by Heinz Kohler
At just about the time we all gave our performances, Mr. Klaus announced that the danger of atomic war had slightly decreased. President Truman, he said, had relieved the war-mongering General of the Army, Douglas MacArthur, of all his posts. He had replaced him with the more rational Lt. General Matthew B. Ridgway. As a result, a U.S attack on China, via North Korea, was less likely, as was an attack by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, via the Formosa Straight. For the moment, we could all sleep more easily, he said.
That day, Helga received her notice of admission to the Conservatory in East Berlin and we promised each other to meet there in the fall. As it turned out, that was easier than we first thought, because my parents had made plans of their own, which were to bring us back to Berlin as well. For months, I learned, my parents had been shipping packages of our belongings–including my crucial collections of notes about everything–to Aunt Martel in West Berlin, and their plan called for us to follow the packages there right after my graduation.
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There was no way for an entire family to get permits to travel to Berlin, not even to the Soviet-occupied eastern sector, given that anybody, once inside the city, could easily escape the German Democratic Republic by walking across the street into West Berlin. We decided to split up. I would go on my own; my parents and Helmut would go separately. Furthermore, to avoid suspicion, we would take no luggage, except a rucksack to carry some food, and we would circumvent the ever present police checks by staying away from buses and trains and simply walking to Berlin. On the map, as the crow flies, the distance was 80 kilometers; even doubling it, to account for the zigzag shape of country roads in the real world, would not make the trip an insurmountable task.
Mr. Fischer helped plan my own escape. First, he got me an official permit to travel to his nonexistent brother in Genthin, which I did by train. Then I was on my own, but not without Mr. Fischer’s maps. All I had to do, he said, was walk along the Elbe-Havel Canal to Plaue, where the westbound Havel River flowed through a lake and turned north towards Rathenow. Moving east along the banks of the Havel, I would pass Brandenburg, and then, staying north of Werder and Potsdam, I would come upon Sakrow, where they had all kinds of excursion boats traveling on the river. Given that the border was right in the middle of the river, it would be easy to end up on Peacock Island in West Berlin, Mr. Fischer said. All I had to do was swim a short distance or stay behind when one of those boats stopped at that Havel island, where Frederick the Great had built a summer palace and had seen to it that hundreds of peacocks would forever run free.
That’s exactly how things worked out. Carrying a rucksack full of bread and using an umbrella as a walking stick, I moved along the edge of pine forests near the canal and then the river, passing through giant ferns and scaring rabbits as I went. They scared me as well; I must have been more nervous than I was ready to admit. Every sound, no matter how natural, made me think of the People’s Police.
To avoid suspicion, I also carried a metal specimen box of the type we had used in botany class. If I ran into someone, I could always argue that I was collecting samples of plants for a project in school. On one occasion, when I was actually picking up a bit of moss, I ran into a fox that locked eyes with me and froze in place for the longest time. I told him I was his friend, but he bolted when I spoke.
Because the moon was full and I didn’t want to be seen, I walked quite a bit at night and spent much of the daytime not moving at all, lying instead among the ferns, watching the sun rays pass through the hazy sky and the trees above, and listening to droning insects all around. Avoiding detection, however, was easier said than done. Once I was trying to sleep at the edge of a meadow, under the swooping boughs of a weeping willow, and all the cows ambled over to my spot and stared down at me. Under ordinary circumstances, that would have been fun, but not that day. The last thing I needed was some enterprising farmer coming by to check out what was going on. At another time, a group of ravens discovered me and made an endless racket whenever I took a step. I don’t know why they always had to be bickering so much.
The weather gave me trouble as well. Most of those August days were oppressively hot and humid, and I found relief by swimming in the Havel, which I always kept in sight. But I had not anticipated thunderstorms, which came in the late afternoons and scared me to death with all that lightning. My umbrella notwithstanding, they also turned my clothes into a damp mess, which never managed to dry. All the while, I was looking for beech trees and oaks, thinking of the old nursery rhyme my mother had read to me. According to her story, one was to seek out beech trees to survive a lightning storm, while oak trees attracted lightning and meant certain death!
