Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  And pigs can fly.

  No! No! I didn’t see it!

  “A child doesn’t count for anything.”

  The Red Army won’t do it.

  Because a certain Gesine Cresspahl doesn’t believe it?

  Exactly. That’s why.

  The military commander of the town of Jerichow, K. A. Pontiy, might shoot at birds with a rifle, might kick a cat out of his way as often as pet it, he might jump down Cresspahl’s daughter’s throat for not sweeping the path to his villa clean enough, but he didn’t entirely forfeit her respect. In fact, she was downright grateful to him. He’d removed the corpses from her sight.

  The British had made dead people public in Jerichow. They were the Nazis’ prisoners from Neuengamme concentration camp, twelve miles southeast of Hamburg, along with its Mecklenburg branch camps, Boizenburg and Reiherhorst in Wöbbelin. At Neuengamme the Nazis hadn’t managed to do it. When the German Reich had to clear out the Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor death camps in occupied Poland, it made squads of prisoners open the mass graves, dig up the bodies, and grind up the bones. The bone meal was strewn on the fields, the gas chambers and incineration ovens were blown up, and once the prisoners had leveled the camps to a plot of land smooth as innocence they were killed for their efforts. In Austria the Germans had had to leave the Mauthausen camp standing, and at Neuengamme they didn’t manage it either. The Danish government negotiated for their countrymen until, in April, they could have the famous Convoy of Ninety-Two White Buses transport them to Frøslov and Møgelkaer. More than six thousand people were left behind in Neuengamme, under German command; to keep the British from finding them, they were evacuated. First, some five hundred died in the freight cars on the way to Lübeck via Hamburg, unable to endure any further starvation, lacking medical care. Four cars’ worth of sick prisoners weren’t even loaded onto the ships, they were screaming with fever, they were shot, and anyone who didn’t hear that in Lübeck’s outer harbor might well have heard the festive sounds of the German SS in the adjacent grain silo, celebrating final victory with the finest cognac and delicacies from stolen Red Cross parcels. The prisoners, whom the people of Lübeck knew absolutely nothing about, spent almost ten days waiting at Lübeck’s wharf in their freight cars, German Reich Railway cars, out in the open, or else stuffed into the Thielbek and the Athen; more dead kept being buried next to the harbor. The Thielbek had been bombed in 1944, and not been repaired, and was hardly seaworthy: two tugs had to tow the ship down the Trave and out into the bay. The Athen could move under her own steam and she brought more and more batches of prisoners from Lübeck’s industrial harbor to the Cap Arcona in the Bay of Neustadt. The three ships carrying prisoners were easily visible from land, and known to not only the fishermen. The Thielbek, 2,815 gross register tons, 345 feet long, draft 21 feet, had carried freight for Knöhr & Burchardt in Hamburg. The Athen, somewhat smaller, was also designed to carry freight, not people. The Cap Arcona was built for people—a luxury ship of the Hamburg–South America Line, 27,560 GRT, 675 feet long, draft 28.5 feet. Before the war it sailed to Rio de Janeiro, thirty-five days, first class only, 1,275 reichsmarks: avoid part of the winter and relax in the mild sea air under the southern sun! The Cap Arcona was designed for 1,325 passengers and a crew of 380; now, however, there were 4,600 prisoners belowdecks with the sick at the very bottom (with no medicine or bandages) and the Russian prisoners in the banana storage hold (with no light, no air, and for the first three days no food); the dead were piled up on deck. The ship stank of the dead, of the disease and shit of the living—a putrid heap and not even moving. For the Cap Arcona was not seaworthy either, not without fuel. There was almost no food for the prisoners, they were not given water, but roll call, with counting off and tallying, was mandatory. It took longer to die here than in the gas chambers, but it wouldn’t be long before they were all dead. Then came freedom. Freedom came across the bright sunny bay on May 3 in the shape of a squadron of British bombers. At around two thirty they flew over the Bay of Neustadt and started in on the Athen. The Germans defended their prisoners with antiaircraft fire; after the third direct hit they hoisted a white flag. The British pilots may have seen it, because they left that ship and attacked the ones in the outer bay. After twenty minutes the Thielbek lay down on its side and disappeared altogether under the surface of the water, since it was almost sixty feet deep there. The Cap Arcona, with the captain’s bedsheet on the mast, took an hour, then it tipped onto its port side, slowly, faster and faster, until it was lying on its eighty-five-foot side, twenty-six feet of it above water. Meanwhile death was proceeding more quickly, and in various forms. The prisoners could die in the fire, in the smoke (the fire hoses had been cut), from the German crew’s rifles (the crew had life jackets), jammed in by hoarded food supplies, crushed in the panicking crowd, from the heat of the glowing Cap Arcona, in the lifeboats plummeting into the water, from jumping into the water, of cold in the water, by being hit or shot at by German minesweepers, and on land from exhaustion. The saved numbered 3,100, the dead somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000. At around five in the afternoon the English took Neustadt, so it was in the British zone, same as Jerichow, and contact was permitted between the two places, and that’s how we knew about it.

