Destined to Witness

  Glad to be out of the cold and out of the MPs’ sight, we decided to brave the stench and coexist with the chickens until daybreak before continuing our perilous journey home. After sharing our last cigarette, we huddled together on the ground for warmth, then drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

  As soon as we saw the light of dawn shine through the cracks of the shack, we got up. We couldn’t keep from bursting out laughing when we looked at each other and discovered that we were covered from head to toe with chicken shit. After cleaning up as much as possible, we left the chickens, whose stench followed us, and resumed our trek. This time there were no more MP patrols to dodge.

  We had walked steadily past warehouses, cranes, and boxcars for about twenty minutes when we reached the free port’s main gate. Our hearts sank when next to the gate we noticed a small wooden guardhouse marked MILITARY POLICE. Just as we were about to tippy-toe past the post, a bleary-eyed redcap poked his face out of the door and yawnfully wished us a good morning. “You blokes must be Yanks,” he guessed, to which we responded in unison with a perfunctory “Yeah.” Without bothering to look closely at the papers we had pulled out of our pockets, the MP waved us on our merry way with an unusually cheerful “Cheerio.” Had he bothered to take a closer look at our “IDs,” he might have raised an eyebrow or two on discovering that one was an expired shore-leave pass Werner had borrowed from an American buddy, and the other was a piece of paper on which Smitty had scribbled his Alabama address.

  While Werner was within walking distance from his home, I had to suffer through yet another indignity before my ordeal finally came to an end. Riding the crowded city train to Othmarschen while smelling to high heaven, I had to endure the contemptuous stares of my fellow riders, who were pointedly holding their noses in undisguised disgust. They couldn’t even begin to guess the trouble I had just seen.

  In the weeks that followed, I underwent an amazing physical as well as psychological transformation. Having been convinced by Werner that there was lots of money—meaning cigarettes—to be made on American ships, and that my exotic appearance made me a natural for negotiating lucrative business (meaning black-market) deals with black seamen, I went all out to make myself look, sound, behave, and think like an American. Soon I had scrounged up an entire wardrobe of U.S-made clothes, complete with penny loafers, boxer shorts, loud ties, and broad-shouldered, peg-legged zoot suits, as well as a couple of broad-brimmed Stetson hats. To complement my American wardrobe, I changed my hairstyle from the long swingboy look, which I had painstakingly cultivated with ample applications of pomade, to a short-at-the-sides-and-back crew cut.

  Under Werner’s tutelage, I learned to eat the American way, with only a fork in my right hand, instead of the European way, fork in the left hand and knife in the right hand. Werner also helped me Americanize my rapidly expanding English vocabulary by making me discard British terms such as petrol, leftenant, bloke, and lorry in favor of gas, lieutenant, guy, and truck, respectively. What we didn’t know about the States, its customs, and speech habits, we learned from watching American movies that were frequently shown in the Urania, a downtown movie theater reserved for Allied personnel, which Werner and I crashed regularly with impunity. Through movies I learned for the first time about the great American pastime, baseball, and about a roughneck game played largely by carrying a ball, which—inexplicably—Americans insisted on calling football.

  To stay in practice and to keep from blowing our cover, Werner and I made it a habit of communicating in English only. Being taken for Americans, we found, had many rewards. One was the ability to ride free of charge to any destination on city trains in uncrowded, comfortable compartments reserved for the Allies. Another was that we got more respect from Germans, especially German officials such as police, who had no jurisdiction over Allied personnel. They never hassled us the way they did their own countrymen.

  But there was also a downside to our charade. No matter how hungry we were at times, we were obliged to pass up filling our rebellious bellies at German outdoor food stands in order not to destroy our carefully built identity as Americans. Since it was widely known that Allied personnel were overfed on scrumptious food in their own canteens, nobody would have believed that we were Americans had they seen us wolf down a meal of boiled cabbage.

  One time in particular I recall when my impersonation of an American proved a major embarrassment. I had been accompanying a young lady home after we had met for the first time at Haus Vaterland. Unaware that my German was at least as good as hers, she had struggled all evening trying to converse with me in what little English she had picked up since the end of the war. Our slight “language barrier” notwithstanding, things moved right along and I had reason to believe that this was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. We were taking the subway and because of her presence, I deigned for a change to ride in the packed German car. I was chatting engagingly about life in America and she listened with fascination when all of a sudden, at the opposite end of the coach, I spotted an old acquaintance from my pre-Ami days, a wartime factory worker whom I had not seen in a couple of years. For a moment I considered moving to another part of the train to keep him from recognizing me. But it was too late. Before I could move, he was headed toward me and in a loud voice that, I was sure, was audible throughout the coach, hollered in unadulterated Hamburger Platt, “Hans-Jürgen, bis du dat? Ik hef die bino nich wedder erkannt mit den Bort” (“Hans-Jürgen, is that you? I almost didn’t recognize you with that mustache”).