Die Buchen sollst Du suchen; den Eichen sollst Du weichen!
But all worked out in the end. I never ran into the People’s Police and I knew I wouldn’t once I had swum across the Havel and met the peacocks of Frederick the Great under a grove of poplar trees. I lay on the ground to dry out a bit and remember how their leaves were fluttering, showing off the paler green of their undersides. From there, I made my way through familiar parts of town towards Aunt Martel’s place, but I noticed how all sorts of names had changed. The Kronprinzenallee had become Clayallee, after the American military governor and airlift hero. The old Augusta-Viktoria Platz had become Breitscheidplatz, after the SPD leader murdered in Buchenwald. Later that day, in the center of West Berlin, oddly enough, I did run into a company of Russians. They were marching through the Brandenburg Gate, or what was left of it, playing trumpets as they came, right towards me. But they were not invading the west; nor were they out to catch an escaped citizen of the German Democratic Republic. They were just going to lay a wreath at new Soviet War Memorial that stood just a hundred meters or so inside West Berlin.
akg-images, London, United Kingdom
Soviet company marching through Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate
41. A New Life
[August 1951 – February 1952]
As I made my way through West Berlin on that hazy summer day in 1951, having just escaped from the East, I was suddenly struck by the finality of the step I had taken. There was no turning back, just as on that day seven years earlier when a bomb had wiped out our house in Berlin. In a way, I realized, I had already lived two lives; a third one was about to begin. My Aunt Martel was elated to see me sitting in front of her door when she came home from work. My parents and Helmut didn’t arrive till three days later, which gave us time to get acquainted again. Before all else, we threw away my dirty, wet clothes and I had a wonderful hot bath. That in itself, like my being there, was quite a miracle; Aunt Martel’s new apartment, unlike our old one or my grandmother’s for that matter, came equipped with hot water! In addition, all the rooms had central steam heat; radiators had taken the place of the old tile ovens everyone used to have. And the kitchen had a gas stove with a little blue pilot light centered among four burners. One could start any one of them with a simple click. Come winter, there would be no need here for lugging firewood and brown coal briquettes up from the street and then struggling to get a fire going. How times had changed!
On that first evening, I told Aunt Martel all about my trip. I remember her being shocked about my swimming in the Elbe-Havel Canal, amidst oil drums, dead fish, and all sorts of green slime. She was worried about my health and made me aware, long before it was fashionable, of what industrial effluents could do to people and the flora and fauna of this world. While we talked, she found me new clothes in the packages my mother had been sending for months. In return, I gave her the only present I could at the time, my black umbrella walking stick with the shiny handle that looked like ivory. Aunt Martel liked the pictures of Paris that were printed on the umbrella top–the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and a cathedral, the name of which we didn’t know.
Aunt Martel also served me one of my favorite meals, mashed potatoes and a delicious sauce of chanterelles. There was Rote Grütze pudding and vanilla sauce as well; she had remembered!
I was so happy by the time I was ready to fall asleep–to fall asleep in Berlin, it occurred to me, for the first time in seven years! This time no sirens would blare.
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Clank, clank, clank.
Mr. Joseph was banging on the ceiling pipes. Then silence and darkness…
“Don’t stop! Don’t ever stop!” Mrs. Schmidt cried out to Mr. Joseph. “Let someone else do it for a while. Just when we stop, they listen and decide it isn’t worth it to dig.”
Clank, clank, clank.
The light flickered on and off. I rubbed my eyes and tried to get rid of all the dust. Then I saw what it was. It was the little blue pilot light on the stove, and I suddenly realized what it meant! Why hadn’t I thought of it before? There were gas pipes hanging on the ceiling of this cellar and Mr. Joseph was banging on them! If he wasn’t careful, there would be a leak, and everyone in the cellar would be blown to bits in a giant explosion not unlike the one at the Gas Works near Wildenbruch Park. I tried to warn Mr. Joseph, but no sound would come out of my mouth. I was choking on all that plaster dust.
