My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  “For all we know,” added Mrs. Ernst, “those Russians were being punished for trying to escape or to murder a guard. You got to have discipline in a place like that.”

  Well, my mother didn’t buy that story and from that day on she sneaked all sorts of food out of Aunt Rachel’s pantry and fed it to her Italians at work. She brought them other supplies as well, such as band-aids and bars of soap and even some clothes–until Aunt Rachel discovered it.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she screamed. “Do you realize what you are doing? You are aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war! THAT’S HIGH TREASON! We could all get killed over this! Stop it right now or you are out of here!”

  I don’t remember exactly what happened next, except that my mother said something sarcastic about “good old Christianity at work” and she wasn’t referring to herself and that made Aunt Rachel get red in the face. One would have thought that things could hardly get worse, but I managed to arrange that on the very next day when my eagerness to hear the latest news about the war led me back into Uncle Eddy’s study, where I had seen a really fancy radio set. I managed to tune in the BBC and found it not jammed. I listened to the monthly summary of events:

  October/November 1944

  1) V2 rockets, traveling at supersonic speeds, now launched against Britain from Holland

  2) Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the desert fox, apparently implicated in the July plot, dies mysteriously, but still gets state funeral

  3) Marshal Tito captures Belgrade

  4) Aachen surrenders to U.S forces

  5) The U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R. recognize the new Italian government under Premier Ivanoe Bonomiä

  6) German positions in Holland and Belgium increasingly untenable

  7) Russian troops near Warsaw

  8) Russian troops take Lithuania

  9) Russian troops near Budapest

  10) A joint U.S. Army/Navy statement holds it “entirely possible for Hitler’s flying bombs to reach the United States from Europe”

  Unfortunately, Aunt Rachel caught me in the middle of the report. To make matters worse, she also saw that I had rummaged through one of Uncle Eddy’s huge packages and had discovered its contents: bottles of French champagne, cognac, and gin; a box of cigars; all sorts of satin underwear, silk stockings, and a silver fox fur coat! That’s when she screamed a lot and told us to take our things and get out.

  “You and that son of yours are just as crazy as Arthur,” she said to my mother. “You are jeopardizing my life and Eddy’s as well. That’s unforgivable.”

  But she still gave me a good-bye present, taken from Uncle Eddy’s study, a beautifully bound copy of Dr. Martin Luther’s Catechism, With Bible Sayings, Gospels, and Epistles, 16th edition, Breslau, 1885.

  -----

  My mother thought of reminding Aunt Rachel of the document she had received from Dr. Dietrich. As usual, I had made a copy of it:

  Placement of Bombing Victims in the Village of Ziesar

  To:

  Mrs. Superintendent Rachel Lichtenberg

  Ziesar

  Cloister Street 3

  According to laws and executive orders promulgated on 1 September 1939 and 19 August 1943, the following rooms are sequestered :

  1 bedroom, plus necessary common rooms (bathroom, corridors, kitchen, living room)

  and are to be made available forthwith to the family:

  Gertrud, Hans, and Helmut Keller.

  Legal recourse against this order does not exist.

  15 September 1944

  Dr. Dietrich, Mayor

  Village of Ziesar, District of Magdeburg

  But Mrs. Zweig told my mother to go back to the Town Hall and talk to the housing officer, which we did, dragging Helmut along. Like Aunt Rachel, he was screaming, too.

  “Now you aren’t Catholic, are you?” the housing officer asked after my mother had inquired about another place to live. My mother shook her head.

  “Then you are in luck,” he smiled. “You’ll fit right in at the Albrecht place. You can live above the butcher shop, on Breite Weg, Number 29.”

