by Heinz Kohler
“Just the opposite of your dress,” I said. “It’s white with red dots,” and I looked at the curves of her breasts and wondered how soft she was.
The ground was soft with moss and the pines were tall. My feet were wet from the dew on the grass and the slightest nudge of some overhanging branch brought down a shower of raindrops on both of us. There had been thunderstorms last night.
“I love this place in the morning,” she said, “and wow! There are hundreds of them!”
I didn’t see a thing, but she showed me the bumps in the moss that were hiding the mushrooms.
“You just have to read the signs,” she said. “They always leave a subtle trail.”
She showed me green mushrooms, too, and dark brown ones with thick white stems. I found beige ones with yellow bottoms that turned blue when I touched them.
“That reminds me,” she said, “do you know the test? Tell your Mama to put a peeled onion in the pot when she boils the mushrooms. If the onion doesn’t turn blue, you can safely eat the mushrooms.”
On the way home, we sat in the meadow carpeted with clover and I brought her a bunch of red poppies. She read a poem to me from a little blue book, by Schiller, and she sang a sad song. Later, we crossed the big highway to get back to the village. A column of Russian troops was going west, with tanks, trucks, and motorcycles. And suddenly, the motorcycles followed us on the dirt road in a big cloud of dust and they surrounded us. I saw their slit eyes when the Mongols pointed their guns at us, and they motioned me to lie down on the grass next to the road, on my back, arms spread out, like Jesus on the cross. They pointed a pistol at Jutta. Three of them dragged her out of sight, but I could hear them yell and her cry. One soldier decided to rest the barrel of his rifle at the center of my forehead. I saw him grin, I felt the cold metal, and I froze.
Time stood still. I closed my eyes to escape that dreadful grin; I felt a colony of ants meandering across my feet. I heard crows fretting and shrieking in the branches of pine trees above, complaining about us who had disturbed their lives.
I almost prayed, but caught myself in time. There was no use in praying for anything at all. And I clearly heard the cuckoo clock ticking in my head–ticking away the last seconds of my life. If I lived at all, I was sure, I would be insane.
I felt so numb, but then I noticed the silence after the motorcycles had roared away. Ever so slowly my feelings returned, like the morning light after a long night, when the darkness grows transparent, just a bit, when shapes appear and then take on color, when silence yields to the twittering of birds, when suddenly the world is back again, fresh and new. I was surprised to be there.
I went to look for Jutta. She was kneeling next to a tree, sobbing softly. I touched her, and I kissed her on the forehead. We held one another and cried.
We took a shortcut across the fields to the castle, but that was a mistake as well. In a thicket of blackberry bushes, almost hidden among the brambles, we made a gruesome find. We discovered a skull, still attached to a collection of bones and rags and buttons and a rusted rifle, all of which was once a man in uniform. I decided never to go outside the village again.
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The next day, from our window above the butcher shop, I spied Jutta walking down the street, each arm linked with a Russian. They sat down in front of the Kommandatura and someone played an accordion. The Russkaya. Jutta was giggling, and I couldn’t understand. Nothing in this world made any sense.
I also saw Werner Albrecht crossing the street, but I didn’t know then that I would never see him again. The next morning, they found him in the alley next to the butcher shop. Like old Mr. Senf, the baker, not so long ago, he had a knife in his heart.
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My mother said we should be grateful for being alive after all the terrible things that had happened around us in the past years. And soon my father would be back and all would be well again! She took us to church that Sunday to hear Uncle Eddy’s first sermon after his return. I didn’t like the idea. Being in the church gave me a headache and made me feel dizzy. I insisted on sitting way in the back, near the open door so I could escape if I had to.
