Destined to Witness

  BOMBED OUT

  Slowly, as if awakening from a nightmare, we filed out of the shelter—a long line of humans with a new lease on life. At the top of the stairs, we were greeted by the uniformed Luftschutz (Air Guard) rescue workers who had freed us. They told us to cover our heads with blankets or towels to protect ourselves against the thousands of flying sparks that filled the air.

  The rescue workers cautioned us to remain calm, regardless of what we would see. Their advice hardly prepared us for what we saw. What awaited us was one of the saddest, most horrific sights in our lives. Stückenstrasse—no, all of Barmbek, our beloved community—was totally wiped out. As far as we could see, there was utter destruction. In stark contrast to last night’s ear-shattering noise, a muffled silence had settled over the eerie scene. Occasionally, we encountered charred, mummylike corpses of people who apparently had decided too late to leave their homes and seek shelter. Most of the houses had been burned to the ground, others were still ablaze, and still others were only burned-out shells. One of them, now reduced to a smoldering pile of bricks, had been our home from the time I was a little boy. As we walked by, carrying the four suitcases and a few blankets that made up our worldly possessions, I watched my mother from the corner of my eye to see how she would take seeing everything lost that she had worked for so hard and for so many years. But to my surprise, she remained dry-eyed and composed. “The only thing that matters is that we are alive and unhurt,” she reassured me and herself. “Everything else we can one day replace.”

  It was not until after the war ended that we learned the truth about the full extent of the casualties and destruction Hamburg had suffered as a result of Operation Gomorrah and thus could appreciate how truly blessed we had been to be among the survivors. More than forty-one thousand people had perished. Most of the victims died after facing the no-win dilemma of barricading themselves in their shelters and suffocating or confronting the infernos that were raging in the streets. Some nine hundred thousand people were made homeless. Nearly half of the city’s buildings and some six hundred major industrial plants, including its four biggest shipyards, were destroyed. When the smoke had cleared, 277 schools, twenty-four hospitals, and fifty-eight churches had been reduced to rubble.

  Before my mother and I reached the el-train tracks where we expected some protection from the airborne burning debris, my mother took off the blanket with which she had covered her head. Suddenly I heard her scream, “My hair!” Turning around, I saw that a piece of burning newspaper had landed on her head and within seconds had singed a large hole in her thick brown hair. Using my own blanket, I was able to quickly smother the flame, which, fortunately, caused only a few minor burns to her scalp.

  One after another, the survivors from our shelter arrived under the el-train tracks, some grim faced, some jubilant, but all with the ordeal of the previous night etched in their faces. There was hardly a dry eye as we walked around, indiscriminately hugging each other—whether we were close neighbors, casual acquaintances, or total strangers—sad to have lost everything, yet happy to be still alive.

  When I spotted my buddy Jack in the crowd, I asked him how he would get back to his unit. “Don’t tell anyone what I’m telling you,” he whispered conspiratorially, “but I’m not going back. After what happened here last night, I’m sure the war can’t last but a few more weeks, or maybe days. Until then, I’ll have myself evacuated with some of the other families.”

  Pointing to a suitcase he was carrying, he told me that as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he was going to change into civilian clothes and get rid of “diese scheiss Uniform (this shit uniform).”

  While I shared his belief that the bombings certainly must have helped hasten Germany’s defeat, I wasn’t nearly as optimistic as he. “What if the war isn’t over in a few weeks?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said cockily. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “I hope you do,” I said, and wished him well. After we shook hands and he walked away, my eyes followed him until his stocky frame had disappeared in the crowd. I felt a strange sadness, as though I could sense that I would never see Jack again.

  By noon, several army trucks arrived that took us to the Moorweide, a huge parade ground in front of Dammtor train station, which had been designated as a major refugee aid station. There, we joined the huddled masses of thousands of survivors and waited our turn in endless lines to receive sandwiches and milk from the Red Cross workers. I couldn’t help but marvel at the organizational skill and efficiency displayed by the emergency crews in bringing huge amounts of tasty food in such a short time to so many people.

