Dieter just stared at me, an amazed look on his face. “What are you saying? Hitler intends only to save our country. He has said so many times in his speeches. And that’s exactly what he’s doing. He has saved the Sudetenland; he has taken back the Alsace area, land that has always been German. People are working again. What are you saying?”
“Why, oh why, do you believe such nonsense? Don’t you know the rest of the world is against us? France and England? Oh, Dieter, Dieter, don’t be a fool!” And we argued and argued, and I never got through to him, and I was scared for his sake. He listened to all the propaganda that they fed those boys in the HJ, and he believed it all. We would argue when we came home from school, and we would argue when we did our chores, and then he would bring home the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi propaganda newspaper, to try to prove to me all the good things the Nazis were accomplishing.13
What we did together was go to church, and it was every Sunday, and afterward we would spend our time talking late into the afternoon—about God and what was true and what was false. Dieter was very devout—maybe this is why he refused to see there was anything wrong with the world. He thought everyone had good intentions, that all people had a good heart and that they only wanted what was good and that all intentions for this war were good and that things would all turn out just that way—good.
III.
Karl Spaeth was home less and less. He had much to do at the OKM Oberkommando, and this should have come as no surprise. After all, Germany was at war. He was close to many of those in higher positions at the Oberkommando, and I met a number of them when they came to visit on occasion. These men would join us for dinner and then withdraw to what they called their “salon.” They would stand around in the parlor with their cigars and discuss things that I was never included in.
But I did overhear some things. “Ja. Well, he says, ‘Even Chamberlain and Dadalier gave glowing reports. Even they are happy we freed Czechoslovakia and Austria.’ ” Then, “That man’s not to be trusted. He’s doing things that no law in the German books would ever allow. How is he getting away with this?”
I could hear from the tone of their voices that these men were serious and they were not pleased with how our Führer was handling things. As these meetings continued, the talks became more serious. Many years later, when I spoke with Papa Spaeth about these nights—and yes, I did come to call him “Papa” again—he confided in me that these “salons” were a small part of what was a loosely knit organization of German officers called the Schwarze Kapelle, the Black Orchestra.
Maybe it was a day when the family was expecting guests—Karl often invited them—I can’t remember, but Mutti had baked a cake with whatever ingredients she could find. It had been baked in a Bundt pan, and who knows what she used to make it smell so good! Could it have been real flour and butter and eggs? I came home after swim training, and I was exceedingly hungry. As I was every day. Even before the rationing, I was a child who liked to eat, but now I was twice so. I saw the cake sitting on the stove to cool, and I don’t know what got into me, but I took a knife and cut myself a healthy chunk and ate it. Boy, that tasted good! As if it had real butter in it and real sugar sprinkled over the top, and it was still warm, and just the smell of it made my mouth water for more.
And then, just as I was about to swallow the last bite, bent over the stove, knowing it was a wrong thing to do, Mutti entered the kitchen and stopped in her tracks. She looked at me, horrified. I turned around with crumbs still hanging off my chin when she let out a scream. “Ach! What have you done! What have you done! My cake … my cake! You’ve ruined it!” She burst into tears, her hands wringing the apron that now had several mended spots on it.
Oh, how sorry I was for what I had done! I knew immediately I was in deep trouble, but what could I do? The cake was already in my stomach, and how was I to change that?
Karl Spaeth heard her scream and immediately came running into the kitchen from the desk in his office, and he had one of his You’re about to get it scowls on his face. I was relieved to see he was not holding his cane, but I could see too that he was not about to let that stop him.
“You ate Mutti’s cake?” he shouted, staring straight at me with his blue beady eyes. “The one she’s been baking all day? The one she worked so hard to get the ingredients for? You? You, you filthy cow, you should have that cake?”
He used the word Vieh, which is worse than cow, a dirty farm animal, but at least he didn’t say Hure, which he had flung at me once before, but because Mutti was standing here in the kitchen listening, the word “whore” did not come out of his mouth, a word no one of his gentility should ever use. He used that word only in private when I came home with my coat open and Mutti wasn’t looking.
His face became redder and his hands began to shake. I knew something was coming, but I didn’t expect this. He took the cake in both his hands and lifted it high over his head, then smashed it into my hair. When that was done, he rubbed what was left of it all over my face and chest with his slimy hands. Yes, my chest. This, too, he began to do now—touch me there. I looked down at my feet and felt so bad because of the wasted cake and the crumbs that were lying all around me on the floor.
I was not going to cry, though. Those days were gone. He could beat me all he wanted, but he was not going to see me cry ever again, so I stood there and watched while he did this. He’s making such a fool of himself, I thought. What a waste it was that now there was no cake left at all. All that butter, all those eggs—gone. Couldn’t Mutti have at least sliced the rest of it up and served it on a nice plate? I thought. But no one was asking me.
That evening, when the guests arrived, I was sent to my room as punishment, without dinner, and I was not allowed to be with the family guests. I don’t think there was a dessert, though. The ruin of yet another night.
