The Hands of War

by Marione Ingram

  The triumphant Allies may have considered the trials of selected Nazis at Nuremberg as symbolic purification rites, like swinging canisters of incense in a gothic cathedral after the celebration of an auto-da-fé. Whatever the victors thought, their “denazification” program was mostly scented smoke. For all of the crimes of the Nazis’ twelve-year reign of terror, fewer than a thousand monsters were severely punished. The vast majority of those who had participated in the various campaigns of mass murder were troubled if at all only by their own conscience. With but few exceptions the cogs in the killing machinery—the judges, bureaucrats, prosecutors, informers, military, and police officials who had made genocide happen— could look forward to well-oiled retirements. Industrialists who had starved and killed thousands of slave laborers were not even asked to open their Swiss bank accounts to treat the wounds of those who had survived. The most abusive slaveholder was pardoned by the Americans two years after his conviction for crimes against humanity and was given tens of millions of dollars to refire his furnaces. In the heat of the cold war, he quickly became one of the five richest men on earth.

  Since economic atrocities were seldom considered grounds for prosecution, bankers who had financed aggression and fattened themselves on confiscation, even trading gold from the teeth of the murdered, were encouraged to reopen for business. Lions of the learned professions, which had purged their ranks of Jews and had refused to treat, teach or represent them, resumed their practices as if nothing upsetting had happened. So did many musicians, actors, entertainers, filmmakers, writers, and artists who had scorned Jewish colleagues and the works of Jews. The Bayreuth opera orchestra, which had serenaded the SS with music from Wagner’s The Meistersinger as local Jews were being rounded up for slaughter, was soon playing the same stirring music for the Allied elite. Clerics who had preached hatred and publicly mourned the death of Hitler promptly remounted their pulpits. Teachers in the public school I attended ridiculed claims of genocide and at the same time assured students that we were subhuman anyway.

  While British soldiers frequently returned my thumbs-up, their leaders were not keen to help surviving Jews or other Germans who had suffered at the hands of the SS or Gestapo. The fact that two of Father’s brothers had been killed for opposing the Nazis didn’t entitle their families to so much as an extra bucket of coal from the conquerors. Property taken from Jews, even something as prominent as a downtown department store or a mansion overlooking Alster Lake, often remained with unrightful owners or was taken over by the British for their own use. Although the Nazis had kept meticulous records of their crimes, there was little hope that Mother would recover her parents’ confiscated Shakespeare First Folio, which apparently made its way across the English Channel, or any of their other valuable texts and works of art. Mother was too stunned and full of grief over the loss of her family even to think about pursuing former possessions, and the occupation authorities weren’t much interested. Their attitude was that they had done their bit by defeating the German armed forces, and they didn’t much care whether you were thankful or resentful, only that you not make trouble. The pudding-faced second lieutenant who had scorned my father’s offer to help resettle refugees appeared to reflect the prevailing attitude.

  When Mother rushed off from time to time to rescue a survivor still in detention or to interview someone who might know something about one of her relatives, she often entered a country where being German and a Jew earned her a double portion of hatred. Disregarding all dangers, she would leave home aglow with hope and would return days later in deep despair, possibly with a refugee in tow but never with a family member. I hated to see her hopes dashed and feared a return of the expression I had seen on her face the day she had tried to kill herself. When she seemed to be almost overburdened by sorrow, however, she would lift both our spirits by conspicuously defying a public rule or convention, as by refusing to stand in one of the lines that shortages and Occupation controls made ubiquitous. Instead she would walk to the head of a line and announce in a very loud voice, “You have always said that I’m not good enough to stand in line with you. So I won’t force you to stand with me now.” After letting that sink in for a bit, she would quietly demand and usually get whatever she had come for and depart with head high, followed by hateful looks and hissed epithets.