  Since all refugees could travel free of charge by train to any destination within Germany, my mother and I had decided that we would try to make it to Salza, at the edge of the Harz Mountains, where we were assured shelter at the home of our relatives. But there was a hitch. Several trains, jam-packed with refugees, were stuck in the station, unable to leave until a logjam of outbound trains had been resolved and the tracks had been cleared. Since that could take days, we decided to get on the first available emergency truck leaving the city and board a train later. That was easier said than done, because thousands of other refugees had the same idea. After several hours and numerous attempts, we finally succeeded in getting on one of the trucks that were ferrying refugees out of the city.

  As we huddled with a truckload of fellow refugees among our meager belongings, all of us unbathed, disheveled, sweaty, and tired, it occurred to me how one major catastrophe had made us all equal—equally poor, equally filthy, and equally miserable. My “different” appearance, which used to turn heads wherever I went, suddenly had ceased to be of interest to anyone. People were far too preoccupied with their own tenuous toehold on civilization to worry about anybody’s hair texture or shade of skin.

  A young woman, who was seated on her battered suitcase next to my mother and me, kindly offered to share her last three cigarettes with us, which we confirmed nonsmokers gratefully declined. Major catastrophes, it seems, bring out the very best in people. Wherever I looked, I saw people eager to help alleviate the suffering of their Volksgenossen (fellow citizens). Unfortunately, that selfless concern for others that was so pervasive in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe vanished as quickly as it had come with the first signs of a return to normalcy.

  After several hours, our truck reached Lüneburg, where we were lucky to catch a southbound train, jammed beyond capacity with Hamburg refugees, just minutes before it pulled out of the station. Because all the compartments were filled, we had to make do with sitting on our suitcases in the packed aisle.

  Midway between Lüneburg and Hannover, our train squealed to a shuddering stop amid wide open meadows. Hearing several shouts of “Fliegeralarm,” my mother and I followed the line of refugees headed toward the nearest exit. Leaping to the ground, we joined the stampede that was racing away from the train. I grabbed my mother’s hand and pulled her along as fast as she could run toward a few clumps of bushes in the distance. Before we could reach them, a male voice shouted, “Everybody lie down!” We then heard the sputtering of an airplane engine above us. Dropping to the ground, we looked up and saw an RAF-marked fighter plane coming out of the blue sky and flying twice over the length of the train before disappearing.

  After a while, our train engine’s whistle signaled that the danger had passed, and a few minutes later we were once again on our way, filled with euphoric relief.

  When we pulled into Hannover Hauptbahnhof, an army of Red Cross workers and other emergency personnel handed us sandwiches, milk, and apples through the train windows. When a Nazi Amtswalter in his brown uniform came in sight, one woman on the train started screaming, “You pigs got us into this mess!” and similar seditious remarks until someone gagged her by covering her mouth with a towel.

  After an excruciating thirteen-hour train ride that under normal circumstances would have taken no more than five hours, we arrived
at the tiny village of Salza am Harz, one stop before the thousand-year-old city of Nordhausen. It was way past midnight when we got off at the deserted whistle-stop.

  For the first time since we escaped the inferno of Hamburg, we experienced complete silence. So “new” was the experience that it caused our voices to sound unfamiliar to us, as if they were the voices of strangers. To this day, none of the psychological and physical blows my mother and I endured during the war compare in my mind with the sense of total devastation we felt when the train pulled away and we were left standing on the dimly lighted platform, shivering from cold, weak with fatigue, and feeling utterly forsaken.

  As tired as we were, we somehow managed the fifteen-minute walk down Salza’s dark and narrow Hauptstrasse until we reached Harzstrasse 6, our relatives’ address.

  We didn’t have to explain anything. One look at us was all Tante Grete needed to realize what had happened to us. The next moment she and my mother embraced and cried. It was the first time since the cataclysmic events of the last forty-eight hours that I saw my mother break down.

