Destined to Witness Read online

  I ONCE HAD A COMRADE

  Among my least favorite classmates was Egon Faber, the ranking class clown and son of a Nazi functionary. Since I had not yet developed my anti-Nazi bias, his father’s affiliation had nothing to do with my dislike for him. The reason I held Egon in such low esteem was that he simply got on my nerves. Incessantly showing off, Egon would stop at nothing to get attention or a few laughs. Extremely creative when it came to thinking up new ways of being obnoxious, he once regaled the class by taking a leak out of the second-floor classroom window into the schoolyard.

  That performance, which was climaxed by Herr Grimmelshäuser’s unheralded entrance, would have undoubtedly resulted in immediate corporal punishment had it not been for his father’s clout. All of us kids resented his virtual immunity from punishment.

  For the most part, I avoided Egon like the plague and, since the antipathetic feelings seemed mutual, he avoided me, too, until one day when he literally bumped into me, leaving an impact that lasted throughout my life. At the time we were nine years old and in the fourth grade. It happened at the end of recess in the schoolyard. In keeping with school regulations, we had been standing at attention in formation and were awaiting the teacher’s orders to march back to class. Egon, who stood directly in front of me, was clowning as usual by tickling the boy in front of him. When the boy spun around to face his tormentor, Egon reared suddenly, causing the back of his hard, crew-cut blond head to crash into my left eye. The impact was so severe that my eye immediately swelled shut. Wincing with pain, I was ready to deal Egon a retaliatory blow but was deterred by the stern look of a teacher who had come to check on the commotion. All I could do for the moment was to hiss menacingly, “I’ll get you for this,” to Egon who was barely aware of the damage he had caused. My anger at Egon kept growing and growing throughout the rest of the school day as my eye turned a conspicuous shade between violet and black that seemed to amuse everybody but me. It was my firm intention to make good on my vow to get even with Egon the next day in school. But it turned out to be a vow I not only couldn’t keep, but that I later wished I had never made.

  The following morning I arrived in class, ready to settle the score with my fists at the first opportunity that presented itself. I immediately looked for Egon, but without success. He apparently had taken my warning seriously, I figured, and decided to keep out of my reach by staying home. When Herr Grimmelshäuser was about to call roll, the door opened and an upper-class student entered. He and the teacher exchanged a few words that we couldn’t understand. Suddenly, Herr Grimmelshäuser bolted out of his seat, visibly shaken by what the boy had told him. After regaining his composure, he addressed the class with, “Boys, I have a sad announcement. I’ve just learned that our classmate Egon Faber is dead. He shot himself accidentally yesterday after school.” Following his announcement, Herr Grimmelshäuser dismissed the class for the day.

  News of Egon’s death left the class torn between grief and speechless disbelief. The teacher’s words hit me in a very personal way. I became convinced that, although I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, somehow I was responsible for Egon’s death because of the blind hatred I had felt for him following the previous day’s schoolyard incident. In my anguish, I was prepared to tell him not to worry about my black eye, that I knew he didn’t hurt me intentionally, and that all was forgiven. But then I realized that I would never get another chance to tell him that, and that I had to go on living with the thought that the last words he heard coming out of my mouth were a hateful threat. All of a sudden, my long-harbored dislike for Egon evaporated as if it had never existed, to be replaced by an overpowering need to mourn him as a dear friend.

  When details of Egon’s death made the rounds through the street grapevine, we learned that the shooting occurred around 4 P.M. in the entrance hall to his apartment building, only a five-minute walk from my home. It seemed that after returning home from school, Egon had accidentally come upon his father’s service pistol in a drawer. Carefully hiding his find from his mother, he had taken the weapon and gone downstairs to the street, where he summoned some of his playmates with the announcement that he was about to give a special performance. Several kids, lured by the promise of excitement, followed him into the hallway. For several minutes, he brandished the weapon in various “Stick ’em up!” poses, aimed it at some of the kids, and even pulled the trigger several times. Yet nothing happened, apparently because the weapon’s safety was on.