  In a futile attempt to preserve my dignity, I looked at my old acquaintance with unrecognizing eyes and said in English, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” My acquaintance took another look, unsure whether he had made a mistake, shook his head, then walked away while mumbling an apology. I wish I could have explained to him that I was, indeed, Hans-Jürgen from Barmbek but that for the time being I was Mickey from America. But I was caught in my own web.

  When we got off the train, my date glared at me with ice-cold, unforgiving eyes. “I don’t like being lied to,” she said in German, “especially not on a first meeting. Aufwiedersehen, Hans-Jürgen or Mickey or whatever your name is.”

  “Please let me explain,” I pleaded.

  But she didn’t want to hear anything else I had to say, and I really couldn’t blame her.

  Without giving me a chance to utter another word, she turned around and walked out of my life.

  THE THREE AH-YUE HON LOUS

  During an intermission at the Alkazar, one of the solo acts, a young Asian-looking tap dancer by the name of Ah-Yue Hon Lou, stopped by the bandstand and asked whether he could have a word with me after the show. We had only exchanged polite hellos in the past. I was curious to learn what was on his mind and agreed to meet him at the bar. When I arrived, he was already seated, elegantly dressed in a tailored double-breasted gray suit and smoking a cigarette through a long silver holder. It was the first time I had a chance to study him up close. He was of delicate, yet athletic build, with large, almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and long, wavy black hair—the kind I would have given my right arm for as a child.

  After telling me that his friends called him Yue, he opened the discussion: “I have a proposal for you that could be beneficial for both of us.” Despite his striking, exotic appearance, he sounded like a native Hamburger, a fact that struck me as strange until I remembered that I, too, didn’t look exactly like someone who had been baptized with Elbe water.

  Yue explained that he had been born twenty-five years earlier in Hamburg. His German grandfather had been a sailor who, during one of his trips to Shanghai, befriended a young Chinese man whom he invited to visit him in Germany. One day, to the sailor’s surprise, the young man showed up at his home in Hamburg, where he met and later married the sailor’s daughter, who became Yue’s mother. Yue’s grandfather and father both died when he was still a little boy, but his mother was still living. It was his mother who had enabled him to study tap dance, acro
batics, and acting and become a professional entertainer. He said that he was married, and that despite his racially mixed background, he had been accepted as a volunteer by the German Luftwaffe and did wartime service in a parachute outfit.

  “I am planning to enlarge my act and to take on two partners,” Yue continued. “One of the partners would be a girl dancer and the other would be you.”

  When I injected that I didn’t know the first thing about tap dancing, he told me that I wasn’t expected to dance. “The girl and I will do the dancing,” he explained. “Your job would be to accompany us on the saxophone.” He said that he had already auditioned several girls and that one seemed promising. “Finding a qualified girl is no problem,” he assured me, “but finding someone like you—someone who looks like an American and who can play the saxophone—isn’t easy in Germany.”

  Yue explained that he intended to promote his group, the Three Ah-Yue Hon Lous, as “a musical United Nations in microcosm,” one Chinese, one German, and one American. He then asked me to imagine myself center stage playing “a wild number” on the saxophone from a top a large, drumlike reflector illuminated from within by a powerful electric bulb, while he and the girl tap-danced on two smaller reflectors that would flank mine. To give the act additional pizzazz, it would be cast against a spectacularly illuminated backdrop of New York’s skyline by night.

  As an already confirmed Americophile, I liked Yue’s concept, except the name he had chosen for the group. A Chinese name, I felt, added neither sex appeal nor box-office appeal. Postwar German youths identified with Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Harry James, not with Confucius and Mao Tse-tung. When I tried, as tactfully as I could, to point that out to Yue, he stubbornly disagreed, explaining that it was easier to book an act with an already established name.

  What few reservations I had about Yue’s proposition were totally dispelled when he told me that he would nearly double my present monthly salary and that instead of working two hours per night I would never have to work longer than fifteen minutes per night. Making twice as much money for one-eighth of the work appealed to my budding business sense. Before Yue and I parted that evening, I agreed to become one of the Three Ah-Yue Hon Lous when my contract expired at the end of the month.

  The following month was filled with feverish activities aimed at getting our new show ready and on the road. Through a theatrical agency, Yue had been promised a prominent spot in a British Army Welfare Service-sponsored variety show that was to tour theaters near British army camps in central and western Germany, provided we would be ready to audition a week before departure time. After stepping up his search for a prospective dancing partner, Yue settled for one of his more gifted pupils, a blond seventeen-year-old girl-next-door type named Ilse. Ilse had taken up tap dancing as a hobby but had never danced professionally. Her biggest obstacle was talking her parents into allowing her to go on the road.

  Driven by Yue’s constant prodding, we three spent hours rehearsing our routines, having our costumes fitted, going over musical scores with an arranger, and taking turns urging a theatrical supply company to meet our deadline for the completion of our stage props. Our tireless efforts paid off. With not a day to spare, the Three Ah-Yue Hon Lous auditioned before a panel of British Army Welfare Service personnel and were signed as opening act for a month-long tour.

