Destined to Witness

  The inevitable result of crucial food and other shortages was the rapid spread of a brazenly open black market where everything from food to cigarettes to clothes could be bartered in exchange for jewelry, cameras, binoculars, accordions, and other valuables that some people had managed to hang on to during the war. Within days of the arrival of the British troops, I saw branches of this new, highly volatile economic force spring up at various street corners and in parks and squares throughout the city. Since German cigarette production had stopped, American and English cigarettes quickly filled the vacuum and became the black market’s new, not-so-legal tender, with an astronomical exchange rate of one cigarette to five German marks.

  In spite of the black market’s highly illegal nature, relatively few of its participants were the underworld characters one reads about or sees in crime movies. Most of those I observed furtively trading on the black market were basically law-abiding men and women who had decided to give up their cherished wedding bands or cameras in order to brighten their drab existences with an occasional puff on a cigarette, a feast of canned corned beef, or a few cups of coffee, or to sweeten their hard lives with a couple of chocolate bars. Then there were the small-time amateur suppliers—British soldiers who were looking for bargain souvenirs from Germany, and who were sacrificing a pack or two of their own tightly rationed cigarettes. The real black-market pros, the big-time players, were the suppliers, a bunch of sleazy Germans whose secret warehouses received truckloads of cigarettes from equally sleazy British supply officers for retail black-market distribution. Easily recognized by their long leather coats and enormous gold chronometer wristwatches, they were ruthless wheelers and dealers who, like drug kingpins of generations yet to come, commanded armies of street “salesmen” who retailed the merchandise for maximum profits.

  Since I neither was a smoker nor possessed any valuables that I could barter for food, the black market, at first, held no particular interest for me. But that was to change eventually because of several unforeseen events that totally changed the direction of my life.

  While I had never formally terminated my employment with Max Roepke, I had no intention of ever returning, since the Allies had declared the compulsory Nazi work laws null and void. Determined to hang up my greasy machinist coveralls for good, I was more than ready to make my move to something better. What that “better” was, I didn’t yet know. But I was confident that in the new era of Allied occupation, my color would be less of an obstacle than it had been so far and that, one way or another, I would find a way to put bread on the table for my mother and myself.

  A NEW CAREER—MY FIRST GIG

  I was still looking for opportunities when I ran into Herr Giordano. When he told me that he was working as a pianist for the British Army Welfare Service, I mentioned in passing that I, too, was a musician of sorts, and that I had taught myself to play the clarinet. “Then you may be interested in knowing that the British are still looking for more musicians to entertain their garrisoned troops,” he told me, and urged me to go for an audition. I admitted that I wasn’t good enough to play professionally, but he insisted that I couldn’t possibly be as bad as some of the “hacks” the British were hiring. I wasn’t so sure about that, but figured that with my pockets and stomach empty, what did I have to lose? So the next day, after dusting off my trusty old “licorice stick,” which I hadn’t touched for many months, I followed Herr Giordano’s advice and headed for the Hamburger Staats Theater across from Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof and mingled with the musicians who were milling under the theater’s marquee in hopes of landing an afternoon gig. They were a varied lot, dressed for the most part in clothing that had seen better days and at best could be described as shabbily elegant. Looking at my own well-worn suit and shoes, I was struck by the irony that at least this time nobody could say I didn’t fit in.

  When I spotted Herr Giordano, he briefed me on the hiring procedure. Every noon, he explained, the British put together a number of twelve-piece bands from the assembled musicians. “Whenever they call for a clarinet, you raise your hand,” he told me. “If you are lucky, you’ll get picked. After the gig, you’ll be paid a few cigarettes and sometimes they’ll serve you tea and sandwiches. So far, I’ve been lucky only twice, since piano players are a dime a dozen.”

  After we had waited about an hour, a canvas-covered British army lorry drove up and an officer called off the instruments he needed to form a band. Once he had chosen a dozen musicians from those who had raised their hands, they were loaded on the lorry and, without audition or rehearsal, driven to one of the many British army garrisons in and around Hamburg to provide the troops with an afternoon of musical diversion.