  The place was easy to find, being on the main street and having a sign with a pig hanging above the shop window, which we had noticed even on the first day while marching into town. We walked into the shop and met Mr. Albrecht himself. He had bushy white hair, bright blue eyes, and was huge. He must have been nearly two meters tall and may well have weighed three hundred pounds. He was also short of breath, and his face was red. We caught him in the middle of weighing sausages on an old rusty scale that was hanging from chains fastened to the ceiling. When he learned who we were, he stopped and took us to a room above the shop. Two windows faced the street, right above the entrance to the store. We had pretty lace curtains, two beds, a small table, and two chairs. There was a walk-in closet, too, and I saw a stool in the corner with a ceramic wash basin and a water pitcher. The smell of freshly oiled floors hung in the air.

  Swarms of flies were buzzing about the room and I noticed honey-colored flypaper dangling from the ceiling and the fact that the windows, unlike Aunt Rachel’s, didn’t have any screens. Helmut was climbing onto one of the beds.

  “The pump’s in the backyard, the latrine’s out in back–way back, near the fields–and there’s a little kitchen through that door,” Mr. Albrecht said, pointing to a small opening in the back of the room.

  My mother and I had a look and found a second room, tiny, windowless, and nearly empty, except for an aluminum pail, a broom made of straw, and a black cast-iron stove. The stove stood on a shiny sheet of aluminum that was nailed to the floor. Another such sheet was nailed to a spot near the ceiling where the stove pipe disappeared into the wall.

  “That stove can get pretty hot,” Mr. Albrecht explained when he saw us stare at the aluminum. “We don’t want to burn the house down. But you’ll have to get your own firewood eventually. Until you do, feel free to use the pile in the backyard.”

  “Or, if you prefer,” Mr. Albrecht added, “you can also use the big kitchen downstairs, but then you'll have to share it with two other bombed-out families. They are from Cologne, a bunch of Catholics, I’m afraid. Sure am sorry about that; let me know if they give you any trouble.”

  He turned to leave, but stopped at the door and grinned at my mother.

  “You know the joke about the whales, don’t you?” he asked, “Used to be my father’s favorite: The moon sails in the sky, the sheep graze down below, the whales live lower still, their shit drifts lower yet. But Catholics are lower than whale shit!”

  He laughed so hard, his whole body shook. I saw ripples flowing over his belly like waves on the ocean. After he left, my mother sat down at the table and cried.

  -----

  I took the pail and went to explore the backyard. The water pump stood next to the back door. It was all dressed in straw, to keep the water from freezing in the winter, Mr. Albrecht said. The handle was rusty and the pump made a squeaking noise when I filled up our pail.

  I also found the big pile of firewood. It was really tall, stacked up to look like an Egyptian pyramid. Mr. Albrecht said he’d teach me how to build one just like it. All I had to do was to get lots of small trees from the forest; I could borrow his hand cart and a saw. And he’d teach me what to do next, he said, pointing to a chopping block with an axe stuck in it.

  I had a look at the outdoor toilet next–way out in back, just as advertised. It consisted of a small wooden shack with four doors, each of which had a hole in it near the top, in the form of a heart. Inside each of the four cubicles was a wooden bench with a circular hole, no cover, and a bad smell. There also were piles of newspapers, some of them cut into little rectangles, to serve as toilet paper. And, again, there were swarms of flies, but I saw no flypaper there. I opened one of the doors a second time and made it slam against the door frame with a bang.

  “Gets pretty cold in the winter out here,” Mr. Albrecht said, just in case I was having too much fun, “but at least
those damn flies will be gone.”

  After Mr. Albrecht had disappeared, I slammed the toilet door a few more times and then sat down to examine one of the newspaper piles. There were lots of copies of Der Angriff [The Attack], a military paper I thought, and they featured many an article about Berlin. One of them showed photographs of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s central park where dozens of marble busts of the Hohenzollern dynasty were lined up along its central boulevard. Berliners referred to it jokingly as Puppenallee [Avenue of the Dolls]. Dieter and I had been there. I almost cried at the thought, but was determined not to lose control of my feelings again, not ever. So I held back my tears and examined another issue of the same paper instead. It reported that there had been 160,564 Jews in 1933 Berlin, only 140,000 by 1937, then 75,000 by 1939, and none at all by 1943. I took the article to my mother, but she wouldn’t read it, which inspired me to make it the first item in a new secret stash I created under my new bed. As I told you, it was the sort of thing Dieter and I had always done: gather evidence about all the things the adults refused to discuss.

