My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  He showed me how to fell a tree. I did it with just thirty strokes, but he said I would do much better than that in a few weeks. He did it in six strokes, but then we still had to cut off all the branches. None of us, of course, had any chain saw in those days, but I never felt that I was suffering from all the physical labor. Despite the pine pitch on my fingers and the splinters and skinned knees, and lots of mosquito bites, I had fun! I spent most of my life outside that summer and nothing would bring me inside except when I was on fire or bleeding and, therefore, convinced that I would die an agonizing death momentarily.

  Each noon, Russian soldiers came with a mobile field kitchen and large kettles of soup. The soup had lots of meat in it and milk and potatoes, too. I had never tasted such good food in my life! I also learned a new word. The food was cooked in a Gulaschkanone [goulash cannon], a cast-iron stove with a super-long smokestack, which made the whole arrangement look like a cannon.

  One evening, I inflated my rubber ball and played ball with the Kommandatura guards in the middle of the street. They also showed me new money that was blue and had big numbers on it. They wanted to buy my inflatable ball, but I said I would have to think it over.

  “Thinkitover, thinkitover,” they said and laughed.

  We cut wood for several weeks, and, finally, I could do a tree in ten strokes. Mr. Kalitz said I could be proud. Once he said I could take the afternoon off and go swimming in the old gravel pit. Russian soldiers were swimming there, too, and they were naked, which, incidentally, made them look a lot less dangerous. One of them showed me lots of blue money and pointed to my bathing suit. I guessed that he wanted to buy it, and I might have sold it, for we needed a radio. But I didn’t know how to take off my trunks without being naked myself. They all laughed.

  When I got home, I was glad I hadn’t made the deal. There were radios for sale in the hardware store as well, for new money only, but what had I been thinking? By then, the electricity had gone out all over town! Still, each night, my mother and I managed to play rummy despite the lack of electric light. I had made black candles with wax that Mr. Kalitz had given me, and my mother was very proud of me. She was proud for other reasons as well. Thus, I had also made myself a pair of wooden shoes, with a single leather thong across the top, like the clogs I had seen in pictures of people working in Holland’s tulip fields. And I had found an old iron in a barn that could be filled with glowing charcoal so that my mother could do her ironing.

  I did one thing, though, that my mother didn’t like. I had been looking at pamphlets the Russians had given away, which I had been hiding under my bed. The pamphlets were full of skeletons, piled high, and gas ovens and barbed wire fences.

  “Four million men, women, and children,” one of the pamphlets said, “were killed in the German extermination camp Oswiecim, also known as Auschwitz, in Poland. They were killed by gassing, shooting, starvation, poisoning, and torture. The Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.”

  My mother didn’t want me to get my nightmares back, and she also didn’t want Helmut to find such pictures in our place. She threw them all away, but that did little good. The Russians announced that the entire population aged 10 and above was to appear at the school auditorium during any evening next week to see a new film about Auschwitz. Attendance would be taken. When we went, we saw even more horror than the pamphlets had shown. My mother kept covering my eyes with her hand, but I still saw enough.

  After the film, we were offered more pamphlets about the same general subject. To my surprise, my mother took one of them. She must have been thinking of my father; I realized it when I saw the title: The Concentration Camps of the Reich Capital.

  The next day, when my mother was downstairs with Mrs. Albrecht, I took a look at the pamphlet. It featured Ravensbrück, a special camp for women, located some 80 km north of Berlin, and Sachsenhausen, where my father had been, located in the town of Oranienburg, some 30 km north of the capital. I read of Ravensbrück’s “Nacht und Nebel” [night and fog] prisoners, accused of high treason and, therefore, destined to disappear without a trace. “Return not desired,” their papers would say and that meant a death sentence, to be carried out through hunger or exposure or medical experiments or even outright shooting, while “trying to escape.”

