Destined to Witness Read online

  I’m sure that even the less quick-witted among my classmates knew immediately what Harden had in mind. With growing terror, I watched while Harden whacked away with his switch—three licks per pupil—until the class was filled with howling boys holding their aching behinds. Like a condemned man at a mass execution, I watched my comrades fall, one by one, under the cruel hand of the executioner. Finally, it was my turn to pay for my part in the “conspiracy.” Before I knew it, it was all over. At first, I only felt three sharp stings, which, I thought, I could manage. But within seconds, the pain grew steadily until my entire posterior seemed on fire. I instantly realized what the howling and crying around me was all about, but I was determined and managed not to cry.

  Unfortunately, my run-in with Harden wasn’t my only acquaintance with corporal punishment. The events that led to my second brush with this barbaric aspect of German education came as a result of an old Hamburg street custom called Kloppe (rumble) in which fighting between boys from adjacent neighborhoods erupts like instantaneous combustion. No one among the warring factions knows, or cares, what the fight is all about or who started it, other than experiencing the joy of kicking butt. It all begins with someone out of nowhere hollering “Kloppe!” This sets off a rush to arms—wooden handles, broomsticks, bats—anything that lends itself to inflicting minor cuts and bruises. We younger boys would take our marching orders from the older boys and usually would be assigned as lookouts to report advancing enemies or—God forbid—the approach of a Schako, which is Hamburg street talk for cop.

  On this particular occasion, two classmates of mine and I were entrusted with an especially dangerous mission. After each of us was handed two water-filled pop bottles, we were told to wait in ambush until the enemy “soldiers” had come within throwing distance, then hurl the bottles at the pavement directly in front of them.

  Eager to demonstrate our courage, we did exactly as told, with amazing results. As our bottles exploded on the pavement, the advancing attackers were caught in a hail of glass shrapnel that caused them to beat a hasty retreat.

  The next morning in school, still basking in the new status to which my bravery had elevated me, I was unceremoniously summoned to the class of Herr Siegel where, to my dismay, something akin to a war-crimes trial was in session. After several witnesses, including some of our street enemies, testified that they had seen me—no one else, mind you—throwing pop bottles filled with water like hand grenades, Herr Siegel gave me a stern lecture on the gravity of my action and how fortunate I was that no one had lost an eye or was otherwise seriously hurt.

  In retrospect, Herr Siegel’s comments made a great deal of sense to me, except that I was being singled out for punishment—the usual three lashes. When he asked me whether I had anything to say in my defense, I didn’t think that snitching on my partners in crime would have been ethical or get me off the hook, but I questioned Siegel’s jurisdiction in this case—his right to punish me for something that had happened after school and outside the school building. But Herr Siegel waved my objections aside. I had always considered him a decent sort of guy, too civilized to stoop to Herr Harden’s level, but as he whacked away at my rear end, I painfully concluded that I had been wrong.

  As so often, my mother had been right. She had often warned me not to get involved in mischief, even if other boys were doing the same thing. “Afterwards,” she said, “the only one people will remember is you.”

  BOOKS TO THE RESCUE

  If the relentless barrage of Nazi propaganda to which we were constantly exposed failed to close my mind permanently, it was because of a childhood habit of mine that had reached compulsive proportions. As soon as I had learned to read, my mother fostered my interest in books, and by the time I was eight years old, I had become hopelessly addicted to reading books—any books. Since I grew up in the pre-television age, books became my primary source of diversion, escapism, and information, and every pfennig I earned running errands or that was handed me by well-meaning adults for the purchase of candy, I saved up to buy books. A compulsive reader in her own right, my mother made sure that I had a public library card and that at Christmas, Easter, and birthdays, most of the presents I received were books.

