Later the men told Mother that they had fled the camp because all the prisoners were being killed to keep them from telling the Allies, who were expected to arrive in a few days, what had been done to them. When Mother protested that this would mean killing thousands of prisoners, Rainer said that the orders had come from Berlin and were being carried out across Germany. First Mother and then Rena began to cry and I soon joined in, furious also at the two men for bringing such gruesome news. They left the next morning without saying where they were going. I was glad to see them go and told myself they must have been lying.
A few mornings later, as I traced with my finger the lacy shadows cast by new leaves on the wall of our shack, Tante Lieschen sailed up the pathway, skirts and sleeves flying, looking as merry as if she had been sampling schnapps. She stood, smiling and shielding her eyes from the sun while I explained that Mother had taken Rena to look for wild mushrooms in the woods. She took my hand in hers and announced that we would also go for a walk. I wasn’t sure what to make of that since I felt certain that she knew I was still not allowed to leave the perimeter. Guessing that we would go looking for Mother or stay within the approved area, I let her lead me. But instead of going in the direction that Mother had taken, Tante Lieschen headed us toward the lane that bordered the woods and the wheat field. Deciding that she must be joking and would soon stop and turn back, I went along with her. When she didn’t stop I signaled my unease by dragging my feet until we halted in the shadow of a tree with new, light green leaves.
“It’s May Day!” Tante Lieschen piped in a high-pitched voice that came from several feet above my head. “It’s May Day and we must gather a lovely bouquet.”
I knew that Tante Lieschen liked me and I was glad that she wanted my company. Instead of remembering the near disaster when I had tried to steal apples, I recalled the beauty of the flowers in the wheat field. I inhaled deeply, savoring the mysterious smell of new life, and looked up at huge clouds drifting like icebergs in the cerulean sky. I stopped dragging my feet and went forward eagerly into light so golden I wanted to run my fingers through it. At the sight of wildflowers, I lost all restraint and began to pull the overblown woman along the road after me. It was like towing a massive balloon against the wind and I felt lighter than air as she wagged her kerchiefed head from side to side and laughed.
After gathering handfuls of narcissus near the ruins of a brick farmhouse, we returned to the lane and resumed our mock promenade. Then just ahead of us, Frau Pimber seemed to materialize out of the ground like the devil in a puppet show. But her broad back was to us and I thought with some relief that she hadn’t seen us. Suddenly, without looking back, she stopped, bent all the way over, lifted her long, full skirt, pulled down her pink bloomers, and bared her enormous white buttocks. She stayed that way without moving—her large, incredibly pale, unbelievably luminous moon beaming in our faces.
Tante Lieschen stopped and gasped but I stared, enthralled, until she covered my eyes with her own voluminous skirts. I struggled to break free but Tante Lieschen turned me around and walked me back to our hut without allowing me a backward glance.
Mother was so excited by an announcement she had just heard on the radio that, for once, she didn’t even ask me where I had been. “Hitler is dead!” she shouted, unable to contain herself. “The beast is dead! The Russians killed him in Berlin. It’s over! He’s dead! It’s over!”
I hugged her and kissed her and danced around the hut while she kissed Rena and threw her into the air and laughed and cried at the same time. I wanted to go outside and shout at the top of my voice, “Hitler is dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!”
“Are they sure?” Tante Lieschen asked, looking stunned and even a bit sad.
She didn’t mean it to be, but her question was a reminder that we weren’t yet free. We were still Jews and this was still Germany. The radio hadn’t said anything about surrender. But I was so glad that the leader of the haters was dead that I even smiled at Frau Pimber when she came to see what all the ruckus was about. After what I had seen of the ungainly Frau’s glistening bottom a short time earlier, I couldn’t have kept from smiling at her, even if the news had not been so momentous. I knew that she didn’t like me and probably didn’t like any Jews, but she was joyful because she disliked Hitler so much, and so did I.
