dr. Dietrich said, finally, “welcome to Ziesar.”
“And here is your work assignment,” he continued, looking at my mother. “You will work at Steinert’s, part-time, because of the small child. It's a ceramics factory, right here at the edge of town. Used to make flower pots, vases, and the like; they make insulators for electric and telephone lines now. You can take the baby along. It’ll be an easy job, you’ll hardly have to do a thing, mainly keep an eye on a bunch of Italian traitors, Badoglio bastards all of them and lazy as can be.”
He handed my mother a white card.
“And we, young man,” Dr. Dietrich concluded, looking at me, “will meet again in school, at the end of School Street, tomorrow at eight.”
Dr. Dietrich explained that he was also the school principal and I would learn all there is to know about the school in the morning.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he said as we were about to leave.
“I want to be a pilot,” I said, which surprised me and my mother alike. Where did that come from? I certainly didn’t know.
“An excellent choice,” Dr. Dietrich said before I could think about it. “The Air Force needs well educated young men and you are on your way.”
“Which reminds me,” Dr. Dietrich added, looking at my mother and me, “I have some welcome presents for both of you.”
He gave my mother a little radio, the familiar Goebbels Snout, although, of course, he didn’t call it that. He also gave her a pamphlet about the history of Ziesar. In turn, he gave me three books. One was called The Cossacks, the next one, Opossum, and the third one, The Olympic Games of 1936, which was full of pictures. Helmut got nothing.
I spent the rest of the day examining our new-found treasures. As expected, the radio only worked with German stations; I managed to tune in Radio Berlin, Radio Germany, and Radio Hamburg. No luck with Radio Beromünster or the BBC.
My mother’s pamphlet was more interesting. It was filled with colorful drawings and said that Ziesar had been founded almost 1,000 years ago, in the year 948 to be exact, by a man called Clio who built an early version of the castle. Eventually, it had seven towers. By then, the town had made an alliance with the Bishop of Brandenburg, which was the occasion of putting a red-brick bishop’s cap on top of the tallest castle tower. Later still, the allies successfully battled the Slavs, while Zisterzienser nuns and monks lived in the cloister. More recently, Frederick the Great built a fancy house in town and he stayed there whenever he inspected his troops nearby. And Queen Luise stayed at the local inn, called the Prince of Prussia, and never missed a chance to drink tea at the Alte Post. In our day, the pamphlet concluded, Ziesar was linked to the rest of Germany not only by rail but, more importantly, by the Führer’s Road, the Autobahn, which was a mere three kilometers away. There was also a picture of the ceramics factory where my mother was scheduled to work. I showed it to her.
It took much longer to examine my three books; in fact, I didn’t finish doing that till Christmas, some 3 months later. The Cossacks told the story of great cavalry men, living mostly in the Ukraine. The word itself, the book said, came from the Turkish qazaq, which meant adventurer. Nowadays, the Cossacks were excellent hunters of Bolsheviks, Gypsies, and Jews, the book said.
The Opossum book described life in the Southern United States. The hero was a white rancher who had lots of black slaves. One day, he decided to teach his teenage son about sex and “they had their way with a beautiful slave girl in a freight car parked at the railroad station.” The girl pleaded with them to leave her alone, having just been married, but they persisted. I read the above passage and I read it again, but I didn’t understand the story at all, and when I asked my mother, she was angry and threw the book away.
She did let me keep the Olympics book, however, and Helmut and I had fun with it. When we first looked at the pictures, and there were over 200 of them, they all seemed fuzzy and unclear. But once we put on a special set of glasses, which were embedded in the back of the book, a miracle happened. Everything appeared in three dimensions and looked as alive and close as it would have if we had stood right there, taking the pictures ourselves! In fact, I liked my book better than the film about the XI Olympic Games in Berlin, which had been made by a famous woman, Leni Riefenstahl, and we had seen at school in Berlin.
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It was easy to find the school the next morning. It was a big building made of red brick, just as in Berlin, but it wasn’t as tall. Nor were there any ruins all around, just meadows and hundreds of white sheep grazing in the rising sun. Dr. Dietrich stood at the door, waiting for me. He was again dressed in his uniform, but he also had a Yellow Uncle in his hand. I knew he was in charge. He took me to his office and explained that I would once again start at the beginning of 7th grade, because their school year began in early fall rather than on January 1, as in Berlin. He also said that he had seen my excellent record and was very pleased.
“You will have 12 subjects, 3 hours per week each,” he said, “Mondays through Fridays 8 to 15:30 and 18 minutes for lunch.”
He handed me a card, which listed the subjects like this:
German, English, Latin;
History/Contemporary Issues, Geography;
Biology, Chemistry, Physics;
Mathematics;
Music, Religion, Sports.
