by Heinz Kohler
“Even the water in wells underground?” I asked.
“Even the water under the ground,” he said.
“But once all that water is in the air,” I protested, “won’t the air be saturated and it’ll all rain right back to the ground?”
“More about that next time,” he said. “Time’s up for today.”
On the way home from school, I was worried. I kept thinking of Mr. Wolf’s chain reaction. What about land-locked lakes, I thought, or the snow and ice on the North and South poles? And I kept thinking of the inevitable flood of rain. I even thought someone might have had the Bomb at Noah’s time and caused the deluge.
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By the time I got to the Town Hall, I could see all the jeeps in front of our house. A lot of Russian MPs milled about; and I wished they’d handle their damn submachine guns more carefully. Someone could get killed. Mrs. Albrecht wailed, as usual.
“Why do they do this to us? Why do they do this to us?” she moaned.
The Russians, I learned, had dug up their son’s grave and were taking him away.
Upstairs, the news was only slightly better. There was a letter from my father and another one from Aunt Martel. My father was writing from Brandenburg. He had been released by the British, but rearrested by the Russians during quarantine. Unlike Werner Albrecht, who had been in Italy, or Uncle Eddy, who had spent the war in France, the Russians were investigating carefully anyone who had been at the eastern front. It might take months, my father said. My mother was crying.
Aunt Martel was still living in the cellar, but she was now in the American sector of Berlin. No more Russians to contend with. She sent a picture of her street to prove the point.
akg-images, London, United Kingdom
A Berlin street scene after the 1945 division into four sectors of occupation.
34. Bread Winners
[October 1945 – February 1946]
In the fall of 1945, at just about the time we all went back to school, we learned what it meant to be hungry. That seems odd, given that we were living in the countryside and it was harvest time, but it makes sense once you think about it. For one thing, many farmers hadn’t plowed or seeded their fields in the spring because of the chaos that accompanied the last months of the war. Many farmers had been too busy dealing with refugees, building tank traps, and attending werewolf meetings. In addition, fields that had been prepared were often devastated by the retreating and conquering armies that flowed across them like a deluge. Finally, and more recently, crops that had made it to harvest time were often confiscated by the Russians. As a result, food stores had emptied out and soon there was nothing left to sell. The baker didn’t have flour to bake anything. The grocery store had exactly three items when I last checked; I bought them all: some chunks of suet, a bag of flour crawling with maggots, and a single can of salt herrings.
Theoretically, and despite the daily foraging by the Russians, farmers had lots of things to eat, given their private gardens filled with fruits and vegetables and their barnyards full of chickens and geese and cows and pigs. And they had sheep, too, so many sheep! Indeed, Helmut and I had made a habit of watching the village shepherd and his trusty little border collie, walking from farm to farm every morning at sunrise, gathering up three sheep at one gate, twelve at the next, seven more across the street, and so on, and finally moving an army of hundreds of wooly beasts down School Street to the meadows for the day. What fascinated us even more was their return trip at dusk. Somehow, that little dog saw to it that precisely the right sheep were deposited at their respective homes. They all looked alike to us; how did the little black-and-white creature manage to do it?
But I am rambling here. The point is that we were rapidly running out of things to eat and my mother couldn’t very well go out to look for food at the farms because of what the Russians did to women. I offered to become the bread winner, and I soon discovered numerous ways of doing my job.
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Often after school, I sat on the steps to the butcher’s shop. That was all right, I was in nobody’s way, for that store was empty as well. Mr. Albrecht rarely sold anything these days, except cow udders and lungs which the Russians didn’t like. Once he even sold horse meat; we always snapped up whatever we could. Horse meat was weird; even when cooked, it smelled like a horse.
