My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  “Our subject today,” Dr. Dietrich said, “is Werewolves. Many of us will soon be called upon to join a movement codenamed Der Werwolf. It is similar to the People’s Storm, yet differs from it in significant ways. It is similar in purpose, being set up for one thing only: to fight our enemies. The movement is different in the sense that its work is to be carried out behind enemy lines, which requires the utmost secrecy. The film will explain.”

  Down came the window shades and the big white screen, and the projector was rolled into place. “The film you are about to see,” a voice said in the dark, “is based on a novel by Hermann Löns, which tells the story of the Thirty Years’ War from 1618-1648. Although the film deals with the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in a time long ago, the essence of its story speaks directly to us: By setting up a secret resistance movement, a people can continue to fight an enemy even after an apparent defeat and that may well become our task as well.”

  “By becoming werewolves and dedicating yourselves to duty and self-denial,” Dr. Dietrich said after we had seen the film, “you can prove your loyalty to your Führer and your country. And in the process, you will learn to exhibit the character traits of that great man whose portrait hangs on the wall to your left, Frederick the Great. You will learn to be tough on the outside, but, like that great Prussian King, a werewolf can be soft on the inside. It is no accident that Frederick the Great, the great warrior, also played the flute and wrote verses and befriended Voltaire, the great philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment.”

  Having thus enlightened us, Dr. Dietrich turned to practical matters. His secretary rolled in an exhibit of werewolf equipment, which each of us was to receive when the time was ripe. As it turned out, a werewolf’s gear included five items:

  1) a silencer pistol

  2) a raincoat lined with explosive

  3) cans of oxtail soup packed with plastic explosives

  4) a few sheets of edible rice paper to send messages

  5) suicide pills “to escape the strain of interrogation and the inducement to commit treason”

  However, Dr. Dietrich explained, once received–and the time wasn’t ripe yet–all of these items were to buried in a secret spot and we were to go about our business as if nothing had happened. Not even our parents could know. Further practical training was to follow on the next day.

  -----

  On that day, as promised, all the werewolves received a shovel and were marched to the edge of our village. There was a faint drone of bombers way up in the sky, but nobody seemed to notice them.

  “At every road leading into this village,” Dr. Dietrich explained, “we are going to dig a big hole, large enough to swallow a tank. The enemy’s main strength at the moment is tanks. If we stop the tanks, we stop the enemy.”

  Everyone began to dig, but I didn’t understand. Did tanks have to drive on the road? Nobody else seemed to ask that question.

  The digging was tiring, because we kept running into rocks and the roots of trees near the road. We stopped digging when the big men came with wagonloads of logs, which they pulled though narrow gates they had built on the sides of the road, stacking one log on top of the other and thereby building a wall. But Captain Werther didn’t like it when he saw us malingering.

  “Are you tired and hungry, little grandmothers?” he asked. “Get to work! I’ll tell you when you are tired and hungry!”

  It was just about then that a truckload of soldiers from the POW camp came by. Ironically, they bypassed the tank trap by driving on the grass. An officer jumped out and inspected the work-in-progress. Then he had some kind of argument with Dr. Dietrich and Captain Werther.

  “No one ever consults army commanders about the placements of these things,” I heard him say. “In fact, in the entire war, I have never seen a tank trap impede a tank attack.”

  That made sense to me, and when no one was looking, I sneaked home. I sat on my bed and, before my mother could throw it away, I carefully read the long poster Martin had given me. My eyes kept returning to one section, which frightened me:

  Men of the East Prussian People’s Storm!

  In this province, from now on, every village will become a citadel and every city a fortress.

  You, men of the People’s Storm, have dug the trenches and have built the tank barriers.

  There, where you have built, you will also fight with your weapon, and each one of you knows

  the place at which he will stand and fight with his machine gun, with his anti-tank grenade.

  Forward!

  No one retreats here

  Here we fight for our homeland, for Prussia!

  Here we fight for Germany and our National Socialist Revolution!

  Long live the Führer!

  Your District Leader

  Erich Koch

  I didn’t want to fight, but that, it seemed, was precisely what Dr. Dietrich was preparing us to do. Unfortunately, I couldn’t very well ask my mother about the whole thing. I knew she would instantly burn up the poster, but I needed it for further study. So I rolled it up, put a rubber band around it, and stashed it under the bed. I also looked for my Valerian drops, but my mother had hidden them.

  akg-images, London, United Kingdom

  Refugee column near the end of World War II

  26. Thunder

  [April 1945]

  In the week following our werewolf work, my mother found the East Prussian poster I had brought home and it made her livid.

  “That guy is ranting and raving, just like Adolf,” she said angrily, crumpling up the poster and tossing it on the floor. “He’s positively insane! Don’t give it another thought, Hansel. They can dig all the trenches they want, but I will not let them drag us into any fighting.”

  “Could I have some Valerian drops?” I asked.

  Just then, Helmut started crying and Radio Germany was issuing another urgent appeal. This time, a werewolf was talking, asking everyone to join the group and to do so now.

