Destined to Witness

  I had no desire to come face-to-face with the SS man and his dog. So before making eye contact with him, I turned around and headed back to Salza.

  A few days later, when I returned from work, my aunt greeted me with an expression that spelled pending doom. Without a word, she handed me an official looking envelope from the office of Salza’s mayor. The letter demanded my presence “on an urgent matter, as soon as possible.” That, I knew, meant tomorrow. So before going to work the next morning, I went to the village hall, the only office building in “downtown” Salza. After waiting my turn while undergoing intense scrutiny from several villagers, all of whom, I was positive, knew already who I was, I was led into an adjoining office by a secretary, who told me that Amtsleiter Hirsch, the “mayor” of Salza, would attend to me personally. I had no illusion that this personal attention from the highest Nazi in the village was meant as a courtesy to me; rather, His Honor was short-staffed.

  The big, brown-uniformed man seated behind a large desk in front of a huge swastika flag reminded me a little of Herr Wriede, my erstwhile school principal. I interpreted this as a bad omen. The mayor returned my Heil Hitler salute with a noncommittal expression, then asked for my ID. After carefully examining my Wehrpass, which indicated that I was ineligible for the draft, the mayor came straight to the point. “I have received a report that you have been seen spying at the Kohnstein. What do you have to say to that?”

  At first I was unable to say anything. Being accused of spying at a top-secret military site was a matter of utmost gravity.

  “I never spied at the Kohnstein or anywhere else,” I finally told the mayor.

  “Then what in heavens were you doing there?” Herr Hirsch demanded to know.

  I told him about my hiking trips with my uncle as a child and how I was trying to relive that part of my childhood. Wisely, I left out my curiosity about the convoys and their strange cargo.

  “As soon as I reached the wire fence and saw the ‘Off Limits’ signs,” I assured Herr Hirsch, “I turned around.”

  The mayor seemed satisfied with my explanation, but warned me to stay away from that area in the future and to keep my nose clean in general.

  “I have known Schneidermeister Baetz and Frau Baetz for many years,” he told me. “They are fine people. So I don’t want you to get them or yourself into trouble. Do you understand?”

  After I assured the mayor that I understood perfectly, we exchanged Heil Hitlers and I was dismissed.

  I never heard the end about my “foolishness” from Onkel Karl and Tante Grete after I told them what had transpired at the mayor’s office.

  “I told you to forget about the Kohnstein and not to worry about what’s going on up there,” Onkel Karl berated me, quite justifiably. “We are lucky the mayor is an old customer of mine for whom I’ve made many suits and uniforms. Otherwise, we could all be in deep trouble now.”

  I promised Onkel Karl, as I had promised the mayor, that henceforth I would watch my step.

  BACK IN HAMBURG

  At the time my mother and I were evacuated from Hamburg, we left in the belief that the city had been wiped out entirely, since we hadn’t seen a single intact building on our way out. But during the ensuing months, we ran into several fellow refugees from Hamburg who assured us that substantial portions of the city had been spared.

  The knowledge that not all of Hamburg had been reduced to rubble, as we had believed, triggered in us a longing to return that we found increasingly difficult to resist. It hadn’t taken us long to discover that we simply weren’t cut out for small-town life, no matter how idyllic. The mountains that surrounded us, and that we had once admired as beautiful tourist attractions, had in time become menacing prison walls to us that threatened to suffocate us. We both longed for the flat, unobstructed northern German landscape that surrounded Hamburg. No matter how much Onkel Karl and Tante Grete tried to make us feel at home and encouraged us to grow roots, we became more homesick by the day. Finally, we couldn’t take it any longer, and decided to tell them that we were going back.

  As we had expected, they all but hit the ceiling. Onkel Karl told us we were reckless and stupid for taking another chance to be killed by bombs when in rural Salza and Nordhausen we were safe from enemy attacks. Tante Grete played hardball by suggesting that we wanted to leave because we didn’t think village life was good enough for us “city people.” And Trudchen tried to change our minds by simply crying every time we brought up the subject. But after becoming convinced that nothing they could say would change our minds, they finally gave their blessing and wished us luck. A few days later, on a beautiful spring day, they saw us off with many hugs and tears, and the admonition that if things didn’t turn out the way we expected, or if the air raids resumed, to come back on the next available train. The site was the same little whistle-stop where almost a year earlier we had arrived totally demoralized in the middle of the night, but this time our mood was upbeat, buoyed by anticipation of the old familiar sights and sounds.

  With rail traffic restored to near normalcy, the trip back to Hamburg took only seven or so hours. Since it had gotten dark by the time we reached the city, we were mercifully spared the sight of the massive destruction that had almost claimed our lives. Although detonating bombs had turned the huge canopy over Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof into a glassless steel skeleton, the station, which was as busy as ever, was a most welcome sight to us. Without putting it into words, we both knew how deeply we felt about being back in the only city on earth where we felt at home.

  At an information booth especially set up for returning refugees, we learned that the shelter for returnees nearest to where we used to live was a former elementary school on Brucknerstrasse which I used to pass daily on my way to school. A twenty-minute local subway train ride to Barmbek put us within walking distance of the shelter.