Clank, clank, clank.
And then something went boom, Boom, BOOM, and the earth shook and I heard the loudest noise I had ever heard in my life.
I woke up with a start. My heart was racing and I felt so hot.
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Aunt Martel said it was just a bad dream and easy to explain if I looked outside. The sun had just come up and its rays were trapped in a huge cloud of dust across the street.
“They’re taking down the ruins on the other side,” Aunt Martel said. “A different one each morning and by evening it’s all gone. Sorry, I should have warned you. We are all used to it by now. ‘Controlled implosions,’ they call them.”
By then some of the dust had settled and I could see the remaining skeleton houses down the street, with the familiar bare walls and black holes where doors and windows had once been. I also saw rows of pockmark bullet holes in all the walls–a reminder of what had happened here while I was gone. And I remembered my grandmother’s street, which had been similarly filled with ruins–minus the bullet holes–at the time of her 1944 birthday party when I had removed Aunt Lotte’s pin with the big red head from the tablecloth. I still felt guilty about that.
“Where did they bury Oma?” I asked. “I think I’ll take some flowers while you are at work.”
“At Rachel’s Cemetery in Neukölln,” Aunt Martel said, “but that’s a sad story. She isn’t there anymore.”
“Not there anymore?” I asked. “Where is she?”
“Nowhere,” Aunt Martel answered, and she started to sob.
“During the air lift,” Aunt Martel said. “It happened during the air lift. They needed a lighted approach corridor to the Tempelhof runway and the cemetery was in the way. They bulldozed a long stretch of land, ruins and houses and graves alike. They sent a compensation check.”
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That morning, I went to the cemetery to check things out. One couldn’t miss the long stretch of paired steel towers, each painted red and topped with a big light, each standing in a block of hardened cement where graves had once been, and all of them, jointly, descending underneath an invisible glideslope towards the threshold of Tempelhof’s longest runway. I sat underneath one of the towers where my grandmother’s grave might have been and put down the little bunch of flowers I had bought down the street.
My mind went to the day they buried Leo Krell in the cemetery next to the Ziesar church and I could almost hear ravens cursing and squirrels chirping and carrying on in the trees above his open grave. I also thought of the day the Russian MPs had come with their submachine guns and had dug up Werner Albrecht’s grave and had taken him away. A lightning bolt flashed through my head, right there in the middle of the day.
I saw the old woman fall from the window across the street. People screamed. I heard a thud. She didn’t move. She wore a long, white nightgown, and I saw her white hair turn slowly red and then her gown. My mother grabbed me and took me home. I was scared and it felt as if my heart wanted to come out of my throat. And I saw red fire trucks hose down red cobblestones….
The street car screeched outside the old cemetery gate and I was back, feeling very, very strange. My heart was racing and my head hurt. I took my pulse. One hundred fifty-nine. I wished I had some Valerian drops.
I walked to Aunt Martel’s place to go to bed and fell asleep almost at once. The walk from Genthin, I thought, must have been more exhausting than I had been willing to admit.
“Why don't you find a nice cozy spot in the cemetery where things aren’t so hectic?” the street car conductor yelled at the old woman. “Then you can feed the cemetery plants–from below!” All the people laughed and laughed and the laughter wouldn’t stop. I climbed over the ruins to escape the sound that was mocking me with echoes from all the skeleton walls. And suddenly the sound came from below the ground, from all the corpses that were decomposing under mounds of debris because the rescuers hadn’t come in time. And I ran faster to escape their smell and I came upon the carcass of a horse, smelling sickly and vile. Strips of meat had been hacked from its flanks and thousands of flies rose up in black swarms to greet me. But armies of beetles and maggots stayed behind doing their work, leaving nothing but belt buckles and bones and buttons of uniforms, carrying tiny inscriptions, “God With Us.”
I woke up out of breath and felt ill, like throwing up. I could still hear waves of laughter, which was scary indeed, but I didn’t say anything to anybody.
