Destined to Witness

  “Do you speak English?” the leader of the group demanded.

  “A little,” I replied meekly.

  “Smashing,” the leader, a tall man with a bushy red walrus mustache and matching red beetle eyebrows snapped without making sense to me. He was the only one in the group who was not pointing a weapon at me. Instead, he was holding a riding whip, while his heavy pistol remained securely inside a canvas holster. I didn’t know British military rank insignia at the time, but I gathered that the three big brown stars on the walrus’s epaulets were the insignia of an officer.

  Introducing himself as Captain So-and-So, the walrus confirmed my guess. “What’s your nationality?”

  I explained as best as I could that I was part Liberian, part German, in that order.

  “How many people are living in this building and what sort of people are they?” the walrus continued while offering me a cigarette. Up to that point I had steadfastly resisted all peer pressure to take up the smoking habit, but now I didn’t feel that I should reject this first expression of cordiality from my liberators. So I gratefully accepted and lighted up as a symbolic gesture of solidarity with my allies. I then explained to the officer with what little English I had at my command that the school served as emergency quarters for bombed-out German civilians, of whom approximately 80 percent were women and the other 20 percent mostly elderly men.

  “Tell them that I want all of them assembled in the schoolyard immediately so that I can talk to them. And since my German is much worse than your English, I want you to translate for me.”

  I assured the officer that I would do the best I could. Proud of my new, semiofficial status as interpreter in His Majesty’s service, I returned to my dorm and passed on the captain’s order. I immediately noticed that a new note of respect crept into my dormmates’ voices and demeanor while dealing with me.

  As I went from dorm to dorm to relay the captain’s order, I was bombarded with anxious questions and requests to act as intermediary. To my amusement, even those neighbors who had always acted distant toward me were eagerly reminding me of what close pals we had always been. Their sudden change in attitude came as no surprise to me, since I knew that many expected harsh treatment from the British, including summary, SS-style executions. Some women, in a state of full-blown hysteria, had locked themselves in the women’s washrooms to keep from being raped, as Goebbels had predicted in the event of a German defeat. My attempts to convince them that they had nothing to fear met with only partial success.

  It was a miserable-looking bunch that assembled in the schoolyard, with some of the women still sobbing while the men were trying to look as fearless as they could under the circumstances.

  “Tell them,” the captain told me, “that they are to remove a portion of the barrier in front of the building wide enough for our vehicles to pass through. I want every able-bodied man to meet us in front of the building in half an hour. The women can go back inside.”

  I was surprised at how much of my school English I had retained. While I didn’t understand every word the captain had spoken, I had no difficulty getting the gist of what he meant. When I finished translating, there was noticeable relief among the school’s occupants.

  Some of the captain’s men had confiscated several jeeps full of picks and shovels at a nearby bombed-out construction firm and distributed them among the German men who had assembled at the barricade. The captain instructed them, again through me, to work as fast as they possibly could. He gave them until 4 P.M. to complete the job. That meant they had exactly five hours to dismantle what had taken months to construct—a rather unlikely task.

  In spite of the captain’s deadline and the steady pace of the workers, it was dark before the breach in the barricade was wide enough for the widest vehicle in the convoy to drive through. After the last truck had reached the other side, the captain asked me to tell the men that they were dismissed and to distribute several packs of cigarettes among them. Before mounting his jeep and disappearing into the night, he thanked me for my help and handed me two round sealed tins containing a total of one hundred cigarettes. I didn’t know it then, but I was soon to learn that I had just been paid in Germany’s newest currency.