  Around that time, his mother discovered that her husband’s pistol was missing and, suspecting her son, came running down the stairs shouting, “Egon, Egon, give me the pistol!” Seeing his mother approach, Egon was ready to surrender the weapon—but not without one last look into the barrel and a simultaneous squeeze of the trigger. This time, for some reason, the safety was off and the weapon discharged. Shot through his right eye, Egon died within seconds in the arms of his grief-crazed mother while his non-comprehending playmates looked on in horror. The boy who stopped at nothing to get some attention had paid the ultimate price for his compulsive showing off.

  When school resumed, Herr Grimmelshäuser informed us that Egon’s parents had requested that the class attend the burial service and that, on that occasion, we would sing “Das Lied vom Guten Kamerad (The Song of the Good Comrade),” Germany’s traditional military burial song. For three days, hours on end, we rehearsed the song until Herr Grimmelshäuser was satisfied that we got it right.

  On the day of the funeral—my very first—we were bused to Ohlsdorf Cemetery at the outskirts of Hamburg, reputedly the largest burial ground in Europe. There, we took up position beside the newly dug grave and the closed coffin that looked much too small, I thought, to contain the remains of our classmate. Facing us, on the other side of the coffin, were Egon’s stern-faced father, his uncontrollably crying mother, and his teary-eyed sister. The mere thought that the weapon that had claimed Egon’s life belonged to his father made me shudder.

  After a few words from Herr Grimmelshäuser and a short burial service by a Lutheran minister, the coffin was lowered into the grave while we pupils sang with subdued voices our well-rehearsed farewell song.

  Several days following the funeral, I still had a black eye. But instead of being a source of ridicule, it had changed into a mark of distinction that all my classmates beheld with reverence and that I displayed proudly, like a badge of honor. For all of us kids, the impact of Egon’s death was tremendous, since he was the very first contemporary dead in our young lives. My black eye took on special significance, since it represented the last tangible evidence of Egon’s life among us. I fervently wished that this eerie link with the boy we had just buried would never go away, but as the days passed, it kept fading until one morning I noticed that it had totally disappeared. It was at that moment that I realized with unbearable sadness that Egon Faber, the class clown I used to despise, had left my life forever.

  QUEST FOR CONVERTS

  Not long after his rise to power, Hitler let it be known that those diehards who refused to embrace his Nazi ideology were part of the old order that was on the way out. Regardless of the parents’ political persuasion, he boasted, he would make sure to have the undying devotion and loyalty of their sons and daughters. “Germany’s youth,” he bragged, “will belong to me.”

  To make good on his boast, schools throughout Germany were ordered to mount elaborate drives aimed at recruiting pupils for the Hitlerjugend (HJ)—the Hitler Youth movement. The schools were aided in their efforts by a formidable arsenal of visual aids—charts, slides, documentary and feature films—churned out by Goebbels’s propaganda ministry, which spared no effort when it came to winning converts among the young. One such film, Hitlerjunge Quecks, left a lasting impression on me when it was screened in my school during Volkskunde (folklore) class. It was the tragic story of a handsome, blond teenage boy nicknamed Quecks, who grows up in a predominantly Communist Berlin slum. His father, an alcoholic Communist sympathizer, who divides
his time between getting drunk and mistreating his wife, was played convincingly by Heinrich George, at the time Germany’s premier character actor and an avowed Hitler fan.

  Escaping temporarily from his seamy surroundings, Quecks secretly attends a Hitler Youth outing where, within an idyllic Boy Scout-like setting, he experiences for the first time in his life wholesome camaraderie and bonding around a campfire. When he returns to his bleak neighborhood, he does so as a converted Hitlerjunge and active worker for the Nazi cause. While distributing Nazi leaflets, Quecks is cornered by one of his father’s Communist cronies, who, after branding him a traitor, knifes him to death. As Quecks lies dying in the arms of his new Nazi comrades to the strains of the Hitler Youth’s anthem, “Vorwärts, Vorwärts (Forward, Forward),” composed by no less a Nazi honcho than HJ leader Baldur von Schirach himself, he becomes the youngest martyr of the movement.

