One day Mutti told me that I needed to have compassion for Bertha because she was only a maid and she was one of those people for whom things were difficult; her family was very poor. If Bertha were not working for us, she would have nothing at all, and her family would have even less than they had now, so we needed to keep her working for us for as long as we could. The twenty Marks she received each month from Mutti and the few Pfennige her sister earned for mending clothes was all the money her family of ten had.
Bertha’s father, like so many men in 1934, did not have work, and her family was “stamped.” It meant that once a week her father stood in a long line at the Labor Office to get help. There he had to show his work certificate to a woman, and this certificate stated clearly that he was not working. The woman would put a stamp on his card, and with this he would receive cash for buying food. It would provide for the basics only, Mutti said: bread, mostly, perhaps some meat sometimes, but that was all.
Bertha had seven siblings. She was the oldest of the eight, and she had attended school only as far as the Volksschule. So, as I understood it, she had an education that was equal to the one I was to complete when I turned ten. This seemed odd to me because she was so smart.
Her family lived outside Swinemünde, somewhere in the countryside, about an hour from our home. Their house was small and shabby. It smelled bad whenever I visited, although I hardly ever did. Only when I went with Papa in the car to fetch her. Inside her house it was dark, and the odor that came to my nose was something like cooking, but it was putrid cooking that smelled like old sweat. Maybe it was her Papa’s bathrobe that hadn’t been laundered in a very long time.
One day I saw a dog skin hanging from the porch of Bertha’s house, although I didn’t know at the time that’s what it was. I hopped out of my seat that day, expecting Meckie to run up to me to lick the back of my hand the way she always did. Meckie was a mutt, a skinny dog, mustard-colored, with a limp in her hind leg that she lifted as she ran, and I was always so excited to see her playing around in the dirt, just in front of the small barn where Bertha’s family kept a pig and a goat. Oddly, on this day, though, Meckie didn’t come, and the barn was still and no one was in the yard at all. I thought Meckie must be sick or sleeping under the porch somewhere. “Meckie! Meckie!” I called.
“Ja. Meckie,” Bertha began to explain, as she lumbered down her front steps. “Meckie, our dear dog. I am sorry. She’s not with us anymore.” Bertha gently stroked my hair, and from the look on my Papa’s face, I knew that questions from me right now would be out of the question.
Papa later asked me if I had noticed what was hanging over the veranda railing. Well, yes, of course I saw it. It was a blanket of sorts, right? Fear gripped my stomach. I did notice it was the same mustard color I knew so well. And then Papa said it. “Yes, Gretel. It was a blanket of sorts.”
Gretel. That was my name when I was a child.
“Was it a dog skin?” I mumbled. Papa always said nothing should be kept from a child, good or bad, a child should know what life is about, so I knew what he was about to tell me was something true.
“Yes, child. A dog skin. It’s that way these days. People are hungry, Margarete.”
He called me by my adult name now, and by that I knew this was something he wanted me to know. People are hungry. I repeated this over and over in my brain. But how could they? They ate Meckie? What would I know about it? What would I know about “that way”?
IV.
The dining parlor was not a place for a maid to sit, but I saw it that morning—Bertha sitting there, resting her head in her red hands. Her elbows had made two smears Mutti would have made a fuss over on the mahogany table, right where she must have just finished polishing. I could see she’d been crying. Was it another dog? I went to her and placed my arm gently around her big waist. “Bertha?” I said quietly.
She looked up so suddenly she must not have known I was in the room. Indeed there were tears in her eyes, but her lips were soft and turned up in a gentle smile. “No, no, darling Gretel. These are not tears of sorrow. I am happy! Happy! I have learned the most wonderful news. I heard it on the radio today.” She then opened her arms and lifted me onto her lap.
Bertha. “She was a soft woman. Her voice was quiet, and her body was big and round.”
“The new Führer has declared that no one shall be out of work anymore! No one. That means my father will have work. The radio said, within four years, this would happen. Everyone shall have work; no one shall be allowed to be without food again! This is what I heard. My Mutti, my Papa, things will be good again!”
With that she pressed my face into her bosom and stroked my hair and said, “Come. I have some warmed milk for you.”
This about the new Führer was indeed news, and it was news my father should hear, I thought. He would be proud of me for knowing something so important, and that evening at dinner I walked over to his chair and said softly, “Papa? Excuse me.”
“Yes, little one. What is it?”
“Do you know something? I heard it from Bertha today. A new time has come.” I was so pleased with myself. “No one is allowed to be poor anymore! Everyone will have work! The new Führer has said this over the radio!” He would surely praise me, I thought, the way he did when I received good marks in school, and I stood by his side, eagerly waiting for his response.
But no! Papa was not happy at all. He seemed angry, in fact, something I rarely knew him to be. “You are wrong!” He turned and looked at me harshly; then he spoke louder than I’d ever heard him speak before, his finger pointed right at my nose. “Don’t ever believe that!” He leaned down and looked very close into my face. “He who learns will have work. He who has earned it will have work. Work is not free!”
And I thought, Oh my. How much I don’t know.
