by Knud Romer
Carl gave up the ghost in 1949 and was buried in Østre churchyard, which looked out onto the Sugar Factory – to the site where the knacker’s yard had once stood. It had long since been demolished. It was an irony of fate that fourteen years later a direct rail route was opened connecting Berlin and Copenhagen – just as he had foreseen. It was christened Fugleflugtslinjen and, true to its name, sent trains straight as the crow flies, right past his grave. But it shouldn’t make us sad, Farmor said. It had all ended well. Grandfather had only ever wanted one thing and that was to get away, and now his wish had been granted.
The road to freedom was packed with refugees hauling children and old relatives and as many things as they could carry, and Mother felt ashamed sitting in an American jeep overtaking them all. Then she thought of her mother – and of Papa Schnieder, Eva, her cousin Inge – and joy bubbled up inside her. They were alive and in the West! They had survived the war, all of them, and she was on her way home and had been such a long way away that it was almost too good to be true.
Raegener Division had been annihilated by the 2nd US Armoured Division and the 30th US Infantry Division, and Mother crawled out of her bunker on 18th April 1945. She acted as translator during the capitulation and was sent to a camp for prisoners of war. Germany may have fallen to the Americans, but the American GIs fell for Mother. She played cat and mouse with them, stroking an arm here, smiling there and throwing back her hair until in the end they gave her a Red Cross uniform that would get her out of the camp. She didn’t bat an eyelid but went straight to the hospital in the sector, Magdeburg-Goslar, and reported for duty as a nursing orderly.
Mother tended the sick and the wounded and the dying, but it was hopeless. She couldn’t bear it. For as soon as they recovered, the soldiers were fetched and driven back to the Russians as prisoners of war on the other side of the Elbe. The whole area was going to be handed over to the Soviet Union the following month and the only thing to do was to get away, but she hung in there, waiting to hear from her family and to find her mother. She set enquiries in motion through the Red Cross, and, when the news came, she could hardly believe her luck. They had been evacuated to Einbeck!
She gave the head of the sector – Mr Plaiter – a kiss and got leave from the hospital. Then she wiped her mouth, picked up her suitcase and persuaded an American soldier to drive her to Einbeck – Papa Schneider was rich, he would be well paid for his trouble, and it was only 190 kilometres. When they drew up in the courtyard, she jumped out. It was Eva who caught sight of her first and shouted ‘Hilde!’, and the others came running, and she wept and laughed and kissed them and threw her arms around Papa Schneider and asked for her mother. Where was she?
The figure that lay in the bed was a mummy, and she blacked out, broke down, strangling her screams, unable to breathe. Grandmother had been caught in an air raid that hit their house in Magdeburg as she was sorting out the washing in the cellar. The containers full of white gas in the room next door exploded, and she went up in flames. Mother wanted to kiss her, to stroke her hair, but she had no hair and no skin and was seared with pain at the slightest touch, by a breath of wind even. They kept the windows closed and crept around, carefully opening the doors, and every movement was torture. She stared out from under her bandages and her eyes were begging to die. And Mother gathered her whole life into one look – ‘Ich bin bei dir’ – and whispered it so softly that it could scarcely be heard. I am with you.
Papa Schneider gave his camera to the soldier who had driven Mother home, and then there was nothing left. His wife, his estate, his land, he had lost it all – and now they were refugees in their own country, and not even welcome at that. They had been brought to this farm outside Einbeck, Kuhlgatzhof – now dilapidated, it dated from 1742 and had belonged to a snaps distiller – where they now lived in what had been one of the living rooms, with table and chairs and one camp bed each. In the room next door they had installed Fräulein Zilvig, who was a churchgoer. And then there was Frau Rab, who stole. The daughter of the Kuhlgatz family lived on the second floor and was married to an artist, Herr Hänsel, and they lived with Frau Dömicke, who was the widow of a doctor and dressed in old-fashioned clothes. Herr Webendürfer had previously been the manager of a fridge factory and had his quarters out in the stable. He had been a student in a duelling club and was always demanding satisfaction and rattling his sabre – ‘Ich verlange Satisfaktion!’ His plump and freckled daughter was called Oda and in the midst of it all she gave birth to a child and squealed like a stuck pig.