  The last time I had spent my summer school vacation in Salza was six years earlier, when I was eleven years old. Onkel Karl and Tante Grete looked exactly the way I had remembered them. Trudchen, now a chubby young lady of twenty-one, was engaged to an army corporal who was somewhere at the Russian front. All seemed genuinely glad to have us live with them.

  It took some doing, but after a while my mother and I adjusted as best as we could to small-town life. Onkel Karl, Tante Grete, and Trudchen did everything possible to make us forget the horror we had gone through and make us feel at home. Accomplishing that was no easy task for any of us. Unlike Hamburg, where the people’s disillusionment with the Nazis had become so palpable that the Nazis began to keep a lower and lower profile, Salza, like most small towns in central and southern Germany, was still the undisputed domain of Nazi functionaries. Since Salza was the kind of village where, it was said with only mild exaggeration, people made it their business to know the exact number of bedsheets each family owned, Onkel Karl and Tante Grete had learned to keep their political views to themselves, even from us. They didn’t have to tell us to do the same.

  On our arrival, the village was abuzz with the news of a few days earlier that Mussolini had been overthrown and captured by anti-German Italian troops commanded by Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The immediate effect of II Duce’s fall was massive defection of Italian troops and the near collapse of Italian resistance to Allied forces. The villagers, who had yet to get a real taste of war, took the news of the collapse of the vaunted Berlin-Rome Axis like a personal loss. Many vented their dismay through loud denunciations of the “cowardly Italians.”

  A few months after Mussolini’s capture, the morale of the people in Salza received a much-needed boost. A news flash from the Führer’s headquarters announced that Mussolini had been freed. Later we saw in the newsreel how a special, glider-borne commando of SS men, led by a strapping colonel named Otto Skorzeny, snatched Il Duce from the clutches of his captors in the Abruzzi Mountains and returned him, shaken but unharmed, to safety.

  Like many World War I veterans, Onkel Karl had been redrafted by the army when the supply of younger recruits became increasingly scarce. Ostensibly, he was stationed in Erfurt, a short train ride away. In reality, he lived a near-normal civilian life at home. After learning that he was a master tailor, his commanding general had arranged for him to work out of his home in order to tailor fancy uniforms for him and his fellow senior officers. The few times my uncle donned his own corporal’s uniform was when he traveled to his Erfurt garrison to take back finished uniforms and to pick up new work.

  Occasionally, he pressed me into service by making me put on one of the gray gabardine, gold-or silver-braided tunics in order to apply the finishing touches. It gave me a sense of perverse satisfaction to imagine what General von So-and-So and Colonel von What’s His Name would have thought had they known that their uniforms had been worn by someone who was considered unworthy of wearing even a private’s uniform. Onkel Karl, on whom the irony of the situation seemed totally lost, never could understand my expression of amusement whenever I looked at my mirror image, resplendently uniformed as top Nazi military brass. “What’s so funny?” he would ask. “Nothing,” I would reply, without trying to explain.

  Of all the losses I sustained during the conflagration in Hamburg, none had been as painful to me as the loss of my beloved hockey skates and my equally beloved trumpet. The shortage or total absence of “nonessential goods” rendered both irreplaceable. I especially missed being able to express myself musically. It was, therefore, a huge and most welcome surprise when Onkel Karl presented me one day with an old, beat-up B-flat clarinet that he had scrounged from one of his buddies. There was no doubt that it had seen better days. “I know it’s not a trumpet, and it’s not much to look at,” my uncle said, “but it’s the best I could do.” With a great deal of intensive, tender love and care, I soon had the old licorice stick looking and performing almost like new. After many hours practicing, and after discovering that I had been playing with my mouthpiece upside down, I surprised everyone by being able to coax catchy modern tunes from the ancient instrument. But with a war going on, my leisurely pursuit of my musical hobby was short-lived.