Note: Students are also graded on Conduct, Industry, Attention, Penmanship, and Orderliness in Textbooks and Notebooks.
Then Dr. Dietrich took me to my classroom where everybody stared at me, but I pretended not to notice. In the back of the room, I saw the pictures of two men, one of whom I recognized immediately. I had never seen the other one, but the captions underneath both were clearly visible, even from the door. Frederick the Great (1712-1786) said the first one; Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) said the other. There was smaller print as well, but I couldn’t read that until later in the week when I had time to explore.
“Frederick the Great (1712-1786),” said one of the labels, “Won the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) as well as the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and, thus, brought Prussia great military prestige throughout Europe.”
“Immanue
l Kant (1724-1804),” said the other label, “German philosopher whose synthesis of rationalism and empiricism marks the beginning of idealism; put forward a system of ethics based on the categorical imperative.”
But, as I said, all that came later. At the moment I entered, when all the farmer boys looked me over, my attention was riveted to something else entirely: The teacher I was about to meet was a woman and there were also lots of girls in the class. I had never seen anything like that in Berlin!
“Unlike in Berlin,” Dr. Dietrich said, interrupting my thoughts, “you will have many different teachers here, each teaching a different subject. This is Mrs. Dr. Dietrich; she’s in charge of biology.”
I sat down as in a dream. I kept looking at the girl with the black braids. She sat across the room, and I wondered whether Snow White might have looked like that, or Sleeping Beauty. I found out later that her name was Helga.
In the meantime, Mrs. Dr. Dietrich talked about Germany’s birds. Her words, hypnotically and rhythmically, washed over my mind like the distant waves on the Baltic coast, almost, but not quite, putting me to sleep. I kept staring at Helga, and I didn’t even take notes.
“For a century now,” said Mrs. Dr. Dietrich, “voices have been raised around the world about the possible extinction of animal species due to the actions of people. The most infamous example is the American buffalo. At one point, hundreds of thousands of them were roaming the prairie; now hardly any are left––all because of conscienceless hunters, who lack feeling for these creatures, and because of meat producers, who have an insatiable hunger for profit. Similar stories could be told about bears, wolves, and wild cats. In some countries, there are even bounties for birds of prey, which leads to the coldhearted murder of eagles, owls, and ravens.”
“But not in Germany!” she exclaimed, almost awakening me from my trance. “Under the leadership of our Führer, we have established nature reserves and taken resolute measures to preserve the animal kingdom. To give just one example, our government has established breeding colonies for 12,000 pairs of seagulls on Borkum and Sylt, which yield 30,000 eggs per year, which are nursed into new seagulls. And that’s what we will talk about in the coming months: Germany’s birds. Before the year is over, we will have studied 25 different types, including,” and now she read from her notes, “eagles, hawks, falcons, buzzards, and owls, then herons, storks, cranes, snipes, and ducks, then swallows, seagulls, swans, and geese, and, finally, woodpeckers and cuckoos, ravens and crows, larks and thrushes, nightingales and sandpipers, and doves, partridges and pheasants. Surely, you have seen the storks at the castle? Did you know that the adults have a wig span of 2 meters? That’s more than the height of the tallest man!”
Snap! went the Yellow Uncle on the desk.. I was wide awake then.
“There will be no more classes today,” said Dr. Dietrich, who had somehow come back into the class while I was daydreaming. “You will form groups of 10 and collect chaff for victory.”
Everyone seemed to know what to do. Mrs. Dr. Dietrich told me to follow one of the big boys; and out of the back door we marched, right into the fields behind the school.
There, outside, I heard the sound of huge swarms of bees, but they were really formations of bombers, way, way up in the sky, heading for Berlin, the sun reflecting off their canopies and propellers, glittering, shimmering, and making my mind spin.
I saw bullets stitching their way across a bridge and little blue flames feeding on the melted fat of a corpse lying on the sidewalk; I felt choking plaster dust in my throat and my heart pounding. My thoughts were too terrible to utter aloud, my images too horrible to describe….
And the others kept pointing at me. As I dodged thistles and nettles and bumble bees, I didn’t keep up with the general line of advance. Also I didn’t know what to do, since I had never heard of chaff before.
Before long, everyone was gathering up silvery strips of aluminum that were draped over all the potato plants. I did the same, but I couldn’t figure out who had spread all this Christmas tinsel and why. I asked the big boy leading our group, but he just laughed and repeated my question out loud. Everybody stood around me in a circle and whispered, even the pretty girls in their Jungmädel uniforms [Jungmädel = junior division of BDM, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth, consisting of “Aryan” girls aged 10-14]. Then someone said I had just gotten a new name and one of the big boys bent back the little finger of my right hand till it hurt and another boy did the same thing with the left hand. Without letting go, they pulled me across the field and lifted me across a fence that said “Beware of the bull.” They all chanted “Village idiot, village idiot, village idiot ...”
