The Hands of War

by Marione Ingram

  Almost seventeen and on my way to America.

  Two years earlier I had become alarmed and angered by the murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy whose killers were set free by a white jury in Mississippi because he was said to have winked at a white woman. After that, and after my unsuccessful attempt to rent an apartment with an African-American girlfriend, I realized that racial discrimination was viewed as normal by many if not most Americans. I saw it as a variation on the persecution I had experienced in Europe. So did Daniel, who grew up, studied, and was licensed to practice law in the segregated South. When we moved to Washington, D.C., which was also highly segregated in 1960, we became active members of the Congress of Racial Equality, engaging in nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to combat discrimination. I became a volunteer worker for the historic March on Washington in 1963 and a year later coordinated D.C. support for seating the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democrats at the National Convention in Atlantic City. Immediately after, at the invitation of civil rights heroine, Fannie Lou Hamer, I went to Mississippi as a field staff worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. When the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of our Freedom School in Pascagoula, Mississippi, I painted FREEDOM on the charred crossbar and continued to teach.

  Because of my experience with European racism, I had grown up with the firm belief that I had a duty to oppose racism wherever I found it. That was an article of faith in our family, but I had never been able to act on it effectively in Europe. So I not only welcomed it but was grateful for the opportunity in America to fight back against an evil that had taken so many lives and continued to injure countless more. One of the things that excited me the most about the American civil rights movement was the way it chose to fight—by confronting overwhelming power and terror with nonviolent resistance. Having seen what righteous as well as unrighteous warfare could do to people, I was opposed to violence except when absolutely necessary to save lives. And while not all who participated in the movement were equally committed to the principle of nonviolence, even those who would have preferred to fight fire with fire agreed to practice it regardless of the risks. For me, it was a privilege and often a joy to work with so many people with that kind of courage and conviction. And when, despite the murder of rights workers, bombings, beatings, assassinations, and incarcerations, we eventually won many of the rights we fought for nonviolently, I was no longer a victim; rather I was a combatant in a successful campaign against racial injustice. Nonviolent resistance had replaced the helpless rage I had felt as a child, and at the same time it had vindicated my painfully acquired belief in viable alternatives to the hands of war.

  After I returned to Washington, Daniel enlisted in the War on Poverty, while I at one point was able to combine activism for civil rights, peace in Viet Nam, and women’s liberation by working in the presidential campaign of African-American Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. We were arrested separately on occasion and participated together in demonstrations aimed at South African apartheid. I took it personally when Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign in the Mississippi town where three civil rights workers had been murdered, to pledge his allegiance to “states’ rights,” the doctrine that had condoned segregation and shielded the murderers from punishment.

  With the idealistic movements largely undone by rioting, backlash, political conniving, and their own historic successes, Daniel and I sold our modest house and moved to rural Tuscany where we lived in peace with fiercely independent hill villagers and enjoyed the splendors in nearby Rome, Florence, Siena, and Venice. While Daniel wrote the great American civil rights novel, I sketched and painted and made constructions with found objects that had once been useful. As I had begun to do in Washington after an astonishing variety of new yarns had rather suddenly become available in the 1970s, I also made colorful abstract fiber creations that could be worn or displayed as works of art. I experienced some modest success in exhibiting these works and placing them in collections and on the bodies of stylish people in cities across Europe and America. When we moved after a few years from Tuscany to the tiny Sicilian island of Levanzo, I continued to make wearable art, incorporating designs drawn, etched, and painted more than 10,000 years earlier on the walls of a cave there—prehistoric art that reminded me of the drawings I had made as a child in hiding.

  After living for seven idyllic years on the island, and for several more years back in Tuscany, where we helped the same hill villagers celebrate the 300th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty by the Archduke of Tuscany, we decided to move for a time to Hamburg. I wanted to talk with living relatives from my father’s side of the family, including Cousin Inge, and learn more about our past. Both my parents were dead, but I knew I would be able to commune with my father’s ghost at his gravesite in Hamburg’s beautiful cemetery.

  The memorial for those who died during Operation Gomorrah in the air-raid shelter of the Karstadt Department Store.

  Chapter 11

  The Children of Blankenese

  As life itself proceeds from chance encounters, my rebirth in 2006 as one of the Children of Blankenese resulted from bumping into someone I barely knew, who invited me to join him for a cup of tea at Hamburg’s Literature House. I accepted with pleasure because I greatly admired Peter Hesse for organizing the placement of small brass markers in sidewalks or streets fronting the last residences of Jews and Gypsies murdered by the Nazis. For many, including my grandmother, Rosa Singer, her son, Hans, and her sister-in-law, Emma, these four-by-four-inch plates, inscribed with the names, birth dates, years and places of the victims’ murders, were their only memorial. Embedded in the sidewalks, the markers are called stolpersteine—or stumblestones.

