We were not invited to the funeral either. It all happened without us, the children, and that was the day I realized my world would never, ever return. I would never be the way we used to be.
3
AN IMPORTANT MAN ARRIVES
I.
This is us, when we were allowed, finally, to visit our Papa. The gravestone reads: Werner Dos, 21 November 1894–13 May 1934. I could not help but notice the dash between the dates. Such an insignificant mark, and the thin sky and the drizzle, on this Sunday morning, made me shiver.
II.
Mutti was away from home more and more. Off, mostly, at the riding club or at the tennis club. We were alone now, most nights, left to eat our bread and cheese in a quiet parlor, and when we spoke, it was only with Bertha or with each other, but even that was rare. The lights seemed dim. There was no music in the house, no more stories; I never heard laughter. Dieter and I stayed indoors often now. We’d sit on his bed and play Käsekasten. Dieter had his notebook, and we drew lines on the paper and put Os and Xs between them, tic-tac-toe. And we played Mensch ärgere dich nicht, a board game that made us forget about things. Sometimes Dieter would hide his face and smear away the tears when he thought I wasn’t looking, but mostly we both sat and were brave. Neither of us talked much about what our lives had become. Mostly we listened for more changes.
We heard something then, one evening when we weren’t quite prepared. We had the feeling that something quite terrible was coming, there was such a flurry in the house, and still no one spoke. Mutti was home, but she kept to herself, and Bertha made a roast. Mutti came out of her room then, and she was wearing a new silk dress that was long and elegant and had bands that crisscrossed her back. It was dark blue like dusk. She had on her long string of pearls and her silk stockings. They were white with a small pattern woven into them, and they had seams up the back. She had made her lips dark red, and her hair was pinned up high, and she smelled beautiful. A man was coming for dinner. “He must be important,” Dieter whispered to me, but I could see the fear in his little-boy eyes, eyes that were asking me what now? I had no answer; I did not know.
Bertha told us his name was Karl Spaeth, from Bavaria, and he was a naval officer with a high rank. And, she said, we should remember our manners. I should curtsy; Dieter should bow.
Karl Spaeth. “An important man arrives.”
At five minutes before the hour of six, the bell rang like a shock. Dieter and I shot our eyes straight to the door. Bertha went to answer, and I ran to stand just behind her. What I saw when she first opened the door was the man’s frame, so large it filled the sky behind him. He was a blond man with a pencil line for a mustache, and he did not smile. This I recall. He did not look in my direction, either. He was a determined man, though; that was easy to see.
Karl Spaeth stood there in his naval uniform; in his right hand were roses he held properly upside down, then righted them up in order to hand them to Bertha. They were for my Mutti. Seeing the formality of this gesture, I knew it was time for my best manners, and I curtsied while I held the side of my skirt. Dieter promptly followed and bowed, giving the man his hand and his name, Dieter Dos.
We were not allowed to speak once dinner was served, and my stomach began to hurt. I suddenly missed my Papa, who would have said something just then to make me giggle. But now everything was strange, and when the conversation lapsed and Mutti sent a look in Bertha’s direction, I knew she wanted to be left alone with this man. They were the adults, after all, and the conversation bored me anyway, so I asked, as soon as it was polite, if I might be excused, and Dieter followed right behind me. We disappeared into our rooms, and eight months later Karl Spaeth became my Papa.
Another event we were not invited to, and now Mutti’s name would forever be different from mine: Frau Spaeth, no longer Dos.
Karl Spaeth was the man I was supposed to call my Papa. But he was a stern man, a man who had never been married before, and it was clear that children, in particular Dieter and I, were not to make noise when he was at home. I decided to call him Papa Spaeth, separating him from the man I once loved.
Papa Spaeth was a great storyteller, and he would talk endlessly about adventures he’d had. His long stories in exotic settings fascinated me. I would try to imagine what he was telling us about by recalling pictures I had seen in my schoolbooks: Indians with great headdresses of feathers, birds in rainbow colors sitting high in a canopy of trees, and fruits and flowers the likes of which I’d never seen. He amazed me and impressed me and frightened me all at the same time.