  Thanks to my truly eclectic literary taste that didn’t distinguish between good and bad books, appropriate- or inappropriate-for-my-age books, I read anything I could get my hands on with equal enthusiasm. Consequently—and in spite of the Nazis’ restrictive, one-dimensional totalitarianism—I became part of a vast, multifaceted, and multicolored world long before I was able to physically escape the mental prison that was Nazi Germany. If it had been Dr. Goebbels’s intention to keep our young minds nationalistically inward-directed, he had missed the boat as far as I was concerned. The genie of knowledge in the form of dozens of dog-eared books was out of the bottle and filled my mind with wondrous images that made me yearn for adventures far beyond the narrow boundaries of Germany.

  Through the pages of my books, I could traverse time as well as space, reality as well as fantasy. Before I was fourteen years old, and decades before nuclear-powered submarines and space travel ceased to be science fiction, I had traveled into outer space and twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea with Jules Verne. James Fenimore Cooper had me smoking the peace pipe in a wigwam of a Native American chieftain years before I laid eyes on a real Native American. Long before I would actually behold the Coliseum and other remnants of Roman antiquity, with Henryk Sienkiewicz I watched Christians being fed to hungry lions and Nero fiddle while ancient Rome was burning. Harriet Beecher Stowe let me feel the pain of slaves in the South of far-off America, evoking in me a strange sense of empathy that at the time I refused to recognize as having been brought on by a feeling of kinship. Miguel de Cervantes had me root for deranged Don Quixote in his quest for knightly honors. Charles Dickens brought me face-to-face with the horrors of institutionalized child abuse during the Industrial Revolution in merry old England. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had me follow Sherlock Holmes, accompanied by his sidekick Dr. Watson, through the narrow cobblestone streets of foggy nineteenth-century London as the master sleuth searched for clues to a mysterious crime. Mark Twain had me rafting down the Mississippi with Huckleberry Finn and Jim, the slave, long before I saw North America’s mightiest stream. Victor Hugo made me shudder as the guillotine did its grisly work on behalf of French liberty. And long before I had the opportunity to visit tropical island paradises on plush cruise ships, Robert Louis Stevenson let me sail the seven seas with buccaneer scoundrels and swashbuckling heroes in pursuit of hidden treasures.

  Ironically, among my favorite books during my formative years were those that dealt with the old Germanic legends of Siegfried, the fairest of fair knights, which provided much of the National Socialists’ racial mythology. What fascinated me most about the chivalrous knights of yore was their iron-clad code of honor, to which they adhered even in the face of certain death. By far my favorite and—by no coincidence—the most macho of the Teutonic deities was Thor, god of war, who when angered cruised the heavens wielding a magic hammer that dispensed lightning and thunder.

  Thanks to my books, I was able to escape at will from some of the more painful situations in my daily existence into worlds that, however perilous, were fair, where good was rewarded and evil punished. Reading provided me with an effective buffer against the constant racial attacks by the likes of Herr Wriede and helped to blunt their impact on my immediate consciousness. Without my being fully aware of it, reading became my indispensable survival tool.

  WORDS OF WISDOM

  Of the many characteristics that defined my mother, one of the more pronounced ones was her incurable optimism. This was most apparent in her high expectations for me in spite of the dim outlook imposed by Nazi racial laws. Nothing could shake her conviction that, quite apart from race, I had exceptional potential and that some day—Nazis or no Nazis—I would make something of myself. After she learned from Tante Fatima that Liberia had a shortage of univer
sity-trained engineers, she decided that I should become an engineer and one day help Liberians build urgently needed bridges and roads. Never mind that my math grades were the lowest on my report card. She convinced me that an engineering career would be within my reach, if only I reached hard enough. To encourage me to do just that, she would say, “If you want to become a hook, you’ll have to start bending early.”