  The dead washed up on every shore of Lübeck Bay, from Bliestorf to Pelzerhaken, from Neustadt to Timmendorf Beach, into the mouth of the Trave, from Priwall to Schwansee and Redewisch and Rande, even into Wohlenberg Cove, as far as Poel Island and the other Timmendorf. They were found almost daily.

  Too many washed up on the coast near Jerichow—the finders couldn’t bury them all secretly in the sand. The British occupation authorities had issued orders that all corpses from the water be reported, and they insisted that these orders be followed. The British took a truck and rounded up men who had been members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. These men were driven along the beach, and wherever a black lump lay on the white sand the British stopped. The Germans were given no gloves for the loading, not even pitchforks or shovels. The British drank their whiskey right in front of the Germans; despite this medicine, they too had to throw up. The British created no special cemetery for the dead from this watery camp. When the truck was full, they drove the load far inland, all the way to Kalkhorst, even Gneez. When they drove into Jerichow they lowered the sides of the truck. The MPs made the Germans leave their houses to look at the cargo as it was driven down Town Street to the cemetery at a walking pace. Slower than walking. The cargo was not easy to recognize. It had been damaged by bullet wounds, charring, shrapnel, blows. It was recognizable by the faded, split, clinging, striped clothes. The individual pieces of human being were often incomplete. There were limbs missing, or there were limbs on the truck bed without a torso, one day there was nothing but a piece of head. The fish had eaten a lot of that one. The British made the people of Jerichow gather on Market Square. In the middle lay the first load of bodies. The commander handed over to the Germans the Germans’ dead. He made them their property. He allowed them to place the mortal remains from the sea into coffins. Then they were permitted to close the coffins and carry them to the cemetery. After the dirt had been shoveled onto the mass grave, the British fired a salute into the air. At the cemetery gate stood a sergeant, holding a box in front of him, and on this box he stamped the ration cards. Anyone who had not accepted the dead would not eat.

  – It was their dead! Those English are utter scoundrels! Marie says. – You guys let them get away with anything, and then some!

  – They were the Germans’. The Germans had held them prisoner, loaded them onto ships. If they’d kept them the only difference was they would have died slower.

  – The British dropped the bombs. They saw the prisoners’ camp uniforms and fired at them anyway. That’s the truth.

  – The British didn’t want that truth. You could be thrown in jail for less than that. There were German U-boats above water all around the ships, and none of them were hit—t
hat was too dangerous even to whisper.

  – But you Jerichowers knew.

  – It wasn’t new information. You could already see prisoners like that in striped clothing in Mecklenburg (maybe not in Lübeck)—but they weren’t to exist in language. Now the British were bringing in dead bodies and decreeing the cause of their death however they wanted.

  – The Mecklenburgers may have been cowards, but the English weren’t.

  – By 1956 they’d put out five volumes on the air offensive against Germany through the end of the war. May 3 was before the end of the war, and nowhere is the bombing in Lübeck Bay mentioned.

  – Official history. Stiff upper lip.

  – It is also official history that the British came before the German submarines had time to sink the prisoners themselves. The monument in the Old Cemetery in Jerichow is official history too.

  – And one in the British zone?