  And with even greater interest, I read of Sachsenhausen, created in the summer of 1936, right after Heinrich Himmler became Reich Leader of the SS. At first, the pamphlet said, it was a camp mainly for German political opponents of the regime, Communist and Social Democrat. Officially, the camp was designed “to help these misdirected citizens to turn around politically and recover the work ethic.” In time, the camp also took in “biologically and racially inferior” prisoners, ranging from Jews and Slavs to Sinti and Roma Gypsies, homosexuals, and “asocial elements,” such as professional criminals. Later still, room had to be made for “special prisoners,” such as the heads of state of annexed or occupied countries, like the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, and all sorts of prominent individuals, such as Stalin’s oldest son or Martin Niemöller, the leader of the Confessional Church, or the conspirators of the 20th of July plot.

  During the war, the pamphlet said, the camp also housed forced laborers from all the occupied countries and (mostly Polish and Soviet) POWs. The prisoners of war were employed in places such as Oranienburg’s Heinkel airplane plant or Berlin’s Siemens electrical equipment factories. Others were less lucky, being put to work right at the camp, perhaps on the Schuhprüfstrecke [shoe testing range], where prisoners had to walk for days and weeks with shoes having different types of non-leather soles to test the usefulness of artificial materials for army boots. Others still had to work in the Klinkerwerk [brick works], where prisoners produced bricks for Albert Speer’s grand post-war construction projects in Berlin.

  Altogether, the pamphlet said, the camp took in 200,000 prisoners between 1936 and 1945. Of these, 30,000 died from hunger, exhaustion, sickness, cold, mistreatment, executions, medical experiments, or mass killings. In the fall 1941, for example, some 12,000 Soviet POWs were shot by an experimental “bullet-in-the-neck machine.” And in the spring of 1942, some 250 Jews were used to test an experimental “gas-them-on-the bus” project that ultimately inspired the infamous gas chamber and crematorium. On February 1, 1945, in anticipation of the Battle of Berlin, a mass killing of British and Soviet officers occurred, and on April 21, 1945, the remaining prisoners were marched out of the camp in freezing weather in the northwesterly direction of Schwerin or they were shot, if they couldn’t march.

  Moreover, the pamphlet said, since 1938, Sachsenhausen had been the administrative SS headquarters of all German concentration camps. Himmler loved the place; he called it “the most modern, up-to-date, and most expandable concentration camp of all.”

  The camp was liberated, I learned, by the Red Army on April 22, 1945, during the encirclement of Berlin.

  akg-images, London, United Kingdom

  The gate of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, like that at Auschwitz, announced:

  “Arbeit Macht Frei”

  [Work Makes You Free].

  The camp was set up “scientifically,” in the shape of a giant equal-sided triangle. This is a picture of its main roll-call area, a bare exposed stretch of ground, baking hot in summer, lashed by icy winds in winter, where thousands died.

  31. Typhus

  [July 1945]

  By the summer of 1945, if they had survived the Russian onslaught, many people began to hear from their relatives. We were no exception. I remember one of those days. Helmut and I were looking in the mirror that hung behind the door and that hadn’t been smashed by the Russians because they couldn’t see it when the door was open. We were making faces, but my mother told us to stop it.

  “If you get startled by a sudden noise, your face could freeze like that,” she said. “Do you want to look like that for the rest of your lives?”

  “But there’s not going to be a sudden noise,”
I said. “And I wouldn’t mind looking like this.”

  Then I spotted the mailman across the street. I hadn’t seen him for several months, not since March anyway. My mother said I could run out and see what was happening, and he did have mail for us, mail from Aunt Martel in Berlin. But the news wasn’t good. My mother opened the envelope ever so slowly, as if it contained something that might bite her, and then let out a cry. She covered her face with her hands, as she always did when something bad happened.

  “Oma died,” she sobbed, “last April, and we didn’t even know.”

  She let me read the letter. My grandmother had died just before the Russians got there, Aunt Martel said; the doctors thought it was stomach cancer, but what do they know? And then their house was blown to bits at the last minute as well; it was just a sooty heap now, but Aunt Martel was still living there, in the cellar. Aunt Martel said she had to wear a heavy winter coat whenever she went out, even in July. For one thing, if she left anything in the cellar, it would be stolen by the time she returned. More importantly, if she looked too feminine walking down the street…you know the Russians, she said.