‘Ach, Kinder, ihr seid nichts als Vieh,’ Papa Schneider snorted and informed them that they had sunk to the level of beasts.
Herr Hänsel had a servant girl, Schmidtchen, who was a refugee from Pomerania and had a little daughter. She was slow-witted but did her best to make herself useful, fishing in the river and digging for worms in the dung-heap. Then she went off leading a she-goat to have her tupped and when she returned she stank of he-goat – and so did the stairs, the living rooms, everything – and it hung in the air no matter how much they scrubbed and scoured. It was too much for Herr Hänsel, who could no longer control his urges, and Mother was constantly having to say no and to ward off his advances, which became more and more physical. She didn’t give a fig for the artist or for the Expressionist daubs he painted and hung along the corridor outside the toilet. And when she had been to the bathroom she would genuflect before his self-portrait and say, ‘Meister, ich habe gespült’.
Frau Dömicke’s son had suffered brain-damage from shell-fire and was missing a section of his skull. When he took off his hat, you could see the blood pumping round and his brain mass pulsating. He was mad – and madly in love with Eva, who had an admirer at last, but it was the bane of their lives. It ended up with him assaulting her and hauling her behind a bush, but she escaped and ran home weeping and screaming that she wanted to get away, to get back to Kleinwanzleben, wanted everything to be as it had been before!
Mother fetched milk from the nearby farm, Mönchshof – they had ration coupons for three litres a week. To get to the cowshed, she had to pass a goose, which stood chained to the entrance and hissed at her. One day something went wrong and the goose was loose, flapping its wings and beating and biting until the farmhand came running to the rescue. Mother had fainted and was carried back to the farm, where prisoners were airing the place out. They had carried tables and chairs out into the open and were beating the carpets – and they put her to bed. She had bruises all over her body and was sick and vomiting, but the only medical man in the vicinity was the vet. He told her that she had broken two ribs – and that she might be… pregnant? He beat his arms up and down and laughed – it was only a joke – and gave her morphine. She had had enough of life on the farm.
More refugees kept arriving all the time, from Pomerania, from Lithuania, and Papa Schneider sank into black depression. Mother tried to comfort him, while at the same time she nursed Grandmother, looked after Eva and Inge and struggled on. And she determined that she would get back what they had lost, would go to the East Zone and fetch their things from Kleinwanzleben. So she contacted people she knew. Some of them were now at the top of the party – the SED – and had a say in the new administration, and a mention of the name of Horst Heilmann was enough for most doors to open before her. He had been part of the Communist resistance in Berlin, they said, part of the Rote Kapelle. He and Schulze-Boysen and Libertas and the rest were feted as heroes in East Germany – later a street was even named after him in Leipzig.
Mother cycled off and slipped across the border – she was almost caught by two Russian soldiers – and all she had with her were the keys to the house and a bag of ground black pepper for self-defence and with them a letter from Horst Heilmann’s father:
Halle (Saale) den 4.9.1946
An den
Herrn Landrat des Kreises Wanzleben
in Wanzleben
Frau Hildegard Voll war die Braut meines infolge aktiver Teilnahme an
der Widerstandsbewegung Schulze-Bosen am 22.12.1942 hingerichteten Sohnes Horst Heilmann. Frau Voll selbst war mit meinem Sohn Horst und Schulze-Boysen, der der Lehrer der beiden an der Universität war, auch politisch eng verbunden. Frau Voll verdient es infolgedessen bei ihren Bemühungen um Rückführung des inzwischen von der Beschlagnahme frei gegebenen Inventars der Familie Dr. Schneider, nachdrücklichst unterstützt zu werden.
Ich bitte Sie, Frau Voll jede mögliche Unterstützung zuteil werden zu lassen.
Dr. Ing. Adolf Heilmann
Stadtbaurat.4
The remainder of her trip to Kleinwanzleben was by bus. She visited Papa Schneider’s business connections, Rabbethge and Olbricht, who received her with open arms, putting her up and supporting her in her fight with the local authorities. She was called a spy and a capitalist, and they tried to get rid of her with threats, until a message came through from the most powerful man in Sachsen, Vice-president Robert Siewert. Mother was given the right not only to have their possessions returned but also to travel with them to the West Zone, and a train carriage was placed at her disposal.