  To my surprise, I was among the second truckload that was hired. I felt bad when the truck pulled off and I saw Herr Giordano still standing patiently among the musicians who were left behind. I hoped that he, too, would be lucky, but for the moment I had more pressing concerns. How could I possibly fool the other musicians and pass myself off as a pro? The closer our truck came to its destination, an army installation near Hamburg Flughafen manned by several hundred Tommies, the more I regretted having let Herr Giordano talk me into this. But there was no turning back.

  When we reached the camp, we were led into a giant Quonset hut—like auditorium, seated on a wooden platform next to an upright piano, and told by our escorting officer that the concert was to start at precisely 3 P.M. That gave us just a little more than half an hour to set up and get our instruments tuned and organized, not to mention rehearse. The officer then distributed several sheets of popular British and American hit tunes and instructed us to choose a bandleader from our ranks. Our unanimous choice was the oldest member of the group, a short, paunchy, bespectacled saxophonist-clarinetist in his middle sixties with thinning white hair and an authoritative demeanor whom everybody addressed respectfully as Kapellmeister Fuller. Herr Fuller, I was told, had once had his own orchestra.

  Soon the soldiers poured into the auditorium and, after a brief address by the officer, our band blasted off with Glenn Miller’s hit arrangement of “In the Mood,” a tune that was soon to take occupied Germany by storm. No thanks to me, the band sounded better than one could reasonably have expected under the circumstances. However, it was quite apparent to me that, Herr Giordano’s vote of confidence notwithstanding, I was clearly the weakest link in this musical chain.

  The fact that I was seated in the first row between Kapellmeister Fuller and a brash young tenor saxman who had just pulled off a brilliant solo did little to bolster my confidence in my musicianship. Thus, when a too-dry reed caused my clarinet to let out a piglike squeak in the middle of “At Last,” I had to control the urge to walk off the stand before being asked to quit. But instead of the rebuke or ridicule I had expected, Herr Fuller gave me an encouraging wink. “Don’t worry about it,” he told me between numbers. “You’ll be all right.” Even Addi Wulf, the cocky tenor saxman, gave me encouragement. Thanks to my new colleagues’ moral support, I made it through my first gig.

  Following our performance, we musicians were led to a long table that was laden with fluffy white-bread sandwiches and pitchers of sweet, creamy tea and told to eat to our hearts’ content. Starved as we were, we hardly needed any encouragement. The fact that nobody mentioned money didn’t bother me in the least, since I felt amply compensated for my efforts, especially since I was able to take a doggy bag of sandwiches home to Mutti.

  The following day I went back to the theater, hoping to get “hired” again. This time we were told to remain with the same group we had played with the previous day and that henceforth we would stay with that group. In effect, this meant that now I had a steady job instead of each day being at the mercy of Lady Luck. Although the pay was ridiculously small and the working conditions far from ideal, I was happy as a lark. I had access to food and I had achieved a significant breakthrough—the seemingly impossible transition from blue collar to white collar. This time, I felt, the pendulum had truly
swung my way.

  One evening, upon our return to the theater following a gig, Herr Fuller made me a surprising offer. “You’ve got what it takes to become a fine musician,” he told me, “but as you know yourself, you still have much to learn. If you want me to, I’ll give you clarinet and saxophone lessons.” He even offered to furnish an E-flat alto saxophone, since all I had was my B-flat clarinet. When I asked him how much the lessons would cost me, he told me, “Nothing. Just promise me you’ll work as hard as you can.”

  I couldn’t quite understand what he was getting out of the deal, but I was so elated about what I considered my big break that I immediately accepted, without bothering to ask why he was being so nice to someone he hardly knew.