  After checking our IDs, taking down our names, and handing each of us a clean, mothball-smelling blanket, a kindly warden briefed us on the amenities of his establishment, which consisted largely of two daily hot meals (lunch and supper) on the house, toilets, and cold water sinks for taking a “bath” in the basement, then led us to a classroom that had been converted to a dormitory. The room was filled with primitive wooden double bunks. The warden explained, with a telling wink, that since there were no lockers on the premises, it would be a good idea not to let our belongings out of our sight. He also told my mother that, since the place was co-ed, the only way women could assure themselves a measure of privacy while taking their baths was to get up in the morning before everybody else.

  With privacy in mind, my mother and I chose two bottom bunks that were separated by a narrow aisle in the farthest corner of the room. On top of each bunk there were several stiff, porous sacks of some undefinable material filled with prickly straw and wood shavings—a far cry from the heavy mattresses, down-filled comforters, and fluffy pillows we had been used to all of our lives. But even the prospect of having to spend an entire night on these monstrosities could not dim our joy over having returned to our beloved city.

  After storing our suitcases beneath our bunks, we joined our new roommates, about a dozen mostly elderly men and women, at a large table in front of the room for supper, which had been delivered in a huge, piping hot metal container by an emergency kitchen somewhere in the city. During the ensuing conversations, we learned that all were former Barmbekers who, like us, had lost virtually everything but their lives during the July 1943 bombing raids, and who, also like us, had returned because they found life away from Hamburg intolerable. All hoped to reestablish contact with family members and friends and to somehow rebuild their lives.

  When the evening news came on the radio, everybody went silent. There were several sarcastic remarks when the announcer gave one of Dr. Goebbels’s carefully worded reports of another “strategic withdrawal” of the German troops on the eastern front.

  “Strategic withdrawal, my foot,” sneered one of the men. “We are getting our as
s whipped, that’s what’s happening. I wish they’d stop lying—” He abruptly stopped in midsentence as the warden poked his nose through the door to remind us that the lights would be turned off in half an hour, at 10 P.M.

  “He seems like an okay fellow,” the speaker resumed after the warden had closed the door, “but you never know about these Nazis.”

  I made sure not to voice my opinion, although I was in full agreement with him.

  Two days later, two uniformed Nazi officials arrived at the shelter for a routine check of the residents. They carefully inspected and recorded our IDs and instructed us to either return immediately to our old jobs or, if that wasn’t possible, to report to the employment office for reassignment to a new job. Each reminded us to do our share to help Germany win the war.

  We knew that my mother’s rubber factory had been largely bombed out and employed only a tiny skeleton crew, but decided to give it a try anyway. We were lucky. The personnel manager immediately put my mother to work in the kitchen and assigned her a bunk in a makeshift women’s dorm. Since production at the plant had stopped, he said he had openings for machinists only in the company’s intact branch plant in Harburg, Hamburg’s neighbor city, south of the River Elbe. If I decided to take that job, he told me, I could stay at the Harburg plant’s men’s dorm rent-free. Without giving a great deal of thought to the consequences, I signed up, and the following morning, after a one-hour streetcar ride, I reported to my new boss, Meister Erdmann, the head of the Harburg plant’s machine shop.

  TALE OF TWO CITIES

  When Herr Erdmann and I met, it was mutual dislike at first sight. Unable to conceal his feelings, Erdmann, a shriveled prune of a man with a permanent scowl, eyed me suspiciously as he briefed me on my future duties, which, he explained, consisted largely of troubleshooting. Housed in a dozen or so buildings throughout the plant were hundreds of steam presses used to mold hard rubber into various shapes under heat and pressure. Before the war, the company specialized in the manufacture of high-quality combs, smoking-pipe stems, and other useful household items. But like virtually all industrial plants in wartime Germany, the company had switched to the production of war-essential objects. Only the company’s top brass, I was told, were privy to the military purpose, or purposes, of the various odd-shaped objects the presses were turning out at a record pace.

  Among the machine shop’s major responsibilities was the maintenance of a vast network of pipes that carried the steam from the boilers to the presses. Another was the tooling and replacement of worn-out machine parts. “You will be working quite a bit on your own in various departments all over the plant,” Herr Erdmann concluded the briefing, “but just so we understand each other, there will be no goofing off on the job.”

  When I asked him what gave him the idea that I had come all the way to a miserable hick town like Harburg to goof off, he revealed the real source of his problem. “All you Hamburgers think you are so damn smart that nobody can tell you anything,” he fumed. “Well, let me tell you something, my friend: I have already smelled in places where you have yet to shit.”

  Since I had no interest in hearing further details about his venturesome nose, I left his remark unchallenged, but decided right then and there that ours was not going to be a good relationship.

  Later, several of the machinists who had been transferred to Harburg from the Hamburg plant told me not to take anything Erdmann said personally. Like many small-town Harburgers, they explained, he harbored an inbred suspicion and envy of all big-city Hamburgers.

