Destined to Witness

  Within a few months, the stringent dusk-to-dawn curfew was relaxed and Germans were permitted to stay outdoors until 10:15 P.M. As for me, my liberation wasn’t formalized until twenty-one days after General Alfred Jodl signed Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7, which officially ended the hostilities. On May 28, the Allied military government struck down all Nazi laws, including the so-called Nuremberg Laws that were aimed at “the protection of German blood.” In a sweeping move, the Allies ordered that “henceforth, nobody may benefit from his connections to the NSDAP or suffer disadvantages because of his race, nationality, or beliefs.”

  HOME, SWEET HOME

  Envious of the occasional gifts of cigarettes and food I was able to scrounge through my rapidly expanding contacts with British soldiers, some of the people at our shelter vented their disapproval of my “consorting with the enemy” through hostile remarks. Since they were too cowardly to confront me, they made their remarks only in the presence of my mother whenever I wasn’t around. When I learned about this, I told Mutti that apparently we had overstayed our welcome and that it was time for us to move on. She agreed, then surprised me by formally turning the reins of our small “family” over to me. “You are in charge now,” she told me. “With this new British occupation, I don’t know my way around anymore. So from now on, you make the decisions for us both.”

  I was deeply touched and honored, and resolved to skipper our little boat as best I could. The question was, where could we go?

  Ralph and Egon told me not to despair and that, in due time, help from somewhere would materialize. I was not convinced. What I badly needed, I felt, was contact with representatives of the Liberian government, but the establishment of a Liberian consulate in Germany, I was told, could still be years away.

  Just when I was about to give up hope of finding a suitable place to stay, the Giordanos introduced me to an elderly widow, reputedly a relative of a former Nazi bigwig, who had befriended them and offered her help. The woman immediately agreed to let my mother and me rent a room in her house, not far from the Giordanos’ basement. “You and your mother are welcome to stay until you find something more suitable,” she told me. I gladly accepted. After that, we grabbed what few belongings we had and, without regrets, left the school that for two years had been our home.

  Our furnished room, on the second floor of the woman’s home, was barely large enough for a bed, a small couch, a dresser, and a wardrobe, but to my mother and me it seemed like paradise found. For the first time since we were bombed out three years earlier we enjoyed the luxury of privacy within space—however small—we didn’t have to share with strangers. But our bliss was short-lived.

  It soon became apparent to us that what at first appeared to be an altruistic gesture on the part of our new landlady was nothing but a calculated ploy. I suspected that like most Germans with Nazi connections, she had lived in mortal fear of what the British might do to her once her background came to their attention. By going on record as having helped victims of Nazi persecution like the Giordanos and me, she hoped to earn brownie points with whatever British military tribunal would investigate her case. When, within a few days, it became obvious to her that the Brits were not about to come down hard on Nazis, she totally lost her fear of them and with it, her enthusiasm for helping us. Quite abruptly, her attitude toward my mother and me changed. Instead of friendly greetings, we received the silent treatment coupled with hostile glances. Before the month for which we had paid rent was up, she told me that she really needed her room and would appreciate it if we would move as soon as possible. So anxious was she to get rid of us, she even offered to refund our rent money in full if only we left.

  Out of desperation, since we were determined not to return to the school, my mother and I scouted the neighborhood for an unoccupied basement under a bombed-out and abandoned building. Luckily, we found one just a few blocks away from the apartment from which we had been more or less evicted. Invoking an unwritten but widely honored squatter’s-right law, we immediately took possession by simply moving in.

  Our new “apartment” had several conveniences that would have made it a bargain even if it hadn’t been rent-free. It boasted a fully operational flush toilet, running cold water, electric light in the form of a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, and an entrance door we could secure with a padlock. In addition, it had congenial neighbors, a middle-aged couple who said they had lived next door since they lost their home in the big 1943 air raids.