  During several months that followed, under the stern guidance of my new mentor, I threw myself into the study of clarinet and saxophone with an intensity that bordered on obsession. Except for the daily afternoon sessions at British Army camps, I spent tedious hours in our basement “apartment,” practicing a wide range of musical fare from the famous clarinet cadenza in Franz von Suppe’s “Light Cavalry” to the E-flat saxophone solo in Glenn Miller’s arrangement of “In the Mood”—anything Herr Fuller had assigned to me—until I got it right. Twice a week, I went to Maestro Fuller’s modest apartment for two-hour practice sessions during which he critiqued my progress, coached me, and assigned new lessons.

  One day, after I had finished my lesson and prepared to leave, Herr Fuller looked unusually nervous. “There is something I would like to discuss with you, if you don’t mind,” he announced, his discomfort mounting visibly.

  Pausing repeatedly while groping for the right words, he told me that in order to be certified as a Kapellmeister under the Nazis, he had joined the Nazi Party shortly before the war. When the war broke out, he was inducted into the Luftwaffe as an officer with the rank of Oberleutnant (first lieutenant) and conductor of a concert band. He explained that both as Nazi Party member and as Luftwaffe officer, his duties had always been strictly musical, nonpolitical ones.

  Since the Allies had announced an extensive denazification program, he continued, he needed an enormous favor from me. Would I sign a letter stating that he had been an old friend of my family who had used his influence to “modify my plight as a person persecuted by the Nuremberg racial laws”?

  At first I balked. Lying to help a Nazi get off the hook was the last thing I thought I would ever do. But looking at the pitiful-looking old man who, in the short time I had known him, had been like a father to me, I started thinking. The military government’s so-called denazification program in Hamburg had already turned into a big joke, with former big-time Nazis being exonerated without as much as a slap on the wrist. And, I rationalized, Herr Fuller had merely been a tiny party wheel, not a wanted war criminal who had committed heinous crimes. When I considered how much he had already done to modify my present plight by giving me a toehold on a new life when none of my Allied “liberators” had given a damn about me, I reluctantly agreed to stretch the truth a bit and sign the letter, for whatever it was worth. Even though I realized, somewhat sadly, that it wasn’t all altruism that had prompted Herr Fuller’s generosity toward me, I felt that he had really become fond of me, as I had become fond of him, and that his interest in me was genuine.

  Things started looking up not only for me, but for my mother also. Through some of her old friends at the hospital she learned that persons fired by the Nazis for political reasons could apply for reinstatement. Within a few days of filing her application with the hospital, she was notified that she could have her old job back. After thirteen years of absence, she returned to her beloved ear, nose, and throat clinic, where she was welcomed by her colleagues with open arms. One of her former fellow employees and close friends did not return. Walter Schmedemann, little Erika’s Social Democrat father, who had served time in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp for his anti-Nazi activities, had been elected to the Hamburg Senate in one of the first political elections held in newly democratic West Germany.

  ROBBED

  Just when my mother and I thought that, since both of us were more or less gainfully employed, the bad times were behind us, we were dealt a catastrophic blow that sent our morale plummeting to another record low. It was early in the evening and I had just returned from an army camp gig when, several blocks from our basement, my mother came running toward me, tears streaming from her eyes and sobbing convulsively. At first, I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. But gradually, as she calmed down a bit, she kept repeating over and over, “Everything is gone!” It took me a while to comprehend what she was trying to tell me, namely that once again we had lost everything we owned. All our clothes, shoes, bedsheets, blankets, and dishes, everything we had painstakingly acquired since our home had been destroyed three years earlier, was lost again. Only this time we weren’t ripped off by enemy bombs but by our own countrymen.

  Between sobs, my mother told me how she had returned from work at the hospital less than fifteen minutes earlier only to find the padlock to our basement broken and the room ransacked clean. Apparently somebody, perhaps a neighbor who knew that no one was in the apartment during the day, had taken advantage of that fact. When we questioned the couple who lived next door, they said they had seen and heard nothing. Unlike three years ago, when we were able to salvage four suitcases packed with our belongings, we now had only the clothes on our backs. Fortunately, I still had my sax and clarinet.