As I said, I sat on the steps and soon I was surrounded by farmers’ kids, which meant it was time to hold my daily auction. I hid my postage stamps in a little book and crouched on my knees. My customers gathered around me, with eggs in their hands. Helmut leaned out the window above us. I put a first stamp on the step, a huge, yellow one from Finland, and said: “Anyone?” Twelve greedy eyes stared at the stamp, but there were no takers. I placed a second stamp next to the yellow one, making sure no one could see the others in my book. “Anyone?” Klaus said: “A deal,” and two stamps changed hands for an egg. At the end of my auction, I said: “Same place, same time tomorrow,” and Helmut turned to our mother and yelled: “He’s got six.”
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Later in the afternoons, I went outside the village, pulling my wagon. I liked to stay on the roads, because they were lined with apple trees, plum trees, and bushes of elderberry. The trees on different roads belonged to different farmers and the habit of planting them along all the roads rather than in an orchard, I was told, had been introduced way back in Napoleon’s time when he had swept across Germany on his way to Russia. Usually, to avoid detection, I went a kilometer out of town, filled up the wagon with fruit, and covered it with something innocuous, like a layer of chestnuts or pinecones or some brush and straw. But this was dangerous.
Sometimes, farmers chased me with big dogs. At another time, former Polish POWs, who were still hanging around the area, caught up with me. They looked at all German boys as embryo SS and checked in my armpit for the tell-tale SS tattoo. Then they made me stick up my arms and searched my pockets. They found my little gold coin with the red ladybug on top that Dieter had given me for good luck, way back in Berlin. They hurled it into the gravel pit. They also found my collapsible knife and held it to my throat. They took it with them when they left.
I decided to stay off the roads. I went into the fields with a hoe and dug for potatoes and carrots after the harvest; the farmers always missed a lot, and they didn’t mind. I also walked through the wheat fields when the farmers were done; they said it was alright to glean. But I didn’t like gathering the wheat, because my wooden clogs kept falling off–I didn’t know how to attach the makeshift straps–and the stubbles cut my feet. Luckily, my mother and Aunt Liesel did the threshing when I got home.
Once I brought home a lot of fish. It was a Sunday and I had taken the half-shell of a large bomb I had found and gone canoeing in it down the brook that flowed between the cloister and the castle. A group of Russian soldiers sat at the point where the brook flowed into the castle pond. They had their guns ready and shot the last stork just when it sailed over the top of the pine trees. That was sad; I had so liked the stork. I actually cried, which was weird because of all the bad things that had happened to me when I hadn’t felt a thing. The soldiers wanted my watch, but I didn’t have one.
"Uri, Uri,” they said.
Then they tossed hand grenades into the pond and made me gather up the dead fish with my canoe. They let me have a dozen.
“Karasho, kamerad! Karasho!” they said. I already knew what it meant. “Good, comrade! Good!”
There was a surprise for me when I got home. My mother had made false liverwurst, a mixture of grits and marjoram. Aunt Liesel had baked a cake with false coffee grounds, topped with marmalade made of red beets. She had also made tea from apple peels. More importantly, she had found all kinds of new postage stamps for me at the post office. Some of them were old Hitler stamps, but the words “Destroyer of Germany” were printed across Hitler’s face. The new stamps showed houses under construction and farmers plowing at sunrise.
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Just
before winter came, I went into the forest to gather up the beechnuts that the squirrels hadn’t gotten first. At the Town Hall, one could exchange 50 pounds of them for a certificate promising 1 pound of margarine. It took me days to get it, but I did and that was my Christmas present for my mother. She was very happy.
I also picked up wagonloads of elderberries, which my mother pressed to make juice. I remember us once drinking a whole pitcher full of the juice; it looked just like red wine and was delicious. The rest of that meal was not so great. I had stored the potatoes and carrots in the cellar under a pile of straw, just as Mr. Albrecht had told me, but the frost got to them anyway. That gave the potatoes a sickeningly sweet taste after being boiled, while the frozen carrots turned to mush after they thawed. But we ate it all. In those days, even Helmut ate every last drop of the soups my mother made; we didn’t have to bribe him with visions of flowers or fairytale characters waiting at the bottom of an empty bowl.
Helmut and I also ate all the vitamin pills that my mother had gotten from the pharmacy next door. We thought they were candy and we both got very sick and red in the face.