Still smarting from Frau Pimber’s moon, Tante Lieschen refused to talk to her former friend except to mutter, when Frau Pimber left to fetch some schnapps, that it was not right to celebrate anyone’s death. This provoked an exceptionally loud snort from Frau Pimber, who shot me such a wicked smile as she departed that I thought she might hoist her skirts again. But as if aware that she was denying me a treat, she merely flounced them a bit as she waddled up the path.
* * *
The next day British tanks rumbled over Hamburg’s Elbe River bridges and tight-lipped Tommies in olive drab took over the ruined city without a fight. They were greeted like poor relations—or members of an inferior soccer team that had scored a lucky goal—by swaggering Nazis wearing patronizing smiles, belted leather coats, leather boots and rakish, leather-billed garrison caps decorated with death’s heads and silver eagles that soared. I was so eager to welcome our liberators that I finally persuaded Mother to take me with her to Hamburg a few days later when she hitched a ride on the back of a farm cart carrying a few metal containers of milk into the city. We had received no word from Father since he had been transferred to the eastern front, and Mother was desperate for news of him and to find out if any relatives who had been sent to concentration camps were still alive.
As the lean but heavily harnessed horse ignored the driver’s frequent clucking and slaps with the reins, I imagined being warmly embraced by a ruddy British sergeant-major who would insist on loading the cart with the finest produce from a fancy grocery store. He would then boot the Nazis out of one of the spacious houses that had been taken from Jews and would invite us to move in. When we reached the edge of the city, however, my fantasies were chastened by a landscape more devastated than I could have imagined despite having been present at its destruction. Even the horse was so upset that it whinnied, balked, rolled its eyes, flared its nostrils and refused to enter the canyon of rubble.
With the driver leading the horse, we were jolted through several square miles of residential housing reduced to roofless shells. In time we came to Hasselbrook Strasse, the once lovely street where we had lived in Eilbeck, now abandoned except for a few crows and magpies perched on broken walls or poking in the rubble. I shuddered, recalling the sight of charred bodies lying in the street. Nevertheless I wanted to examine the remains of our building, but Mother stared straight ahead as we passed.
A few blocks past Hasselbrook Strasse, a helmeted Tommy in the turret of a tank halted us and made the cart driver uncover the milk cans before letting us proceed. From time to time we saw other clumps of British soldiers standing, sitting or squatting near tanks or armored cars. Many were eating, sometimes beside a campfire in the street. I waved at them and called out hello but they ignored us, barely even looking up from their tankards of tea.
A view of Hasselbrook Street after the bombing.
We were stopped again as we approached the main train station. While two helmeted Tommies lifted the lids on the milk canisters, I noticed a tall, rather stout British soldier standing beside a jeep near the station entrance, which was partially blocked by a collapsed section of sheet metal that sloped gracefully to the ground like a sculptured waterfall. His weapon was casually pointed at the ground and he was wearing a smart military shirt and a brown beret with a ribbon trailing from it, reminding me of Uncle Fred in Scottish gear. The soldier seemed to be looking straight at me and smiling as if he knew me. Deciding that he was the one I would thank for my liberation, I jumped off the cart and started toward him, excitedly hopping and skipping in anticipation of greeting and embracing my hero. Before I had gone more than a few yards, however, I saw the muzzle of his weapon rise to the l
evel of my eye, so that I was literally looking down the barrel. Bam! Bam! Bam! I saw fire flash from the gun’s muzzle and thought I heard the whir of bullets passing overhead.
I dropped to the ground and lay flat, listening to Mother’s screams, relieved that they were screams of outrage rather than injury. Then, realizing that she must be running toward me, I scrambled backwards on hands and knees until we collided. Holding hands but crouching low we ran in the opposite direction of the trigger-happy Tommy, toward Cousin Inge’s apartment on Brandsende.