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Aunt Rachel was not happy when I got home and tracked all the dirt through the house, even though I had washed off the green cow dung under the garden pump before I went inside. She said she hoped I hadn’t similarly annoyed Mrs. Dr. Dietrich. After all, she was the Mayor’s wife and also the sister of the District Leader of Magdeburg, a most important man.
My mother didn’t like what Aunt Rachel had said and took me into our room. While I was in school, my mother had bought a large mirror, and there were blankets on the bed. She had a new pair of pajamas for me, too. I put them on and looked at myself in the mirror. Then I turned up the brims of my leggings as far as they would go until I had two puffy rings of cloth above each knee. I liked the way I looked. Just like the prince in my old Cinderella book. In my mind, I pictured Helga as my princess.
That night, I had nightmares and ran into the cellar to check out once again how safe it was. My mother took me to Dr. Weiss, right there in the middle of the night. Unlike Dr. Dietrich, Dr. Weiss was a real doctor and lived just down the street from us. He said my pulse was far too high and gave us a bottle of Valerian, a water-like liquid, which, he said, we should use with the utmost of care.
“Give him precisely three drops on a spoonful of sugar whenever he’s upset,” he said. “Don’t give him more than that; we don’t want his heart to stop.”
That remark scared me to death and caused me to make another trip to Uncle Eddy’s dictionary when the first chance arose.
“Valerian,” it said, “from the plant of the genus Valeriana, widely cultivated in Europe and Asia for its small, fragrant white to pink and lavender flowers. The rootstalk of the plant can also be turned into a powerful sedative, used in medicine.”
I knew what to do. Three drops per day in sugar. No more, lest my heart stop.
Ziesar’s history
22. Christianity
[October – November 1944]
In the weeks that followed our night-time visit to Dr. Weiss, many things happened that upset me. Unfortunately, my mother was less than forthcoming with my Valerian drops. She thought they were much too dangerous and said Dr. Weiss was a quack. As I soon discovered in Uncle Eddy’s dictionary, the word referred to either “the characteristic sound uttered by a duck” or to “a charlatan who pretends to be a physician and dispenses medical advice and treatment.” Accordingly, I did a little bit of investigating by looking more carefully at the white enamel sign outside Dr. Weiss’s office.
“Dr. med. Werner Weiss,” it said, “Specialist in Dermatology and Venereal Diseases.”
As usual, this raised more questions than it answered. As was to be expected, too, my mother wouldn’t explain, which only increased my curiosity. But, alas, I had to wait for my explanation because my mother was clearly too busy with other things. She had started her job at the ceramics plant and her assignment to the “Strike Force for Total War” soon got her into trouble with Aunt Rachel.
It all started when my mother discovered that there was a prisoner-of-war camp outside the village and it was from there that military guards, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, marched a contingent of Badoglio Italians to the ceramics plant each day. My mother was to watch over their work inside the plant, which proved difficult because she spoke no Italian, and the Italians spoke no German. Neverthel
ess, they managed to communicate using sign language, and one thing quickly became clear: The prisoners received no medical attention and very little food. In fact, they were starving.
“That’s not a problem that concerns you,” one of the guards said to my mother. “Those lazy bastards are lucky to be alive. Nobody is more despicable than an ally who has changed sides.”
My mother’s German coworkers echoed the thought, which was supposed to be a direct quote from the Führer. And, as if it made matters better, my mother’s coworkers pointed out that other POWs at the camp were much worse off by far.
“You should see the Russians,” said Mrs. Mertsch, “they are positively emaciated. Their clothes are in tatters and they sleep on the ground, wrapped in filthy blankets. Last spring, the SS was still in charge of the camp and they always had their fun with the prisoners. Sometimes they made them strip and sing for hours on end, threatening to set the dogs on them if they stopped. At other times, they made them do knee bends or goose-step in rapid time, hitting them with rubber truncheons if they failed to do it right. Frieda, that’s my daughter, told me all about it; she’s a secretary at the camp.”
“But it’s not all bad,” interjected Mrs. Krohn. “Don’t exaggerate. My daughter works in the camp, too; she’s a cook. She says they also have Americans, and some English and French, and they live like kings. They don’t have to work, you know, lie in the sun all day with their hats over their eyes or play ball or cards and they even get letters and Red Cross packages! It’s a long holiday for them.”