  Imbued with a strong aversion toward religiosity—an aversion that has resurfaced in me—she was convinced that you could go to church and pray until you were blue in the face and know the Bible backwards in five languages and still not be a good person. The only way to accomplish that, she believed, was by treating your fellow human beings, and animals, right. She didn’t attend church regularly until, well into middle age, she married a devout member of the Serbian Orthodox Church and actively participated in her husband’s observances of his church’s rituals. Instead of religious dogma, she had at her command an inexhaustible supply of proverbs, rhymes, and maxims to which she adhered. There was one for every occasion a person might possibly encounter in a lifetime—advice on how to manage money, how to treat friends, why it pays to be punctual, and on and on. It was a legacy from her mother, one she was determined to pass on to me. By the time I started first grade, I already knew that “lies have short legs,” especially after having been caught in a lie. When she tried to teach me the benefits of a righteous life, she’d say, “A good conscience is a soothing pillow.” To instill modesty and politeness in me, she’d say, “With hat in hand, you can travel through the entire land.” To keep me from treating a school chum meanly, she’d warn, “If you dig a hole for others, you’ll fall into it yourself.” When I seemed unappreciative of a money gift because it was smaller than I expected, she would remind me that “he who doesn’t honor the penny doesn’t deserve the dollar.” Although, unlike the Ten Commandments, they lacked divine endorsement, these little morsels of German folk wisdom have lost nothing of their validity since I became a man, something I’ve tried to impress upon my two sons. Today, nothing pleases me more than to hear them quote their Omi (granny) or me when making a point.

  Endowed with a great sense of humor, she genuinely enjoyed a funny story even when the joke was on her. Thus, she delighted in telling and retelling stories like the one in which a Freudian slip made her address a professor with an exceedingly generous proboscis as Professor Nase (Nose).

  Mutti loved to sing—anything from operatic arias to tunes from movies and operettas, folk songs and hit tunes from her youth. One of her frequent laments was that she didn’t have a beautiful voice. That realization, while perhaps true, did not make her any less inclined to fill our apartment with songs, whether she was knitting, crocheting, or doing the laundry. “Where there’s music, settle down,” she would say, “for evil people have no songs.”

  Generous to a fault, Mutti would spare no effort to help a needy friend in distress. More than once she gave up her own bed and slept on the couch in order to provide temporary shelter for one of her friends who had marriage problems. Any friend who asked her for a favor could consider it done. On the other hand, she was a courageous, stubborn, and combative woman who didn’t mind confronting anyone, high or low, who she felt had done her or me wrong. But if ever someone she had trusted crossed her in a major way, she would put that person out of her life for good with no possibility of reconciliation. She was of the opinion that “trash fights and trash makes up.”

  Unbounded resiliency enabled her to get through the many ups and downs of her long life. Strong and determined, she used to quip, “Weeds don’t perish,” whenever someone noted her remarkable ability to bounce back from adversity.

  Despite her outspokenness that spared no one, Mutti was well liked and, in turn, liked people. Frequently on weekends, our tiny attic was packed with her friends, mostly fellow hospital and factory workers, who gathered for a gemütlichen Abend (cozy evening) of talking, singing, laughing, eating, and coffee drinking, all of which were her favorite pastimes. During cold winter evenings, she would warm and enliven her social gatherings even more by serving her guests a glass of Glühwein, a hot beverage of wine, hot water, lemon juice, sugar, and nutmeg, that soon had everyone singing. That’s about as lively as things would get, and shortly after my bedtime, everyone thanked her for a great evening and went home.

  MUTTI’S INNER CIRCLE

  In spite of Mutti’s professed anti-Catholic bias, which her own mother had instilled in her when she was a small child, her closest friend and confidante was Rosel Genseder, a statuesque, buxom redhead and a staunch Catholic. This indicated to me that her occasional talk about the not-to-be-trusted Catholics was just that—talk—and wasn’t to be taken too seriously. Rosel, who spoke an unreconstructed Bavarian dialect that I had difficulty understanding, had newly arrived from the Bavarian countryside when she and my mother were hired as unskilled workers by the hard rubber factory in Barmbek.

  And then there was Liesbeth Schroeder. Liesbeth had only one major objective in life, which was to find a husband, and this perennial quest had become an all-consuming obsession that frequently stood between her and common sense. Although by no means a close friend or even a well-liked companion, needy Liesbeth, a former fellow nurse’s aide, had over the years attached herself to my mother in such a way that my mother found it impossible to shake her off. Never one to take no for an answer, Liesbeth just kept coming until she, too, became part of Mutti’s regular social group.