“Oh thou Almighty God, merciful Father!” Uncle Eddy said. “I am but a poor, miserable, and sinful man, and I confess before thee all my sins and misdeeds through which I have ever angered you and for which I have well deserved your eternal punishment. But for all these sins and misdeeds I am truly sorry, and I repent them thoroughly, and I implore you in your bottomless mercy and because of the holy, innocent, and bitter suffering and death of your beloved son, Jesu Christi, that you may be merciful and accepting of me, poor and sinful wretch of a man that I am.”
I felt sick. My mother said I could stand outside the church door for a bit. When I dared return, Uncle Eddy was preaching from a pulpit high above the congregation. I counted the angels decorating the underside of the pulpit, all carved in wood. Some of them were blowing trumpets.
Then I tried to occupy my mind by translating Uncle Eddy’s words into Pig Latin, moving the first letter of each word from the front to the back and adding an “a.” Thus, “poor and sinful wretch of a man” turned into “oorpa ndaa infulsa retchwa foa aa anma.” But I couldn’t keep up with the sermon; Uncle Eddy’s voice kept interrupting my thoughts.
“Be not wise in your own conceits,” Uncle Eddy said. “Thus we read in Romans, Chapter 12: Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath, for it is written: Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Then the organ played and everyone joined to sing a hymn:
“Now thank we all our God,
With heart, and hands, and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom the world rejoices….”
33. Chain Reactions
[September 1945]
They buried Werner Albrecht on the last day of World War II. To be sure, at the time, I didn’t know about the war in the Pacific having ended, but I did find out some two weeks later when they put up another installment of news on the Town Hall bulletin board. I wrote it all down on my trusty notepad so I could show it to my mother.
1945
August 6
Hitler’s V-3 has become a reality! A new kind of weapon, called the atomic bomb, was dropped on Japan today by an American B-29 Superfortress, theEnola Gay.
The power of the bomb was equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT that would normally be carried by 2,000 B-29s. The blast wiped out Hiroshima, population 318,000, and created a blinding flash many times as brilliant as the midday sun. A massive cloud boiled up to over 13,000 meters. On the ground, the bomb vaporized even steel towers, and a heavy pressure wave, accompanied by a tremendous sustained roar, knocked down people over 8 kilometers away.
August 9
A second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, population 253,000
The Soviet Union declares war on Japan, occupies Manchuria
August 15
Japan surrenders, on Emperor Hirohito’s order
The secret of radar–short for radio detection and ranging–is announced:
The new technology sees through the heaviest fog and the blackest night and was responsible for Allied successes in fighting German planes and submarines.
September 2
Japan signs rigid surrender terms, on the famed superdreadnought Missouri, in Tokyo Bay. Present are General Douglas MacArthur and Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, signing for the government, and General Yoshijiro Umezu, signing for the Imperial General Staff.
War Minister Korechila Anami commits suicide, citing his responsibility for the first defeat in 2,600 years of Japanese history
That wa
s interesting news, indeed, and, as I said, I wrote it all down in the middle of September, which happened to be the day on which we all went back to school for the first time in over five months.
So far as our school was concerned, things had certainly changed! Dr. Dietrich, of course, was gone, having been hanged at the Town Hall way back in May after his foolish werewolf attack. And most of the other teachers we once knew were gone as well. Miss Mahler was still there and she had become principal. Pastor Jahn was still there, but he was to teach Geography. All the other teachers were new, having been imported from Russia, one and all. Unlike other teachers we had ever met, the new ones didn’t have university degrees and were supposed to be “learning by doing,” which is why they were called Newteachers, which itself was a new word that Miss Mahler introduced as a deliberate merger of adjective and noun.
We met in the big auditorium to learn other things as well. For one thing, Miss Mahler said, there was going to be no more corporal punishment. It was a disgusting Nazi habit and the Russians forbade it. In addition, we were all going to repeat the grade we left way back last spring, having lost so much time since. For me that meant starting the 7th grade for the third time, having once done so in January 1944 in Berlin and then again in September of 1944 in Ziesar.
