Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

  GRETCHEN

  In spite of a few rather promising contacts with members of the opposite sex during my early childhood years, my relations with young women grew increasingly tenuous as I got older. By the time I reached the age of fourteen, my contact with girls had largely fizzled and been replaced by wishful thinking and secret fantasies. The event that set the stage for this frustrating state of affairs occurred four years earlier. At that time, one of my teachers, Herr Dutke, told the class that non-Aryans, “like your classmate Hans-Jürgen,” were prohibited by the Nuremberg racial laws from marrying or associating with German women. The purpose for the prohibition, Dutke explained with ill-concealed relish, was to prevent Rassenschande, the most cardinal of cardinal sins under the Nazi regime, by which superior Aryan blood was diluted with inferior non-Aryan blood. Such dilution, he elaborated, if allowed, would ultimately lead to the destruction of the German people. Accordingly, Rassenschande was considered worse than murder.

  At the time, I was much more upset about having again been used as the class’s resident “contemptible non-Aryan,” than over the news that I wasn’t allowed to marry German women. At age ten, getting married did not rank high on my list of priorities. But as I reached adolescence and girls began to become increasingly important in my thinking, Dutke’s words started to take on a new, frightening meaning.

  Yet my fear of running afoul of the law was only part of the problem that kept me from enjoying a normal relationship with girls. As far as the opposite sex was concerned, I had long considered myself an ugly duckling. The occasional “I gittigit,” the German expression of extreme disgust, with which some girls reacted to my looks, did not exactly bolster my self-esteem. Even if there hadn’t been laws that prohibited Rassenschande, what girl in her right mind, I reasoned, would want someone like me? Thoroughly convinced that no girl could possibly be interested in me except, perhaps, in a platonic way, I never let on when I liked a girl, no matter how much I yearned for her. In this way, I hoped to spare myself the humiliation of what I believed would be certain rejection. Unlike most of my pals, who were beginning to pair off with the girls in the neighborhood, I had no girlfriend and seemingly no prospect of ever having one.

  All that was to change with the arrival of a tall, slender, and exceedingly haughty girl my age. Her name was Gretchen Jahn. The moment I saw her, as she, her younger brother, and their mother moved into an apartment a few houses up the street, I was smitten. But getting to know her better was more than I dared to hope.

  The Jahns, I learned later through the neighborhood grapevine, had lived in a better part of Hamburg, but following the breakup of Frau Jahn’s marriage to a well-off police official, were forced to settle for a less affluent lifestyle. That did not keep Frau Jahn from acting quite superior. On the contrary, she kept her contact with neighbors to an absolute minimum and apparently encouraged her children to do the same. In that she was quite successful. Neither Gretchen nor her brother paid any attention to the kids on the block, and they in turn repaid the Jahns in the same coin. Most of my buddies hated the mere sight of Gretchen, whom they considered stuck up and much too skinny, and thus utterly lacking in sex appeal. That suited me just fine, since competition, I felt, would have made my already hopeless situation only more so. As far as her looks and demeanor were concerned, I felt she was the most elegant and aristocratic creature I’d ever laid eyes on. Next to her, I felt, the other girls on the block looked like plump peasants. But as always, I kept my real feelings to myself.

  By a fortuitous coincidence, the center of social activities for the boys on my street was a broad concrete stoop directly below the Jahns’ second-floor apartment. There, to the chagrin of the building’s occupants, we congregated regularly and noisily in groups ranging from five to fifteen or more. I frequently caught precious glimpses of Gretchen at the window, a fact that made me considerably more reticent in manner and speech than my freewheeling peers.

  I would have remained Gretchen’s secret admirer till the end of time had it not been for another coincidence. Walking home one fall afternoon, I couldn’t believe my eyes when just as I was about to pass our greengrocer’s store, I saw Gretchen leaving with a huge net filled with potatoes. The load was obviously more than she could easily handle, but before I had been able to make up my mind as to whether or not to offer her my assistance, she asked me if I would be kind enough to help. Would I?

  When I started to introduce myself while relieving her of her burden, she said, “I already know your name; it’s Hans-Jürgen.”

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “I know a lot about you,” she replied, then proceeded to tell me what school I went to and that my father lived in Africa, that my mother and I lived on the third floor of Stückenstrasse 3, that I was an amateur boxer, and on and on. She certainly had done her homework.

  To her amazement, and amusement, I then turned the tables on her by telling her all I knew about her, that her name was Gretchen and her brother’s name Ingmar, that her father was a big shot in the police, and that, before they moved to Barmbek, they used to live in Uhlenhorst, where she and her brother had attended the gymnasium (high school).

  Within minutes we had arrived at her house where, fortunately, the stoop was deserted, sparing us the inevitable wisecracks from my pals.

  “Can you help me carry those stupid potatoes upstairs?” she asked. Again I was only too happy to oblige. When we reached her apartment and I prepared to beat a hasty retreat, she told me to wait. “I want you to meet my mother.”

  From what I had heard about Frau Jahn, I was none too eager to make her personal acquaintance. But it was already too late for me to take a rain check, because Gretchen had knocked and Frau Jahn had opened the door.