  It was way after midnight when I finally turned in. None of my dormmates said a word, making me acutely aware of another shift in attitude toward me. Only this time, it was a negative shift. I immediately understood. In their view, I no longer was one of them, as just a day ago. Instead, I was now “on the other side.” It dawned on me that in one fell swoop I had ceased to be what I had always considered myself—a German. But somehow, the thought didn’t bother me. The Germans never let me fully share in their happy past. Now I didn’t need any part of their miserable present. Lying awake on my bunk and reflecting on the day’s events, I concluded that I had reached a watershed in my life. I could sense that the pendulum of fate was swinging my way for a change and wondered what had taken it so long. For the first time in years I felt totally free of the paralyzing fear that my pride had never permitted me to admit to anyone, least to myself, but that had stalked me relentlessly by day and by night. It was not an ordinary kind of fear, such as the fear of being killed in a bombing raid or in a Nazi extermination camp. Instead it was the fear of being humiliated, of being ridiculed, of being degraded, of having my dignity stripped from me, of being made to feel that I was less a human being, less a man than the people in whose midst I lived. Suddenly, that fear was lifted from me like a heavy burden I had carried without being fully aware of it.

  Shortly after the daytime curfew had been rescinded, I headed downtown to see what changes had occurred. Still unsure of what to expect from their conquerors, German civilians kept mostly out of sight while the streets swarmed with British troops who were crisscrossing the city in huge olive-drab trucks and small vehicles they called jeeps. Overnight, street signs with arrows and the words UPTOWN and DOWNTOWN had been posted at major intersections, obviously to help British drivers find their way around the city. I noticed that whenever Germans waved at passing British trucks, their occupants did not return the greeting. Instead, the Tommies stared grimfaced ahead or even looked pointedly the other way. I knew that many Hamburgers had been fed up with Hitler’s war and regarded the British as their liberators rather than their conquerors. Thus, I was puzzled by this obvious snub. I had to wait two months for an official explanation of this behavior when posters, instructing the city’s population on new occupation regulations, contained a special message from British Field Marshal Viscount Bernard Montgomery. Characterizing his countrymen as basically friendly and good-natured people, he explained that his troops did not wave back at Germans because he had ordered them not to fraternize. In view of the bitter struggle that had just ended, he felt that it was too soon for letting bygones be bygones. He further explained that World War I was not fought on German soil but in France and Belgium, and that after the beaten German army returned intact, Germany’s leaders concocted the lie that the German army had not been defeated. To prevent history from repeating itself a third time and to prevent World War III, the field marshal said, Germans had to be taught a lesson and be made to understand that a nation has the leaders it deserves. Until that lesson had been driven home, he said, it was too early to kiss and make up. “It is our goal,” he concluded, “to destroy the evil of the national socialistic system. It is too early to be sure that this goal has been reached.”

  However well reasoned, the nonfraternization policy of the man who had outfoxed Erwin Rommel, Germany’s famous Desert Fox, contained a fatal flaw: It was conceived without considering one of the most compelling of human characteristics—the sex drive. Before the week was over, certainly long before Monty got around to changing his mind, I witnessed how Tommies and German fräuleins made a mockery of his edict by making out like love-starved fools. Conceding Monty’s military genius, I concluded that the good field marshal didn’t know a bloomin’ thing about the birds and bees.

  I h
ad often wondered what had happened to the Giordanos, but kept postponing looking them up out of fear of what I would find. Finally, about two weeks after Hamburg’s surrender, I overcame my reluctance and took a walk to their basement on Diesterwegstrasse. To my great relief, I found the entire family relatively well, considering that they had just survived an ordeal of indescribable horror while hiding for weeks in the ruins with barely enough food and water to survive. Even Frau Giordano had shed her worried look and seemed visibly relieved that her family’s ordeal had come to an end. All were euphoric about their liberation. They still found it difficult to believe that the nightmare was over and that they had actually survived the Holocaust. In what seemed like a reenactment of our first clandestine meeting, they were all over me, hugging me, slapping my back, shaking my hand, and pinching my cheeks while congratulating me and themselves for the umpteenth time on the death of “that Nazischwein Hitler.” Somehow the scene reminded me of the conclusion of that old German fairy tale when the seven little goats dance with their mother around the well in which the big bad wolf has just drowned.