There was a new line-up of subjects. Religion, for example, was out; Russian was in. As for me, my subjects were these:
German, Russian, English, Latin.
Current Affairs, History, Geography.
Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics.
Drawing, Music, Sports.
In addition, Miss Mahler said, we would also be graded on Cooperation, Penmanship, and Orderliness in Textbooks and Notebooks.
We were given a whole stack of textbooks. Some were old; others were donated by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and published by the State Publishing Agency in Moscow. It was easy to spot the old books. They still had an eagle with spread wings on the front cover, along with claws resting on a swastika, although a feeble attempt had been made, with the help of black ink, to cross out these old rubber stamps. One of my books had been wrapped into an old newspaper to hide the swastika on the cover, but apparently nobody had bothered to look at what the paper said. But I did. I found a page from the November 16, 1941 edition of Das Reich, with an article by Dr. Goebbels, entitled The Jews Are Guilty. “The Jews,” it said, “will be annihilated, according to their own Law: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
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My first class that day was Geography, and I was happy that Pastor Jahn wasn’t allowed to hit me anymore. Just in case he did, I relished the thought of turning him in to Miss Mahler or even the Russians. I also figured that he had too much time on his hands, now that Uncle Eddy, the Superintendent of the Church, was back and had taken over the preaching. What I hadn’t figured on was that Pastor Jahn would be doing his own preaching in a different way.
Before all else, he had us draw a map centered on the Middle East, but reaching from Italy in the west to India in the east and Arabia in the south. In the following weeks, he had us fill in the detail, like the Sea of Galilee, also known as Lake Tiberias, lying 214 meters below sea level, and being fed and drained by the Jordan River.
“That’s where our Lord Jesus found Matthew, the despised customs officer,” Pastor Jahn said, “and made him one of his disciples. Later, somewhere between 62 and 66 A.D., Matthew wrote one of our gospels, in Hebrew.”
Likewise, we located Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome, where Markus, originally called John, Pastor Jahn said, traveled and wrote his gospel, this one in Greek. And then there was Lukas, a physician, who wrote a gospel, too, who left Antioch, Syria, to teach in Macedonia, Dalmatia, Galatia, and Italy.
Having found and labeled those places, we learned about John, a fisherman and the youngest disciple, also a gospel writer, who preached in Jerusalem and then Ephesus, Asia Minor. And there was Peter, another fisherman, infamous for denying Jesus in a moment of weakness, but famous also for great faith and courage later on, teaching everywhere from Jerusalem to Babylon and Rome, where he was crucified, hanging–at his own request–on a cross upside down.
“He didn’t think he was worthy of dying in exactly the same way as his Lord and Master,” Pastor Jahn said.
In the same sneaky fashion, he taught us about Jakobus the Elder, fisherman and brother of John, “one of the first witnesses to the resurrection” and also the first martyr, killed by sword in 42 A.D. And we learned of Thomas, who was slain by Brahmins in India, and of Bartholomew, killed in Armenia, and of Simon, who preached in Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, and Libya, and of Judas, who betrayed Jesus and died by the sword in Phoenicia, and, finally, of Paul, the carpet weaver and overeager Pharisee, who persecuted Christians in the name of Mosaic Law, only to meet Jesus on the road to Damascus, then travel to Arabia, Cyprus, Galatia, Macedonia, live in Corinth and Ephesus and, finally, in Nero’s Rome, where he died a martyr’s death.
“Just think of it,” Pastor Jahn said, “the appearance of Jesus on earth started a chain reaction that spread from a handful of disciples to some 70 apostles and through them to all the countries on your maps and, ultimately, around the globe.”
I know he said more, but I wasn’t paying attention at the time. I had been leafing through the new art book we had received for our drawing class and I came across a beautiful reproduction of Renoir’s Blond Bather, 1881. She reminded me of Jutta and I decided to cut out the page and keep it no matter what.