  Looking back, it amazes me how quickly I adjusted to my new unfettered lifestyle among freewheeling, colorful performers after my drab existence in grimy workshops among staid factory workers. Within a few weeks on the road, it seemed to me as if I had never known another life.

  EVENING IN PARIS

  One of the more memorable stops I made while traveling with the Three Ah-Yue Hon Lous was at the little town of Helmstedt, which was as prominent a crossing point into the Soviet Zone of Occupation as Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie. Since we had arrived late in the day, when hotel vacancies were limited, Yue and I had been assigned a room in a small inn, while Ilse stayed at another inn nearby.

  Upon entering our room, dead tired from hours of travel by truck, we were instantly revived by gramophone music and the voices of two women coming from the adjacent room. Closer investigation revealed that the rooms were separated by only a door and a dresser. Trying to be “neighborly,” we introduced ourselves through the door and, to our delight, struck up a lively conversation that ended in the mutual decision to see if the door was locked. When we determined that it could be unlatched from our side, we—again by mutual consent—pushed the dresser aside and opened the door. What we found on the other side was too good to be true—two pretty young women who seemed as bent on having “a good time” as we were. They told us that they came from the countryside of Lüneburg and were on their way to Magdeburg, in the Soviet Zone, where they intended to visit relatives. In turn, we told them that we were entertainers working for the British military and that we could arrange to have them come to our show and see us perform. Although they had planned to leave the next morning, they said they were in no particular hurry and would gladly stay another day.

  It wasn’t long before we had the lights turned low and were dancing cheek to cheek. What made the encounter especially memorable for me was the heavy fragrance that filled the entire room. It obviously emanated from an electric blue bottle on the dresser with the inscription EVENING IN PARIS. I didn’t realize it then, but that name and that fragrance would stay with me for many years to come.

  After playing their record for the umpteenth time, the girls reminded us that it was getting late and that, after all, there was still tomorrow. Yue and I decided to be gentlemen and not to press our luck. After the girls agreed to pick up where we left off when we returned from morning rehearsal the next day, we wished them good night, closed the door, and moved the dresser back where we found it. Before going to sleep, we congratulated each other on the extraordinary luck that had guided us to this particular room.

  The next morning, on our way to rehearsals, we tiptoed around our room in order not to awaken our new friends. We figured they needed plenty of sleep in order to be up to the program we had planned for them.

  At around noon, when we returned to our room from rehearsals, we found the dresser in front of the door pushed aside but the door closed. It was still unlatched, the way we had left it. After receiving no answer to our knock, we opened the door and, to our huge surprise, found the next room completely empty—except for the odor of that confounded, all-pervasive Evening in Paris perfume. Our second, even bigger surprise was that, upon closer inspection of our room, we discovered that most of our belongings were missing, with the exception of our near-empty luggage, which the two thieves were kind enough to let us keep.

  When we reported to the innkeeper what had happened, she told us that the two women had checked out shortly after we went to rehearsals, and that in all probability, they were already many miles inside the Soviet Zone, where, because of mounting tension between East and West, pursuit was virtually impossible. Fortunately, I had my saxophone and clarinet with me at rehearsal and we had already dropped off our stage wardrobe at the theater. The loss of those items would have literally killed our act.

  After several sporadic outbreaks of impotent rage, Yue and I had to grudgingly admit that we suave and sophisticated men of the world had been duped by a pair of slick country bumpkins. We could never quite decide which was more painful, our bruised egos or the loss of our things, but as with so many adversities, in time we got over our ill-fated brush with the Evening in Paris “ladies” and the adventure that never was.

  BETWEEN GIGS

  After fulfilling our contract by completing a remarkably successful month on the road, the Three Ah-Yue Hon Lous returned to Hamburg with the understanding that after a month we would hit the road again. Our partner, Ilse, whose parents had only reluctantly consented to her joining us on the road, returned to her original role of girl next door. Yue, the inveterate entrepreneur, picked up where he left off as black-market trader and
faithful husband, and I returned to my new hobby of looking for Amis on Hamburg’s waterfront.

  After contacting my buddy Werner, he told me that I had come back just in time to participate in a juicy deal that involved helping an American seaman bring ashore—meaning smuggle—twenty cartons of American cigarettes. The seaman needed the cigarettes as payment for a brand-new four-hundred-dollar Leica camera that a German man had agreed to sell. For our trouble, Werner explained, the seaman had offered an additional six cartons.

  Without hesitation, I agreed to take on the job. I never felt for a moment that I was about to engage in something immoral or dishonorable. After all, everybody, and I mean everybody, had a piece of the black-market action—old ladies who were bartering their good silver for cigarettes; young women who were spending a night with an Ami for a pack of Lucky Strikes; respectable businessmen who accepted cigarettes instead of coupons for scarce merchandise; German cops who shook down black marketeers and kept the cigarettes for themselves; and finally, British and American seamen and soldiers who pestered Germans for their cameras, gold watches, binoculars, wedding rings, and other valuables in exchange for a few miserable cigarettes.