It was on one of those evenings when my Papa Spaeth was giving one of his long speeches that he said he did not understand the meaning of MAH-deh in Gher-MAH-nee. “What is the meaning of this? Written on every article we buy!” And he thumped the table with his fist. I had to laugh and hide my grin behind my hands. I knew what the words meant! I had learned them in school: it was “Made in Germany”—not France, not England, and we should be proud of that. It was a law that had been written as a part of the Versailles Treaty just after the Great War and said all things manufactured had to be labeled, saying where they were made, and all those labels were to be written using English words, a language he did not know. Perhaps he was teasing us, but I quickly made my face serious to show my respect for him, this new Papa Spaeth who did not know what Made in Germany meant, but I would surely tell Dieter what I knew, later, when we had been sent to our rooms.
Over the months, Karl Spaeth told us about his past. He had been in the navy on a U-boat in the Great War when he was just eighteen, and he had opinions about that war, and after the war he studied chemical engineering. Mutti interjected that it was the Kali-Syndikat that employed him, Germany’s largest fertilizer concern. They manufactured potash, and to this day I don’t know what that is. Kali-Syndikat had ties in Algeria and countries in South America. Karl, at the age of twenty-four, traveled to all those exotic places in South America—Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, where he lived for nearly ten years.
One evening he told us how he had survived in the jungle. It was quite simple, he said. He ate what the Indians ate; he drank what the Indians drank; and he slept the way the Indians slept. He used their medicines. “I was determined never to become ill. Not even once. That was for the weak men, and so many of my compatriots were just that—weak men. They did not eat and drink like the Indians; they ate what they were used to—beef and boiled vegetables. They drank water, not tea, and many of them became sick. Many even died. They became infected with malaria, dysentery, typhoid, and diseases we did not even have names for. They got strange skin rashes and boils.”
Papa Spaeth certainly made himself seem important. I thought he must be very smart, this man, and yet I feared him.
“Many of the men I was with, the Germans, began to drink, and I believe that was their undoing. I didn’t do that. I watched the Indians who had been living in the jungle all their lives, and I saw that they didn’t drink alcohol, not one drop. I paid attention to this.”
Papa Spaeth’s stories became grander and more heroic as our evenings progressed. He told us how he never spent his money while he was in South America. He saved it all, everything he’d made during the years he worked there. He took it to a German bank in Argentina, every penny of it, hoping to be rich when he got home. Then, in 1933, after ten years of service, when he was to return to Germany, the bank was gone. It had gone under during that time when so many of the banks went under, in America too, and his money was lost forever.
He said he had nowhere to go then, nothing to save him, so he went to the German embassy and asked for help. This is how he told the story: “I announced: I’m here. Take me. I have nothing left; everything is gone. Do with me what you like, but I have nothing and nowhere to go, not even the money for my fare home.”
He was shipped back. It seemed the embassy did this. I’m not sure that’s exactly what happened. He was a great spinne
r of stories, my Papa Spaeth, and this is the one he told. He landed, somehow, in Germany, penniless, and contacted an old comrade from the Great War who suggested he reenlist. His comrade said he’d heard Hitler intended to reestablish the navy; it could be a grand opportunity for him. And with that advice, Papa Spaeth enlisted as a naval engineer. Not much later, he was promoted in rank to become a Fregattenkapitän, and then, only a few years after that, he became a Kapitän zur See.
Although my new Papa was a military man, his views did not differ much from those of my real Papa. For example, I heard him say once that the Great War, the one he participated in, in the waters of the North Sea, was “a war about nothing, a war started by old men who lied to us.”
III.
