Unwavering: Love and Resistance in WW2 Germany
Page 20
The priest placed a hand on his shoulder and then left. Q and several other prisoners were escorted out to the small van. A few minutes later, he was on his way to his final home on earth.
Q arrived in Halle midafternoon and was put in a cell on the death row. It looked very similar to the one in Plötzensee but without any furniture. Just a mattress on the floor and a blanket provided some comfort.
He raised a brow as one of the guards shackled his arms and legs, but his soul was too far away to feel humiliation or anger. Despite the further-reduced ration, he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. It was as if his body had ceased to function already. It was merely a shell holding his soul in place.
The minutes became hours, then days. A pasty mass of haze. Q lost all sense of time and place, the light and darkness of day and night the only indicator of passing time. He crouched motionless in the corner and waited.
Waited.
Waited.
On the eighth day, they came for him. In shackles, they led him to a room where pen, ink, and paper waited for him.
Q eyed the blank paper. He had said farewell to everyone he cared for a long time ago, and now only two letters were due.
Dear family Dremmer,
Today I follow my beloved Hilde.
I’m glad that the time of waiting is over and I will soon rest in peace.
The outside doesn’t have any promises left for me; so much is broken. To think of a better future and long for it, is too far away and too foggy in my imagination.
Please make my sons’ lives easy and happy. Today, the sacrifices are made so that tomorrow, life will be innocent and relaxed again. One generation had the bad luck to drown in the cooking kettle of our era, to give the next generation a happy life without problems.
At least we, Hilde and I, have seen the best of our time. When will it ever be so enjoyable as we found it in the short years of living together?
I don’t have sorrows anymore about what I leave here on earth. Everything is in order. My help in rebuilding this destroyed world has not been wished for by the higher powers of fate.
It will have to be done without me; there are plenty of others, maybe not as understanding as I would have been as a mediator between hostile worlds. But who am I to decide, now without me?
Q
February 4, 1944
PS: When you receive my belongings, please send a letter to Gunther. It’s already stamped and includes a collection of spoonerisms. They may brighten the day of the ones coming after me.
Q paused for a moment and then took another sheet of white paper to write to his mother.
My dearest beloved mother,
This is my final goodbye.
Everything you need to know about how and why everything happened is explained in my previous letters to you.
Please do not mourn for me. I am resigned to what must now happen, and I will leave this world with my head held high. Soon I will be where I want to be – reunited with my adored wife.
Give my best regards to Gunther and tell him to live a good life once the war is over. May he care for you as I would have.
Know that I love you and cannot express my gratitude for all the love and strength you gave me, despite our disagreements over politics. With time, you will see how right I was.
Your loving son,
Wilhelm
Q sealed both letters and left them lying on the small table. The guard returned with his final meal. Q drank the soda and ate the small piece of bread, chewing slowly and with great care. All too soon, he finished his meal, and the guard came to take him away.
The executioner was already waiting for him by the guillotine, and on steady legs, Q walked his way. Q caught the twinkling reflection of a ray of sunshine on the sharp metal blade and turned his thoughts to his wife.
I’m coming, my love!
***
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Tom Westlake is a Britsh RAF pilot. His struggle to survive starts the moment his fighter-bomber is shot down over Germany in 1943. Follow his adventures and find out if he manages to stay alive despite Gestapo hunting him down.
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Author’s Notes
Dear Reader,
Thank you for accompanying me on this emotional journey through my grandparents’ lives.
Most of what I know comes from letters that Q (Hansheinrich in real life) and Hilde (Ingeborg) sent to their family members. I have scanned to letters at the end of this chapter, one as original in handwriting from Ingeborg to her family, the other one as transcription from Q’s letter to his in-laws. Both letters are in German, but I’ve included them to show you these persons were real and as much as I would have wanted to write a different ending to the story, that’s the way it was.
Unfortunately, the letters the two of them exchanged during their time in prison were never recovered.
The letter to Q’s cousin Fanny in America (in Chapter 44) never made it across the ocean and was later found at the prison Plötzensee.