  She also said that all the ruins were plastered with pieces of paper, like these:

  “Winter boots, felt-lined. Excellent condition. Will trade for children’s shoes.”

  “Any information: Anna Reese? Previously at Glogauer Strasse 33.”

  “Your future revealed! Madame Lamberti. Personalized star charts. 20 Marks.”

  “War widow, 2 children. Attractive. Excellent cook. Seeking husband. Must have apartment.”

  When I had finished reading the letter, my mother was still sobbing and I was suddenly seized by a terrible thought: Might my grandmother’s death have been my fault? I recalled the last birthday party we all had had at her place, with exactly thirteen people sitting around the big table in my grandmother’s living room and Aunt Lotte taking a pin with a big red head from her sewing kit and sticking it into the tablecloth.

  “That way, we have fourteen heads,” she had said, “and we’re safe.”

  I had known of the superstition. When there were thirteen heads around a table, one of them wouldn’t survive another year. But I had also disdained such obviously false notions; so I had removed the red pin when nobody was looking, just to prove everybody wrong. Now I was sorry, very sorry. In fact, I felt so guilty that I decided to escape my mother’s looks and hang out in the backyard.

  -----

  Downstairs, to my surprise, the Albrechts were celebrating. They were having wine and bread and a barbecue grille filled with sausages, because their son Werner had just come back from Italy. He had been quarantined at Brandenburg, they said, because of all sorts of diseases going around, including cholera, diphtheria, dysentery, scarlet fever, and even typhus.

  “He came home on the last train,” Mr. Albrecht said. “The Russians sealed off the railroad station this morning. They won’t allow trains to unload any more passengers.”

  “It’s the Russians’ own fault,” Mrs. Albrecht added. “Just look at the unsanitary conditions under which they prepare food and the way they slaughter livestock on straw by dirty roadsides! Have they never heard of germs?”

  “Lots of people haven’t,” I thought, picturing Pastor Jahn doing the communion thing and having everyone drink from the same chalice. I decided to let that go for the moment, but to check out what the Russians were doing. So I ambled over to the Town Hall. There was news; as usual, it was over a month old:

  1945

  June 5

  As a matter of international law, Germany has ceased to exist. The victorious powers have divided the former Germany into four occupation zones, to be governed by an Allied Control Council, the first members of which are General Eisenhower, General Montgomery, and Marshal Zhukov.

  Soviet Zone: Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia

  U.S. Zone: Bavaria, Hesse, Württemberg-Baden, Bremen

  British Zone: Lower Saxony, Nordrhein-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg

  French Zone: Baden, Rheinland-Palatinate, Württemberg-Hohenzollern

  The bulletin board also contained a Health Warning from Dr. med. Werner Weiss. In order to avoid infectious diseases, such as dysentery and typhus, he urged everyone to add chlorine tablets to drinking water or, if unavailable, to bring water to a rolling boil for 1 minute before drinking. Likewise, he urged us only to eat foods that have been thoroughly cooked and that are still hot and steaming. Avoid raw vegetables and fruits that cannot be peeled, he said, and note that some vegetables, like lettuce, are easily contaminated and very hard to wash well. When you eat raw fruit or vegetables that can be peeled, wash your hands and peel the food yourself. Do not eat the peelings. In a nutshell, boil it, cook it, peel it, or forget it! And wash your hands often, with plenty of soap, he concluded. But I knew we didn’t have any soap.

  While reading the warning, I also ran into Aunt Rachel. She had gotten mail as well, she said. Uncle Eddy would be home soon. He had returned from France, but was quarantined at Brandenburg. Aunt Rachel looked so different from just a few months ago. She was emaciated and coughing a lot. She said Dr. Weiss had told her she might have tuberculosis or even lung cancer. She was supposed to fend it off by drinking lots of red wine with raw eggs blended into it. That seemed strange to me, but by the time I got home, I forgot to tell my mother because of the commotion in the hallway.