  “Every Bolshevik, every Englishman, every American on our soil must be a target for our movement,” the werewolf said. “And any German, whatever his profession or class, who puts himself at the service of the enemy and collaborates with him, will feel the effect of our avenging hand…”

  Then they broadcast a live concert by the Berlin Philharmonic, organized by Albert Speer, to prove to the world that, even on April 12, 1945, everyone in Berlin was alive and well. Thus it came to be that far away, in a small room over Ziesar’s butcher shop, we listened to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Bruckner’s 8th Symphony, and the finale of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. What we didn’t know, but learned many months later, was the fact that Hitler Youths, armed with baskets of cyanide capsules, later stood at the concert hall’s exit doors and offered their wares to the members of the audience as they left.

  Meanwhile, as Wagner’s music poured out of our radio, I looked out of the window and noticed that our street was empty. For several days now, the flow of refugees had ceased, but unbeknownst to us, something else was just about to take its place.

  On the very next morning, when Helmut and I raced each other to the windows after we woke up, we found our street jam-packed once again, this time with columns of military vehicles, most of them in various stages of serious disrepair, and jointly stretching, once again, from one end of the street to the other, as far as our eyes could see. We saw trucks filled with soldiers and weaponry, their engines now stalling, then revving, their headlights covered with black electric tape, except for narrow slits, to make for safer beams at night; we saw battered tanks lurching and bumping forward on the cobblestones, pulling cannons behind them; we saw covered wagons with big red crosses on their sides, all pulled by teams of horses; we saw fancy Mercedes convertibles displaying officers in charge; and, finally, we saw dozens upon dozens of flat-bed wagons, pulled by tractors here or oxen there, even by a lone elephant, all of them loaded and overloaded with rows of wounded soldiers, lying on thick beds o
f hay and straw–soldiers without arms or legs, with bloody stumps of knee, with chests or heads encased in white turned red to match the crosses on the side.

  “An elephant! An elephant!” Helmut cried excitedly.

  I heard thunder in the east.

  -----

  My mother made me watch out for Helmut; I watched her from above, as she ran into the street to look for my father. A soldier screamed. My mother called on me to bring him wine to ease the pain; I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see the blood, but she said “Come!” The caravan moved on, I ran, the bottle slipped, broke on the cobblestones; a soldier screamed.

  My mother ran to catch the group. One-twenty-one, the eastern front, my father’s company! She had to know.

  “Sir, can you hear? Arthur Keller. Did you know him?” my mother asked.

  “No, ma’m, never did.”

  “Where are you coming from? Where have you been?”

  “Battle of Cottbus,” someone said, “couldn’t hold the Neisse line, but the One-twenty-one was there.”

  My mother ran to catch another group. One-twenty-one, the eastern front, my father's company!

  “Sir, my dear sir, did you know Arthur, do you know what’s happened to him?”

  “God, ma’m, oh God, I do. Last saw him at Cottbus. ‘Trudchen,’ I heard him cry, and he was gone.”

  And my mother fainted in the street. A cow stepped over her, left by the refugees. The soldiers’ caravan moved on.

  I heard thunder in the east.

  -----

  Mrs. Albrecht put my mother on the couch of her living room and fed her peppermint tea. She also gave milk, bread and liverwurst to Helmut and me. And she told my mother not to despair.

  “It’s pandemonium out there,” she said. “These men are shell-shocked, half unconscious. They don’t know what they did or didn’t see. But we could go and talk to those they left behind in the inn down the street. It’s a field hospital now, you know.”

  And so it was. After my mother felt better, we got Mr. Albrecht to donate a few liverwursts for the hospital and also to watch Helmut, while Mrs. Albrecht, my mother, and I made a trip down the street. The Prince of Prussia was unrecognizable. A couple of ambulances were parked outside and a huge Red Cross had been painted on the front door. The lobby was filled with women who had brought water and food and mounds of fresh bandages torn from sheets. The man from the Black Eagle pharmacy was there, too, stocking a cabinet with aspirin, bandages, salves, and similar things. And a Red Cross worker was unloading boxes filled with Front Fighter Packages. I read the label. Each package contained one Kommisbrot [a rock-hard army loaf of bread], ¼ liter of schnapps, a small cake, selected sweets, and a bar of chocolate.

  But our attention was quickly drawn to the rest of the inn. Every room and every corridor was filled with wounded soldiers, most of them lying on blankets spread out on the floor. We saw men with hollow cheeks, unshaven and unwashed, greasy and covered with sweat, some of them squatting next to piles of bloody pads of gauze, surrounded by squadrons of flies circling above them, walking on their faces and hands and feet and, finally, landing on their bandages and feeding on the clotted blood seeping through. We saw drawn faces lost deep in weariness, perhaps past all feeling, some mute and oblivious to others, some staring at us or groaning and wailing and imploring, some talking to themselves, others calling out the names of those who might help if they were only there. We saw men writhing in pain or retching or wandering through the corridors, all dazed, and unbelieving that this is what had happened to the three great armies of the east.

  I felt someone’s eyes on me and saw a man, still bloody and dressed in his rancid wool uniform, his hands reaching out for me, gripping. I shrank back in horror, but I heard him ask for my mother.