  After storing our meager belongings, my mother and I went furniture “shopping.” This was simply a matter of scavenging through several abandoned basements and picking from the things that had been left behind whatever seemed usable to us. After several trips and within less than two hours, we had furnished our new apartment in the most eclectic of tastes with two wooden cots, four nonmatching chairs, a small, three-and-a-half-legged kitchen table, a dresser, an enamel face bowl minus most of the enamel, and a large, badly chipped, but highly functional water pitcher. My mother and I were ecstatic when, surrounded by our newly acquired treasures, we ate our first meal in our very own home. The fact that the meal, which my mother had prepared on a hot plate, was meatless as usual and consisted only of some cabbage boiled in water did nothing to diminish our joy. But something else did.

  In addition to the various extras that came with our new residence, there was one my mother and I hadn’t counted on: fleas. Even though my contact with these bloodsucking parasites was mercifully brief, they are indelibly etched in my memory as the most worrisome of critters ever unleashed on man.

  Despite the fact that we had given the basement a thorough cleaning before we moved in, we had been totally unaware of the fleas’ presence at the time. It was not until we turned off the light and went to bed that we realized we had a problem—a big problem. Like an army attacking from ambush, literally hundreds of fleas swarmed all over our bodies, biting and sucking, until we were covered from head to toe with welts and little splotches of our own blood. Totally impervious to pressure because of their armorlike shells, the insects continued their biting and sucking right through our scratching and slapping at them. The only thing, we discovered, that would make them call off their relentless attack was light. As long as we kept the light on and our blankets off, they would leave us more or less alone. Rather than unleash another attack by these Draculas of the insect world, we kept the lights on and braved the night chill while scratching our itching and burning skin until daylight put an end to our misery.

  Since we had no other place to go, my mother and I decided right then and there that if anyone had to leave, it was the critters and not us. So as soon as the stores opened, we loaded up with several large bottles of Lysol and started an all-out war on our six-legged invaders. After spending most of the day scrubbing and dousing every nook and cranny of the basement—and most of our possessions—with Lysol, we managed to have the place and us smell like a chemical factory. Whether the smell was as distasteful to the fleas as it was to us remained to be seen. The acid test came at nightfall when we turned off the light. For a while we waited with bated breath while bracing for another attack. But nothing happened. Not one flea made its presence known. When we awoke the next morning, each without a single new flea bite, we congratulated each other for having won another battle with adversity.

  HUNGER—THE NEW ENEMY

  Throughout the war, the Nazis had managed to keep the German civilian population supplied with food. They did so largely by limiting the occupied nations to cruel starvation diets and shipping the lion’s share of their food production to Germany. Thus, we always had food to eat—if not our favorite dishes or as much as we would have liked, at least enough to keep us from starving. All that changed with the defeat and occupation of Germany. Immediately, the Allies stopped the flow of food. Instead of food coming into Germany to supplement the supply produced in Germany, Germany was forced to depend on its own food production. This caused catastrophic food shorta
ges in Hamburg and other German cities and resulted in widespread starvation. For the first time in my life I learned the true meaning of the word hunger. The realization that we were now reaping what the Nazis had been sowing was hardly any consolation to my mother and me. With allotted food rations pared down to inhumane minimums that were too little to keep us alive, yet still too much to let us die, we were growing thinner and weaker and more apathetic as the days went by. Making matters even worse was the fact that food-rationing coupons were no guarantee that what little food we were entitled to was actually available. Often, after hearing that a new shipment of meat, bread, or potatoes had arrived at the shops, my mother and I would spend grueling hours taking turns standing in long lines at the butcher’s, baker’s, or grocer’s, only to be told before we reached the counter that the last item of food had just been sold. The disappointment, rage, panic, hopelessness, and depression we felt every time we had wasted our time and what little energy we had left are impossible to put into words. Sometimes my mother and I were so sapped of strength and will by hunger and disappointment that we didn’t even try to stand in line after hearing of another food shipment. Our long-held conviction that once the war was over, most of our troubles would be over too evaporated in the face of sobering reality. Suddenly, the irony of having survived Hitler’s pogrom and the Allied bombs only to die from hunger during peacetime loomed as a distinct possibility. I remember that during the height of the starvation period in Hamburg, overweight Germans were as hard to find as Nazis. My mother, for instance, who during normal times had always been on the plump side, shrank to a bone-rattling ninety-nine pounds.

