My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  The ceremony concluded with our singing Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen fest geschlossen, SA marschiert, mit festem Schritt und Tritt…[The flag held high, the formation tightly closed, SA marches, with firm step and stride...]

  However, we weren’t done yet. Captain Werther also gave us a piece of advice.

  “When fighting the Russians,” he said, “you must always be aware of one thing: The Russians never fight fairly; they always break the rules. They may lie on the ground, for example, pretending to be dead, but when you move over them, they leap up and shoot. Or they may wave white flags of surrender, but then fire on those who come to capture them. You must be ready for their Asiatic tricks!”

  And finally, we were introduced to the People’s Grenade, which turned out to be nothing but a lump of concrete surrounding an explosive charge and detonator. We were each asked to throw one as far as we could and watch it explode. Not all of us did well. Those who hesitated were called “little grandmothers” and those who didn’t throw far enough were cursed in the name of all the Germanic gods looming above us in the sky….

  -----

  Back in school, Dr. Dietrich concluded the day with a bit of theoretical training.

  First, we each received a tiny booklet with useful Russian phrases. That’s when I learned my first Russian words: Ruki vverch = Hands Up!

  Second, we each received a piece of white cardboard, containing the following printed summary of the Geneva Convention:

  A Primer on Prisoner-of-War Rights

  1) From the moment of surrender, German soldiers are considered prisoners of war and stand under the protection of the Geneva Convention.*

  2) As soon as possible, prisoners of war are to be brought to collection points that are far enough from the danger zone to assure their personal safety.

  3) They are to receive the same food, in quantity and quality, as members of the Allied armies and are to be treated, if sick or wounded, in the same medical facilities as Allied troops.

  4) Medals and items of value are to be left in the possession of prisoners of war. Money can be confiscated, but only by officers at the collection points and in return for a receipt.

  5) Sleeping facilities, room distribution, and similar matters in the prisoner of war camps are to be equal to those accorded Allied troops.

  6) According to the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war may not be subjected to torture, nor be subjected to public curiosity. At the end of the war, they are to be sent home as soon as possible.

  Note:

  In order to avoid misunderstanding during the process of capture, the following is recommended: Lay down weapons, put helmet and belt on ground, hold hands high, and wave with handkerchief or this leaflet.

  *Soldiers are defined as all armed persons who are wearing a uniform or some other identification that can be seen from afar.

  For our peace of mind, a giant red note was printed diagonally across the above:

  Also valid for the People’s Storm

  -----

  When I got home with my newly acquired armband and literature, my mother threw another one of her ever-more-frequent fits. She yelled and screamed a lot and forbade me in the strictest terms ever again to participate in any People’s Storm activities. If they ask you to, come straight home, she said. Mrs. Albrecht agreed wholeheartedly.

  “So that’s what it has come to,” she said, “now they are ready to sacrifice children in a last-ditch defense. And, you know, it wouldn’t even work. Mr. Kalitz says the Panzerfaust can’t even penetrate the armor of the Russian tanks; God knows how he knows. He also says Russian sharpshooters would sit in the trees and pick off People’s Storm fighters long before they got anywhere near the tanks.”

  “What a pleasant image,” my mother said sarcastically.

  I didn’t tell her about the Nemmersdorf film. The thought of it kept me awake most of the night. I kept counting my pulse and my heart was racing.

  -----

  On the next day, school was back to normal, but I had another run-in with Pastor Jahn. It all happened in the afternoon when a special train arrived, filled with women and children from East Prussia. Captain Werther and some of his policemen met them at the station with a whole bunch of horse-drawn wagons, and, having determined that they were all Lutherans, the captain had a brilliant idea.

  “You can all live at the Superintendent’s house,” he said. “There are lots and lots of furnished rooms ready and waiting for you.”

  And off they went to Cloister Street Number 3, where Aunt Rachel, no doubt, let out a loud cry that traveled all the way to the Heavenly Father himself. But that came later. Still at the railroad station, Pastor Jahn took it upon himself to bless the assembled crowd, thanking God, our Heavenly Father, for having saved the refugees from the Red Beast and having brought them to a place of safety and peace.

  When he was finished, I asked the Pastor, quite humbly, whether I could ask a question that had been bothering me. Without waiting for an answer, I said:

  “You said in class ‘there is no gender in heaven.’ Why then do you always refer to the Heavenly Father, as you just did, and say He and Him and such? Are you saying God is a man, contradicting here what you taught us in class? Or is this like the ice-water-steam thing, with God being a man in one place, a woman in another, and something neuter in still another?”

  Pastor Jahn snarled, jerked the reins of his horses, and his wagon took off down the dusty road toward the village and the church.

  Toward the end of the war, those once considered too young or too old for service in the military were mobilized and armed:

  For Freedom and Life. People's Storm.

  The armband says:

  German People's Storm--Army.

  25. Werewolves

  [March 1945]

  A couple of weeks after the East Prussians invaded Aunt Rachel’s cloister-house–she compared them to an angry swarm of ants crawling over everything–the rest of the village lost its serenity as well. I remember the sudden end to our relative peacefulness and the dawn of a new era of frantic activity and, ultimately, violence and death. It all started on a Saturday morning in March, the day we were planning to celebrate Helmut’s third birthday.