I was ten in 1935 when the man who had been our Führer now for more than two years held a rally for members of his Nazi Party in Nuremberg. Here he announced, for the first time publicly, his intention for the Jewish population of Germany: they were not to enlist in his army, and they were not to hold public office. They were told further what they could and could not do. Now many things would change for the Jews in Germany, and I didn’t understand any of it, but my Mutti and my Papa Spaeth spoke of it quietly at home, and often at night.4
It was not noticeable at first. There were not many Jews living in Swinemünde, and I didn’t know any. I didn’t really even know the meaning of the word Jude, except that I heard it spoken only in hushed tones around the dinner table after the children were given permission to leave. Jude, as I understood it, was an important person; so important that my parents needed to wait until the children were gone to talk about him. But, I overheard this: “Das ist aber nicht möglich!” Impossible! Then there was the name Pastor Gottlieb. “Surely he’ll be immune. He is not even Jewish; he’s a pastor in a Protestant church, for God’s sake.” And another man whose name Papa Spaeth brought up time and again: “But he won the Iron Cross in the Great War. Surely he’ll be immune!” Things I didn’t understand until many, many years later.
One thing about the new Nazi regime I did understand. It was early still, before that Nuremberg rally. I was perhaps nine years old when I found a pair of men’s underpants. I thought of something funny to do, and I wanted to make my friends laugh, so I pulled on the rope of the flagpole in front of our school and lowered the new red flag with its black swastika on it—we called it the Hakenkreuz—all the way down. I suppose this alone was an act of treason, but I thought my idea was a humorous one, so I didn’t stop. I decided to replace the flag with the underpants and pulled those old ragged things all the way to the top. All day those shorts flew around up there in the wind, and no one noticed, except me and the children I told, “Look up! Look up! Tell me what you see!” We all giggled behind our hands and then ran off. Perhaps I knew there would be consequences, but it was not until that evening, when the school director appeared at our home, that I understood I had done a very bad thing.
I was relieved that my parents would not punish me, but the school director made sure I understood how serious my offense had been: “You must understand, Herr Spaeth. This cannot happen!” I was to write an essay, he said, two essays in fact. One about the meaning of the Hakenkreuz, the other about the importance of the Nazi Party.
It was on an evening not long thereafter that Mutti piped up at the dinner table with something dreadful she wanted to share with us. It was something that had happened to her just that day and it frightened her very much. Her eyes went wide as she began her story. She said our telephone rang and she went to answer it. The person on the wire did not identify himself, which already was quite unusual. A caller always replied with “Spaeth hier,” or “Meyer hier,” or “Hier” whatever his name was. This caller, however, just started to speak and then kept speaking as if he knew her: “Frau Spaeth” this, and “Frau Spaeth” that, and he said things like “Hitler is the Devil, Hitler will undermine our country,” and then the voice suddenly asked innocently, “Don’t you agree?”
Mutti was confused and distrustful, thank God, and she didn’t answer him. She didn’t say a thing. He kept at it, though, and when she still did not respond, the phone just clicked off. He had hung up, and there was nothing but silence while she held the telephone receiver and stared at it, bewildered. It was a ploy, she surmised, someone wanting to trick her, and the thought of it terrified her. My parents had never joined the Partei—as the Nazi Party came to be known. And yet my Mutti’s husband was a military man, so perhaps the Partei had their suspicions. Perhaps someone wanted to see where her allegiance stood.
Even before the Weimar Republic, there was a law on the books that said no officer was allowed to be affiliated with any party. Country loyalty, yes; party loyalty, no. That was how it was written. And even now, with the Nazis in power, it was still a law. No officer could join the Nazi Party or any party. So the idea that all German officers were Nazis is a false one. Even though the Nazis became the only legal party in Hitler’s regime, an officer of any military branch was never allowed to join. Throughout the entire era of the Nazis, officers remained “party-neutral.”5
So, Papa Spaeth was perhaps suspected or merely being tested for his loyalty to Hitler, because his beliefs and how he had once voted were never publicly discussed. Perhaps someone hoped my Mutti might speak. Maybe she would tell, give Papa Spaeth’s ideas away. I don’t know the reason behind this telephone incident. But it gave my Mutti a fright and she became determined not to speak out again, not ever in public, and even at home she became silent.
My Papa Spaeth said nothing.
4
A CITY I WOULD FALL IN LOVE WITH
I.