One night in early December, Mr. Kalitz came and told us about an American truck that had gone off the Autobahn and burned. I went with him to investigate and we found it loaded with big wheels of charcoal. Mr. Kalitz took a knife, cut the edges away, and turned up a treasure of soft, melted cheese. We filled my wagon to carry home all we could of the charcoal-cheese. True enough, in a few days, the maggots appeared, but my mother said the cheese was just turning into meat. We ate all of it, for we didn’t like the stomach ache from eating dried dandelions and frozen turnips. Still, we dreamed a lot of better days and sometimes we shared our thoughts. My mother had visions of candles and soap and hot water, she said, and of milk and meat, which made me sneak out and steal another sausage from the smoking chamber downstairs. As for me, I was clamoring for things one could only dream about in those days, like bananas and oranges and chocolate hussars….Just in case, I decided to send a Christmas wish list to Aunt Martel in Berlin; decades later, I found it among her affairs:
Dear Aunt Martel:
How are you? I am fine. Here are the things I would most like for Christmas:
1 loaf of white bread
1 eraser
1 pencil
notepads
any book
cookies
anything edible!!!!
Exceptions: None
Aunt Liesel wonders whether you could find her six candles.
Sorry I can’t write any more. Helmut wants to lick the envelope shut and refuses to wait any longer.
Your Hans
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It was a cold winter that year. A week before Christmas, I looked down into the backyard, which we could do from the window in our second room, and saw Mr. Albrecht swearing by the pump. He stood on a sheet of ice. Even though the pump was packed in a thick coat of straw, it wouldn’t yield any water. I was glad I had filled up our pails the day before. Even in school, the ink in our desks had been solid for a week. Sometimes at school my hands and feet were so cold that my fingers and toes got really white and then blue and numb. Putting my hands in my pockets and stamping my feet didn’t always help. Then I had to run home to thaw out in a pot of warm water, which made my fingers and toes turn red. Dr. Weiss said I had Raynaud’s disease rather than frostbite, but who knows? I still have the symptoms today.
The day our pump died was also the day Aunt Martel appeared for a surprise visit. She was on one of the trains that arrived once a week filled with city folk looking for food. There was a sign at the railroad station warning “black market transactions strictly forbidden,” but nobody paid any attention to that. Hordes of people with rucksacks and suitcases would emerge from the train and walk from farm to farm, offering to trade city possessions for food of any kind. I saw people trading dishes and dolls and clothing and even Christmas tree ornaments for eggs, flour, and potatoes, only to disappear on the next train, loaded down like mules.
“Before long,” Mr. Kalitz said, “even the cows in the barn will live on Oriental carpets.”
In any case, Aunt Martel emerged from one of those crowded trains, having come straight from Berlin, and that’s why Aunt Martel, Aunt Liesel, and Uncle Herbert joined my mother, Helmut, and me for Christmas dinner that year. It turned out to be a strange gathering, indeed. For one thing, the food was less than presentable. There was flour soup, made with water, but filled with chunks of sausage I had stolen from the Russians downstairs. We also had lots of potatoes, frozen one and all, and then plenty of turnip mush. Actually, it wasn’t so bad; what happened next was another matter.
Uncle Herbert was puffing on his pipe, smoking dried rose petals, as was common in those days, when Aunt Martel asked him whether he was sorry yet. Showing total indifference to the question, he changed the subject to the pamphlets the Russians kept distributing around town.
“Those concentration camps,” he said, “I am certain they never existed,” Uncle Herbert said. “Except for Siberia, of course,” he added, “which is where the Russians must have taken all those disgusting pictures.”
That’s when my mother took the pitcher of cold water from the table and emptied all of it over Uncle Herbert’s head.
The rest of the day didn’t go much better. After Aunt Liesel and Uncle Herbert had left, we all went to hear Uncle Eddy’s Christmas sermon, which turned out to be a mistake. Despite the fact that it was Christmas, his subject was the Seventh Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Steal.
