Destined to Witness Read online

  HEAD START

  The fact that Tante Möller lived comfortably on her widow’s pension enabled her to devote a good portion of her time to her one remaining passion—the gathering and disseminating of gossip. Toward that end, she had founded, and was now the most respected member of, the Thursday Knitting Club, made up of a dozen or so pensioned old ladies like herself. Each Thursday, on a rotating basis, members would entertain each other with coffee, cake, knitting, crocheting, and—most important—the latest “news.”

  For me, the weekly meetings of the old ladies were a welcome interruption of my daily routine. There were two reasons in particular why I looked forward to them. One was that I could always count on getting my fill of delicious cake; the other, equally important, was that it gave me a chance to play with Erika. Erika was a frisky redhead a year younger than I, whose maternal grandmother, Frau Häselich, was her baby-sitter and a charter member of the club. By coincidence, Erika’s father, Walter Schmedemann, was a Stationsarbeiter (station worker) at my mother’s hospital. Station workers did menial tasks such as delivering food from the kitchen to the various hospital wards by way of a two-wheeled pushcart. I learned later that Onkel Walter was also a prominent functionary in anti-Hitler Social Democratic politics.

  This particular Thursday it was Tante Möller’s turn to entertain. As always, after Erika and I had finished our plates of pastry, we were banished from the Gute Stube (good room) where the old ladies had gathered and told to play and not to make any noise. Thus instructed, we repaired to an adjacent bedroom where we kept busy for a while with various children’s games. Eventually, we ran out of things to do and boredom set in. All of a sudden, Erika—ever ready for mischief—signaled that she had an idea. Before I could fully comprehend what was taking place, she had stepped out of her panties, lifted her little skirt, turned around, and bent over to give me an unobstructed close-up of the lower part of the female anatomy. Since I had never seen anything as funny as that in all of my four years, I broke out in uproarious laughter. Soon my voice was joined by the high squeals of Erika, who relished my enthusiastic response to her impromptu striptease. At precisely that moment—at the height of our mirth over a successful performance—the door to the Gute Stube opened and Frau Häselich stepped into the room. Apparently made curious by our boisterous laughter, she had come to investigate.

  “What in heavens is going on here?” the old lady demanded to know after recovering from her initial shock. Literally caught with her panties down by her nonplussed grandmother, Erika shifted into reverse and started to cry. With instant tears streaming down her cheeks, she pointed an accusing finger at me.

  “He told me to do it! Hans-Jürgen told me to take off my panties!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

  Taken totally by surprise by the sudden turn of events and the accusation of my playmate, I was too dumbfounded to speak up in defense of my good name.

  “Well, what do you have to say for yourself, you rascal?” Frau Häselich, blue in the face with anger, wanted to know.

  Gradually, I recovered my composure. In a halting, barely audible voice I presented my version of the unspeakable act to a summary court-martial that had been hastily convened by—and consisted of—the Thursday Knitting Club. Immediately, the court split into two factions. One, headed by Frau Häselich, held that I was guilty as charged. The other, headed by Tante Möller, believed that Erika was a shrewd and conniving femme fatale who had led poor Hans-Jürgen astray. For a moment it looked as though the anti-Hans-Jürgen faction would win out as Erika backed her testimony with a new deluge of crocodile tears, but eventually Tante Möller prevailed. Convincing everyone, except Frau Häselich, that Erika’s testimony was highly suspect because she had been caught telling fibs before, Tante Möller persuaded her peers to dismiss the case. Not long thereafter, the club adjourned until the following Thursday, leaving behind a bewildered four-year-old boy whose view of women—for more than one reason—would never be quite the same.

  The lessons I gleaned from this traumatic interlude were (1) that there was a distinct anatomical difference between boys and girls, (2) that there was something about that difference that for some unfathomable reason made grown-ups uptight, and (3) that a girl could get a fellow into a whole lot of trouble. Having had my share, I decided to leave well enough alone and in the future to avoid girls like the plague. But as the best-laid plans of men and mice sometimes go awry, so eventually did mine.

  GOING TO TANTE TILLI

  The only person who shared the attic floor of our apartment building with us was a gaunt, gray-haired spinster of indeterminable age whom everybody called Tante Tilli, and who was the great-aunt of my little friend Erika. Tilli was a fountain-pen polisher in the local Mont Blanc factory whose once well-to-do family used to own the building in which we were living. When hard times forced her family to sell the building, they made an agreement with the buyer to have her live in the small apartment rent-free in perpetuity.