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Our second class that day was History, taught by Newteacher Hirsch. He decided to review the story of Adolf Hitler, beginning, as he put it, with “the grotesque 1923 Munich beer cellar putsch” right to the end of the war. He described Hitler’s “interminable speechifying, his wild gesticulations and foaming at the mouth, his shifty staring eyes and his monstrous, bloodthirsty fantasies.” He pictured Hitler as “a deranged, repulsive hoodlum representing the cesspool of humanity.” I had heard all this before, way back in Berlin, when examining Mr. Joseph’s newspapers and coming across a Communist Party ad.
Mr. Hirsch talked of Hitler’s ruthless rise to power and the early indications of what he was about: ending the freedom of the press, arranging the boycott of Jewish stores, kicking Jews out of Germany’s civil service, setting up concentration camps for political opponents, burning books, mocking organized religion (as by replacing Christmas with winter solstice ceremonies), banning labor unions, neutralizing or banning political opposition parties (Stahlhelm, Social Democrats, Communists).
Mr. Hirsch also told us about the 1935 Nuremberg Laws:
1) the Reich Citizenship Law that introduced the distinction between Aryans, called Reichsstaatsbürger (full-fledged Citizens of the National Socialist Commonwealth) and Jews, called Staatsangehörige (mere State Residents)
2) the Law to Protect German Blood and Honor that outlawed intermarriage and strongly discouraged other relations between Aryans and Jews
Mr. Hirsch reviewed the role of the SA [Sturmabteilung], known as storm troopers or brownshirts (he called them “a bunch of thugs”) and told us about June 30, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler, “in a fit of paranoia,” summoned SA leaders to Bad Wiessee, Bavaria, only to have 200 of them killed, including Ernst Röhm, the top man.
Mr. Hirsch similarly reviewed the role of the SS [Schutzstaffel], known as blackshirts; once merely a handful of Hitler’s personal guards, later expanded into “an army of precision killers” that ran the concentration camps. “Yet,” said Mr. Hirsch, “the public succumbed with hypnotic trance to the glamour of depravity. Something of a chain reaction was set loose, and the world witnessed an ecstasy of evil.” Table A, he said, says it all:
* Includes other countries and the murder of 6 million Jews in concentration camps
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Mr. Hirsch also gave us a homework assignment, an essay on Horst Wessel, the infamous SA man who was responsible for the song we always had to sing during
the Hitler years. I was lucky; Mr. Kalitz knew all about him.
“He was the son of a Lutheran pastor,” he said, “became a storm trooper early on, in 1930, loved to be in those bloody street battles in Berlin, fighting Communists. Then he fell in love with a prostitute and moved in with her. Their landlady tried to eject them for living in sin, or at least to pay double rent. They refused. She sought help from the Communists who were glad to oblige and shot him dead. Among his possessions, someone found a poem—The Flag Held High––and when Goebbels got hold of that, he had it set to music and made up a story about Wessel, making him a martyr. The rest, as they say, is history.”
Mr. Kalitz helped me a lot that year and history became one of my favorite subjects– unlike another one that I should tell you about. Our final class, on the first day of school after the war, involved Current Affairs. It was taught by Newteacher Wolf who was also slated to teach us Russian. His concern was the dropping of atomic bombs, and he managed to scare us to death in no time at all.
“It is one thing,” he said, “to drop a couple of bombs on Japan, but if anyone ever drops a whole bunch of them, maybe a dozen or so (nobody knows for sure), a critical mass of split atoms builds up and a dangerous chain reaction occurs. As a result, water begins to evaporate and that process, once started, can snuff out life all over the earth!”
That statement got my full attention; I even put aside my beautiful Renoir girl.
“What is it that would evaporate?” I asked. “Water in brooks and rivers? The whole Pacific Ocean?”
“There comes a point,” he said, “if they drop even one more atomic bomb, a chain reaction will be set into motion and every single drop of water on earth will evaporate. That will be the end of life as we know it.”