I took some artistic liberty with the person of Werner Krauss. He is a real person who survived the war and was indeed Hansheinrich’s cellmate, but only for a few months. Krauss wrote a 33-page report about his involvement with the Schulze-Boysen group, which included several pages about his time in Plötzensee, sharing a cell with my grandfather. From this report, I have reconstructed their friendship to the best of my ability.
Pfarrer Bernau, the priest, was modeled after the Catholic priest Buchholz and his Protestant colleague Harald Poelchau, who worked both in Plötzensee and belonged to the resistance.
The Plötzenseer Blutnächte, when the mass executions were carried out, happened between September 7 and 12th 1943 after a large portion of the prison was destroyed. Apparently, Hitler had complained about the slow clemency appeal process shortly before the air raids, and the destruction of many holding cells might have been the perfect excuse to speed up the killings.
It is not known why Hansheinrich Kummerow and Werner Krauss were among the few who were spared during those terrible five nights.
Not everyone in my family sympathized with the resistance. In fact, Hansheinrich’s mother wrote in several of her letters to Ingeborg’s family in Hamburg, “I am not sad about Hans’ death; he was lost to a diligent and civil life. Even after one year of imprisonment, he lived in such an illusion that he did not acknowledge the heavy guilt he had committed against his country. Our grandsons wouldn’t have become good people with those parents.”
While Ingeborg’s mother blamed him for the death of her daughter (and told him so), his mother blamed Ingeborg for the fate of her son. But she never said so openly to the two of them, only in her letters to Ingeborg’s family in Hamburg.
This is what she wrote in one of the letters in the possession of my family: “Inge has endured the hard penitence, but Hans is still purging. One thing both my oldest son and I know very clearly now by the happenings in combination with remarks of Hans to me in the year ’42: Inge bears the bigger guilt at this tragic end to two lives. She bears the bigger guilt about the final sliding onto the wrong path.”
I believe after more than seventy years, history has decided that they hadn’t taken the wrong path in life. But it would take many decades to acknowledge their sacrifice.
After the war, the family was further torn apart by politics. Some of them lived in the part of
Berlin that belonged to the German Democratic Republic, the rest in West Berlin, and the Federal Republic of Germany.
Hilde’s and Q’s good name wasn’t completely reinstated for decades in the Western world because they had the “wrong” political reasons in their fight against the Nazis.
During the Cold War, it was unthinkable to commemorate someone who had believed in the ideals of communism and had worked together with the archenemy, the Soviet Union. This changed only with the reunification of Germany in 1989.
In 1995 a student of political science visited my parents’ house to write a bachelor thesis about my grandfather. This was the seed for me to start challenging old beliefs, and stoked the desire to learn what had really happened.
Thankfully, my uncle had collected all the letters from that era, and I was able to reconstruct much of their lives and their personalities from those letters and other material.
Volker and Peter (those are not their real names) grew up with their grandparents in Hamburg, and both of them followed in Q’s footsteps, as they went to university and became scientists. Each of them married and had two children. Me, my sister, and my two cousins.
I hope I have done a good job of respecting my grandfather’s last wish…“I want to be remembered honorably.”
Letter from Ingeborg to her mother
Transcription of Hansheinrich’s letter to his in-laws
Acknowledgements
Writing this trilogy was a very emotional and at times tedious journey, and I couldn’t have done it without help.
First of all I want to thank all my fantastic readers who’ve given me personal feedback or reviewed my first book, Unrelenting. Without your encouragement I wouldn’t have persisted in writing part 2 and part 3.
My terrific cover designer Daniela from www.stunningbookcovers.com, has once again taken my ideas and made them into a wonderful cover, that – in my opinion – captures exactly the mood of the book and the times back then.
And a book could never be complete without a thorough editor. Lynette Patterson has once again provided immensely helpful advice for the first draft, as well as found a thousand and one typos in the finished manuscript.
Many thanks also to JJ Toner, who proofread the manuscript for me. He has written at least four books about WW2 himself and has proven immensely helpful finding anachronistic words.
And last but not least I want to thank the fantastic readers at the Second World War Club for their unwavering support and their generous sharing of knowledge.
If you’re an avid WW2 fiction reader, come and join our group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/962085267205417/
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