Papa Spaeth had become important in the world. He had moved from the rank of Fregattenkapitän in the navy to Kapitän zur See, and this meant we had to leave Swinemünde. It was a sad parting. All I ever knew of life was what I learned in Swinemünde, but now with my new Papa at the helm of our family, everything was changing rapidly.
We moved first to Pillau, a city on the Baltic Sea three hundred miles east of where I had lived my entire childhood. I no longer saw Bertha in the kitchen; it was someone else now, and it was two of them. New maids, both of whom Mutti soon released, because she suspected them of stealing. But none of this mattered anyway, because a few months later Papa Spaeth was told his new post was to be at the OKM Oberkommando, the high command, the National Office for Military Planning, the German Department of Defense. You could, I suppose, compare it to the Pentagon.
And for this post, we would move to Berlin.
II.
I was fourteen now, and old enough to recognize that first day Mutti and I walked all the way down and then all the way back up the avenue, Unter den Linden, right through the center of Berlin, that I would fall in love with this city. What I loved first was the fragrance. It was early summer, but a hot day, and what was so remarkable about that walk was the shade. Unter den Linden was canopied, from one side to the other, with blooming flowers hanging long from large, old linden trees. The perfume in the air in Berlin on that day was a breath from heaven, something that will always stay with me.
My new life was one of awe and fascination. I lived in a city now, and I was becoming a woman. Shopping trips with Mutti on the Kurfürstendamm, the street of fancy shops, showed me things I suddenly wanted to buy, things I’d never thought of before, like hosiery and nail polish and silk.
Papa Spaeth and Mutti took us to the opera at the Staatsoper on Sundays. My favorite performance that year was Herbert von Karajan’s Die Zauberflöte by Mozart, and my favorite orchestral music was written by my favorites, the “three Bs”: Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach. The Staatsoper was a joy to visit. It was an old building with figures carved into the pediment and a frieze above the entry with the name of our Kaiser from the time of its opening, Friedrich der Grosse. Majestic Corinthian columns decorated the front, and I always felt so glamorous coming here for an evening.
Berlin introduced me to other things, too, that I had nev
er seen before. Bad things, things that astounded me. For the first time in my life, I saw—often—men without a leg or missing an arm. These men hobbled along using a crutch or simply waving a stump. The pant leg or the empty sleeve was folded under, pressed and neatly pinned in place. Many of them wore a black band around the upper arm as well. Mutti said it was to signify a lost comrade from the Great War. I also saw men wearing a patch over one eye. Another casualty of the Great War, Mutti told me, most likely from exposure to poison gases. Many of these men were still quite handsome. They carried their blights as a sign of valiance, it seemed. To me, it looked as though they had great secrets they were carrying. But I noticed this too: they always looked me straight in the eye, with pride.
We lived in Charlottenburg, a “borough,” I suppose you’d call it, close to the city center. It was a wealthy borough with large homes built a century earlier, and the streets were lined with expensive boutiques: stores selling hats and men’s suits, fancy chocolate shops and bakeries. We lived on the Windscheidstrasse, and I took the S-Bahn to school each day. “S” for street train. Then there was the “U.” The U-Bahn, the underground train.
Our home was grand, but it was grand in a city sort of way. It was a Wohnung, a large apartment, on the third floor of a distinguished house. There were five floors in the building, and it was built of stone with decorated windowsills and a large oval-shaped front doorway with a dark vestibule where it was always slightly cooler than it was outdoors. Inside the vestibule was a floor made of white marble, polished bright each day by our house manager, with a wide marble staircase leading to the homes above.
The rooms in our Wohnung were larger than any I’d ever seen in Swinemünde. Each of our bedrooms—and there were four—had a table in the center with chairs, where Dieter and I would sit together to study and write our school papers. On many of these nights, Papa Spaeth sat with us and helped with our school problems, especially with the Maths, which, for me, was difficult.
Letters From Berlin: A Story of War, Survival, and the Redeeming Power of Love and Friendship Page 4