  The film left as deep an impression on my ten-year-old, impressionable, non-Aryan mind as it did on the minds of my Aryan peers. I know, because when after the movie the window shades were raised, there was a suspicious rash of nose-blowing and sniffles throughout the auditorium.

  It would be years before I discovered that the film’s message of Nazi virtue and Communist evil had been a brazen distortion of the facts. The truth was that during their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany, the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize in order to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.

  With arch-Nazi Wriede at the helm, Kätnerkampschule aggressively pursued the indoctrination and recruitment of young souls for the Jungvolk, the HJ’s junior league for ten- to thirteen-year-olds, whose members were known as Pimpfe (cubs). Hardly a day went by without our being reminded by our teachers or Wriede himself that for a German boy, life outside the movement was no life at all. Pursuing his objective with characteristic single-mindedness, Wriede was tireless in thinking up new gimmicks to further his goal. One day, he announced his latest brainchild, a schoolwide contest in which the first class to reach 100 percent Jungvolk membership would be rewarded with a holiday.

  The immediate effect of the announcement was that my new homeroom teacher, Herr Schürmann, became obsessed with the idea of winning the coveted prize for our class and some brownie points for himself. Toward that end, he became a veritable pitchman, who spent much of his—and our—time trying to persuade, cajole, or otherwise induce our class to join the Nazi fold. The centerpiece of his recruitment drive was a large chart he had carefully drawn on the blackboard with white chalk. It consisted of a large box divided into as many squares as there were boys in the class. Each morning, Herr Schürmann would inquire who had joined the Hitler Youth. After a show of hands, he would count them, then gleefully add the new enlistees’ names to his chart. Gradually the squares with names increased until they outnumbered the blank ones.

  Up to that point I had followed the contest with a certain degree of emotional detachment because quite a few of my classmates, including some of my closest pals, had let it be known that they had no interest in anything the HJ did and would not join, no matter what Wriede or Schürmann had to say. That suited me fine since I, too, had no intention of joining. But under the relentless pressure from Schürmann, one resister after another caved in and joined.

  One morning, when the empty squares had dwindled to just a few, Herr Schürmann started querying the holdouts as to the reasons for their “lack of love for Führer and Vaterland.” Some explained that they had nothing against Führer and Vaterland but weren’t particularly interested in the kinds of things the Jungvolk were doing, such as camping, marching, blowing bugles and fanfares, and beating on medieval-style drums. Others said they didn’t have their parents’ permission, whereupon Herr Schürmann instructed them to bring their parents in for a conference. When it came to what I thought was my turn to explain, I opened my mouth, but Herr Schürmann cut me off. “That’s all right; you are exempted from the contest since you are ineligible to join the Jungvolk.”

  The teacher’s words struck me like a bolt of lightning. Not eligible to join? What was he talking about? I had been prepared to tell him that I hadn’t quite made up my mind whether I wanted to join or not. Now he was telling me that, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Noticing my bewildered expression, Herr Schürmann told me to see him immediately after class.

  Until the bell rang, I remained in a state of shock, unable to follow anything that was said. I felt betrayed and abandoned by my friends and terrified at the prospect of being the only person in class whose name would not appear on the chart. At age ten, I was as tough as any of my peers, able to take just about anything they dished out in the course of rough-and-tumble schoolboy play. What I couldn’t take, however, was feeling that I didn’t belong—being treated like an outcast, being told, in effect, that I was not only different but inferior.

  Schürmann invited me to take a seat beside his desk. “I always thought you knew that you could not join the Jungvolk because you are non-Aryan,” he began. “You know your father is an African. Under the Nuremberg Laws, non-Aryans are not allowed to become members of the Hitler Youth movement.” Charitably, perhaps to spare at least some of my feelings, he omitted the much maligned and despised Jews from his roster of ineligibles.

  “But I am a German,” I sobbed, my eyes filling with tears. “My mother says I’m German just like anybody else.”

