My Name Was Five
Page 38
40. Escape
[September 1948 – August 1951]
In the fall of 1948, during my second high school year, Mr. Fischer offered to take me along to West Germany on one of his smuggling trips. I didn’t dare tell my parents, who would have had a stroke at the idea of my crossing what Churchill had called the Iron Curtain. I simply sent a note to the school about having caught a terrible cold and figured I would be back before the weekend. Mr. Fischer took care of the rest. He had his Quellen [sources of supply], as he liked to put it. In this case, he was referring not to his suppliers out west, but first and foremost to his friends at the People’s Police who gave us both a permit to travel to Mr. Fischer’s circus, allegedly roaming about somewhere in the Harz Mountains.
“You’ve been like a son to me this past year,” Mr. Fischer said. “It’s time for you to see the world.”
Permits in hand, we took the train to Wernigerode, a town near the border, and, looking out the train window, I suddenly recognized the Slavic origins of the names we saw. To a Russian, who calls a town gorod, Wernigerode sounds like Werner’s town, just like Leningrad is Lenin’s town and Stalingrad Stalin’s town. Even back home where my parents were, Ziesar sounded suspiciously like za ozero, the Russian words for “by the lake,” Lakeside perhaps.
We boarded a tourist bus into the Harz Mountains, pretending we were going to climb the Brocken, at 1,140 meters the tallest peak in the region. They stopped us twice, but our papers must have looked fine. I had never seen mountains before, and they were beautiful, filled with tall fir trees, moss and ferns, and brooks of pure water, cascading over streets of stone. Mr. Fischer kept on walking, right up the Brocken, and the fir trees gave way to scrubby pine.
By evening, the mountain top appeared from behind a cloud, and both turned pink and then purple. In one direction, we had a gorgeous view of altocumulus stratiformis, the small heaps of clouds arranged in layers up high, which turned into glorious colors at sunset. We went into a shack, and an old man appeared. He embraced Mr. Fischer and was introduced as an old circus pal of his. He looked just like Rübezahl, the good-natured ghost of Silesia’s mountains–tall, with a white beard and long, flowing hair. I thought he must have been 100 years old at least, perhaps 200. I also thought of Berlin and all the Rübezahl books I had read on the balcony. That night, we crossed the border, about half a kilometer from the shack. Rübezahl had told us all about the dogs and the changing of the guards. We avoided them all. It seemed easy, but in retrospect I wonder: Didn’t they have mines, as they certainly did in later years, or were we just lucky?
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West Germany was a big surprise. We took the train from Braunschweig to Hamburg, where Mr. Fischer had “business.” The train was clean, fast, and there wasn’t any black smoke. Nor were there any police checkpoints. Most of the ruins in the cities were gone. There were still empty lots, but also plenty of parks, filled with newly planted trees and fountains and flower beds. There were new houses everywhere, finished or under construction, “with the aid of the Marshall Plan” the signs said, and people wore wonderful clothes. In contrast, my legs prickled from the rough cloth of my pants, and my feet sweat inside my plastic shoes.
“Come over from the Soviet Zone?” a man said next to me; it was that obvious.
And the stores! I spent hours looking at the stores, while Mr. Fischer was hanging out with all sorts of buddies of his. They sold everything in the stores, even things we could only dream about back home–coconuts, oranges, and pineapples, soap and real sponges taken from the sea, newfangled ball point pens I had never heard about, and books; so many books about so many things.
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We had no trouble getting back to Rübezahl. It was dark at the time, but my mind was filled with the neon lights of Hamburg. The next day, we were off on the train and I wondered how we could pass all the controls on the way to Burg. I had lots of time for worry, too, because the train stood forever in the Magdeburg station waiting for the Berlin express going west. By then, all the railroad lines in the Soviet Zone had single tracks. The Russians had taken the other tracks as reparations. While we waited, I read the big sign painted on a nearby wall. I had seen it during the Nazi days even in Berlin, but the Communists were using it all the same.
GEMEINNUTZ GEHT VOR EIGENNUTZ [Community Welfare Comes Before Self-Interest], the sign said.
Naturally, that made me think of all the black market posters, the sacks of sugar inside the legs of my pants, and about the cocoa, coffee, and cigarettes that hung from my waist. But I needn’t have worried. Mr. Fischer knew what he was doing. Presently, a man in farmers’ overalls walked up to us and Mr. Fischer gave him a package, just as the Saxons came onto the platform–policemen with bright, green uniforms and the familiar Saxon drawl.
“Inspayction, inspayction,” one of them said, but for some unknown reason, they never entered our compartment.