  During the immediate postwar period, nothing had a more devastating, more debilitating effect on us than the constant hunger that plagued us. It robbed us of our sleep at night and made it impossible for us to function during the day. If we did manage to fall asleep, we often were dreaming of—what else?—food. These dreams usually had me seated at a table, ready to enjoy a scrumptious meal of some kind or another, only to have me awaken abruptly just as I was about to take my first bite. Several mornings Mutti and I woke up to discover that both our faces were swollen and distorted to near-unrecognizable shapes, a temporary condition that my mother diagnosed as hunger edema—an accumulation of fluid brought on by a regular diet of cabbage boiled in water and an extreme lack of protein. Once, I stood weak from hunger on a crowded subway train when all of a sudden, just before reaching my destination, I had the distinct sensation of blacking out, something I had never done in my entire life. Desperately trying not to collapse and make a spectacle of myself, I braced my back against the side of the train and locked my legs before losing consciousness. When I came to, I was surprised to discover that I was still standing, although I had passed my destination by one stop.

  I was walking once in my neighborhood when a trucker stopped me and asked me whether I would help him unload his truck, which, he explained, was loaded to the top with boxes filled with bottles of cooking oil. For my efforts, he said, I could keep one of the bottles. Feeling weak from hunger and afraid of ruining my best—and only—suit, I turned him down at first. But after thinking about it a moment, I changed my mind. Cooking oil was, like butter and other types of fat, among the most scarce and therefore most coveted food products, which my mother could surely put to good use.

  As I labored like a galley slave in the noon summer heat, carrying one heavy box after another into a warehouse, I could already taste the delicious fried potatoes with which I intended to surprise my mother. After several hours of backbreaking labor, I finally finished the job and collected my bottle of oil. When I surprised my mother with the gift, she told me to rest while she whipped up a pan full of fried potatoes. It wasn’t until the first drops of oil hit the heated pan that our happy anticipation turned to huge disappointment. Instead of the appetizing aroma of fried potatoes, thick yellow smoke that had us gasping for air wafted through the apartment. Painfully, I realized that I had been duped, that the “cooking oil” for which I had labored so hard and long was nothing but an industrial oil that was totally unfit for ingesting. Killing mad and eager to even the score, I ran back to the warehouse in hopes of still finding the trucker. But by the time I arrived, the warehouse door was locked and the trucker and his truck were gone.

  One day, at the height of the postwar starvation era, Mutti announced cheerfully that she and four of her lady friends, including the irrepressible Lisbeth, had decided to pool their meager resources and prepare a rare culinary treat—a genuine pound cake. We were all looking forward to the following Saturday afternoon, when the feast was going to take place in the apartment of one of the ladies whose home had been spared by the bombs. On Saturday noon, shortly after leaving work, the women congregated in their friend’s kitchen and started measuring and mixing whatever ingredients they had been able to scrape together, fudging here and there on the recipe when ingredients were missing, and using their creativity in coming up with substitutes. Each of us had contributed, among other things, one egg, which was our allotment for three months. Just as the delicious-smelling, pale yellow batter was ready to be put into the oven, someone decided that a pinch of vanilla extract was needed to make the cake perfect. So while Mutti and I and the rest of the cooks fanned out over the neighborhood to look for the missing ingredient, Lisbeth volunteered to stay behind and clean up the kitchen. When we returned half an hour or so later, we were totally unprepared for what we found.

  Lisbeth was sitting at the kitchen table in tears amid dirty pots and pans.