“What does that mean?” Uncle Eddy thundered from the pulpit. And he answered his own question:
“We shall so fear and love God that we don’t abscond with our neighbor’s money or possessions, nor acquire them in exchange for worthless goods or by engaging in unfair trades, but we should always take care of, improve, and protect our neighbor’s possessions and livelihood.”
“There’s been a lot of thievery in this village lately,” Uncle Eddy continued, “and it has to stop. Hunger is no excuse! You must have faith in the Lord, for it is written: ‘Ask and you shall receive.’ Pray to the Lord and God, our merciful Father, will provide.”
My mother didn’t like the sermon. She had a big fight with Uncle Eddy afterwards. He said he couldn’t invite us to the cloister because Aunt Rachel was ill and, more importantly, those East Prussians had stolen everything they owned. And my mother said something about Uncle Eddy being hypocritical as well as insane, which he didn’t like. But I was happy enough. Aunt Martel had brought me pencils and notepads and wonderful pictures of postwar Berlin. And she had also brought me a little suitcase full of old money from the 1920’s, the days of the hyperinflation, when it cost thousands and later millions of marks just to buy a loaf of bread. In those days, Aunt Martel said, one had to spend one’s pay on the way home from work because prices would double by the next day. In any case, I loved the idea of having that old money with all those zeros on each bill. I just knew it would enable me to engage in all sorts of wonderful, unfair trades with the farmer boys. But I didn’t always trade my wares for food. Once I traded a paper bill from the 1920’s for a drawing of Ziesar way back in 1710. I still have it today.
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In early 1946, we had an even bigger surprise than Aunt Martel’s visit: My father came home! Suddenly and unannounced, there he was. I found him in my mother’s arms when I came home from school and it felt strange, just as it had some years ago at the railroad station in Berlin. I saw a tall, thin man in an army uniform, but all the insignia were missing. Despite the time of year, he was tanned, suggesting that he had spent a lot of time outside. I also noticed a big scar on his forehead. And I saw his belt buckle. It still said “God With Us.”
“Hansel,” he said, “how big you are!”
But it felt awkward to hug him. It took quite some time for that feeling to subside. It helped that we did some projects together.
First, my father agreed to play the organ in churc
h and that turned out to be fun. The giant pipe organ was played from a spot way above the congregation and my father, it turned out, was a master at it. He could play both the regular keyboard with his hands and a second one with his feet at the same time, but in order to do it, he needed help. The giant instrument needed the support of a pair of bellows, which were hidden in the church tower behind the pipes. I was just the right man to do the job and, as an added bonus, it kept me from sitting among the congregation down below. All I had to do was jump on a giant lever, grasp a wooden bar above my head with my hands, and push my body down towards the floor. That would fill the bellows with air and then, as it slowly escaped, I was automatically pushed up again towards the ceiling, where I could repeat the procedure.
Indeed, there was another bonus still: Using a long rope, I could ring the church bells before the service and also afterwards, which I did with great fervor and joy, each time sending hundreds of pigeons into the air. And during the sermon, when the organ had to be quiet, my father and I practiced translating Uncle Eddy’s sermon into op-language, which was created by taking any sentence and inserting the syllable op in front of every vowel. Thus “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” turned into “Opin thope nopamope opof thope Fopathoper opand thope Sopon opand thope Hopolopy Ghopost.” That was a lot of fun and I beat my father every time when we tried to see who could finish first.
We had a second fun project, too. This one involved getting firewood from the forest. I selected two of the sharpest axes from Mr. Albrecht’s barn and loaded them into my wagon. My father said I could climb into the wagon, too, and he pulled me all the way, pretending to be a horse. At the forest, I challenged him to a race, all the way to the big oak and back. He won.
He challenged me to climb a tree. He was in the top of it before I could even figure out how to begin. But cutting down a 15 centimeter tree was the biggest contest of them all. I took eleven strokes, and my father said I could be proud. He did it in five strokes. He was very strong. He let me feel his muscles.