  Unfortunately for me, my admiration of her independent attitude was not fully reciprocated. She greatly preferred children to be compliant. It was not that she was severely disapproving or that I was even slightly disrespectful. She sometimes scolded me, but not nearly as often as she scolded Helga. Instead, she would appear unhappy or put upon if I did something she didn’t like. This was very effective because I adored her and would get terribly upset if anyone or anything made her sad. Since I was always trying to please her, her most effective tactic was to withhold praise, ignoring or appearing indifferent to any drawing or design or whatever I brought to her in the hope of winning a smile. Often, simultaneous approval of something Rena had done would salt my disappointment. But even though Mother seemed to be growing more distant as we both grew older, she continued to be my brave and beautiful hero, the savior who had held my hand and led me safely through the flames as the world exploded around us.

  While my parents were at work, building shelters for the multitude of homeless in the early postwar years, I dutifully looked after my two younger sisters. I also played with them at times, but I didn’t have any real interest in the things they wanted to do. Uncannily wellcoordinated, Helga almost always wanted us to do something that was physically challenging. With wide, sea-green eyes and platinum pigtails, she didn’t look much like a tomboy, but her movements were swift and deft and her idea of fun was to hang by her legs from an upper branch of a tree nobody else could climb. Although she was as thin as wire, she could outfight kids twice my size. When she threw a rock it always hit the mark. Seemingly fearless, she frequently flirted with danger, and I was as awed as I was grateful to have her as my defender. As might be expected she had occasional mishaps, such as when she fell headfirst into a huge pot of tar being used for street repair. She suffered superficial burns and had to be shorn of every platinum lock but was off and running again within minutes. Taken to a surgeon’s office months later for removal of a plum pit from her ear, she popped it out like a champagne cork when she saw what had been done to another child who had been similarly reckless.

  Helga was not as fortunate when she fell down a long flight of stairs, up which she had been pushing a neighbor’s baby carriage. The baby was unhurt but Helga suffered a severe concussion and had to be taken to a hospital, where she was strapped to her bed because moving about too much might cause serious complications. But, as I discovered during a visit, when no one was watching she slipped out of her straps faster than I could say Harry Houdini and literally climbed the wall to look out the window. To my lasting regret I let my hatred of informers keep me from telling anyone. Later, she began to have terrible seizures.

  Rena looked like a living doll and was treated like one by adults. If for any reason she didn’t get her way immediately, a few tears from her dark blue eyes would quickly wash away all opposition. When she wanted us to play with dolls, however, I could not be moved. I didn’t mind designing clothes for her dolls; in fact I rather liked that. But I had bitter memories of playing dolls with my onetime friend and neighbor, Monika, who had later refused to let me into the air-raid shelter during the deadliest bombing there had ever been. Rather than playing dolls with Rena or doing impossible acrobatics with Helga, I spent as much time as I could drawing, painting, or reading.

  During the war, I had made pictures to help me stay calm during air raids and endure other lengthy periods when we were more or less confined to our apartment. I had saved these and shown them to my approving Father when he came home on leave. In hiding, the scarcity of materials had forced me to improvise by using leaves and wildflowers to make colorful compositions first sketched out in the dirt. These, of cours
e, hadn’t lasted but the desire to make pictures had remained strong. Having cut my teeth on adult literature during the war, after reading and rereading all my children’s books many times, I had no interest afterwards in the fairy tales or other stories my sisters wanted me to read to them. Instead I was fascinated by books such as Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, in part because it was about people suffering from consumption, which mirrored my own lung problems, but also because of its mysteriously complicated love relationships. Engrossed in such a book, I could not be moved by begging, bribes or even blows to indulge my sisters. As a result they said I was cruel and unfeeling.

  As might be expected Mother sided with my sisters. She also seemed intent on saddling me with a childhood that war and personal inclination had made redundant. One of her ploys was to dress the three of us in identical outfits. I felt diminished by this but dropped my protest after it became clear that Mother and my sisters were hurt by my objection. Although I lost that battle, it stiffened my resolve to be my own person. I was well aware that I was not yet an adult, but I had seen too many horrors to pretend to be a little girl. To my dismay many of the things I wanted to know more about, my mother couldn’t bear to discuss.