  Later that day, Mr. Albrecht showed me how the household waste water should be dumped into the side street, where it would run downhill to open fields, just like the effluent from his abattoir, where he slaughtered, he said, cows and pigs and sheep and an occasional horse. The place was spanking clean, covered with white tiles on all the walls and floors, and filled with all sorts of shiny machinery to make sausages and smoked pork chops and such. I saw a vat full of discarded horns and rolls and rolls of cowhide, preserved in salt.

  When I finally returned with my pail of fresh water, my mother was talking with Mrs. Albrecht who had a son, she said, fighting somewhere in Italy. She hadn’t heard from him since Naples, and my mother told her about the Italians at the ceramics plant and about my father from whom we hadn’t heard in many months. They both cried, but then Mrs. Albrecht told my mother to come down for lunch till we got settled in. On that day, we had a choice, she said: salt potatoes with gravy and Kassler or rye bread with lard and smoked sausages.

  “Whatever’s left, you can take to the ceramics plant,” she whispered.

  I knew my mother was very happy about that. I also knew about the delicacies waiting for us. I had watched my grandmother make both.

  “Salt potatoes are regular potatoes that are peeled when raw and then cooked in salt water,” I explained to Helmut, although I wasn’t sure he understood a word I said.

  “Kassler is smoked pork, and lard is made by melting a chunk of suet till it spreads like hot butter and, if you are lucky, leaving in the greaves.”

  After lunch, Mrs. Albrecht gave my mother a bowl of oatmeal cookies and my mother told me to divide them evenly between Helmut and me. I counted thirteen and said that an even division of an odd number was logically impossible. My mother ate one of the cookies and told me to try again.

  She also told me to say “thank you” to Mrs. Albrecht, but I refused. That was a problem of mine going back several years, to a day when we had had a family gathering at our apartment in Berlin. Aunt Martel had brought me a bar of milk chocolate, an extremely rare delicacy in those days, but when I had started to eat it, contrary to earlier instructions I should add, my mother had told me to share it with all the guests around the table. That was a bad idea in my view because such generosity would leave exactly nothing for me. Still, my mother had insisted, which had led Aunt Gerda to ask my cousin Werner to share his cookies as well. And then to make matters even worse, my mother had asked me to say “thank you” for one little cookie. It had just been too much for me and my feeling of outrage had stayed with me ever since.

  -----

  The day after we moved in with the Albrechts, I went back to school. Our first subject of the day was religion, taught by none other than Pastor Jahn. He and I, it seemed, were destined not to get along. He asked me for my name, which was nice and seemed to indicate that I wouldn’t be viewed as a mere number, as in Berlin. But when I said “Hans,” he was annoyed and wanted to know my middle name. I didn’t have one and tried to explain. My father had a middle name, Oskar, I said, and my mother had a middle name, Anna, but my parents had decided that giving two names to children was an unfortunate sign of ambivalence. It was vastly preferable to make up one’s mind and come up with a single name, they had said, and that’s why they had just called me Hans and my little brother Helmut and that was that.

  Pastor Jahn didn’t like my explanation at all and intimated that I was on the verge of being insolent, which I must have confirmed by grinning and saying that Jesus didn’t have a middle name either. Pastor Jahn shot an angry look at me and then changed the subject. He gave us each a sheet of paper which, he said, contained an excerpt from Romans 13:

  “Let all people be subject to the governing authority that has power over them. For there is no government authority except from God, and wherever governmental authority exists it has been instituted by God. Those who therefore resist such authority resist what God has appointed, and those who resist will call judgment upon themselves.”

  Pastor Jahn said that a very important lesson was to be learned here and that the July plotters who had tried to kill our Führer had clearly ignored that lesson.

  “What is that lesson, do you think?” he asked.