  After the euphoria had subsided somewhat, Egon, Ralph, and I took a walk to observe our liberators and to discuss the events of the past few weeks. On our way we saw long lines of parked heavy tanks, trucks, and jeeps, with beret-wearing, white-bread-chewing and tea-guzzling soldiers lounging about. They all looked remarkably fit and in excellent spirits. It had been a long time since we had seen so many well-fed-looking men. They contrasted sharply with the long columns of motley-looking German prisoners of war who, flanked by British guards, were being led to discharge centers outside the city. Many hobbled on crutches or wore dirty bandages on their heads and limbs. Some of them showed signs of severe malnutrition. They were a far cry from the goose-stepping young Siegfrieds who not so long ago, in an orgy of conquest, had forced one European nation after another to its knees. Remembering Goebbels’s propaganda newsreels that poked fun at French African prisoners of war by sarcastically referring to them as the “saviors of Western civilization,” I could clearly see who had the last laugh.

  As Ralph and Egon told me about their plans for the future, I realized that, although we had much in common, we were miles apart in our agendas. Or, more correctly, they had an agenda and I didn’t. I was content with having emerged from the Nazi nightmare alive and relatively unscathed, and was now prepared to put it behind me and explore whatever opportunities lay ahead. They, on the other hand, were not about to let go of the past. In fact, they were just beginning their battle with their sworn political enemies, the Nazis and neo-Nazis. Calling me naive and uninformed, they scoffed at my suggestion that with Hitler’s death and the destruction of the Wehrmacht, the Nazis were history. The Nazis and Nazi ideology, they insisted, were alive and well among the German people; both brothers vowed not to rest until the last Nazischwein was dangling from a rope and Nazism was banished from the face of the earth.

  While I, too, wanted to see all Nazi criminals brought to trial and all vestiges of Nazism destroyed, I was quite content with leaving everything to the Allies. Not so Egon and Ralph, who were about to launch their careers as hard-hitting anti-Nazi journalists. Already, they had spent the larger portion of the night pounding on a beat-up typewriter they had scrounged up and produced several articles that they hoped one of the city’s newspapers would print. Each article demanded a swift and radical purge of Nazi elements by the British occupation force.

  But the British wheels of justice, we found out, turned agonizingly slowly, and in many cases ground to a complete halt. Nevertheless, a war crimes trial in Hamburg’s Curio House sentenced fourteen SS men and women to death by hanging after they were found guilty of committing unspeakable atrocities in the Neuengamme concentration camp outside Hamburg, where more than fifty thousand inmates perished. Meanwhile, most of the Nazi bigwigs were let go with a slap on the wrist. Hamburg’s Nazi Bürgermeister Karl Vincent Krogmann, for instance, who from the start of the Nazi regime had been a member of the elite corps of political leaders and a Gauamtsleiter (regional leader) of the NSDAP, received a ten-thousand-mark suspended fine. His boss, Karl Kaufmann, fared even better. Although a faithful Hitler follower and confidant until he defied Hitler’s order to defend Hamburg “to the last man,” he was found unfit to stand trial because of a debilitating angina pectoris condition.

  Equally high on the Giordano brothers’ agenda was the subject of Wiedergutmachung (compensation) to which they insisted all non-Aryans who had suffered in one form or another under the Nazis were entitled. Toward that end, we decided to go downtown and see about our claim.

  As we entered British military government headquarters at the former Hotel Esplanade to make inquiries, we were directed to the office of a British major in charge of relief matters. The friendly officer told Ralph and Egon that, as half Jews, they were on the priority list of various Jewish relief measures set up by the Allies. Such relief, he explained, ranged from housing to extra food rations and preferential hiring by the military government. After asking them to fill out several forms, he assured my friends that massive help for them was on the way.