The courtyard was empty when Mother returned to the manor. The clock on the tower had stopped at quarter to six – and she could see in her mind’s eye the farm’s foremen swinging from the trees. They had been lynched when the Russian Army came and liberated the forced labourers – most of them were prisoners of war from Poland and they were quick to get their revenge. Mother let herself in through the front door and tiptoed through the rooms. Everything had been plundered, and she was given an armed escort by the police and went from neighbour to neighbour reclaiming the things they had stolen.
She marched into the Niemüller’s. They were in the middle of a meal in their dining room, and she seized everything in the room. Then she visited the former principal and pointed to the grand piano. It was theirs. Their bookcases were scattered far and wide and had been used for anything but books – washing, tableware – and she pulled the rug out from under Papa Schneider’s solicitor, who had also been hoarding ill-gotten gains. Mother had the wine dug up from the garden, and she found the silver, the Meissner porcelain and the paintings that had been rolled up and hidden away in the cellar. It was all loaded onto the train and sent to the West. She was profuse in her thanks to the removal men and the party secretary and Olbricht and Siewart and gave them most of the wine and hoped to see them again in happier times!
Once she had had everything sent home to Einbeck and unpacked, Mother brought out the snaps. Now they could celebrate! She distilled her own schnapps using treacle – sugar beet schnapps. It dripped out of the tube and down into a glass flask and still tasted of raw alcohol even though she filtered it through charcoal. Papa Schneider had cheered up – he had his paintings and his books and could clip his fountain pens in his jacket pocket – and Grandmother was out of bed for the first time. Eva put on her best dress, and Inge laughed. They all sat down in their old dining room and then they raised their glasses and said ‘Prost!’, their smiles broad and their mouths black.
Falster lay too far north ever to have a proper summer – and too far south to have a winter. It didn’t snow, and the sun didn’t shine. It just rained and was grey and cold and foggy, and the wind drove in from the Baltic and swept across the flat fields. It was a comfortless place, and when December came a Christmas tree stood at the top of the chimney on the Nykøbing Sugar Factory as though thinking of leaping to its death.
The heating was turned right up when Grandmother came to visit at Christmas. The guest room in the cellar was made ready with lace and Schweizerdrops smelling of mint and chocolate, and then we fetched her from the station. We stood freezing on the platform looking for the first sign of the train from Rødby Ferry. It rumbled across Christian IX’s bridge and came to a halt with a screech of brakes – Deutscher Bundesbahn – and the doors opened and Grandmother stepped down with fur and hat and gloves and valise. ‘Ach, Hildemäuschen!’, she said and embraced Mother. Father took the suitcase, and I helped her out to the car. On the way home I could already hear the sound of wrapping paper and knew I had been a good boy even before she asked the question – ‘Na, bist du auch artig gewesen?’
Grandmother had brought chocolate and roasted almonds and a new book of poems called Des Knaben Wunderhorn. After dinner, when Mother disappeared into the kitchen and Father tidied up, we sat by ourselves in the sitting room to read them aloud. On the first page there was fire crackling in the hearth, and a cat purring, and the scent of pine in the heat. I turned the pages, and it was snowing outside, a post-horn echoed in the distance, and mountain landscapes with castles and knights unrolled under a sky filled with angels. Then the lights were switched on, and Father came in, and the fire and the cat and the tree and the castles and knights were all snuffed out. Father shook his head.
‘Look at you sitting there in the pitch dark! You can’t see anything!’ he said, looking around at the polished mahogany table, the carpets lying without a wrinkle, the silverware. Everything was in place. He nodded and said, ‘Schlafengehen’, and I kissed Grandmother goodnight and went up to bed. The rain dashed against the windows, and I couldn’t fall asleep. Christmas was further from Hans Ditlevsensgade 14 than I dared to dream of.