  I decided to answer him and said: “That the Führer has been put there by God…”

  But before he could reward me with an emphatic “excellent,” I continued: “…and that Stalin has been put there by God and so also Churchill and Roosevelt.”

  Pastor Jahn was not happy. He said I was an impudent brat and that God, the Almighty Father, would surely punish me for such impudence. That remark did something to me. In a fraction of a second, my mind was deluged by images of a cruel world that I had barely left behind: a world in which fire and destruction rained from the sky, charred corpses piled up in the streets, and mothers and children were buried alive in dark cellars.

  “So how could God, the Almighty Father,” I thought, “look down upon such madness and not take a hand? If he was really almighty, why hadn’t he stopped the plane that killed Dieter–surely not a task too difficult for an Almighty God? Or had Dieter, perhaps, committed a sin that I didn’t know about, a sin so grievous that it had to be punished by death?”

  But I said nothing. Yet I felt such incredible rage against Nazi Pastor Jahn and didn’t know what to do with it. I almost felt that I was outside my body, looking down upon the classroom scene, when I said:

  “So, who exactly is going to punish me? Which one of our three Gods? God, the Father; or God, the Son; or God, the Holy Ghost?”

  The room was silent and Pastor Jahn was beside himself. His ears turned bright red and his lips quivered.

  “I will pretend you haven’t said that,” he said finally, with great effort and a very calm voice. “And we will use the occasion to talk about the Holy Trinity.”

  “There is one God and only one God,” Pastor Jahn continued, “but he appears to us in different forms on different occasions, sometimes as the Father, at other times as the Son, and at still other times as the Holy Ghost. Indeed, you have learned something similar in your science classes. Think of all the water we have on this earth, formula H2 O. Do we encounter it only in a single form?”

  “Of course not,” Pastor Jahn answered his own question. “Often water appears in liquid form, as you see it in rivers and oceans around the world or when you work that pump in your backyards. But just as often, you meet water in solid form–surely you have seen ice on winter ponds where you skate. And you have also met water in gaseous form–think of steam coming out of locomotives or of all the clouds in the sky. Still, always, it’s H2 O.”

  “So, is the Father the ice and the Son the liquid and the Holy Ghost the steam?” I asked.

  That’s when Pastor Jahn really lost it. He said something about “rotten city kid” and told me to get out of the room. I obeyed gladly. At first, I lingered in the corridor, where I listened to the
secretary’s typewriter rattling away in the principal’s office and to the murmuring voices coming from all the other classrooms. They reminded me of the rumbling of the subways under our street in Berlin. Then I discovered another picture of the Wartburg with a saying from Martin Luther printed underneath.

  “Martin Luther on the Jews,” it said. “Their synagogues and schools ought to be set on fire, their houses be broken up and destroyed, and they ought to be put under a roof or stable like the Gypsies, in misery and captivity, as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us.”

  Then I went home. And in my mind I challenged the Almighty to reveal himself. I kept looking for a burning bush. I picked up branches lying under trees and threw them back on the ground, daring them to turn into snakes. I told God that when he punished Dieter he had also punished Mrs. Meyer and Mr. Meyer and me and that just wasn’t fair. Whatever it was that Dieter had done, it wasn’t our fault.

  God didn’t answer me.

  A poster of the Strike Force for Total War, which demanded that all women pitch in:

  You, too, Should Help!

  23. Lichtkind

  [December 1944 – January 1945]

  The issue of God responding to us came up again in Pastor Jahn’s class soon after my initial run-in with him. Unfortunately, that lesson got me into trouble again.

  “It is a central tenet of Lutheranism,” Pastor Jahn said, “that Faith is vastly more important than Good Works. You can’t ingratiate yourself with God by doing good deeds. God is not some Jewish trader who gives you one thing if, and only if, you give something else in return. Our Heavenly Father takes a personal interest in your affairs–not because you have proven yourself to be worthy, but simply because you are his children whom he loves. There is no quid pro quo. All you have to do is believe. Talk to God in prayer; ask him for what you need, and you shall receive. Prayer works!”