  “Thanks, Hans-Jürgen, for helping Gretchen with the potatoes,” she said with a friendly smile, without waiting for her daughter to introduce us. Apparently, she, too, had heard about me before. A stately woman with visible traces of former beauty, she was much nicer than I had imagined her.

  “It’s nothing, Frau Jahn,” I replied. When she had disappeared inside the apartment and I prepared to leave, Gretchen thanked me for being so chivalrous, then—catching me totally by surprise—asked me what my plans were for the rest of the evening. I really hadn’t any plans, and when I told her so, she asked me whether I wanted to go for a walk with her “around seven.” Without giving it a moment’s thought, I said fine and we agreed to meet in front of the church two blocks from our street.

  I arrived almost half an hour early, and with every elapsing minute I grew more apprehensive. “Panicky” is actually a better word. What was I going to talk about? Why did she want to be with me in the first place? I knew enough about the Nazis’ preoccupation with Rassenschande to realize that our rendezvous, however innocent, would be severely disapproved of. What if people saw us together and didn’t like what they saw? What were we letting ourselves in for? I suddenly realized how complicated my life was becoming and how woefully unprepared I was to cope with it.

  Although it was getting dark, I could clearly see Gretchen’s lithe figure approaching. The moment she reached me, the bells in the clock tower above tolled, first four, then seven times. It seemed like a fitting beginning of the first date in my young life.

  Somehow, the panic vanished as she came into sight, and before long, we were merrily chatting about anything that popped into our minds—the recent German invasion of Poland, our interests, our likes and dislikes, our teachers, and the people in the neighborhood. She told me that she didn’t care for the boys in my crowd because they acted crude and uncultured. I, on the other hand, was different, she insisted, which is why she became attracted to me. I didn’t see where, except for my obvious racial traits, I was all that different. I certainly did not consider myself cultured and refined, but she got no argument from me.

  From the first moment of our meeting it was quite obvious to us that our interest in each other was everything but platonic, althoug
h neither Gretchen nor I said so or even broached the subject of romance. We didn’t have to. I didn’t have the slightest idea what she saw in me—by most prevailing standards a freak. But who was I to argue with her taste? The important thing was we both could feel the chemistry. As far as my own emotions were concerned, I felt like an entire chemical plant that was ready to explode. At the same time, there was nothing overtly sexual about our feelings. We were innocent in the true sense of the word—two young people who, without knowing why, were attracted to each other, trusted each other, and needed each other.

  When I told her about my concerns about being seen in public with her, she surprised me by telling me that she had thought about it and knew we were taking chances, but that she was willing to take the risk. “We just have to be careful,” she said, resigned to the problems that were facing us. I still wasn’t convinced. The last thing I wanted was to get her into trouble. “What about your mother?” I asked. “What does she think about our meeting like this?”

  “My mother doesn’t mind. She likes you. She’s been watching you for some time and thinks you are a gentleman. She’d rather see me go with you than with any of the other boys in the street.”

  She conceded that her father, the police official, was a different matter altogether, but she said that he had been transferred to another city and therefore we didn’t have to worry about him. When I asked her whether she missed her father, she bluntly told me, “No.” Then she confided that her father had been physically abusive to her and her mother and that, as a result, she and her mother had broken off all contact with him. She said he had made her join the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls), but that after her parents separated, she no longer went to BDM meetings. As a member of the police and SS, he even tried to bolster his standing by trying to interest her in participating in the Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) program, which, she explained, was a pet project of SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler aimed at producing superior Aryan offspring through selective breeding of “women of good blood” with SS men.

  It was mainly her father’s oppressive behavior that led her to question his National Socialist beliefs and, in the process, become a real rebel and anti-Nazi. At the moment, she said, her biggest frustration was with the type of education she received in school, which, she insisted, treated girls like prospective “breeding cows” by preparing them exclusively for motherhood and wifely duties instead of future careers. Unlike boys, who were encouraged to aspire to a wide variety of interesting careers, she said, girls were taught nothing but domestic skills such as cooking, knitting, and how to care for babies, in addition to “racial hygiene,” folk studies, and gymnastics. It wasn’t until Gretchen called my attention to it and pointed out the unfairness of it all that I considered the unequal treatment of girls as something other than a normal and proper fact of life. It had been drummed into our heads by our teachers that, in the Führer’s National Socialist state, men ran the show with women as their helpmates.

  We had hardly noticed the passing of time as we chatted and walked through the dark streets until we passed the church again and the bells tolled nine. Throughout the evening, we had not touched once. Emboldened by the blackout that mercifully cloaked our secret meeting from public scrutiny, I reached for her hand, squeezed it gently, and held it until we had arrived at her house. When we said good night, we did so without making plans to meet again, but we both knew that it would be soon.

