The wallpaper in the bedroom had an art nouveau pattern also, a light background with striped oblong forms.
Our temporary home is therefore a discovery. The chairs around the ten-foot dining table have high backs, higher than the person sitting on it. Each has a carved wooden crown on top. I find out that the crowns display five points, a sign of earldom. The salon has silk chairs and a bookcase filled with small leather-bound volumes of the One Thousand and One Nights. I lie on the floor and read them all. It takes my mind off the worries about what is happening to us, especially with Vati now bedridden. In the neighborhood street, I find a pile of sand and practice far jumping, again trying to block out the realities of our life.
25
Vati is getting worse and needs to be taken to the hospital. Mutti calls me, and I say good-bye to Vati before he is taken away on a stretcher. A feeling of utter helplessness overcomes me, and I cry bitterly.
While Mutti visits him in the hospital, he tries to communicate with her by writing into his calendar booklet. They are just long loops. An embolism is coursing through his body and ends up in his lungs and kills him.
I cradle Mutti. She is crying and is desolate. She is thirty-six years old with two children, ten and four years, her house destroyed, her husband gone. I had done my crying and saying good-bye to Vati, having the terrible feeling that I would not see him again, that he would be gone forever. So to her astonishment, I console Mutti, “Vati does not have to suffer any longer.”
To follow the German tradition, Mutti is dressed and veiled in black and will stay so for a year. I stay in the background, watching all the many people about. A service is given in the chapel belonging to the Queen Louise cemetery, and the grave is located next to that chapel.
I see photos someone has taken of the grave. It is covered with many flowery wreaths, their broad silk scarves showing who they are from. From then on, our Sundays always include a visit to the cemetery to tend to the grave, planting and watering and just sitting on the bench facing the grave with Mutti talking to Vati.
26
Mutti decides that the Dutch family needs to pay attention and maybe help us somehow. She has a portrait made of us three and decides that we need to go to the Netherlands to show our faces. We visit with Vati’s sister, Tante Eeefje, and her husband, Oom Jan, who is secretary of the town of Arnhem. Tante Eef is a tender-looking woman with a narrow face and the small eyes of Vati. She suffers from migraines, and when an attack hits her, we have to be very quiet. When she smiles, all feels well. Oom Jan is the friendly man with a white mustache. I enjoy the Dutch interior of their home, the grandfather clock with its deep, sonorous bell sound, the furniture passed on through the generations.
I learn how to make tea in the living room, with copper kettles, tea cozies and the seven minutes of soaking to make it just right. With it goes sugar and milk, and a cookie is always offered. Teacups are made of thin porcelain and the silver teaspoons are small and light. The typical Dutch breakfast I encounter consists of dense white bread with butter, and on it a choice of sugar mixed with cocoa or an anise confection and, of course, tea. In the middle of the morning, coffee is served with a cookie.
We also visit with a cousin in Naarden who has two boys. I do not feel that close to them. The family situation appears to be strained. Next we visit with the ex-mayor of Amsterdam by the last name of de Vlught, in his large home also in Naarden. His wife is a good friend of Mutti’s from the good Berlin days. The interior of the home is impressive, with large windows looking out over an immaculate garden. The chairs in the living room have covers that are the needlepoint work by Mutti’s friend. She is very kind to us and is somehow able to find shoes for me. They are very adult looking and pinch a bit.
Mutti is not used to not having a man to look after her. While at the de Vlught home, she takes a walk with us in a deserted lane and somehow begins a conversation with a strange man. There was nobody else in sight, and I am very concerned.
27
Mutti begins to call me Vati. When I start to talk to her with “Mutti,” she immediately answers with “Ja, Vati,” an awful responsibility for a twelve-year-old.
The Dutch Consul in Berlin, Mr. Millenaar, is now part of the Swedish Embassy who takes over the interests of Dutch citizens. The Dutch have no diplomatic representation in Germany. Although they were never at war, they are considered to be defeated by the Germans, who have taken Rotterdam by bombing it even though the country was neutral. Mr. Millenaar is standing by and helps us where he can. Mutti needs much help. She is like the women of her times, totally relying on her husband and never asking any questions. There is no life insurance although Mutti tries to cover this mishap up by suggesting that there must be something, probably in Switzerland.
We are seeing our own apartment for the first time after the bombing. Vati’s room does not exist any longer; it was totally burned. The rest of the rooms with everything in them have been cooked and smoked by the heat from the apartments below. The flat roof allowed the incendiary bombs to penetrate the roof and our floors, turning the apartment below into flames.
The smell takes one’s breath away. The furniture is blistered, and each item in the house is smoked. Mutti’s linens, so prettily folded with a pink ribbon and carefully placed into her cupboard, have brown edges. Everything is brown.
We are one of the first buildings to be hit. It is still a sensation. The Germans decide to repair the damage, and we move back into our smoky house. Money is now a problem, and Mutti decides to rent out Vati’s room and the maid’s room with usage of the guest bathroom. A special telephone is installed, with a device that locks the phone until money has been placed into a tray and then moved sideways so that the coin falls inside the phone and activates the dial tone. Mutti enforces the rules she has given everyone, and it is actually nice to have two students move in.