  My feelings about the world as I knew it ran much deeper than mere distrust. I had seen what adults could do to children and I was angry. And the more I understood the enormity of Germany’s crimes and the world’s response, the angrier I became. For all practical purposes Germany had won the war against its Jews. There were only a few of us left. Genocide had succeeded. And though the posters depicting us as subhuman had been removed from Hamburg’s public walls, the attitudes remained.

  One of many Nazi propaganda posters, which were displayed all over Hamburg. This one claims, with its message “Behind the Enemy Powers, a Jew,” that Jews were to be blamed for instigating the war. (Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  Chapter 8

  Refuge on the River

  Fortunately for my sisters and me, some wealthy Hamburg Jews who had fled to America before the war, provided a temporary refuge from the persistent fear and loathing in postwar Germany. The Warburg family had been successful international bankers until their firm was Aryanized in 1938, at which point several members had emigrated to America where they acquired U.S. citizenship. Returning to Hamburg as a colonel in the American army in 1945, Eric (formerly Erich) Warburg found that the family’s huge estate on the Elbe River in the village of Blankenese, where he had grown up, was being used as a German Army Hospital and was in danger of being commandeered by the British for their own use. Asserting the family’s ownership rights, he proposed that the homes on the estate be used to house Jews who were still in concentration camps. This was amenable to the occupying authorities and attendant refugee organizations, and the estate was soon serving as a shelter for Jewish orphans from the pestilential Bergen-Belsen camp.

  The school on the grounds of the Warburg estate was housed in a gleaming white mansion with a columned curved veranda and floorto-ceiling windows that provided a dramatic view of the Elbe River beyond a formal garden and a scattering of trees. I loved it at first sight for being so unlike the public school that had been forced to open its doors to me as a penalty for being on the losing side of the war. I also loved living by the Elbe, which had been the escape route I had fantasized about while lying in bed with my mother as the bombs had exploded all around us. My sisters and I were probably the only students in the school who had not lost one or both parents. Many of the children were the sole survivors of their families, and many of the staff had suffered losses and were wonderfully understanding and caring. Although few of the students had experienced much if anything in the way of formal schooling before coming to Blankenese, we were eager learners, and the staff members were equally interested in imparting their knowledge as swiftly as we were able to absorb it. Some of the instructors were eminent scholars, but they were as patient with us as if we were their grandchildren.

  Rena (left), Helga (center), and me (right) at the Blankenese school for surviving Jewish children.

  Encouraged by my father and by Sonia, a resident instructor with a husky voice who eschewed makeup and wore pants like a man, I looked forward to studying Hebrew. Sonia was not especially devout and neither was I, but she had lived in Palestine and considered the creation of a homeland for the Jews to be a sacred mission. When she told us about the ingenious and often dangerous efforts being made to get around the British embargo on the emigration of Jews to the tiny desert protectorate, she thrilled us with the idea that one day we might also engage in our own courageous and idealistic battles. She also provided us with an example of how to conduct discreet romances.

  All of the older female students had been warned that improper physical contact with a male could spoil our chances for future happiness, ruining what was left of our lives. So of course we were wildly interested in learning as much as possible about every particular and treated the warning as a license to nag Sonia for specific details about what sorts of conduct might lead us to ruin and what we could get by with if we were clever. Sonia was very sympathetic and never made fun of our interest or our ignorance, but she could be devilishly vague. Sometimes, in response to a question, she would curl an arm around my neck or waist and speak so softly and confidentially that I was sure I was learning love’s more intimate secrets. But her disclosures were so full of abstract allusions and the slang terms used by Sabras— Jews born in Palestine—that afterwards I couldn’t be certain what she had told me. Other times, such as when several girls beseeched her for details about French kissing, she would laugh heartily and insist that we must be pretending ignorance to bedevil her.