My birthday in 1940 would be my first of five during wartime. Of course, I believed it was to be the only one during wartime. I was turning sixteen. I was becoming a woman, and I had only two more years of school before my Abitur. I wondered how it would be celebrated. Would anyone remember? It was, after all, wartime. Mutti always made such a fuss over food, and there was no doubt now that Karl Spaeth hated me.
I got out of bed in the morning and made my way to the kitchen. In times past I would surely have been greeted with a delightful surprise. A cake and a gift would have been sitting on the kitchen table. Certainly, I thought, Mutti has done something for me? Gingerly, I walked in. No aroma of coffee brewing. The tiles of the kitchen floor felt cold. No one else was awake. And there, on the table, I saw what I thought I remembered to be the old drapes that had adorned our living room windows when we first moved into this Wohnung. They were heavy drapes, a dark maroon color, made of velour.
“These are hässlich!” my mother had exclaimed back then. “Take them down immediately. They’re ugly and they make the house much too dark. Ugly, ugly, ugly,” she had said. I stood at that table and heard those words again: hässlich, hässlich, hässlich. My face fell. Could she have meant this to be my gift? I looked and I looked again, and I picked up the material. It had been cut and sewn and made into a bathrobe. A heavy, maroon—and ugly—bathrobe. And I assumed it was to be mine. In July?
How I hated her, then.
IV.
From my street in Charlottenburg, I could take the S-Bahn all the way into the city center and get off at Potsdamer Platz and be able to shop. I, of course, had no money, but I loved to “shop” anyway. And so did my friends. Near there, at the Leipziger Platz, was a grand old department store several stories tall that could be reached using elevators, beautiful ones with wrought-iron gates, and each car had its own operator, dressed in a gray uniform, operating the elevator wheel. This store, our favorite, was once named Wertheim. It had a glass-topped atrium and a café that served nougat cake, and the higher up we went on the elevators, the more fancy and the more expensive the goods became. Mutti, when we first came to Berlin, shopped there f
or her dresses and hats and coats.
One day the name of the store, which had been owned by a Jewish family, was suddenly changed to AWAG. The acronym stood for something like “General Products Retailing Organization.” When he thought he was out of hearing range of “busy ears,” Karl Spaeth joked that AWAG also meant something else: Aus Wut Arisch Geworden—Because of Anger, Became Aryan!
Karl Spaeth knew things weren’t going well for the Jews. His Jewish friends had left Germany long ago for Hungary and Romania, or the United States or Canada. One family he knew even emigrated to Palestine. And the other Jews? We never spoke about them at home. We always assumed everyone had emigrated, just as Karl Spaeth’s friends had done. I don’t believe he knew that the Jews in Germany, or in the rest of Europe, were being sent away to concentration camps and killed there. He was in the Kriegsmarine, the navy—not the SS, which was in the Nazi Party.
There were five or six Jewish students in my class. I didn’t know any of them, except, of course, my friend Hilde. Hilde was half Jewish, which I didn’t think meant anything. Her mother was Jewish, and the family always hid her inside the house. I understand this now. At the time, I only felt sorry for Hilde’s mother, always sitting at home. I can hardly remember what she looked like. Her face was always gray, and her eyes seemed far away in the distance behind a wall of cigarette smoke. I never really grasped the terror this woman must have lived in.
One day two SA men knocked on Hilde’s door. Hilde was the one who answered, and she told me the whole story. They had come to confiscate the family radio, they said. The conversation between the two SA men who stood in her doorway, dressed in their brown uniforms and polished boots, and her mother went something like this:
“You are Jewish. We’ve come to confiscate your radio. You’re no longer allowed to listen to radio broadcasts.”
“Hilde was half Jewish, which I didn’t think meant anything.”
“And why not?”
“Because you’re Jewish. We’ve already said this.”
“But my husband isn’t Jewish. What about him? Can’t he listen?”
“Well, yes, if he’s not Jewish, then he can listen.”
“Then what about my children? They’re half Jewish. Are they allowed to listen, or are they not allowed to listen?”
Both men stood in the doorway and looked stunned, and then they laughed. One of them came up with this answer: “Well, if they’re half Jewish, I suppose it would be all right for them to listen, but they can listen with only one ear.” And with that all three of them had a good laugh. Both men sat down with Hilde’s Mutti and shared a smoke with her and then left the home, saying only, “Guten Tag.”
Anyway, it wasn’t permissible to listen to a foreign radio broadcast after the war started on September first, and listening to Hitler’s endless speeches wasn’t all that interesting. That’s what I told Hilde when she told me her story. Oh, that she put up with me in my ignorance!
It wasn’t only the Jews who had problems, though. It was anyone who was not German. Mutti’s friend Katherine came to visit one day. The two of them were sitting in the kitchen. Katherine had her face in her hands and kept wiping her eyes and mouth with her handkerchief when I walked in. I sat down with them at the table, which was very large and in the middle of the kitchen, and Mutti poured me some tea. I tried to take Katherine’s hand in mine. I wanted to let her know I’d listen.
“I’m supposed to divorce my husband,” she cried into her hands. “They’ll take me away, and they’ll take my husband as well, if I don’t do it. We’ve been married for twelve years! Mein Gott, what am I to do? Where am I to go? And he? What’s to become of us?” Mutti couldn’t console her; neither could I, and she spoke with such a heavy accent. What were we to do about it? Mutti and I sat as we watched her weep.