  – In Pelzerhaken, near Neustadt. And four years later the British gave permission to the owners of the Thielbek to salvage any articles of value. The sea hadn’t quite flushed out the whole ship—there were still some bodies, and heaps of bare bones—they had the ship repaired. Let’s call it the Reinbek and put it back out to sea until 1961, until it’s worth selling. Today, if you happen to see a Magdalena flying the Panamanian flag, that’s the Thielbek of May 1945. The Cap Arcona was worthless except for the scrap metal. The Athen, though, that turned into the Soviet General Brusslov in 1946, then the Polish Waryński in 1947, and the Polish Line ran her from Gdynia to Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. What’s left of the Cap Arcona is the ship’s bell. You’ve seen it.

  – At the Museum of Danish Resistance in Copenhagen!

  – In Churchill Park, in Copenhagen.

  – And you still wanted to swim in the Baltic?

  – We ate fish from the Baltic. The Germans eat fish from the Baltic to this day. There are almost three thousand prisoners lying at the bottom of the Baltic.

  – And K. A. Pontiy stopped it?

  – He stopped the education of the German people by means of the overland transport of bodies. This particular flotsam had to be collected in the cemeteries of the coastal villages, outside the territory under his command. That cost—

  – and he made Jerichow pay for it.

  – Tell it to the judge, Marie.

  – No. I would’ve been grateful to him too.

  The military commander of the town of Jerichow didn’t manage to do it on first try—to keep the dead at a distance. For a while they came at him from the other side. They were the refugees, from far outside the parish, who died in the villages and on the farms surrounding the town, in early July already. They hadn’t brought coffins with them when they fled the war; now that they were dying of typhus, they wanted to stay in Jerichow. Pastor Brüshaver was still notified of the first cart, so the little bell could be rung as it pulled up. As a result, Gesine no longer went behind the house; she did keep sitting in her walnut tree, even though that was impolite to the dead. It was a panel truck, with boards running down the sides and cross-planks at the front and the back. Kretts, Gesine called the frontboards and backboards. But language had run off somewhere, away from her. She thought: cabbages, beets. Outside the mortuary chapel the driver and his assistant raised the back Krett and pulled the topmost body down until it flopped onto the stretcher. Gesine tried to think that Jakob, in his strange Pommern German, called a Krett a Schott—she could feel her mind running off somewhere, away from this. The second time, it was too onerous for the villagers to have to dig such deep holes, and they offloaded the strangers into Jerichow’s mortuary without Brüshaver hearing about it in time. That time it was a harvest cart, they were lying visibly one on top of the other between the ladders that the wheat was going to be brought in on the next day. A human arm like the one hanging out past the rails between the rungs, swaying alongside the wheel, seems alive. You couldn’t tell where the dead had come from; K. A. Pontiy had nowhere to send them back to. He ordered sentries to keep watch the next day.

  Another cart was pushed up to Pontiy’s villa in the night, by hand, quietly, on rubber wheels. Hanna Ohlerich and Gesine didn’t hear that one; at one point they woke up reassured when they heard one of the commandant’s cars, which jolted into reverse after lots of loud rattles and shakes, making the horses whinny. Gesine was safe from any new arrivals; that morning she went outside without a second thought. When she glanced to the right she saw both of the chapel’s double doors standing open, with something that looked like a shoe on the ground right outside them. She tried to tell herself that someone must have just slipped and fallen there, but she knew that now she wanted to see the bodies.

  Maybe the living had brought lanterns in the night. The dead weren’t piled on one another the way they’d been in the cart. They sat in the little mortuary hall as if alive, their backs leaned against the walls, most of them with their eyes open. Their dresses, pants, and heavy jackets had been left on, out of fear of infection, or else put back on—they were a bit crooked on their bodies, too high on the neck, too high over the knee. Some were touching one another, holding their neighbor seated, otherwise they might slip. There were two together in the northwest corner, as if they’d sat down next to each other on their own. It was a young man, who seemed to Gesine twenty-two years old, with black hair and long muttonchop sideburns, in a neat black suit with shirt and tie—a city man whose shoes had come off somewhere. His head was turned to the side, as if he were looking at the wall. Then, though she was right up next to him, a girl lay half slumped down—a blond with her hair up, all freckly—and she had slid halfway into the young man’s lap, and her posture was so peaceful, his hand on her shoulder seemed a little embarrassed, and not there voluntarily. They looked posed.