  In spite of Erdmann, I rather liked my new job, especially the virtual independence and mobility it afforded me. Since I was one of only a few machinists at the shop who were qualified gas (acetylene) and arc (electric) welders, I was soon in high demand for special welding assignments that earned me the respect of my machinist peers and even the grudging approval of Erdmann. I got along well with my coworkers, especially the Hamburg contingent, and I made new friends among the French foreign workers with whom I shared quarters at the company dorm. One in particular, a handsome Parisian in his early twenties by the name of Jean Heideiger, became a real close pal whose lasting legacy to me was the ability to tie a Windsor knot and all the French four-letter words I know.

  One day, there was a big commotion in the factory yard when a convoy of army trucks discharged their load—a hundred or so Italian prisoners of war. They were part of several Italian divisions that, since the ouster of Mussolini and the subsequent surrender of the Italian army, had been captured by the German army and pressed into service in Germany’s war industry. The newly arrived POWs were a pitiful, scared-looking bunch in tattered, dirty uniforms. All were unshaven, hollow-eyed, and near starvation. At every opportunity they were digging in garbage cans in hopes of finding scraps of food or stretching out their hands to us and pleading for mangiare. Without being asked, they hastened to assure us that they had always been loyal to Mussolini. “Mussolini gut (good); Badoglio schlecht (bad),” they insisted in an obvious attempt to ingratiate themselves to their captors. Since most Germans had never been too crazy about Mussolini and their Italian allies, whose fighting prowess they had always held in deep contempt, the German workers were not impressed. They nevertheless treated their new fellow workers with compassion, if not respect.

  Within a few weeks, the Italians underwent a stunning transformation into reasonably well-fed and well-groomed hunks with glistening movie-star hairstyles and flamboyant personalities to match. Their initially obsequious demeanor had been replaced by a macho swagger and their straggly beards had given way to slick shaves and meticulously carved black mustaches. This dramatic change had not been lost on the plant’s female workers, and before long I observed, with considerable envy, how some of the fairest maidens at the factory cavorted openly with their brand-new Latin lovers.

  In addition to the Italian and French foreign workers there were also workers from the Soviet Union. The latter lived a far more restricted life and were kept in segregated camps. Since they were not allowed any social contact with Germans or other nationalities, I never became acquainted with any of them.

  My life would have been reasonably bearable had it not been for the fact that I was obliged to live in Harburg, in those days an ugly, industrial town bereft of any type of diversion, except for a few movie theaters and a few neighborhood pubs. Consequently, I looked forward with eager anticipation to Saturdays, when the noon whistle signaled the end of the workweek and I would take the streetcar to Hamburg and visit my mother. With the permission of her roommate, a kindly old lady, I crashed Saturday and Sunday nights at her dorm and returned to Harburg on the streetcar on Monday morning.

  One Saturday, a few minutes before plant closing, as I was rushing to catch the next Hamburg-bound streetcar, Meister Erdmann called me into his small, glass-enclosed office, from which he could overlook the entire shop. Handing me a work order, he informed me that a major steam pipe in one of the steam-press rooms had sprung a leak that needed repair. I carefully folded the piece of paper, shoved it in my pocket, and, promising Erdmann that I would take care of it first thing Monday morning, prepared to leave his office.

  “Not so fast, my friend,” he interrupted my getaway. He then explained that since the hole could not be welded shut while there was pressurized steam in the pipe, the job had to be done while the steam was shut off and the pipe had had a chance to drain, namely on Sunday. “This,” he told me with a wicked grin, “is where you come in.”

  When I asked him, “Why me?” and pointed out that I had already made other plans that I couldn’t change, he bluntly insisted that, since most of my fellow machinists had families and I didn’t, the job was logically mine, whether I liked it or not.

  I most emphatically begged to differ and stormed out of Erdmann’s office, followed by shouts threatening dire consequences unless I changed my mind. Since I couldn’t see myself skipping the weekly visit with my mother to which we both looked forward so much, changing my mind was
out of the question. Besides, at age eighteen, I wasn’t about to let a prune like Erdmann push me around. Without giving the matter another thought, I left the plant and within an hour was on my way to Hamburg.

  I didn’t resume thinking about Erdmann until I showed up at the shop the next Monday morning, still proud of myself that I hadn’t let him intimidate me. To my surprise, he greeted me with a wide grin instead of his familiar scowl. I soon learned the reason for his uncharacteristic mirth. “Let’s go for a little walk,” he invited me, still grinning from ear to ear. After a few minutes, we entered a large hall filled with rows upon rows of steam presses. Usually, the hall was teeming with activity and filled with the hissing sound of escaping steam and the thumping sounds of presses. Now the hall was quiet, except for the chatter of fifty or so men and women who stood idly at their workstations.

  “Put your hand here,” Erdmann told me while pointing at the nearest press. When I did, I noticed that the normally scalding hot press surface was cold as ice.

  “You’re in big trouble, my friend,” Erdmann said, grinning, “and it serves you right. I warned you, but you wouldn’t listen. What you have done is sabotage, and I don’t have to tell you what they do with saboteurs.” He gleefully explained to me that my failure to fix the steam pipe on Sunday had resulted in a massive and irretrievable loss of valuable work hours and a subsequent loss of extremely vital war production.