We followed the German Advent calendar, and Grandmother always made sure she was there when I opened the window on 6th December. That was the day St Nicholas handed out presents to children who had behaved, while those who hadn’t were beaten by Knecht Ruprecht and shoved into his sack – I had been thinking about it for ages. He would come creeping out of the cupboard at night and sidle over to my bed, birch rod in hand, sack across his shoulder, and would shove his face up close to mine – he had red eyes and a hooked nose – and I hid under the duvet, screwed up my eyes and held my breath until I heard the door close. In the morning a package lay in the shoe I had put out for St Nicholas, and it was all over until next time. Grandmother had put in a good word for me and kept Knecht Ruprecht at bay.
From then on it was just a matter of unwrapping the days, and they were full of the sweets that lay in the shoe outside my door – French nougat, jelly babies, marzipan – and waiting at the end of the line was Christmas Eve. It was hard to make time go fast enough. The rain beat down. It was dark. Grandmother and I played cards in the cellar, and she always apologized – ‘Ach nein, das tut mir so leid’ – when she took a trick. We sucked Schweizerdrops, which melted in the heat of the radiator – Father had turned the heating right up to rule out any risk of a chill or the ’flu – and in the evenings she read aloud from romantic classics by E.T.A. Hoffmann – Nussknacker und Mausekönig or Der goldene Topf – the gothic lettering in her books was just as frightening as the stories and looked like magic spells. I was convinced that Grandmother could make any wish come true, and what I wished for most was snow.
I leapt out of bed and peered out of the window, but it was the same every day – there was no break in the greyness and in the end I stopped believing. Christmas came but it didn’t snow. In the afternoon we went to Klosterkirke – the bells were chiming, people walking in clusters holding hats and umbrellas – and I hated walking up the aisle and sitting in a pew, where everyone moved away, looked elsewhere. It took an eternity to get through the service. It was for everyone else and shut us out. And when we folded our hands together, I prayed that ‘Silent Night’ would not be one of the carols this year. After the initial prayer came the first carol – ‘Det kimer nu til julefest’ – and then we sang ‘Et barn er født i Bethlehem’ and ‘Julen har bragt velsignet bud’ and I staked my life on a miracle and lost and died of shame when they finished off with ‘Silent Night’. For Mother sang in German, ‘Stille Nacht! Heil’ge Nacht!’ You could hear it quite clearly, and people shifted in their chairs and coughed – and in my mind’s eye I saw the entire congregation turning and staring and pointing at us, and all I could do was sing along and do my best to drown out her voice in Danish.
What mattered most for Father was that things we
re neat and tidy, and Christmas Eve was a mess. It was a struggle getting a tree into the living room, and when we got home from church we would lay the table and have a nice time decorating the tree according to fixed rules that involved a minimum of damage and of fire risk. He placed a bucket of water beside the tree, fetched the boxes of Christmas decorations up from the cellar and laid them all out on the bureau, the golden balls one side and the silver ones the other. Then he counted the candle-holders and took the same number of candles out from the stash in the cupboard – there were enough to last for the next hundred years – and hung them on the tree. It was not a Danish Christmas tree full of all sorts of paper decorations and flags and strewn with glitter that – Mother snorted – looked so cheap. The glass balls and the candle-holders hung in ordered rows on our Christmas tree, which was so German that it hurt, and as the crowning glory Father placed a star made of steel at the top.
After Christmas dinner and pudding Father lit the candles in the living room – it was dangerous and made a mess and gave such poor light you couldn’t see a thing – and then it was time for presents – ‘Bescherung’ – and we were summoned to the Christmas tree.
‘Ach! Wie schön!’ said Grandmother.
Mother provided accompaniment on her accordion as we stood in a row and sang carols in German and Danish and German again, and admired the tree glittering in the darkness on this one occasion of the year when Father pulled out the plug. Eventually the moment arrived. We had got to the presents, and they were nearly all for me. Mother got cheroots and vodka and a cheque from Father, and Father got a sweater that was the right size and not itchy and was just like the one he had already. I cannot remember what Grandmother was given, but it was all over quickly and we sat there looking at the tree – Mother lit a cheroot and poured herself a vodka. Father fished out the key and opened the lid of the gramophone in the large mahogany radiogram and put on a record with the Wiener Sängerknaben, and we listened to the choir of boys my age singing ‘Kling Glöckchen, Klingelingeling’.