  Gradually, our secret relationship blossomed and our meetings after dark increased both in frequency and intensity. For a while, I didn’t know what to do with my nonplatonic feelings for Gretchen and how to express the romantic urges inside, until one evening she broke the ice. I was just about to say goodbye in front of her house, as I had done many times before, when, without warning, she put her arms around me, held me tightly, and kissed me squarely on the mouth. From that moment, our relationship was never the same. Within a few additional meetings (mostly on park benches), and after extensive practice in kissing and fondling, Gretchen and I were transformed from shy and hapless novices into the most passionate secret lovers since a star-crossed couple met clandestinely on a balcony in Renaissance Verona, Italy. Gretchen even introduced me to kissing French-style, a skill she insisted she had picked up by reading about it in a book. At first I found the very idea utterly repulsive. However, after several intense practice sessions with Gretchen, I became an enthusiastic practitioner of this weird but ever so delightful form of socializing. But all our passion notwithstanding, Gretchen had laid down an ironclad rule that, as a boxer, I had been taught to respect and obey: no action below the belt. It was a tough rule for both of us, but Gretchen was determined to resist temptation and remain a virgin for years to come.

  It was inevitable that sooner or later the neighborhood would get wise to the fact that something was going on between Gretchen and me. But except for some teasing from the fellows about my making out with a “stuck-up sack of bones,” and a girl’s warning to Gretchen that she’d “wind up with a checkered or plaid baby one day,” there were no serious repercussions. In spite of that, we never considered ourselves out of the woods, and continued making our meetings as inconspicuous as possible. When we ventured outside our immediate neighborhood, to movies, carnivals, or on daytime outings, I always made sure to bring a buddy along as decoy. I reasoned that a threesome appeared like a more ambiguous, therefore less suspicious, relationship than a twosome. To make the deception work, I would always position myself in such a way as to lead the uninitiated observer to believe that I, not the decoy, was our trio’s “fifth wheel.”

  It wasn’t long before it became obvious to me that I had lucked out with Gretchen in a bigger way than I had realized. I had always liked the way she looked, but within a few months after we became an “item,” she started to fill out in all the right places until she had turned into a curvaceous beauty. All of a sudden, the fellows were not only noticing her but hitting on her. But the groundwork I had laid apparently paid off. Gretchen continued to look at the other boys as “primitive Proleten,” and had eyes only for me. Even when girls of our age group started to date older fellows, Gretchen, for some strange reason, remained loyal to me. Her undisguised affection for me did much to restore my self-esteem, which had been at an all-time low after years of racial taunts, ridicule, and hostility. But my newfound romantic bliss was soon to receive a devastating blow.

  I had just taken Gretchen home after one of our long nightly walks through the dark streets of Barmbek when my eyes were temporarily blinded by the piercing beam of a flashlight. “Sicherheits Dienst (Security Service)!” a man’s voice behind the flashlight snarled. The words sent shudders of unmitigated terror down my spine, since I was only too familiar with the reputation of the SD as the most ruthless, and most feared, intelligence branch of the SS.

  “What are you doing walking the streets at night during blackout?” a man in a black leather coat and wide-brim hat demanded to know after flashing an ID that I was unable to read.

  “I was just taking a walk,” I answered feebly. “I live on this street, just a block away.”

  Apparently not satisfied with my reply, the man ordered me to accompany him to the nearest police precinct. For a moment I considered running away and disappearing into the night, but thought better of it. Where could I go? And even if I escaped, how long could I elude my captor once he had given the police a physical description of me?

  When we arrived at the police precinct, the man identified himself to the officer on duty, then grabbed my arm and pushed me toward the officer’s desk. “I caught this man loitering a few blocks from here,” the SD man reported. “It looked to me as if he was on the prowl for defenseless women or looking for an opportunity to steal.”

  Before the policeman had a chance to respond, the SD man asked, “Have you ever seen this man before? He claims to live somewhere around here.”

  The police officer took a long look at me, then shook his head.
“No, I can’t say that I have,” he replied, “but I’ve been in this precinct only a short while. Let me ask one of my colleagues who has been here a bit longer than I.” Just then, one of the veteran police officers whom I had known practically all my life walked by. When the desk officer asked him whether he knew me, he said that he didn’t know me by name but that he had seen me around the precinct since I was a little boy. “What is he supposed to have done?” he asked.

  The SD man repeated his accusation, but this time with less conviction.

  “You’ve got the wrong man,” the police officer asserted. “This young man is an apprentice at Lindner A. G., where he works much too hard to have enough energy left to prowl the streets at night looking for trouble. I happen to know that because the son of one of my colleagues apprentices with him.”

  “Well, in that case, I shall consider this matter closed,” the SD man said. “But in these times, one can never be too careful.”

  Without offering an apology to me, he gave the Hitler salute and left.

  I could have hugged the policeman for coming to my rescue, and thanked the coincidences that caused him to know my apprentice buddy and to show up just in the nick of time.

  But the incident also drove home the point that Gretchen and I had been walking on thin ice. I was convinced that had the SD man caught us together, both of us would have been in for a rough time. I decided then and there that our regular nightly meetings would have to come to an immediate halt, no matter how painful our forced separation would prove to be.

  When I told Gretchen the following day what had happened to me, and explained to her that we couldn’t go on meeting the way we had without courting disaster, she said she understood, but that she had no intention of giving up on our relationship. “We just have to be patient and wait for things to change,” she suggested without much conviction in her voice.