  Since our one-room apartment lacked, among numerous other conveniences, a toilet, an arrangement had been worked out with Tante Tilli whereby we had a key to her apartment and unrestricted access to her toilet. While my mother had cautioned me repeatedly that whenever I had to “go to Tante Tilli” to do so as quickly and unobtrusively as possible so as not to disturb our neighbor, I usually managed to make my presence known to the old lady before leaving by closing the bathroom door just a little louder than necessary. I had a reason.

  Unfailingly, as I was leaving she would offer me a treat from a big brown paper bag that she kept filled with an assortment of candy and cookies. While waiting for her, I would sneak glances around the dim, kerosene lamp-lit room. Lined along the walls and piled on every piece of furniture, including her bed, were stacks and stacks of folded brown paper bags, all neatly arranged according to size, and stacks and stacks of newspapers, some reaching almost to the ceiling. When I asked her once what she intended to do with her voluminous paper collection, she told me she hadn’t decided yet, then left me with a piece of advice.

  “Never throw anything away that is not kaput. You never know when it will come in handy.”

  Little did I realize at the time that this reasoning, which seemed like an obsessive quirk of an eccentric old lady, would half a century later become the basis of the well-respected and ecologically correct recycling movement.

  As time went by, having to “go to Tante Tilli” became a code my mother and I used whenever we had to go to the toilet, no matter whose toilet and where.

  The remarkable thing about Tante Tilli was that in spite of her age, which unconfirmed rumors put at about sixty-five, she was an avid hiker and swimmer who spent all of her weekends alone at her rented one-room beach cabin, on the northern bank of the Elbe River. Her ascetic, reclusive lifestyle included leaving for the factory at dawn and returning at dusk. Once she had reached her apartment, she wouldn’t leave the house until it was time to go back to work. When she returned from work in the evening, her tall, angular figure draped in a heavy, dark green loden cape and hood that gave her the silhouette of a capuchin monk, she was always trailed by a flock of urchins. They had discovered the strange old lady’s kind heart and were never disappointed when they asked her for candy, which she always carried in a brown paper bag beneath her cape. While she loved children, she had little use for grown people—nor they for her—and consequently kept her contact with them to a bare minimum.

  All grown-ups, including my mother, thought that Tante Tilli was a bit odd, but she was all right in my book. Somehow I sensed that she was marching to the beat of a different drummer, and her aura of adventure and free-spiritedness appealed to me.

  Except during the coldest days of winter, Tante Tilli would spend weekends swimming in the Elbe River and resting in her beach cabin. Eschewing any form of public transportation, she would cover the twenty-odd miles to and from the cabin on foot.

  Her love for water almost became her undoing. One Saturday night, while s
leeping in her cabin, she was awakened by howling winds, cascading rain, and strange gurgling noises. Instead of the usual lights of boats going up-and downstream, all she could see as she peered through the window was ink-black night. Gradually, she realized that she was in the midst of a flood. Her cabin was completely surrounded by water and the water level inside was almost up to the top bunk on which she was lying. With the water still rising, she climbed out of the window and onto the cabin’s roof. Swimming ashore, she decided, was out of the question since the impenetrable darkness could easily cause her to lose her bearing and head in the wrong direction. Thus, while the water around her kept rising agonizing inch by agonizing inch, she spent the entire night clinging to the roof while shivering in her drenched clothes. It was not until dawn that she was spotted by a fishing boat and rescued and taken to shore.

  I remember that Sunday morning. Two police officers in a squad car had delivered Tante Tilli, still soaking wet and shivering from her ordeal, to our door after she had refused to be taken to a hospital. After drying her off, putting her to bed, and plying her with hot tea, my mother made her promise to stay in bed for a few days—to no avail. On Monday morning, before dawn, we heard her leave her apartment as usual and go to work.

  Eventually, Mont Blanc sent Tante Tilli into retirement and she moved from the neighborhood into a retirement home. Since we were in desperate need of additional living space, Mutti jumped at the opportunity of renting her vacated apartment. At the same time, we—especially I—hated to see the kind old lady go. Before she departed, she took me aside and left me with a bit of advice: “Always do what you think is right, no matter what others have to say about it.” As young as I was at the time, I realized that she was speaking from experience.