  At first we were thinking of going to the police, but we soon dismissed that idea as pointless, recalling the many accounts we had heard about the increasing incidents of robbery in makeshift shelters and the police’s indifference toward going after the criminals. Since we had every reason to believe that sooner or later the person who had robbed us would be back for an encore, we decided that we had no other choice but to move as soon as possible. Before we had time to give in to our despair, we got a morale boost in the form of a visit by Egon Giordano. Egon informed us that the British military government had requisitioned a large apartment in a villa in Blankenese for his family and that, as a result, they no longer needed the basement apartment on Diesterwegstrasse. If we wanted it, he said, we were more than welcome to it.

  Thanks to the burglar, the move to our new home—about a fifteen-minute walk—was a piece of cake since we were traveling extremely light. The “new” apartment was as devoid of amenities as the one we were leaving behind, but at least it had a front door that could also be locked, and again it came with friendly next-door neighbors, a young family of four, who, the Giordanos told us, were extremely helpful and trustworthy.

  Shortly after moving into our home, I made a startling discovery. About a hundred yards from the entrance to our basement, I saw a small group of men who were gathering bricks from the surrounding ruins and, after cleaning them of mortar, arranging them into neat man-high piles. What piqued my curiosity was the fact that, considering the type of work they were doing, all were inappropriately dressed in suits and dress overcoats. Some were even wearing neckties. On taking a closer look, I recognized one of them as my white-maned erstwhile boss, the plant manager at the Harburg rubber factory. The last time our paths had crossed, he had told me that if I didn’t shape up and give up my rebellious conduct, he’d have to let the Gestapo deal with me. Now, the tables had definitely turned.

  Apparently, he and his coworkers had been caught in the first wave of British “denazification” and ordered, like many compromised ex-Nazis with minor rap sheets, to do penance in the form of menial community work. Although the work he was doing was relatively easy compared with mine when I spent grueling hours inside his factory’s suffocating boilers, I could well sense his humiliation. As soon as he recognized me, he averted his eyes. Since I had no particular interest in adding to his misery, I turned around and walked away, leaving him and his cronies to their own consciences. When I passed by that same spot in the evening, the men and their pile of bricks were gone without a tra
ce.

  FRED GASS

  While taking a leisurely morning reconnaissance walk through my new neighborhood—a mixture of ruins and four-story apartment buildings that had survived the war—I ran into an unusual-looking, slightly built fellow with a pencil-thin mustache and long, slicked-back black hair who looked familiar to me. On taking a closer look, I remembered him as one of the regulars at Café König. Only in those days, I recalled, he had worn a German army corporal’s uniform and his arm had been supported by a black sling. Now he was impeccably dressed in prewar-quality clothes, consisting of an elegant glen-check sports jacket, tan gabardine slacks, and a stylish pair of light-brown casual shoes with thick white crepe rubber soles.

  “Long time no see, amigo,” he opened the conversation. “I see you, too, survived the war.” After we compared notes about the good old Café König days, Fred Gass explained that at the time I spotted him at our favorite swingboy hangout, he was convalescing from injuries sustained when Russian shrapnel ripped off his left middle finger. “I still have my souvenir,” he said, holding up a four-fingered left hand.

  During our subsequent walk down memory lane, I learned that Fred lived nearby with his aged foster parents in a block of apartment buildings that the war had left untouched. Before the war, he said, he had been a uniformed page at Hamburg’s prestigious Waterloo cinema, where movie premieres used to be held and featured stars made personal appearances. While a page, he explained, he often had opportunities to ingratiate himself with some of the most prominent people of Hamburg by selling them admission tickets after the box office had sold out. As a result, he said, he was still extremely well connected, and if there was anything he could do for me, I shouldn’t hesitate to let him know. With a disdainful look at my outdated, borderline-shabby clothes, Fred suggested that if I were interested in upgrading my wardrobe, he’d be the man to see. “I think I can put you into a brand-new, high-quality suit for relatively little money,” he suggested.