  “Don’t you ever let me catch you at that again!” Mrs. Albrecht yelled at Mrs. Ebner. “Now we all have to sit in the dark for another week. Hypocrites, that’s what you are, a goddamn bunch of Catholic hypocrites! You kneel in front of that cross all night and then steal everybody’s electricity in the morning!”

  “Calm down, calm down,” Mrs. Holland said, “what’s the matter with the two of you? Had a bad night’s sleep?”

  “Found her frying eggs on the hotplate, that’s what the matter is,” Mrs. Albrecht replied. “For all I know she’s ironing her boys’ shirts as well when she’s hiding behind that door all day!”

  “I guess you have a point there,” Mrs. Holland said. “We must post a sign-up sheet. With 20 kilowatt hours per week and five families, we have four thousand watts per family. Anyone who wants to run that 500 watt hotplate can use up her share in eight hours and then sit in the dark. And anyone who wants to run a 50 watt bulb can have eighty hours of light instead. It’s really very simple.”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Mrs. Ebner said, glaring at Mrs. Albrecht. “How do we know she won’t cheat? You know she thinks she owns the place. Wouldn’t even let the boys get some pears off the tree. She watches the gooseberries like a hawk, and for all I know she’s the one who made off with the vitamin pills from the kitchen last week!”

  That’s when Mr. Albrecht and Mrs. Gronostalski joined the fight, and I decided it was time to make my move. I put on my long-sleeved shirt and slipped down to the backyard. Passing the barbecue grille, I went straight to the smoking chamber, and how I hated the way its door creaked! I pulled out the longest liverwurst I could reach, slid it up my right arm, and was back in our room before anyone could count to one hundred. For a moment at least, my mother and Helmut were very happy. We hadn’t eaten a thing in two days, except dry bread, dandelions, and thistle spinach.

  -----

  That afternoon, Mr. Kalitz came by. He helped finish building my little wagon, and we tried it out. We pulled it to the forest, cut down a fat tree and sawed up the trunk to fit the wagon. Back home, we sawed some more, using the sawing-jack. We did it together; he stood on one side, I on the other. Then I took the axe and split each block five ways so the pieces would fit into our iron stove. Mr. Kalitz laid the foundation of the wood pyramid, right next to the big dung pile Mr. Albrecht was building for his garden.

  “When it’s finished, it’ll hold enough wood for the whole winter,” Mr. Kalitz said about the pyramid, “and every piece will be dry. And if you need kindling, just go the forest and get a wagonload of pinecon
es; they work like a charm.”

  But Mrs. Albrecht was still in a bad mood, despite the fact that her son was back. She complained to my mother about letting a young boy do such hard work.

  “Child abuse,” she said. “That’s what it is, pure child abuse.”

  She didn’t know a thing. As Mr. Kalitz had said, I was strong as an ox. And I was my mother’s man. In fact, to prove the point, I went out to the wheat field and got her a huge armful of red poppies and blue cornflowers. They grew everywhere and the farmers considered them useless weeds. What did they know? My mother was very happy.

  -----

  Later that day, I went to the store to buy more flypaper. The golden strips on our ceiling were covered with black flies because we didn’t have any screens and the butcher shop below us attracted thousands of flies. I took a long time going to the store and I lingered in front of its window for almost an hour, pretending to study the pitiful wares on display. I also studied the poster that explained why electricity had to be rationed. It had something to do with Germany being split in half and all the coal being far away in the Ruhr. That didn’t make much sense to me, given that most of our generators were rusting at the railroad station. But actually, I didn’t care. I spent most of my time looking at the house across the street. I hoped for a glimpse of Helga.

  When I got back, they were still fighting in the hallway, but not about electricity. This time, my mother and Helmut were there, too. My mother said we should be given a second room because my father would come back soon.

  “Everyone else has two rooms,” my mother said to Mrs. Albrecht, “and the one across the corridor from ours would be ideal.”