Mr. Fischer was all smiles. He kept trying to teach me Skat, a card game everybody played, but that I never managed to understand. By the time we got to Burg, we were home free. The chief guard at the station knew Mr. Fischer and he received a package as well. In addition, there was a big commotion in front of the station house and everybody was too busy watching it. Apparently, the man running the greenhouses next to the station had been walking across the square with two pails covered with straw. An overeager policeman had stopped him and asked what he was carrying.
“Cow shit, just cow shit,” the man had said.
“Don't you fuck with me,” the policeman had answered and had parted the straw to reach to the bottom of the pail. The gardener hadn’t been lying! And that’s when we arrived on the scene. I thought the gardener would get shot on the spot. Instead, the Saxon let out a piercing yell, the German equivalent of the Russians’ favorite phrase:
“Fuck your mother in the mouth!” he said.
Everyone laughed.
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Perhaps we had been lucky going to West Germany when we did. Such excursions became next to impossible by the spring of 1949 when the political division of Germany was more or less solidified by the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East. I read about it in the Tagesspiegel [Daily Mirror], a West Berlin newspaper for which Aunt Martel had entered a gift subscription. At the time, the paper was still arriving in my mail with just a day’s delay. Reading the paper, I learned all about the founding of NATO and the determination of its 12 members to protect West Germany and West Berlin from any Soviet aggression. I learned about Israel becoming the 59th member of the United Nations and later about the ending of the Soviet blockade of Berlin after 328 days and 277,264 airlift flights. And then the western news came to an abrupt end. A curt notice from the post office informed me that enemy propaganda would henceforth be destroyed prior to delivery. In the new German Democratic Republic, I never saw the Tagesspiegel again.
All along, there was plenty of news, of course, in Neues Deutschland [New Germany], an alternative paper coming to our school from the other side of Berlin. It was filled with stories about the Molotov Plan, giving rise to the East European Council for Mutual Economic Aid that countered the wicked Marshall Plan concocted by American monopoly capitalists. And we learned about Andrei Vishinsky, the new Soviet Foreign Minister, who assured us that American and British plans for an atomic war would be thwarted by the new atomic bomb then in the possession of the USSR. That was also the time when a giant new flag came to adorn our school–the flag of our new classless society, featuring close cooperation among farm workers (symbolized by ears of wheat), industrial workers (symbolized by a hammer), and the intelligentsia (symbolized by a compass). In fact, earlier that summer, leaving my compass and math books behind, I had learned all about that cooperation, while working, once again, on Ziesar’s collective farm. This time, my schooling in honest work put me into the white-asparagus fields, where I crawled on my knees along rows that were precisely measured to be 1 kilome
ter long and that featured mounds of white sand along each row such that the crosscut of each, as my instruction sheet put it, “resembled an equal-sided triangle with 30-centimeter sides.” As the asparagus grew into the sand from the black earth below, it remained white, and when its tip peeked through the triangle’s top, I reached down with a knife and harvested another spear.
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In the fall of 1949, just after the big ado about the great new alliance between Stalin’s Russia and Mao Zedong’s China, my third high school year was interrupted briefly by the news of Aunt Rachel’s death. She had been suffering for a long time, allegedly from lung cancer, although she had never smoked a single cigarette in her life. Clearly, all that red-wine-plus-raw-eggs medicine had failed. Uncle Eddy insisted on running the service for his wife and we all had to attend. That was the first time Helmut wore a little suit, but he didn’t know how to put on the tie. I tried to help my little brother, but couldn’t do it while facing him. I had to drag him to the mirror and make him stand in front of me. While standing behind him and facing the mirror, I knotted his first tie.
As usual, Uncle Eddy’s sermon made little sense to me. But he handed out copies of it later, which I kept.
“We are saying farewell today to our beloved wife and sister Rachel,” Uncle Eddy said. “But grieve ye not, for she who lived a life of selfless devotion has merely died to the flesh. Just as surely, she has been raised to the spirit by the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound for us as well? By no means! But how can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not yield your bodies to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your bodies to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to any one as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once yielded your bodies to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield yourselves to righteousness for sanctification. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
What any of this had to do with Aunt Rachel’s death I haven’t figured out to this day.
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Later that school year, in the first half of 1950, I believe, all of our classes dealt with the theme of death as well, although there was no mention of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, and the death we were contemplating was our own. Mr. Klaus had clearly coordinated what was being taught, regardless of whether the subject was Russian, Physics, Geography, or anything else. It started in our Russian class with our reading of a lengthy article in Pravda, which reiterated the “obvious fact” that the United States was planning an atomic war to obliterate the Communist world. The “proof” given involved President Truman’s February 1 decision to produce “a hydrogen super-bomb, the world’s mightiest weapon yet.”
Dr. Kahlenberg’s physics class took it from there.