True to its name Brandsende and the streets near it had somehow escaped the wrath of the fire bombings. High explosive bombs had wrecked a building or two, but most had landed several blocks away, so that the neighborhood stood out from its surroundings like an urban island in a sea of ruins. Cousin Inge also looked relatively untouched by the horrors she had lived through. She was tall and slender with soft curves, dark blond curls and a spark of mischief in her light blue eyes that reminded me of Father. She even had recent news of Father. She told us he had been captured by the Red Army and was being held in a makeshift prisoner-of-war compound on the Elbe some two hundred kilometers from Hamburg. We were greatly relieved that he was out of the fighting, which continued despite the death of Hitler and the capitulation of Hamburg and Berlin. We also learned that two days earlier thousands of prisoners from the Neuengamme camp had been drowned near Lubeck, having been forced onto ships which the Royal Air Force obligingly bombed and sank.
Within a month after Germany’s surrender, Father arrived at Frau Pimber’s and I was able to leave her farm forever after almost two years. But burly Frau Pimber didn’t give up Helga without a fight. She chased Father around her kitchen table with a butcher knife, furious at him for wanting to take back the beautiful child that she had taken care of for almost four years. Helga was also upset and at one point I feared Mother was going to let Pimber keep her. Before we left Mother thanked Frau Pimber for sheltering us, and both my parents urged me to do the same. But I couldn’t. Tante Lieschen laughed and blubbered when I kissed her goodbye. Mother returned the radio to our friend and spoke with feeling about the many kindnesses that she had bestowed, including “the lovely gift of white narcissus.”
My parents spent the next few months in Hamburg examining official and unofficial lists of survivors, haunting train stations when refugees arrived, and occasionally dashing through one or more of the occupation zones of the victorious armies in vain attempts to find other members of the family. Father volunteered to help the British relocate refugees or displaced persons, pointing out that he was fluent in several languages and familiar with the cultures and countries from which many of the refugees had come. But a pudding-faced British officer told him that he couldn’t possibly be of any assistance to His Majesty’s Government, because he was married to a Jew.
Father went into the business of erecting Quonset or Nissen huts as shelters for the many thousands of people who were without homes. Mother helped with this enterprise, but she continued privately to help people link up with living relatives. There were many reports of the reappearance of people given up for dead, but almost all were Gentiles. Only a hundred or so Jews were still alive in Hamburg; some 17,000 had been killed or had fled. Among the last to die were several Jewish girls who had been used for medical experiments. They were hanged in a Hamburg school when the British reached the outskirts of the city. The slow death of hope that some members of her family might have survived made Mother even angrier than she had been during the war. After a time she stopped talking to others about them and would begin to cry if anyone asked about them.
I went to school for the first time and was caught up in the struggle to make a place in a world still sadly imbued with the attitudes that had generated so much suffering. All but a few of those who had opposed Nazism had been killed; all but a few of those who had supported Nazism returned to work. Frequently in trouble because I wouldn’t let racial or ethnic slurs go unchallenged, I carried with me like a secret talisman the vision of Frau Pimber’s full moon and often wished that I could flash it at teachers or fellow students who hadn’t learned from our recent history.
Chapter 7
Liberation
The joy of having escaped death by the hands of war made the unearthly ruins of Hamburg seem to me more like a smoldering paradise than the purgatory other people thought our once lovely city had become. After years of fear and hiding I skipped down rubbled streets, ignoring an occasional whiff of decayed flesh, flashing a smile and a thumbs-up at every Tommy I saw. Remembering the bullets that answered my attempt to thank a newly arrived liberator, I never tried that again, even though it soon became clear that such a response wouldn’t be repeated. Despite being self-conscious about my thumbs, which were noticeably shorter above the knuckle than those of other girls, I held them up defiantly because I desperately wanted the British to know that I wasn’t like the rest, that Winston Churchill was my hero, that I was glad they had come and I wanted them to stay to protect the handful of Jews who had somehow survived.