  “You are a German boy,” Herr Schürmann conceded with unusual compassion, “but unfortunately not quite like anybody else.”

  Having gotten his point only too well, I made no further plea.

  “I’m very sorry, my boy,” Schürmann concluded the conference. “I wish I could help you, but there’s nothing I can do; it’s the law.”

  That evening, when I saw my mother, I didn’t tell her what had transpired in school. Instead, I asked her to come with me to the nearest Jungvolk Heim, the neighborhood Jungvolk den just one block up the street, so I could join. Since I had never expressed the slightest interest in joining the HJ, she had never felt it necessary to burden me with the thought that I would be rejected. Thus, my sudden decision to join took her completely by surprise. When she tried to talk me out of it, even hinting that there was a possibility of my not being accepted, I grew frantic. I told her that I simply had to join since I could not be the only one in my class who was not an HJ member. But she still didn’t think it was a good idea. “Please take me,” I pleaded, almost hysterically. “Maybe they’ll make an exception. Please!”

  Against her better judgment, my mother finally relented and agreed to do whatever she could to help me join. When we arrived at the HJ Heim, a long, solidly built, one-story stone structure, the place was buzzing with activities and paramilitary commandos. Through the open door of a class-roomlike meeting room, I could see a group of boys, most of them about my age, huddled around a long table, apparently listening to a troop leader’s lecture. They wore neat uniforms, black shorts, black tunics over khaki shirts, and black scarfs that were held together at the neck by braided leather knots. Most of them, I noticed with envy, wore the small black Dolch (dagger) with the rhombus-shaped swastika emblem of the Hitler Youth. Ever since seeing it displayed in the window of a neighborhood uniform store, I had secretly coveted this largely ceremonial weapon. Even the words Blut und Ehre (blood and honor) that were engraved on its shiny blade, and whose symbolic meaning had totally eluded me, stirred my soul. I knew that once my membership in the HJ had been approved, nothing would stand in the way of my becoming a proud owner of a Hitler Youth Dolch. I wanted it so much, I could almost feel it in my hand.

  After one Pimpf spotted me, I immediately became the subject of snickers and giggles until the troop leader, annoyed by the distraction, shouted “Ruhe (Quiet)!” and closed the door. When my mother asked a passing Pimpf to show us to the person in charge, he clicked his heels, then pointed to a door with the sign HEIMFÜHRER. Upon my mother’s knock, a penetrating ma
le voice shouted, “Enter!”

  “Heil Hitler! What can I do for you?” asked the handsome, roughly twenty-year-old man in the uniform of a mid-level Hitler Youth leader who was seated behind a desk. He reminded me of an older version of my erstwhile bodyguard, Wolfgang, tall, athletic, blond, and blue eyed—in short, Hitler’s ideal Aryan man.

  My mother returned the mandatory Nazi salute, then asked, “Is this the right place to apply for membership?”

  The young man looked incredulous. “Membership for whom? For him?” he inquired, his eyes studying me as if they had spied a repulsive worm.

  “Yes, for my son,” my mother responded without flinching.

  The Nazi recoiled. “I must ask you to leave at once,” he commanded. “Since it hasn’t occurred to you by now, I have to tell you that there is no place for your son in this organization or in the Germany we are about to build. Heil Hitler!” Having said that, he rose and pointedly opened the door.

  For a moment I thought my mother would strike the man with her fist. She was trembling and glaring at him with an anger I had never before seen in her eyes. But she quickly regained her composure, took me by the hand, and calmly said, “Let’s go.” Neither she nor I spoke a word on the way back home. I felt guilty for having been the cause of her anguish and humiliation, and I was afraid she would be angry. Instead, when we reached our apartment, she just hugged me and cried. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry” was all she could say.

  Seeing my mother like this was more than I could bear. “Please don’t cry, Mutti,” I pleaded while tears were streaming down my cheeks. It was a rare occurrence, since usually we outdid each other in keeping our hurt to ourselves. We were Germans, after all.