  When it came my turn to state my business, I explained that I, like the Giordanos, had been persecuted by the Nazis as a non-Aryan and disadvantaged educationally, economically, psychologically, and physically. Consequently, I said, I, too, would like to apply for some kind of relief. After listening politely to my story and agreeing that my situation under the Nazis was everything but enviable, the major told me that nothing could be done for me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “as far as the British military government is concerned, you are a bona fide German. We are authorized to help only Jews, displaced foreign nationals, non-German POWs, and former concentration camp detainees. You can readily see that you don’t belong to any of these categories.”

  So much for the new swing of the pendulum, I thought. In spite of the fact that “my side” had won, I kept being dogged by my old habit of not quite fitting in.

  THE RAZOR’S EDGE

  I was disappointed by this unexpected rejection, but far from defeated. Nothing could convince me that things would not get better for me now that the Nazis were gone and the war was over. The latest setback was simply a reminder that nothing would be handed to me on a platter. But I was quite willing to do whatever it took to make things happen, although at the moment, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what my options were. All I knew was that, if I could help it, I would never work in anybody’s machine shop again. I was grateful to my mother, who had sacrificed to give me the opportunity of learning a trade, but after four years of growing calluses while risking life and limb with backbreaking labor amid lung-blistering stench and ear-shattering noise, I was more than ready for a change. By hook or crook, I was determined to make the transition to the white-collar class; in what capacity, I wasn’t quite sure. I was convinced, however, that in postwar Germany, most of which was controlled by the British and Americans, I needed more than just a smattering of English to get by and decided right then and there to make the study of English my number-one priority.

  I bought a German-English pocket dictionary, which henceforth became my steady companion wherever I went. At first I tried reading the dictionary like a book and memorizing words as I went through the alphabet. That method proved not only boring but largely unproductive. Thus, I made only minimal progress until, quite by chance, I hit on a system that produced dramatic results. A British soldier, with whom I had started a conversation, gave me a much-read-looking paperback copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, with the prediction that once I started reading it, I wouldn’t be able to put it down. It was not until a few days later when I tried, quite unsuccessfully, to read the first page that I realized how woefully inadequate my English vocabulary was. My first inclination was to do what the Tommy had told me I couldn’t do and put the book down until my understanding of the English language had improved. But instead, I embarked on the tedious task of looking up every sin
gle word I didn’t understand, line for line, until the entire page made sense to me. After that, I turned to the next page and repeated the process. At first, progress was maddeningly slow and frustrating. Time and again, when a word I had just looked up reappeared, I had forgotten its definition and had to look it up again. But little by little, I got hooked by the action and, as I went deeper into the novel, which deals with a young American’s quest for enlightenment in the snow-capped mountains of India, words and their meanings began to stay with me. By the time I was halfway through the novel, after about a month of reading, I was able to read many pages without the aid of my dictionary.

  To supplement my reading lessons, I took advantage of every opportunity to strike up conversations with British soldiers. In doing so, I was surprised to notice how quickly some of the English Herr Harden, our much-hated English teacher, had tried to pound into our brains came back to me after I had assumed that it had been irretrievably lost. It wasn’t long before I spoke English with a reasonable degree of fluency and felt ready to face the challenges that lay ahead.

  Most of my observations regarding the escalating British-German rapprochement I made in violation of the dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed on German nationals by the British military government. Under its provisions, any German caught outdoors after sundown was subject to severe penalties ranging from seven to sixty days imprisonment. Relying entirely on what little English I knew and on my not-so-German looks, I moved about Hamburg at night as if the curfew did not apply to me. Whenever I was stopped by British military police, I told them that they were dealing with a citizen of Liberia, an Allied member state, that I was expecting my Liberian passport any day now, and that I was awaiting repatriation to my homeland as soon as it could be arranged. That always got the MPs off my back. Only once did they take me in, but after I repeated my tale to a superior officer, he apologized for the inconvenience his men had caused and sent me on my way.