Later that evening, I overheard my parents speaking in hushed voices. Papa shook his head, and Mutti shook her head, and I knew it was about the new regime and Adolf Hitler, who only a few months earlier in January had been appointed Chancellor but called himself the Führer.
Rechts-Bolschewiken, Papa called them—those who joined the Nazi Party, professing to change the world, but who were in fact “stupid, stupid people, who say they are for freedom and equality, just like the Bolsheviks say their Communism stands for freedom and equality. But with them everyone will lose their freedom, they will lose everything. Just wait and see!” He called them fanatics, those who leaned to the right of right. Right Bolsheviks.
I didn’t understand. None of this was important to me, but Papa was smart, this I knew.
My Mutti told me there was a time not long ago that had been very bad for many people. Women would run to the factories as soon as the night whistle blew so that they could get their husbands’ pay. Every day they were paid, and in cash. The women then ran straight to the baker to buy bread as quickly as they could, because one never knew if the price of bread would double, even by the time they got there.
The new Rentenmark had recently been issued, its value based not on gold, but on Germany’s land values and raw materials, and our money was fairly stable again. But many, many people were still out of work. People were hungry, and they wanted a change. More than twenty parties had been formed—all of them promising to help the situation—and a popular one was the Communist Party. Mutti and Papa told me that the Communists talked a lot to the people, approaching men like Bertha’s Papa as they stood in those long lines. “Don’t you want work? Communism will give you work! You have a right to feed your family. Communism will honor that right!”
But my Papa, who was much smarter than they, said it was a party to be feared. “No one in his right mind wants Communism,” Papa said at the dinner table. “That party will be the downfall of this country!” And he would scowl. “It will be worse than anything we’ve ever seen.” Then he would sit back and say, as if to himself, “And yet, we all want Communism’s promises—work for everyone
, food for everyone, and so what do we do?” Germany’s new Führer and his party, the National Socialists—Nazi for short—promised what all the others promised: work and food for everyone. It was something we should be happy about. But he was not happy.
Many other things were whispered in the evening after the children left the dinner table, but I was too young to understand. What I heard: “Adolf Hitler will be the undoing of German industry.” And, “You just wait and see.” And then one evening I heard Papa shout: “This is impossible!” This time he was shouting about the Enabling Act, which had just been passed by the new regime.3 Now Hitler would be in charge of the police and so much else I did not understand, and my Papa was furious.
2
AM I STILL THE WAY WE USED TO BE?
I.
It was a day when the wind blew harshly off the sea and my brother and I ran along the shore calling to each other, though we could barely hear above the howl of the wind. That night, as on so many nights, we came home late with dirty knees and tangled hair. A strange darkness seemed to have enveloped the house when we skipped up the steps, and we found it all to be eerily quiet. Bertha was standing in the vestibule when we opened the door, not Mutti. This was already odd. Why was it Bertha, not Mutti? Not Papa? “Kommt rein, Kinder. I have your bread ready. And some cocoa. Come in where it’s warm.” All this was confusing. This was not how things went.
Papa had been out riding his horse earlier, Bertha said, as he and Mutti did often when the weather was fair, on days he did not work. Today was one of those days, a pleasant one, with the cool breezes of spring’s new weather, the recently melted snow revealing crocuses here and there, and the trails of the forests black and muddy.
It was the large horse that Papa was on, Bertha told us, the black one, the one Mutti also loved to ride because he galloped so gallantly. “Your Papa was out riding.” That part of the story we had heard already. Bertha kept saying it over and over.
But what happened then?
“He had a fall.”
And what then?
Bertha fell silent for a while, and then replied, “Mutti is with him now.”
Why? We both leaned into her. Where are they?
We tried to coax her to say more, but she wouldn’t. She kept saying he was out riding and then he fell, and she kept pouring us more chocolate and fixing another piece of bread with jam.
What I understood was that the big black horse wouldn’t jump over a log. The horse took a fright and reared up. Papa fell.
But he hadn’t fallen completely off the horse, and this is the part Bertha left for later. Later, my Mutti explained it to us better. He had fallen so that one foot remained in the stirrup, Mutti said. The black horse then galloped all the way back to his stable, Papa banging his head against the stones in the pasture and the cobblestones of the city. He tried to protect his head with his hands, but he couldn’t, and his head kept banging along the ground all the way home.
His hands would have been covered in blood, I imagined, as they held his head. Later I saw his fingernails had been ripped to the cuticle.
Perhaps, Mutti surmised, there was a new stream under that log, perhaps created by the snowmelt, that made the horse shy, even though he had made this jump so many times before.
Bertha reminded us that Papa had injured his head a few years earlier. That time it was in the winter and it was in Switzerland while our family was skiing in St. Moritz. Dieter and I attended a German school there that winter, and, with Papa’s help, each morning we would strap on our wooden skis and our leather book packs, and with our big clumsy poles we would schuss off to school. One day Papa fell and hit his head against a tree, and what I remember seeing was a big boil on his forehead the size of an egg and a black circle under his eye. That eye remained as red as Christmas the rest of our stay in St. Moritz. I remember, too, that he joked about it then: “That’s what I said. A fine-looking egg. On my head, I said!” He was funny about it, and he looked funny too, all swollen and red, with an egg on his head, and that’s what I remember of that winter when I was six.