  At tea, overhearing Hesse’s companions talking about an upcoming reunion of the schoolchildren of Blankenese, I mentioned that I had gone to school there after the war. I explained that it hadn’t been a public school but rather a private retreat for the care of Jewish refugee children.

  A stolpertstein (memorial cobblestone) near the last residence of Great-Aunt Emma Muller.

  Stolpersteine in front of the last residence of genocide victims.

  My husband, Daniel, beside the stolpersteine for Grandmother Rosa and Uncle Hans Singer.

  “It was really wonderful,” I said, “in a beautiful mansion overlooking the Elbe. But I don’t think it’s there anymore. I’ve looked for it several times and couldn’t find it.”

  “It’s still there,” the two companions said, “and you’re one of the Children of Blankenese!”

  The women were members of a multidenominational Christian group in Blankenese that had taken an interest in the fate of Jews who had lived in their very picturesque and affluent community. After exhuming the shameful history of deportations to death camps, the group was glad to discover the story of the school on the Warburgs’ estate—so glad that they organized a reunion for the first contingent of children given refuge, all of them orphans gleaned from the acres of corpses at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It had been costly and difficult, since all the children had been shipped to Palestine, some on the Exodus, but so gratifying that they were now organizing a reunion of the second contingent, which included my sisters and me and I hoped would include Uri, my unruly first love.

  I had been writing about Uri only weeks earlier, trying to recall details of his story about the murder of his family and his own incredible odyssey during the nightmare reign of the Nazis. The difficulty was that sixty years had passed and his story had been overlaid and intermingled with similar accounts of extraordinary suffering, most notably the bestial mistreatment of Jewish women exploited as slave laborers by arms magnate, Alfried Krupp. Their ordeal, documented in the record of the Krupp’s war-crimes trial, had been related in William Manchester’s magnificent history, The Arms of Krupp. Because my memory of Uri’s story seemed to fit, and because I passionately believe that more people should know about this chapter in
the history of war’s depravity, I had written of Uri’s sister as the woman, real but unidentified, who had turned back from what turned out to be a successful escape by other women. So far as I knew the reason one escapee had turned back had never been told, and I thought it might well have been in order to save another prisoner, possibly her brother. The school reunion, I hoped, would enable me to learn from Uri how far off the mark my surmise had been and to correct the account accordingly.

  At dinner the first night, all of us were asked to tell how they had first come to Blankenese and what our thoughts about it were now. All but four or five were orphans from Hungary or Poland, retrieved by Zionist organizations from cloisters, woods, and cellars and taken secretly through eastern states and occupation zones to Blankenese. Each story was an improbable victory for life. One warm and very pleasant woman had been found as a baby without a name. No one even knew for certain when or where she had been born. At the school she had been given the Jewish name of Haya, which means life, and later smuggled into Palestine. Aside from not liking her name, which she thought was too old-fashioned, she was happy with her life in Israel and grateful to those at Blankenese who had nurtured her.

  Extreme hunger was a dominant theme of the stories of these survivors, along with gratitude to the school not just for feeding them but for giving them their first experience of being with other children in a secure environment. One man said that before arriving at Blankenese he had assumed that constant hunger was the natural condition of life. He had been astounded when he was allowed to eat as much bread as he could hold. Living without parents in a world that wanted them dead, many of these children had done impossible things to survive. At an age when German children were not yet thinking of kindergarten, one boy had fled an overrun Polish ghetto and made his way alone across rivers and mountains to Kazakhstan and, still feeling unsafe, on to Tashkent at the eastern end of Uzbekistan.

  The next day, after the group returned from a grim trip to Bergen-Belsen, I began to ask people if they had known Uri or anything about him, whether he was alive and, if so, where he might be now. I said that the last I had heard he was tending an orchard on a kibbutz somewhere. But no one knew anything. When asked why I was so interested, I explained that he was the first young man I wanted to be my young man. (After that several men in the group playfully insisted that their name was Uri.) To illustrate what a troubled youth Uri had been, I told how I had given him my watch as a present and he had immediately smashed it, saying that watches were tools of prison guards. One of the men then insisted that I take his Rolex. I declined, explaining that, because of Uri, I refused to wear one.

  Each day I spent with the Children of Blankenese I became more enamored with the lot of them. They were the most immediately affectionate people I had ever met, affectionate to me, to my sisters, and to one another. They had defied fate by living and were determined to give life their best. Although several were shy, reserved, or more observant than engaging, we were a joyful bunch, laughing often, kissing and hugging all the time. Spontaneously or on request, feelings and opinions were freely shared. No one tried to be a star or insinuate that he or she was in any way more important than anyone else. Appreciation of the Germans who had brought us together was free flowing and richly deserved. Despite our gratitude, though, there was an unbridgeable gulf between the sponsors and the survivors. Having been denied a normal childhood, we were free to be as children together and feel the intense joy of finding forty-six brothers and sisters.