Katherine was British, but she had a German passport. The problem was she was married to an officer in the German army with a rather high rank, and although they were both citizens of Germany, marriage to a person stemming from an enemy country was no longer allowed. Katherine had been ordered to divorce her husband immediately, and that was the final word. The end of this story? She divorced him, as was proper, and they went their separate ways, as was proper. She moved to the country to live with her parents-in-law. Were they ever reunited? I don’t know. Mutti never talked about her again after that day. “We all have our problems, this is war, and that’s just how it is now.” That’s what we would say.
I noticed something from an experience I had on the S-Bahn, which I rode at the same time every morning. There were some young people my age who always sat in the very back of the train car. I thought to myself how arrogant they were that they never spoke to me. As we all rode the same train every day and were all the same age, wouldn’t you think someone would introduce himself? Say hello? What school do you attend? Who are you? I suppose I could have made the first move, but I was too shy and I was alone. They were many.
Then one morning I noticed that they all had a yellow star sewn on the outside of their jackets. A few weeks went by, and I suddenly realized they were no longer on the train. Never again did I see them. It was war. And people disappeared. That was all I knew. I noticed it, but I thought no more of it. And then a time came when I just didn’t see Jewish stars at all anymore.
That’s when I should have begun to understand the significance of the Ahnenpass. We all had one—my Mutti, my brother, and I. It was a book that provided full identification of its holder. On the first page, the person’s name, permanent address, and the parents’ names appeared, with the official stamp of the Reich stamped at the bottom. Thirty-four pages were blank and neatly organized and numbered where all immediate relatives’ names were to be entered, including the parents and the parents before them, and before them and before them. These entries were then officially verified and given the official stamp. To me, it was just a boring document. I did not think to draw any connection between the Ahnenpass and those disappearing stars.
Part II
BOMBS ON BERLIN
1942–1945
8
IN THE BUNKERS
I.
The news about the fronts, the new occupied territories, the places we always heard had been “liberated”—France, Czechoslovakia, Poland—was always announced with great enthusiasm. Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, often came over the radio, giving his long and boring speeches, and the Völkischer Beobachter told stories of victory here and victory there. There were some who doubted, who had seen a war before and how terribly it had ended. Mutti was one of those. She said the news was not always what it appeared to be, but she never said more than that. She merely looked worried.
We, in Berlin, feared for ourselves. With the British having entered the war, wasn’t it possible our city, the country’s capital, could be attacked? Goebbels had an answer to this long before we even dared to think it: “If a single bomb drops on Berlin, my name shall be Meyer,” he announced. It’s a Schnack, a nonsensical saying—“My name shall be Meyer.” He could have said, “If a single bomb drops on Berlin, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”
When the bombs from England did come, the first one landed right on my street, the Windscheidstrasse.14 It was August 1940 and it hit the house just across the street from us. A giant hole had been blown in one of its walls, but I don’t think anyone was hurt. Those first bombs, in 1940, were not so significant yet; the bad ones would come later. However, from this day forward, Goebbels won a new name, Ober-Meyer, among us Berliners: the Super-Monkey.
Days later, new bombers arrived. This time, bomb sirens blared all night.
From leaflets that were circulated throughout the city and from our neighborhood supervisors, we had received instructions on how to run to our basements in an orderly fashion and what we were to bring. We each carried a small sack packed with a change of clothes and our important documents, our passports and birth certificates and, of course, the Ah
nenpass, if we had one. All bathtubs were to be filled with water in case the house caught fire, gas and electricity were to be turned off, and we were to stay in our basements until the all-clear sirens rang through the city.
I was still in school when the bombings began. This disturbance—staying up well past midnight—made classes and studying a near impossibility. The sirens went off; you packed your things. You ran out your door half asleep, your ears were ringing. You’d run to the basement; you’d see your neighbors doing the same, each with his little sack of belongings. And the sirens kept blaring.
I will never ever forget the sound of those sirens. They would start off slow, like a ticking alarm clock, and then faster—saying hurry, hurry, get into your shelters—and then it would become an endless wailing, no stopping, and get progressively louder as the minutes passed. The whining could be heard from all parts of the city.
We would sit then, in the black, a few garish lights hanging here and there, everyone’s face looking ashen and afraid as we waited. On many nights we stayed in our nightclothes. Some of us would wrap a blanket or coat around ourselves. Others paced all night. We could hear the planes overhead, the sound coming closer and closer, the whirring of the machines filling the sky, and we heard, too, when a building had been hit. Boom!15
II.
One night, after the bombs seemed to have come extremely close to our house, perhaps even hit it, and it was already very late or very early the next morning, Dieter and I were sent to the upper floors to inspect the damage.
It was a rule, in our house at least, for the children to be sent up into the house first. The reason? We were young and we could stomach the destruction. The older people might take such a fright they’d have a heart attack. Dieter and I were to report back if it was safe for the rest of the neighbors to come up. That was our assignment.
Letters From Berlin: A Story of War, Survival, and the Redeeming Power of Love and Friendship Page 8