The bombings had left me with such a fear of fire that my heart would begin to pound whenever I heard a siren, and something within me would shiver long after the sound died away. A helmeted fireman haunted my dreams, night after night climbing a tall ladder until the wall it was leaning against collapsed in a shower of sparks. He fell toward the flames in a graceful arc, but never quite reached them because I would awaken and conjure up pleasing mental images, such as poppies or fireflies. Having been trapped for hours beneath smoking rubble and later forced to hide in an earthen dugout, I was extremely uncomfortable in enclosed spaces and dreaded elevators, tunnels, cellars, and windowless rooms. I was also acutely aware that thousands of Hamburg’s children had been killed or maimed by the bombings, possibly even more than had been condemned to death for being Jews. And I hated all such killing with a passion that I couldn’t always control.
At the same time I was glad that the intensive bombing of Hamburg by the British and the Americans during the summer of 1943 had enabled my mother and me to escape being sent to a death camp. Even though the bombardiers of Operation Gomorrah obviously had not intended to save lives, they had derailed our deportation by destroying most of Hamburg and tens of thousands of its women and children. Since we had lived near the center of an all-consuming firestorm and we were not allowed to use the bomb shelters, the authorities who had ticketed us for Auschwitz assumed that we must have been among the thousands who were burned beyond recognition. And if the smile I flashed at British soldiers two years later sometimes appeared a trifle tightlipped, that was because I wanted other Hamburgers to see how I felt but was afraid of what they might do when the Tommies packed their gear, climbed back into their tanks and went rolling, rolling home.
Many Hamburgers must have felt some remorse for the incredible suffering Germany had inflicted, especially when they saw pictures of its extermination programs, such as the photo of a mountain of children’s shoes at one of the death camps. That picture had made my father weep and place a large hand on my shoulder, while Mother had cried out and almost crushed my youngest sister in her arms. But most people seemed too embittered by their own war experiences to give much thought to the suffering of others, especially of people whom they had been taught to hate even before they had been taught their ABCs. Every Hamburg family had experienced losses, most of them in the ten days and nights of Operation Gomorrah, when some fifty thousand civilians had been killed. Long after those raids thousands of Hamburgers had to burrow beneath the rubble to sleep in cold cellars and basements. Whatever sparks of penitence smoldered beneath the ashes of the ruined city, the only expressions of regret I saw or heard in the streets and shops and schools of Hamburg were laments for the hardships of defeat.
Father pointed out to anyone who would listen that, bad as they were, conditions in Hamburg were not as harsh as those in many of the cities Germany had conquered, especially in Poland and Russia where starvation had bee
n used as a weapon of extermination. But most Hamburgers were too miserable in the first years of occupation to concern themselves with such comparisons. Exceptionally cold winters combined with shortages of food and fuel extracted selfpitying moans from people who had silently witnessed mass deportations and had stoically accepted the destruction of their city by Allied bombers.
Even though it was obvious to everyone that the RAF had targeted Hamburg’s residential neighborhoods, few people seemed to be angry with the occupying British soldiers about that. Ignoring the fact that almost all the Jews had been deported before the most destructive raids, some people continued to complain that the bombers had spared Jewish houses. But just about everybody thought that Hamburgers were lucky to be occupied by the British, who were viewed as fellow seafarers with compatible prejudices and a wry sense of humor. General Montgomery’s order forbidding his troops to fraternize with the locals probably didn’t offend very many Hamburgers, however, since most were too reserved themselves to socialize with strangers.
For their part, the victorious Tommies didn’t appear to be at all troubled by civilian casualties, whether caused by the RAF or by the Third Reich, so long as the victims were Germans. They were upset about crimes against captured British soldiers and other breaches of the so-called rules of warfare. The Allies prosecuted handfuls of prominent Nazis for such offenses, adding charges that grew out of the murder of some ten million people because of their ethnic or religious classification. If they added charges for murdering people because of their unorthodox sexual inclinations, I was not aware of that, although it was common knowledge that large numbers of people denounced as homosexuals had been imprisoned and murdered by the Reich.
The Hands of War Page 10