“While the old 1945 uranium-plutonium bomb splits atoms,” he said, “the new hydrogen bomb fuses atoms, which will give it a power that can be 1,000 times greater.”
But we learned more than that!
“Actually,” Dr. Kahlenberg said, “hydrogen, of atomic mass 1, cannot be made into a bomb. The new weapon should be called the triton bomb, because its basic element is tritium, a hydrogen isotope of atomic mass 3. And a triton, in turn, is the nucleus of tritium, composed of one proton and two neutrons.”
We were so glad to know.
Before long, even Dr. Hertling got involved, despite the fact that he was clearly not a Communist. We reviewed the geography of the Far East and learned that President Truman–the world’s Chief Terrorist, he always said with a wink–was sending military aid to Formosa and Korea, thereby setting the stage for the first use of the new triton bomb.
The general theme of imminent destruction continued to dominate all of our classes, even in the fall of 1950 when we returned for our last high school year. Ostensibly, Dr. Schablin’s class was dealing with Chinese and Japanese art, but got invariably sidetracked into scary stories of U.S. forces landing behind Communist lines at Inchon, Korea, and the later showdown at the Yalu River, which was seen to foreshadow a Third World War, fought with atomic weapons, and the end of us all.
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As it turned out, no one dropped a triton bomb on us, but I had an experience that was only slightly less dreadful. After an endless series of colds, our school doctor said that I must have my tonsils removed and he sent me to the local hospital for the procedure, an event that will forever remain etched in my mind. The hospital doctor did not believe in general anesthesia and assured me the whole thing would be over in no time. While I lay on my back, a nurse pried open my mouth and the doctor attacked my throat with a shot of Novocain, using the longest needle I had ever seen. It must have been 20 centimeters long; easily. Then they hung a glass jar above my head, connected it to a black rubber hose that made sucking noises, and went to work on my throat. The pain was unbelievable as the doctor used some kind of miniature saw on me–I so wished I could have turned off that awful sound–and I watched the jar above my head fill up with blood. I thought I would surely die. A triton bomb would have been a relief.
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Somehow, I survived. I didn’t bleed to death, nor die from infection. I was lucky. It felt so good to be still alive and, a couple of weeks later, I rewarded myself by asking Helga for a date. We went dancing at our special place, and it was all our own. An unlikely place it was, too: the House of German-Soviet Friendship. People stayed away from it usually, but they needn’t have. The Russian officers were very nice; we often played chess with them, and I sometimes pitted my brain against their abacus. They always won.
They had a marvelous room with soft lighting, fancy furniture, and the best radio in town. Also, they went away when we told them to. We could sit on the couch and Helga and I could kiss. And we could dance to the tunes of RIAS, the Radio In the American Sector of Berlin, which was ironic, given the place we were in.
We also listened to the news a lot, but Helga thought that the RIAS people told a lot of lies and that it was downright treasonous to pay attention to them. Listening to western broadcasts, she said, was a kind of “moralische Selbstverstümmelung” [moral self-mutilation]. It was bound to destroy the listener’s morale and, if the enemy lies were spread, that of others as well.
This assessment of hers bothered me a lot; it sounded just like the official Party line and no wonder; she had joined the FDJ [Free German Youth] and I still had n
ot. Having been such an avid BBC listener during the war, I didn’t like Party lines, but I didn’t say anything.
For the most part, during that last year of school, Helga and I avoided the subject of politics and focused on more immediate tasks, such as hugging and kissing in all sorts of hidden spots and, when necessary, preparing for our final exams in April and May. Each of us finalists–and there were only thirteen left–had been given one major project to complete before receiving the coveted Certificate of Ripeness. Believe it or not, that was what our high school diploma was officially called. Helga was to demonstrate her maturity with a major piano performance, which was scheduled before the entire school on April 20, 1951. I remember the date because it was also Hitler’s birthday. As for me, I was to demonstrate my adulthood by showing to the assembled teaching staff “the sense in which differential calculus was the exact opposite of integral calculus” and doing the whole thing in Russian! Other class mates got other assignments still–there was one for each, drawn by lot, with three months to prepare and three hours to demonstrate. I kept a list:
1) A Summary of the History of English Literature, in English
2) An Outline of the History of the British Commonwealth, in English
3) The History of Art: Egypt, Greece, and Rome (4000 B.C. to 500 AD), in English
4) The History of Art: Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo (1250-1760 AD), in German
5) Electricity and Magnetism, in German
6) Acoustics and Optics, in German
7) The Science of Meteorology, in German
8) Basic Laws of Chemistry, in German
9) A History of the German Language, in German
10) A Summary of Carolus Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, from protozoa to vertebrata, in Latin
11) A Summary of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, in Latin