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When the rest of the family arrived, Aunt Martel’s apartment got pretty crowded, but my parents were out a lot, looking for jobs and a place to live. At first, nothing seemed to work and my father spent hours each day near the ticket counter of the subway station, pretending to be short just a quarter or a dime and, with feigned embarrassment, pleading with other travelers to help him out. That way, he got enough money to pay for our food.
Eventually, my mother found a bookkeeper’s job at Zille’s, a coffee import firm, and my father ended up on an assembly line at Quandt’s, a precision optical equipment manufacturer. I managed to join Quandt as well, but in the payroll office. There we spent all day working new and noisy electric calculating machines. Every computation was done twice; first by one person, then checked by another. I had a special job processing a large pile of legal documents, mostly court orders garnishing the wages of men who had failed to make alimony payments or provide child support or pay off their loans on time. Because all payments were made in cash, I would simply take money out of one envelope and put it in another, while inserting appropriate legal notices in each. In the midst of my work, I had fun reading copies of all the court papers–the complaints, the rebuttals, the lawyers’ arguments, the judges’ rulings, and more.
In my less busy moments, I rummaged through the personnel files of other people and learned all the secrets of my coworkers in the payroll office. I also came upon a fascinating room. It was filled with the files of thousands of foreign workers–mostly French, Belgian, and Dutch–who had worked at Quandt during the war. Every single file provided a detailed accounting of someone’s life over the course of several years, enough to write a novel, and some of the stories were amazing and horrifying at the same time: There was the mother who had been forced to leave her one-year old child behind in France and who pleaded to be allowed a visit back home. “Request denied,” said the red rubber stamp, complete with eagle and swastika. There was the old man whose daughter was about to be married in Belgium and who begged to be allowed to be there, even for a single day. “Request denied,” said the rubber stamp. There was the woman who was freezing in the dormitory, asking for another blanket, and the man who had toothaches and was asking for a dentist, and there were others who merely wanted permission to go to the cellar during the air raids. “Request denied.”
Someone like me, I thought, should take this material and spend a year writing a book. But I made a big mistake
, which I regret to this day. I took my idea to the firm’s director–a Ph.D. in Business Administration, his office sign said–and Dr. Ebert listened to me with great interest. But before the week was up, on the day the trucks came to pick up a thousand boxes filled with camera lenses destined for Persia, Dr. Ebert’s men came down from the top floor and shredded the whole roomful of precious wartime files.
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Thanks to the Marshall Plan, we got an apartment in a brand-new building at the edge of Tempelhof airport. From our 4th floor balcony, we could look down on the runways as well as the cascading set of approach-path towers that stood where my grandmother’s cemetery had once been. As in Aunt Martel’s case, hot water came out of our faucets and I should have been happy for that reason alone. In addition, I had just been accepted at the Free University of Berlin, where I was set to study economics and law. But despite all the good fortune, I had trouble falling asleep. For one thing, once it got dark, there were strobe lights flashing red along the edge of our roof, just above our balcony windows. For another, there was a lot of unusual noise from all the airplanes that glided past our roof at irregular intervals. Some of the planes were almost silent, except for a whooshing sound and the clanking of flaps being extended just before touchdown. Others made thundering noises as wheels came down just a few meters above our heads. Others still made sudden and startling engine sounds as pilots added power to keep their planes from descending below the glideslope and, therefore, smashing into our roof or landing short of the runway threshold….
The pottery was smashing against the Wagners’ apartment door, but it sounded like the grenades exploding in the pond. I tried to get away from the Russians, but there was pounding on our door. I heard voices of strange men and yelling and the shuffling of feet. Something crashed on the floor in the next room and my mother cried out. I wanted to get up and look, but I was trapped. The braces had been locked for the night. Someone pointed a bright light at my face. Then the front door slammed shut and I heard an army of heavy boots make their way down the stairs. Then the noise started all over again, but my mother held on to my shoulder with her hand, while Helmut sat on her lap. We heard cracks like thunder, and the earth shook. We heard a shower of broken windows landing on the pavement above. Again, there was that nerve-wracking hum of engines overhead and then, suddenly, dozens of lights flashed all around us.