  At first we couldn’t make out heads or tails of her wailing monologue, except the repeated “I’m terribly sorry.” But gradually, we figured out the bad news as we discovered that the cake pan that had held the precious batter was not just empty; it was clean as a whistle. In halting words, interrupted by much boo-hooing and nose-blowing, Lisbeth told us how, after we had left, she had started to clean up. Her mistake, she said, was to allow herself the taste of one teaspoonful of batter. One teaspoon, she said, led to another teaspoon, and another and another, until she had totally lost control. “No matter how hard I tried,” she said, “I just couldn’t stop eating. That’s how hungry I was.”

  Everyone was stunned and getting angrier by the minute. “I think you’d better leave, Lisbeth,” said my mother, “because we are all hungry and if you stay, there’s no telling what we might do to you. Right now we are mad enough to kill you.”

  Lisbeth grabbed her things and ducked out of the door. As soon as she was gone, all the women sat down and released their disappointment and anger in a flood of tears and invectives of which gemeines Luder (low-down hussy) was among the more flattering. I didn’t cry, but I, too, was angry enough at Lisbeth to reserve a few choice words of my own for her, words I didn’t dare to speak in Mutti’s presence.

  While at the time none of us could find even the faintest bit of humor in what had occurred that Saturday afternoon, years later, after food became plentiful once again, Lisbeth’s exploits became one of the funniest stories in Mutti’s sizable repertoire.

  It was during this period that I was standing at a downtown street corner one day waiting for the traffic light to change. Shivering in my thin, threadbare coat, I was wondering how to silence the indignant growling of my empty stomach.

  “What’s happening, m’ man?” a deep voice interrupted my preoccupation with my misery.

  Startled, I looked up and saw a soldier in combat fatigues climb from a heavy-duty U.S. Army truck that had stopped beside me at the curb. He was a black man, the first American “brother” I had seen in all of my twenty years. Dr. Livingston couldn’t have been more elated at the sight of Stanley than I was at the sight of this stranger from another continent.

  “What in the world are you doing here among these Krauts?” the GI asked me. Eager to practice my budding English, I explained as best as I could that “these Krauts” were my bona fide countrymen and that Hamburg was my native home.

  “Where
were you during the war?” the GI wanted to know.

  “Right here,” I replied.

  Amazed, the soldier looked at the ruins around us and then at my well-worn German-style clothes. “How are things now?” he inquired. “Still pretty rough, I bet.”

  I agreed.

  After telling me to wait a second, he climbed back on his truck. When he returned, he carried a helmet filled to overflowing with chocolate bars, C-rations, and cigarettes. “I guess you can use these,” he said, without my having told him that I was dizzy with hunger. “That’ll tide you over for a while.”

  Unable to express what I was feeling, I stuffed my pockets with my treasures while the eyes of curious pedestrians followed my every move. I felt like dropping to my knees and thanking my black Samaritan, but before I could say anything, he had gotten back on his truck and, with a wave of his hand and a “Take care, m’ man,” had pulled away.

  It was during those few minutes that I first was struck by the sentimental notion to leave Germany and to get to know “my people” in the United States. Undoubtedly, my empty stomach had much to do with my decision to get the hell out of Germany.

  Just as crucial as the shortage of food was the severe shortage of coal and other fuel. To supplement their meager allotment, desperate hordes of men, women, and children swarmed like locusts over stalled coal trains, freight yards, and other places where coal was stored or transported in order to fill their sacks, buckets, or baskets. This frequently brought them into confrontation with the police, who fought an uphill battle to curb the pilfering of heating fuel. While the coal rations we received were far from sufficient to keep our home fires burning, my mother and I decided against joining the illegal pursuit of coal after we almost became involved in a battle between pilferers and police in which both sides sustained serious casualties. If need be, we reasoned, we could stay warm by wrapping ourselves in blankets rather than paying for a little extra heat quite literally with an arm or a leg.