Mutti is clever with things. For Christmas, she finds an old two-room dollhouse and some wallpaper, which we paper in the late evening when Micaela is asleep. Mutti has made a paste of flour to attach the wallpaper to the walls of the dollhouse and so is restoring it. “Do not tell anyone that I am using flour to make paste,” she warns me. The dollhouse has a new look for Christmas for Micaela.
There are now food stamps. Because we are foreigners, our food stamps are blue instead of pink. People frown at us when they see them when we are shopping.
28
Before, when Vati was alive, Christmas was a fun affair when we are all together. I do not remember Vati ever being part of it, but I do remember the Christmas man coming, the German kind.
Aunt Minna, Mutti’s sister, was there; the Christmas tree was adorned with balls and lametta, lit with white, real white candles, and gifts under it. Lametta are the thin aluminum strands hung from the tree branches. We have to sing before we are allowed to get the presents. Often there is much laughter because the Christmas man had imbibed just a tad too much. I recognize my uncle Max under the Christmas man getup, but do not want to disappoint the grown-ups.
Mutti does not have much sense of the mechanics of toys. I receive a beautiful doll. I tried to make it sit, and the leg breaks in half with a snap and the stuffing is coming out. It does not have a joint. How shameful for me to have broken my toy. I am crestfallen.
The Christmas after the fire, with Vati gone and the money scarce, is toned down. Just greens with decorations, but definitely cookies. There is a special cookie made in Nürnberg, spicy, covered with chocolate and baked on a wafer. There are anise balls rolled in powdered sugar and Stollen a sugary, buttery yeast bread baked with raisins soaked in rum and nuts. We also have Speculaas, a traditional Dutch cookie pressed into the shape of windmill, spiced with cinnamon and especially cardamom, covered with almonds. Mixed nuts with nutcrackers are in bowls and mandarins for the taking.
We also follow the Dutch tradition. December 5 shoes are set outside the bedroo
m door, and nuts and oranges are found in the morning placed there by Saint Nicholas, the bishop last residing in Spain who gives gifts to children on his birthday. In fact, in Holland itself, he arrives on a white stallion, dressed as a bishop, with his Moorish helper in his Arab dress, turban, and all. They arrive officially on a boat in Amsterdam. Black Piet, the Moor, carries a sack with gifts but also a switch to punish the disobedient children. No, they do not come through the chimney, and there are no reindeer.
In homes, a game is played involving everyone. Fun poems hidden in various places, with hints on where to find the next one are read, often making fun of the recipient, who finally finds his gift, only to discover that it is so tightly wrapped that it is difficult to unpack. Sinterklaas may open the door and throw nuts into the room. The Sinterklaas tradition has its roots in the eighty-year war between the Netherlands and Spain. In Holland, Christmas was actually strictly a religious celebration for a long time. Gifts were not given. We are in the country of Calvin in the north and the south is mostly Catholic.
29
I am back in my own school with my friends. The bombings begin to become very dangerous and threatening to our lives now. Different bombs, different airplanes, louder explosions, several attacks during one night. We are taught to cross our arms over our chests and open our mouths when hearing the howling of a bomb nearby, this to prevent our lungs from bursting. We are tired, sometimes sleeping only three hours a night. School goes on. The walk to school goes along destroyed buildings, still burning. How many bodies are buried under the rubble? Broken gas lines exude their typical smell mixed with the stench of rotting human flesh. The lake in the park is covered with green netting trying to change the topography of the city to confuse the bombers. I have to go on; in my mind, I have to hold on to everything I have learned and am used to. Life as I know, it must come again. This is so terrible, unbelievable, so I have to be strong. I have to survive. There is no choice.
In 1943, Mutti says, “When Göbbels himself recommends that all women and children should leave Berlin expecting heavy bombings, it must be getting very bad.” We move to a small village west of Berlin where Mutti’s sister, Tante Frieda, and her husband, Onkel Heinrich, live with their daughter, Trutchen, my cousin about five years older than I.
We rent a room in a house without plumbing of any kind. We bring a sofa from home that sleeps three comfortably. I hate the place and try to make it more beautiful by waxing the floor with shoe polish. Mutti is not happy. Now the floor is smelly and slippery too. Washing under the pump outside and the outhouse are part of our existence. It is hard to stay clean. All that is normal and dear to me lies behind me, but also burns inside me.
We see the bombings on Berlin and the resulting red fire glow in the distance, the bombers coming over our part of the country from the west. They enter the ring of the defense system, brilliant in the sky found by spotlights then the flashes of the antiaircraft guns. When a plane is in real trouble, they let go of their bombs to be able to reach higher altitudes. That is then happening in our area. Now we have no hiding place, not even just an unlikely place like the cellar under the apartment building in Berlin. A plane is shot down; it comes closer and closer, lower and lower. We cover our ears and cling to each other. It crashes into a field, a walking distance from where we live. Mutti does not allow us to go and see but returns telling us that a little dog found the scalp of a man. It was concluded that he must have been a Negro.