  “Since you speak French,” she said, addressing me on that occasion, “you should know that girls your age are only kissed on the cheeks, if at all.”

  It was true that Mother had taught me French while we were in hiding. Although we didn’t have a book, she was fluent and was able to teach me enough for us to communicate basic information privately in the presence of Germans who didn’t understand the language. But it was also true that as a German Jew I had not had the benefit of schoolyard tutoring on subjects such as French kissing, while Sonia, growing up in Palestine, must have learned about these things long before she had reached my age. My dilemma was that I needed much more information but didn’t want to admit my ignorance.

  I decided that the best way to learn about sex from Sonia was to observe her behavior toward Pavel, a science instructor who was physically very dissimilar to her. She was dark and compact; he was green-eyed, fair, and gangling, looking as Aryan as anyone else I knew in Hamburg. Despite the ban on romantic entanglement, it was common knowledge that Sonia wanted Pavel to go with her to Palestine when their school contracts expired and he was equally determined that they should emigrate to America, where he intended to study and practice medicine.

  “I’m not going to spend my life hoeing desert scrabble,” Pavel had been heard to say more than once.

  “You won’t be hoeing,” Sonia would reply. “You’ll be creating a homeland that will need both doctors and farmers.” To this, he would respond that as a European he needed rivers and trees and winters.

  Mother (right) stands with our favorite Blankenese teachers behind Helga (left), Rena, and me (with puppy).

  Almost all the boys and some of the girls at the school thought Sonia should give up on Palestine and go with Pavel to New York City. Although I thought New York would be a much more exciting place to live, I sided with Sonia because I knew how strongly she felt about creating a Jewish homeland and because it was fascinating to watch her slowly bend Pavel to her will.

  I wanted Sonia to be my Hebrew teacher, but the headmistress gave that assignment to Dr. Liebewitz, who had once taught Hebrew at a Yeshiva in Leipzig. A soft-spoken and frail looking man, Dr. Liebewitz had been blinded by the SS because he had continued to teach privately after being forbidden to do so. As much as I admired his courage, I
could not look at his face and could barely endure being in the same room with him. His scarred sightless eyes reminded me of how Uncle Freddie had looked after the Gestapo had beaten him to death. As a result I dreaded my Hebrew lessons and would have given them up had Sonia not implored me to continue.

  I could tell that my squeamishness was causing Dr. Liebewitz great distress and this made me terribly unhappy, but I couldn’t suppress my feelings. Without meaning to I would lower my voice until it was barely audible and gradually back away from him until I was sitting or standing halfway across the room, angling toward the door. Since oral communication was the primary medium of instruction, my action made us raise our voices unnecessarily and contributed to the tension between us. Feeling guilty I would move back to within reasonable proximity, but the atmosphere would remain charged and my proclivity to inch away would begin again. When at last his patience was exhausted, he removed his dark suit jacket, put it on the back of his chair and told me quietly but firmly to come and stand beside him.

  I wondered if he wanted to chastise me in some way, but he gently admonished me not to be afraid. Then he asked me to place my hands on his shoulders, which I did after hesitating only a moment, and he then placed his much larger hands on my upper arms. Then he began slowly to feel and squeeze my arms and shoulders slightly, tracing the line of my clavicles with his thumbs and then extending his arms further and moving them around my neck and over my shoulder blades. He then paused, and I began to examine him in the same manner, holding my breath at first but pressing hard enough on the fabric of his shirt to feel the bony ball and socket underneath. After some fumbling, I located and traced his long collarbones, then slid my fingertips inside his collar and around his neck, then out and over his shirt-back and suspender straps to press the stiff wing-like plates beneath. He then cupped my chin in his hand and proceeded swiftly but meticulously to examine every part of my face with his fingertips, noticing, I felt sure, that my right ear stuck out a tiny bit more than the left one. When he had finished, he gave my nose a little tweak and smiled.