  In Mutti’s circle of closest friends was Erna Schmedemann, the mother of little Erika of striptease fame. “Tante Erna,” as I called her, was among those who persuaded my mother not to make unnecessary enemies by fighting her dismissal from the hospital. She knew what she was talking about. Her husband, Walter, my mother’s former coworker at the hospital, had been a functionary in the outlawed German Social Democrat Party (SPD) before Hitler’s rise to power. Just a few months earlier, he had been arrested by the Gestapo, the new regime’s secret police, and incarcerated without a trial. I always knew when my mother and Tante Erna were discussing Onkel Walter’s fate. Tante Erna would be sobbing quietly and they would talk in hushed tones in an obvious attempt to keep me from hearing what was being said. That only heightened my curiosity and, pretending that I wasn’t interested in their conversation, I picked up enough little bits here and there to get a pretty good idea of what had happened to Onkel Walter. I learned that Onkel Walter had been picked up in the middle of the night by two plainclothesmen and taken to a prison in suburban Fuhlsbuttel, ostensibly for having distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets. “I know they beat him,” I heard Tante Erna tell my mother, “because he had bruises on his face the last time they let me visit him.” She also suspected that they kept Onkel Walter chained at his wrists and ankles because she noticed that his shirtsleeves and trouser bottoms were covered with rust stains when she picked up his personal clothes after he had been issued a prison uniform.

  I still couldn’t understand why Onkel Walter was being punished if, as Tante Erna insisted many times, he hadn’t done anything wrong. When I couldn’t contain my curiosity any longer and asked my mother, she tried as best she could to explain that the reason for his imprisonment was not that he had committed a crime but that he had disagreed with the government.

  That explanation left me more confused than enlightened, since everybody knew that the government—meaning Hitler—was always right. Bewildered, I asked, why would Onkel Walter disagree with him? My mother promised to explain it to me when I got a little older and could better understand. Meanwhile, she asked me not to discuss Onkel Walter with anyone, especially at my school.

  On numerous occasions, Erna would tell my mother of her many futile attempts to win her husband’s freedom. Eventually, she hit on the idea to have Erika join the Bund Deutscher Mädchen (League of German Girls, or BDM), the distaff side of the Hitler Youth, so that after attaining a leadership position, she could put in a good word on behalf of her dad. As far-fetched as her p
lan appeared at the time, it eventually met with partial success. Following more than four years of incarceration, her father was released in 1938 after Erika—by then a model BDM girl—bombarded the Reichskanzlei with letters in which she explained her exemplary Nazi lifestyle as a dedicated BDM leader and begged for her father’s release. Ultimately, the future Hamburg senator Walter Schmedemann was rearrested at the outset of the war and was forced to spend the war years in a concentration camp. More letters by Erika in behalf of her father, this time addressed to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, were ignored.

  ONKEL MAX

  Since my mother, with her dark hair, brown eyes, and rosy cheeks, was an extremely good-looking woman, she attracted more than her share of men. I had gotten quite used to them buzzing around her like bees around a flower whenever we went out, and I felt flattered when they talked about “your pretty mother.” Once in a while, a lucky fellow would be invited over for Sunday afternoon Kaffee und Kuchen with us, but unless he received my unreserved approval, he rarely got a second chance.

  Enter Max Walz, a divorcé ten years my mother’s senior who worked on the hospital’s kitchen staff. From the moment she brought “Onkel Max” home and introduced him to me when I was about five years old, I took a liking to the gentle giant of a man with the brown wavy hair and huge, sensitive hands that seemed to be able to do everything. The fact that he walked with a limp because one of his legs was shorter than the other, a defect he was born with, as Mutti explained to me, was something I soon accepted as quite normal, as I felt he accepted my brown skin.

  Multitalented Onkel Max played the bandoneon, a square accordion-type instrument, as well as the lute and the guitar. He could also paint and draw portraits like a professional artist and, to top it all, rode a motorcycle on which he took my mother and me for long weekend hikes. In the evenings, he filled our home with music, read to us, or taught me how to sketch or build a model plane.