  Suddenly, there was noise in the street. My mother, Helmut, and I ran to our windows above the butcher shop and came upon an amazing scene. As far as our eyes could see, our street was filling up with wagons, slowly, ever so slowly, making their way from east to west. There were no cars or trucks, just wagons drawn by teams of horses and an occasional pair of large brown oxen. More often than not, six or even eight horses were hitched together; sometimes, several wagons were hitched together as well. Some of the wagons were covered, with tarpaulins and bed sheets and even Persian rugs, but we could still see people looking out the back, lying on tall piles of straw and hay. Other wagons were flat and open, and we could see couches and chairs and boxes on them piled three meters high. Presently, a wagon passed with kitchen utensils hanging from its sides. The frying pans made quite a racket because of the cobblestones.

  Some wagons were full of animals behind wire mesh. We saw chickens and ducks, turkeys and geese, goats and sheep, pigeons and pigs. Cats sat on top of cages and poked their claws through the wire, scaring the pigeons. And cows! There were hundreds of cows, tied to each other and to the wagons, mooing and ringing bells, screaming and dripping milk, getting caught behind trees along the street and leaving piles of green shit.

  And there were people, of course, hundreds of people, walking and tottering besides the wagons and behind them, pushing baby carriages filled with belongings, carrying bundles of clothes tied to poles that sat on shoulders like rifles in a parade.

  I thought of Noah’s ark as each wagon crawled, imperceptibly crawled, past our windows, day and night, in sun and rain. Mesmerized, we stared at the activity in the street, trying to comprehend what it all meant, and, just like ours, hundreds of other eyes watched from behind lacy curtains and followed the movement of
the endless caravan. If anything happened to interrupt its forward motion, unseen people would shout: “No room here” and “No food here, go on, go on!” But that was sometimes impossible.

  I remember watching one of the wagons, this one drawn by a pair of weary horses and led by exhausted women and children walking beside them–walking slowly, one step at a time, going where? Their wagon, overloaded like all the rest, creaked and groaned, its steel-rimmed wheels pounded against the cobblestones, and I saw horseshoes striking stone and making sparks. Suddenly, the axle broke. I saw the wagon teeter and spill household objects, jars of food, and even the huddled shapes of two older women, their clothes in tatters. The whole procession came to a halt.

  We ran into the street, my mother holding on to Helmut, and I, as usual, forgetting to wear socks and shoes. Mr. Albrecht was there already and quickly determined that there was no hope.

  “That wagon cannot be fixed,” he said to a woman with a scarf, “but we can find you another one at the castle. We’ll help you move your things. In the meantime, nobody is going anywhere, I’m afraid. Your wagon’s blocking the street.”

  Captain Werther appeared out of nowhere. He was worried about the same thing. He didn’t like the idea of having hundreds of women and children and their grandparents and their animals camping out in the middle of Breite Weg, but there was precious little he could do about it then. He liked the idea of donating a wagon from the castle, and he quickly put the whole police department to work on the project.

  In the meantime, everyone was settling down on the sidewalks all over our village, temporarily abandoning the covered wagons and baby carriages and hand carts and bicycles in the middle of the street. Through the open door of the pharmacy next door, I heard the radio play a song. Zarah Leander again. Davon geht die Welt nicht unter [That won’t make the world go down], she sang. How ironic!

  Mrs. Albrecht promised to bring some food to those outside her shop; and I saw my mother talking to the woman with the scarf and her two little girls. As luck would have it, the lady came from Schweidnitz, the very place in Silesia where one set of my grandparents had grown up before they came to Berlin and gave birth to my mother. I heard them talk about the Silesian town where my mother had gone on vacation decades ago, visiting all sorts of aunts, uncles, and cousins of hers. And I heard the lady with the scarf talk of her two-month trek, of Shturmovik fighters, with red stars painted on their sides, appearing out of nowhere, their cannons reaching out to kill and kill, only to fly off, turn, come back, and kill again. I heard them talk of bullets flying into fields, if they were lucky; but into men, women, children and animals, if they were not, leaving behind screams and splintered wood and thrashing bodies of men and beasts, dying side by side. I heard them talk of disemboweled horses, left right there where life ran out or, perhaps, rolled into the nearest ditch and barely covered with a bit of soil. I listened to her story and thought of Dieter, but I felt nothing, nothing at all.

  My eyes wandered down the street, where two foals were muzzling up against their mothers, and I caught the smell of horse dung, just as I always had outside the pub back home. And I noticed how thin the horses were, I could see all their ribs, and I also saw the bloodstains where they stood with their feet worn raw from unshod hooves. Mr. Albrecht saw it, too; he called the blacksmith to have a look. Mr. Albrecht also got a pail and took care of a cow that was mooing in agony from swollen udders, because those who should have milked her had somehow disappeared.

  “Perhaps the cow’s owners had gone down the road to church,” I thought, “it being Sunday and all.” Still, the cow wanted to be milked; it didn’t know it was Sunday and it didn’t have to go to church anyway.