  “You were looking for Arthur,” he said to her in a hoarse voice. “I’m Leo Krell; I know him, saw you in the street. I can tell you about Cottbus.”

  My mother held his canteen, while he took a drink. Her hands were trembling; my heart was pounding. We were waiting for the bad news.

  “It was one of the worst battles ever,” he said. “The Russians had crossed the Neisse; we were trapped in that tall pine forest to the west. So they decided to have fun with us and play the Stalinorgel [Stalin’s organ]; oh how we hated that thing! It’s a new type of artillery, spewing out shells at the fastest pace you’d ever seen. They shriek and whistle and whoosh through the air and sound like an organ playing in church. But the worst of it is, they sent their shells to explode in the tops of the trees, making that deafening roar and then filling the air with deadly fragments of pine. It was bedlam on the ground.”

  He coughed and coughed, and he coughed up blood, and my mother gave him another drink.

  “Well, you see,” he continued, “Arthur was there and, at one moment, he was fine. Then came a shell, erupted right in front of us, making a bright orange flash and spewing dirt and rocks and iron fragments all around. And suddenly, there was all that smoke, making my eyes sting and choking the breath out of me, and I ran through the smoke and Arthur was still there on the other side. And that’s the last I saw of him.”

  “So he could still be alive?” my mother asked.

  “Certainly could,” Leo Krell said.

  My mother promised to come back in the morning, with lots of food, but when we did, they told us that Soldier Krell had died during the night. Perhaps, that was all for the good. We had just listened to a speech by Heinrich Himmler on the morning news. He promised “severe punishment for those who give food to retreating troops.”

  “The German soldier is obligated to stand and fight to the death,” he had said. “Only traitors retreat.”

  And Himmler had issued a new decree for those who disobeyed his order to stand fast, no matter what. “Death and Punishment for Dereliction of Duty” it was called.

  -----

  They were going to bury Leo Krell and two other soldiers right next to the church. Rather than go to school, I decided to watch Pastor Jahn in action. There were five women at the cemetery and two soldiers and the grave digger when I got there. Pastor Jahn didn’t seem to notice me, or anyone else for that matter, and he was already half-way through his sermon.

  “The dead are gone,” I heard him say, “and gone with them are their faces and voices and their minds, and all the images of the years of their short lives. Gone is the knowledge of whether they had wives or children, whether they had white handkerchiefs or not, carried pocket knives, good luck charms or Luther’s catechism, whether others liked them or hated them….

  But not all is lost. We can pray for their souls.”

  I heard ravens cursing and squirrels chirping and carrying on in the trees above the open graves. I heard the tinkling of sheep bells in a nearby field and the lowing of cows. And I heard thunder in the east as the assembly prayed in unison:

  “I believe in God the Father, Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth, and I believe in Jesum Christum, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born by the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontio Pilato, was crucified, dead and buried, descended into Hell, on the third day was resurrected from the dead, ascended into Heaven, where he sitteth at the right hand of God, the Almighty Father, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Christian Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, and an eternal life. Amen.”

  The ravens were still cursing as the grave digger flung the dirt into the open graves. I thought of the promised resurrection of the flesh, but my mind gave me images of beetles and maggots doing their work, leaving nothing but belt buckles and bones and buttons of uniforms, carrying tiny inscriptions, “God With Us.”

  Just then, right on schedule, the church bells pealed above us, sending a large flock of pigeons aloft into sky, their wings resonating like the voice of God. And I heard thunder in the east.

  And right there, at the entry to the ceme
tery, I found another bunch of leaflets of the type the Russians had been dropping every night. “Berlin Encircled!” one of them said. It talked of the overwhelming power of Soviet forces and the utter foolishness of exhausted German troops and untrained members of the People’s Storm to resist them. Another leaflet, signed by the Supreme Command of the Red Army, offered “Special Rewards for German Officers and Soldiers” who surrendered to the Red Army now. These included 1) extra food, 2) housing in a highly desirable climate, 3) choice of work, 4) rapid mail delivery to relatives in Germany, and 5) accelerated return to Germany or, if desired, to any other country at the end of the war.

  -----

  In the days that followed, my mother wouldn’t let me go to school. She was determined to keep me out of the clutches of Dr. Dietrich and his harebrained schemes, which was fine with me. That way I missed the deployment of anti-aircraft and anti-tank cannons at the eastern edge of our village, another brilliant plan by someone who could not imagine the Russians coming from the west. That way I also had time to visit Mr. Kalitz, who was equally reluctant to take up arms in the last-ditch defense of his country. Jointly, we pieced together the latest news, as broadcast by the BBC. For us, the most significant stories were these:

  The Americans stood at the Elbe near Magdeburg, some 50 kilometers to our southwest. The Russians were encircling Berlin and had taken Brandenburg, a mere 26 kilometers to our northeast, which explained the thunder I had heard for days. There were cannons in the east!

  ----

  Each day, we made a list of newsworthy items to take to my mother; one of them read like this:

  1945

  April 11

  U. S. troops reach the Elbe at Magdeburg

  April 13

  American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, is dead

  Russian troops take Vienna

  Russian forces cross Oder River on wide front, begin Battle for Berlin