  As required by law, my mother and I had registered with the local police precinct, thereby raising the number of several hundred Salza residents by two. In order to be eligible for food and clothing rationing cards, all able-bodied German males had to be employed in some phase of war production. I applied for a machinist job at a huge steel construction firm in nearby Nordhausen and was hired on the spot. Its size made my old plant in Hamburg look like a mom-and-pop shop. In its cavernous, deafeningly noisy hangar, I felt like an ant as gigantic steel objects passed precariously over my head, manipulated with precision by an invisible crane operator in a movable cabin high up under the ceiling. Although I had been hired as a certified machinist journeyman, I was clearly overqualified for the menial tasks I was assigned—grinding off burr left by cutting tools and moving loads with a forklift truck were among the more challenging ones.

  THE SECRET OF THE KOHNSTEIN

  As fall arrived, a troubling phenomenon caught my attention. A convoy of open military trucks passed daily by the window of my room at Harzstrasse 6. The trucks carried an unusual cargo—bald-shaven, emaciated-looking men in vertically striped convict garb, with hollow cheeks and huge, expressionless eyes that made their heads look like skulls. They stood jam-packed like cattle while several steel-helmeted armed SS guards seated on the tailgates faced them. The convoys of up to a dozen trucks were headed for the Kohnstein, a nearby pine-covered mountain to whose top Onkel Karl and I had hiked many times when I was a child. For the trucks’ passengers, it was obviously a one-way journey, because whenever the convoys returned, they were empty.

  The Kohnstein, my uncle told me, was now off limits to the public. It was totally fenced in and heavily patrolled. Another visible change was a huge gaping hole in the side of the mountain facing Salza, seemingly the entrance to a gigantic tunnel.

  When I asked Onkel Karl what was going on in the Kohnstein, he merely put his index finger in front of his lips and whispered that whatever it was, it was a top government secret and none of our business.

  “Don’t go around asking questions about the Kohnstein,” he warned me. “It’ll only get you and all of us in trouble. The best thing to do is what everybody here is doing—forget what you have seen and act as if the Kohnstein doesn’t exist.”

  That was easier said than done. I couldn’t forget. The sight of the living dead in the SS convoy haunted me, especially at night when I would hear the trucks rumble past my window. Who were these wretched men? What were they doing in the mountain?

  It wasn’t until after the war had ended that I—and the rest of the world—learned the dark, horrible secret of the Kohnstein and its official name, Concentration Camp Dora-Mittelbau.
In a diabolic scheme that could have been conceived only by fiends, the mountain served two major Nazi objectives: the production of the “miracle weapon,” the V2 rocket, that was supposed to wrest an increasingly elusive German victory from the jaws of defeat, and the annihilation of literally thousands of men who, for one reason or another, had been branded enemies of the Hitler state.

  While the expressionless faces of the men on the trucks betrayed utter despair, my wildest imagination was incapable of guessing the horror of torture, starvation, bone-crushing work, and—within a few months—death from exhaustion, undernourishment, and disease that awaited them once they entered the mountain.

  I had no idea that only a fifteen-minute walk from where I lived in relative comfort, thousands of men were brutalized and literally worked to death, then cremated on the premises in ovens manufactured especially for that purpose. Neither did I guess that the black smoke that occasionally wafted from the mountain to Salza may well have originated from the crematorium. It didn’t occur to me that the military staff cars that drove past the house might have contained some of the key people responsible for the mountain factory of death, including SS chief Heinrich Himmler, munitions chief Albert Speer, and the V-rocket mastermind, Wernher von Braun. Ironically, and shamefully, the latter would win laurels and VIP status in the United States only a few years later for spearheading the U.S. space program.

  Spurred by curiosity and boredom, I decided one Sunday to take a walk in the direction of the Kohnstein to see how far I was still able to retrace my childhood steps. In retrospect, it wasn’t one of my most brilliant ideas. Shortly after passing the last house of Salza on the Harzstrasse and the village’s closed outdoor swimming pool, I reached a tall mesh-wire fence topped by barbed wire. There were several signs on the fence proclaiming that the area was off limits to unauthorized persons. From where I stood, I could clearly see the huge entrance to a tunnel but nothing more. There was no sign of life, with the exception of a solitary armed SS guard who, accompanied by a German shepherd dog, was slowly heading in my direction on the inside of the fence.