  My mind was in a daze. I pictured the scene at the church down the street where people just now would be leaving their seats, aisle by aisle, go to the front, kneel on the steps of the altar, open their mouth to catch a wafer, and take a sip from the silver goblet–“the chalice of salvation,” as Pastor Jahn had called it. And in-between sips, I pictured him cleaning the rim of the goblet with a white handkerchief and I thought how unsanitary it all was and that I should point it out to Pastor Jahn to make him mad. A dog barked, all those images disappeared, and I was back in the street. But, as I said, I felt nothing, nothing at all, not even when the blacksmith came and took care of the horse and jokingly offered to nail a horseshoe to my naked foot.

  I saw my mother fill a thermos with hot milk for children, stuff rucksacks with food for their mothers, place feedbags full of oats around horses’ necks, water them at a nearby trough. I fed an apple to a foal. I heard little children whimper and I wondered whether their mothers were sleeping, lying unconscious, or already dead?

  -----

  As in a dream, I wandered off to Mr. Kalitz to get an update on the news. To be well informed, clearly, was getting to be a matter of survival–that much I knew–and the news we received from the BBC was not good:

  1945

  March 3

  Western Allies take Cologne

  March 8

  U.S. forces cross the Rhine at Remagen

  March 24

  Russians under Marshal Georgi Zhukov break through Oder defenses, smash their way beyond Küstrin, stand 52 kilometers from Berlin

  March 30

  Russians take Danzig, capture 10,000 prisoners, 45 submarines

  Royal Air Force Lancasters and Halifaxes, along with U.S. Flying Fortresses and Liberators, are bombing Berlin for 32nd night in a row

  On the way home, I ran into Aunt Rachel. She told me I could go to her cellar and take all the apples I wanted. The East Prussians were stealing her blind as it was. And one family, she said, had infested her house with bedbugs. She’d have to call the exterminator. I should tell my mother we were lucky to have moved out.

  When I got to Aunt Rachel’s house, I ran into Martin and his sister Simone. They were living in the mahogany room and were the cause of the bedbug scare. I knew Martin from school; he had been placed in my class, but his sister was much too young and still at home. I liked Martin. Like me, he was interested in everything and he always had good information. That day was no exception. He had been studying French in East Prussia–they called it “the language of Frederick the Great”–and when I ran into him, he had just looked through his dictionary to find the French word for bed bug. He wrote it down for me; punaise it said, but Martin said that punaise could also be a thumb tack. I loved to be educated like that.

  I also loved the political posters Martin had collected over the years. He was just like me! One of them was over two years old and had been posted in Tarnow, a city in southeastern Poland. His daddy had sent it to him and I made a copy of it, which I still have today. What a chilling reminder it was of what was happening in lots of places at the time and what had probably happened to Mrs. Nussbaum, my mother’s friend in Berlin:

  ANNOUNCEMENT!

  In order to carry out the expulsion of Jews as ordered by the SS and the Krakow police, the following is announced:

  1) The expulsion of Jews begins on September 10, 1942.

  2) Every Pole who by his actions in any way endangers this expulsion, makes it more difficult, or helps others to do so, will be punished most severely.

  3) Every Pole who harbors or hides a Jew during or after the expulsion will be shot.

  4) All entry permits to the Jewish residential area are invalid as of the date of this announcement. Whoever enters the ghetto nevertheless will be punished most severely and may well be shot.

  5) Whoever, directly or indirectly, buys possessions of Jews, receives them as gifts, or acquires them in other ways, will be punished most severely. Every Pole who is in possession of items belonging to Jews is required to report such possession at once to the security police in Tarnow; otherwise he can count on the most severe punishment for plundering.

  6) During the transport of Jews from the assembly point to the railroad station it is forbidden to set foot on the following areas: Lemberg Street, Ho
lz Square, Bernadiner Street, Old Market, Narutowicza Street, Kommandantur Street, Sport Square at the Railroad Station. The inhabitants of the aforesaid streets and squares are ordered to lock all doors and windows when the group in question is approaching and are not to observe the march in any way. Offences against these orders will be punished.

  Tarnow, September 9, 1942

  Dr. Pernutz, District Captain

  And there was another poster of more recent origin. It came from Martin’s home town and urged East Prussians to join the People’s Storm. Martin said I could take it home and read it there.

  -----

  The flow of refugees never stopped. Day in and day out, the scenes were the same, but life had to go on. We still had school. My battle with Pastor Jahn continued as well. I remember the day I asked him about the deluge thing.

  “From where did Noah get all the animals?” I asked, looking as innocent as I possibly could. “So many of them live in different lands, even on different continents. How could he catch them all? Did he travel a lot?”

  “Did he take bed bugs, too?” I added.

  Pastor Jahn was trying his best to ignore me.

  “How does one catch a squirrel?” I asked.

  “Climb a tree and act like a nut!” I said, not waiting for an answer, and the whole class burst out in laughter.

  Predictably, Pastor Jahn came after me with the Yellow Uncle, but I was saved by the bell. Dr. Dietrich was calling a special meeting of the People’s Storm, right then and there, in the big auditorium.

  -----