Margarete and Dieter with Papa Werner in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Now Papa complained of pain all the time. He did not leave the house to go to work, and he spent his days sitting in the parlor in a chair in front of the window, holding his pained head in his hands and staring at the carpet between his shoes. I came to his lap one afternoon, just after school; I wanted him to talk to me the way he used to talk—“What did you learn today? Are you writing your letters well?” Instead, he only stared, distantly, a filmy glaze over his eyes. I then did what I often did—I reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the chain that had a gold watch hanging from it and asked him to say what time it was. Usually he would say, “Time for a story!” and he would tickle me, or muss my hair, but now he only smiled an awkward smile, his stiff mouth thinly bent up on one side. “Ja. Uhri.” That’s all he said, and then he closed his eyes and let his head fall back. “Uhri.” It was said softly and in a funny voice like that of a child. He was trying to say Uhr, the German word for clock.
Margarete, Helga, Dieter, and Werner at the dinner table in Swinemünde. “It was a different man with a different voice.”
Then he was no longer with us. Mutti had taken him to the hospital, where the doctors decided to cut open his brain. There were few anesthetics in 1934 for pain. What the surgeons used was ether. It was a temporary relief, from what I understood, and a numbing medication was injected into the scalp so that at least the skin just around the incision would feel no pain. But Papa said he felt every bit of it—he heard it even. This is what he told the family later: “Grrrrhhh. Grrrrhhh. The sound of the saw going through my bones, I heard it, the bones breaking. And I could hear them talking, the doctors. I knew they were cutting around in my brain. I could hear it!” When he told us this, though, it was no longer my Papa speaking. It was a different man, with a different voice.
Papa still had his face, the same face I knew, but now half his forehead was missing, and when he looked at me, he was lopsided. He walked lopsided, too. And then one day he stopped speaking. There were no more conversations at the dinner table, only silence and the sound of soupspoons clinking against our soup bowls. The stories he told while I sat in his lap, the fairy tales, the tickles, even the late-night discussions between Mutti and Papa, the hushed voices speaking the name of Hitler—all that went away, and one month later he was dead.
II.
My Papa was dead. No story had ever come to this, and no matter how I tried, I could not change it. Nothing had ever ended so abruptly. Mutti had found him in his study on the floor next to his desk that morning; his drawer was open as if he’d tried to take something from it, and then he must have fallen. It was early, maybe four o’clock.
There was a hubbub in our home in the days just after it happened. Bertha always seemed too busy, and Dieter and I were shuffled off to the back of the house to our bedrooms and told we were not to be seen. “This doesn’t concern you,” Mutti said, and we knew intuitively we were not to ask why: Questions were disrespectful at a time like this. But her face had a vague expression to it, as though she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to be doing anymore.
Many visitors came to our home during those days after he died, with food, and the parlor was always full of people. The women were dressed all in black. Mutti was, as usual, fancy, but now in black too, with black stockings and black shoes with heels, and the seams of her stockings looked like an ink line had been drawn straight up the back of her legs.
It was all so confusing for me; I didn’t know why I had to stay in my room. Dieter didn’t know why either, and when I came to his room to talk to him, I would catch him pushing his tears away as he sat on his bed, and when he saw me, he’d fold his hands quietly into his lap, being an obedient child. He was seven, lonely in his grief, and I wanted to console him, but I didn’t know how. We whispered to one anot
her, and I held my arm around his shoulders, hoping to make him feel better. Dieter looked up then, with his tearful face, and asked, “Am I still the way we used to be?”
Dieter with his toy boat. “He was seven, lonely in his grief, and I wanted to console him.”
On one of those afternoons, as women were chatting and teaspoons were clinking, I opened the door to his room and said to my little brother who was on the floor playing with his wooden boat, “I’m going in there, Dieter. I’m going to walk into that parlor.” It wasn’t bravery I felt at the time. It was objection. I couldn’t let those women in there be in charge of my Papa any longer. Dieter only looked at me, startled.
I left his room and marched down the hallway, fast so that I wouldn’t lose my confidence, and I opened the door to the parlor. I found them all sitting around the marble-topped table that had coffee and cake on it, and I saw the cups and plates were our best china.
I stopped in the doorway, wide-eyed and not sure about myself at all, but I opened my mouth all the same and blurted: “I’m here to announce something.” I looked around and fear gripped my throat: Everyone was looking at me aghast. I then closed my eyes and the words came out all on their own: “My Papa is dead!” I opened my eyes, and my knees began to shake. Then I gave a curtsy as an obedient girl should.
Tears I had been fighting away burned my eyes and spilled onto my cheeks, while everyone in the room stared at me in horror. What is this child thinking? Why is she not in her room? My legs buckled just before I fell in a pile on the floor, and I could no longer control the sobbing. I buried my face inside my skirt that circled around me on the floor. No one came to comfort me. Instead, I was ushered quickly out the door by my Mutti, back to my room, and left there to be with Dieter—the two of us, once again, alone.
Letters From Berlin: A Story of War, Survival, and the Redeeming Power of Love and Friendship Page 3