  There was also a chicken in the hall. It had escaped from the Kommandatura. It was feisty, fully alive. It had found some grain next to the corpses’ pants pockets but in its confusion it was pecking at the bare flesh too.

  The mortuary had its windows in the side walls. Morning sunlight slanted in from the right side and lit up the chapel like a waiting room—lit the loving couple most of all.

  Gesine had taken only a half step into the chapel, for no longer than a couple of seconds. She felt watched from every direction, and immediately stepped backward. In doing so, she tripped on the body whose shoe she had noticed earlier. The jokester had forgotten him, he was the only one lying with his face in the gravel.

  She didn’t need to run back to the house. Walking, she considered at leisure what she was expected to do next. Now she knew she was guilty of something—she didn’t know what. She refused her breakfast, and the rest of her meals that day, but it still wasn’t enough to soothe her conscience. She could have eaten without getting sick, she even had some appetite, though she wasn’t exactly hungry that night. It would have seemed like a betrayal of the gathering of the dead to her.

  Cresspahl saw the staged scene too, and that afternoon he had it taken away and then nailed the mortuary shut. Jerichow has had its other cemetery for some time now, the one K. A. Pontiy ordered, on the Rande country road between the town and the air base, on the left, on land expropriated from the nobility. It didn’t have a fence, but Pastor Brüshaver had stood there and done the things and said the words he felt necessary for a consecration. From the countryside you reached it by going around the town, about a mile and a half; it took maybe half an hour longer with a horse and cart.

  Today it’s called the Central Municipal Cemetery. Surrounded by a low fieldstone wall, and within that a ring of thornbushes.

  The chapel, build in 1950 and much more massive than a garage, can’t be seen from the road.

  The old chapel, by Cresspahl’s house, has collapsed and been replaced by part of a white brick wall between the red stones from 1850. The churchyard cemetery is considered an attraction, because it has been untouched for more than twenty years.

  Later it must have been an honor to be allowed into
the earth by St. Peter’s Church. That’s how Cresspahl ended up there, in a grave next to his wife, as a former mayor of the town. While he was alive, he managed to get Jakob a place there, near him.

  And it’s a Schott, Gesine, that’s what it’s called.

  It’s a Krett.

  Schott.

  Krett.

  You laughed first!

  You did.

  May 6, 1968 Monday

  Yesterday, on Karl Marx’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, The New York Times took part in the festivities around the house where he was born in Trier. The students shouted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!” when the chairman of the Social Democratic Party, which owns the house, sought to enter it. The East Germans staged an event of their own. In the West German one, Ernst Bloch contended that many errors had been committed in the name of Marx. “Some people not only do not know anything about Marx but they tell lies about him.”

  Dramatis personae:

  MONSIEUR HENRI ROCHE-FAUBOURG, part heir to a French banking firm. Twenty-one years old, 136 lbs., skin color yellowish, race Caucasian, hair black with split ends and curling over his shirt collar. French, graduate of an elite school in Paris. Has begun to study law and economics. Serving one year in New York. A personage insulted by not being received at once by his father’s New York colleague, instead being first handed over for a subordinate to deal with. At a meal at the Brussels two weeks ago he was capable, all the way until coffee, of refusing to believe that the lady with him really spoke French. Clings fast to his role as the sole person in New York who speaks and understands French, despite the waiter’s proving the contrary. Considers his language to be his exclusive possession, and while he is unable to punish encroachments on this his property with a whip, he did make frequent use of a lack of comprehension. Then he kisses the hand of the lady paying his check, and says with a smile on his impatient red lips: What a charming remark! It was a remark on the enamel-like nature of typical American makeup and was, like all the previous remarks, made in French. He replied in the same language for the first time. Has thirty-one words of American English at his disposal, thirty of them English English. Long jackets, reaching down to the tips of his outstretched fingers, sharply tailored.