  A sensitive subject for me was a question that was posed several times: Why had I never come to Israel? Even those who had lived in America believed that Israel was the only place where Jews could feel free to be Jews. Some who had lived in America for a time authoritatively affirmed that sentiment.

  “You will all have to come when it happens again,” one of them said, without having to explain what “it” meant, “and we will defend you.”

  The belief that Jews were threatened around the globe was broadly shared, as was their faith in fortress Israel. The speaker’s voice had betrayed considerable bravado, however, and her expression after her prideful moment suggested that she still lived, as she had as a child, with fear.

  When I responded that I was a confirmed pacifist who couldn’t bite her tongue and would surely offend those who weren’t part of the peace movement, they laughed and pooh-poohed the idea that I had anything to worry about. I was told repeatedly, “In Israel everyone speaks her own mind!”

  By the time we parted, I had promised to go to Israel. Because my son and grandchildren were in America, I didn’t want to live in Israel permanently. But I wanted to stay long enough to get to know my new brothers and sisters better, and to contribute if I could to a just peace. Many in my family had been murdered by racial hatred in the hands of war. Among the Children of Blankenese, I discovered the loving kinship I had lost as a child.

  ILLUMINATIONS

  A flare descending

  And suddenly I see party balls

  Like Christmas trees from books

  Float through the sky enchanting me

  And after flashing brilliant promises

  Explode

  I see them dancing still

  Their magic becomes unbearable

  Flame and thunder all around

  Escaped one morning

  Aged eight

  No longer sentinel in war

  But lying in a field of ripening grain

  Upon a pillow of anemones

  And their petaled reds upon my eyes

  Shield me from the flames

  Making dancers water-colored against the sky

  Then through slanted downward gaze

  I see my belly heave to heaven

  And on cornflower splendored bed

  I taste the sweet warm scent of peace

  Taste life upon my lips

  Kiss the smells

  Listen to the music of the flowers

  And forget

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My father was the first to encourage me to write about my experience of war and genocide. He believed, and taught me to believe, that it was our duty to expose what had been done and do our best to discourage repetitions. My mother’s courageous defiance of the Nazis also encouraged me to write this book. Because she could not bear to speak about what had been done to her and her family, I wanted to tell her story and theirs, so that they might be remembered and I might add my voice to those saying: NEVER AGAIN! But in New York in the late 1950s, when I tried to write about the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943, my mind would simply shut down. I was still too traumatized by that horror to revisit it. This changed the night my future husband Daniel held me in his arms while I retraced my flight with my mother through a city experiencing biblical destruction. Trembling and sobbing, I remembered what we wore and saw and encountered during Operation Gomorrah, including the charred bodies and the death agonies of people struck by white phosphorus. That night of near total recall not only removed my writer’s block, it started me on a path of recovery and strength which I have happily shared with Daniel through more than fifty years. It is a gross understatement to say that without his help and support I would not have written this book.

  I wish also to thank my wonderful and witty son, another Daniel, for his good-natured responses to hundreds of calls for help with my recalcitrant computer as I wrestled the manuscript into submission. Special thanks also to my sisters, Rena Victor and Helga Anderson, who shared the terror inflicted by the hands of war and supported my efforts to write about it. Both admiration and sincere appreciation are owed to Tony Lyons and his chief editor at Skyhorse, Jay Cassell, for selecting The Hands of War manuscript, and to editor, Holly Rubino, and the other capable staff members who transformed it into a book to be proud of. Warm thanks go to Andrew Clarke for sending Tony Lyons that manuscript.

  Before the manuscript was much more than a single chapter, Ian Jack, then the already legendary editor of Granta, gave me the encour
agement I needed to continue by telling me he was both moved and informed by my account of the bombing of Hamburg. He didn’t have an issue about war in the works at the time, but a year later he did and he included Operation Gomorrah. Its reception far exceeded all my expectations—comparisons to John Hersey’s Hiroshima, high praise in The Manchester Guardian and The Irish Times, and selection by famed writer David Foster Wallace and editor Robert Atwan for inclusion in Best American Essays of 2007. A portion of my family’s vision of war had been broadly read and shared, reprinted even in Russia, and I shall be forever grateful.

  I would be remiss if I failed to thank Justine Dymond, editor of womenwriters.net and Andrei Codrescu, editor of Exquisite Corpse, for their earlier enthusiasm for an abbreviated account of life in hiding. I also wish to thank Sergey and Kathy Shabutsky for shepherding the republication of Operation Gomorrah in the Russian literary journal Inostrannaya Literatura. I cannot close without expressing my warm appreciation to those who arranged for the reunion of the children who had been given refuge in a school at Blankenese and to those in Hamburg, Germany who placed brass stolpersteine in front of the last residence of family members deported and killed.