30
In its heyday, the village was known for its production of a fine liqueur. The Gilka family distilled, bottled and sold it. They were the owners and lived in a French-style chateau in a park with a driveway ending at a wide staircase. The iron gate was impressively designed. Large wooden doors open to a vestibule with more doors leading into the main hall. A high and wide fireplace to the right and French doors look out into the terrace behind the chateau and the beautiful garden. To the right, a wooden staircase winds itself expansively around a pillar to the floor above. A dining room and library and many other rooms are there also, but I have forgotten.
The Gilka family also ran a farm estate with horses to ride and hunt, and cows, pigs and other farm animals. The buildings housing the animals and the equipment to tend to the woods and fields form a large square, all important enough to employ an administrator and a farm manager living in homes attached and part of the estate. The village has a school, a church, some small farms, and one village street.
I need to go to school. Potsdam is the nearest place with a lyceum. To get there, a bike ride is necessary to make it to the adjacent village where a scheduled bus rides to Potsdam.
Vati’s yellow sport bike is brought out of Berlin for me to ride to school.
We go and see what is happening in our apartment. We bring out of it what we can carry. The Dutch family silver, a Delft shaving dish, and one by one a three-hundred-year-old Dutch cupboard, which can be taken apart.
We have boarders in the apartment. There is a very elegant Belgian lady, slim, pretty, with the most coquettish hats I have ever seen, which she makes herself with feathers and veils. She and others are part of some sort of a workforce brought to Germany.
The trains do not ride directly into and out of Berlin any longer. The rails have been destroyed, and the ride goes via any line that is still functioning. It takes so long.
The Gilkas are long gone, and young military families live now in the chateau. Feeling sorry for us, they invite us to take some rooms on the third floor, formerly used as rooms for the maids and other staff. What a relief—running water! The children, Horst and Ina and I ride to school together, first on our bikes and then the bus to Potsdam. We enjoy each other, and the bombings are concentrating on Berlin, so the trip is relatively safe. School is difficult because the courses are different, but I do my best. A lovely girl in my class does not show up any longer. I hear much later that her father, a German nobleman and high-ranking officer, together with other men of the same background as von Stauffenberg, tried to kill Hitler. This is not publicized much in the radio news, the only source for news at that time. It is July 20, 1943.
The rumor in the village is that flying ace Ernst Udet is coming to live in the chateau. Also General Kurt Zeitzler, the man of Stalingrad. But neither one arrives. They have been killed by the Nazis, it is rumored.
31
We eat at my aunt’s. The kitchen has the dining table in it, and I watch her activities. She has a stove for cooking that needs wood for fuel and has iron rings of different sizes she skillfully removes with an iron tong to make the pots fit. All cooking seems to start with bacon, the slabs hanging in the pantry. Her chicken soup is delicious, with vegetables, noodles and potatoes. We seem to have that often. The favorite cake that is always on hand is Streuselkuchen, a flat yeast cake with butter crumbs on it. Tante Frieda makes her own cheese, waiting for the then-unpasteurized milk to turn sour, which also thickens it. Then the milk water in a piece of linen is pressed out. This mass then is boiled with caraway seeds added. The cheese is aged by leaving it in a cool place and is ready to eat when turned transparently yellow. It is sharp and unacceptably smelly but very delicious especially on the German grain-seed bread. There is a bread soup and a soup made of brown roasted whole wheat—food I have never eaten before. A true adventure. We also eat stewed lung—a sweet-and-sour preparation—and boiled tongue with a wine sauce and many wild mushrooms, but I am used to these dishes.
I help my aunt in her garden. It is a piece of land walking distance from her house but not attached to it.
All sorts of vegetables grow there. I am intrigued by the process of putting a tiny seed into the earth and then, when the time has come, to pull at the green above the earth and, surprise, a perfect carrot appears. Asparagus is hidden in long mounds a foot high. The earth cracks a bit. That is the sign to dig up a white spear of asparagus. Vines produce cucumbers in abundance. Potato and tomato plants have
a strong smell I like. I am still searching for that smell, which then, in a lesser degree, moves on into the tomato with the warmth of the sun still on it. There are bushes with berries, the sour red grapes of the red currants, and the furry green balls of the gooseberries. I am picking them for Tanta Frieda into a basket hanging from my arm, for her to make jellies and jam and, once in a while, a fruitcake. I eat them too while working. Too much temptation.
It is decided that I need some other activity to keep me busy. With a horsewhip in my hand, I go from farm building to farm building to take their geese to the meadows surrounding the village. The animals are gray in color with yellow beaks. The geese scare me. They are big and have a bad temper. When they are really mad, they stretch their necks, spread their wings, and with a hissing sound, come running toward me. My horsewhip is my only defense. While in the meadows, I am also to pick greens for the rabbits. Still, today, I know which weed to cultivate in my garden here to avoid the rabbits from nibbling on my flowers.
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