  I don’t know what ever happened to her thousands of newspapers and brown paper bags, but after she packed them and left, her bedroom became my bedroom and—thank God—was never the same.

  WYK AUF FöHR

  Seemingly out of the blue, my mother asked me one day whether I would be interested in spending a few weeks at a children’s summer camp. At first the idea of being separated from her for more than a day seemed too frightening to contemplate, but when she explained that I’d be with lots of other children my age who were there for one purpose only and that was to have fun, I changed my mind.

  Thus, barely five years old, I arrived via train and ferryboat with several hundred children on the tiny North Sea island of Föhr, whose small town of Wyk included a large Kinderheim (children’s home). Following our arrival, we were grouped according to age, and a counselor, a pleasant red-haired young woman whose name has escaped me, assigned us to our dormitory. For the first time in my life I was required to follow a strict daily routine that included getting up at 7 A.M. and taking a cold shower, making up my bed, being ready for breakfast in the huge dining hall at exactly 8 A.M., and participating in organized games such as building sand castles on the beach, collecting seashells, wading in the surf, and playing soccer. At night, our counselor would read us a bedtime story, Emil und die Detektive, for half an hour, then turn off the lights at 9 P.M. on the dot.

  The most popular person at the home was the Heimleiter (camp director), a tall lean Friese (a member of a Northern German ethnic group) whom everybody called Onkel Tamm. I adored Onkel Tamm because he singled me out with special bonbon treats whenever he ran into me. One day, after asking my counselor’s permission to “borrow” me for a few hours, Onkel Tamm took me for a walk in town, which consisted largely of picturesque old straw-roof farmhouses, until we reached a house where, he told me, he was born and grew up. Inside, he introduced me to his ancient-looking parents, who looked at me in utter disbelief as if I had just descended from Mars. While at the time I felt extremely proud of having been singled out for special attention by Onkel Tamm, since I imagined that of all the children at the camp he liked me best, I now can’t escape the nagging suspicion that the good uncle used me to provide his old parents with an exotic treat, their own private Hagenbeck “culture show,” so to speak.

  THE FIRST SCHOOL DAY

  The first weekday after Easter 1932 marked an important milestone in my life. It was Germany’s traditional beginning of school and my first school day. Like most of my peers, I had longed for it and dreaded it with equal intensity. The prospect of being transformed from “just a kid” into a “schoolkid” filled me with a sense of accomplishment and pride. On the other hand, I dreaded venturing beyond my familiar surroundings into a new, and—by my perception—largely hostile world.

  According to the older boys on our block, school was a no-fun, no-nonsense place where if you got into trouble with the teacher, neither your parents nor God could help you. After listening to hundreds of the most detailed and vivid accounts of atrocities committed by teachers, I had become convinced that teachers were a subhuman species of sadists who derived their sole pleasure in life from beating up on kids. I recalled with terror the cluster of thick, angry-red welts on the buttocks of Eugen Braun, the neighborhood blacksmith’s eight-year-old son. Eugen had invited us boys to a special viewing to prove his ability to take everything his teacher could dish out. Right then and there I disavowed any such ambition. I had no intention of ever becoming acquainted with that three-foot bamboo switch, which, Eugen told us, was as much a teacher’s standard equipment as were blackboard and chalk.

  But fear of teachers, which I shared with most school beginners, was only one of my problems. My biggest worry, which I carefully tried to keep to myself, was having to face hundreds of strange children and the certainty of racial taunts and ridicule. In an obvious attempt to make me less conspicuous, my mother told my barber—albeit with a heavy heart—to get rid of my generous Afro, which I wore decades before it became the rage among African-Americans in the United States and that my mother loved as much as I detested it. Sensing my growing anxiety, she tried to reassure me that I had nothing to worry about and that I would love school once I got the hang of it. But her words seemed to lack conviction, and I sensed that she, too, was becoming anxious as the day drew near.

  Finally, the big day arrived. Since Mutti was unable to take time off from her job, the chore of taking me to school fell to Tante Möller. All scrubbed and dressed up in my spanking-new “school clothes,” and with my new leather school satchel strapped to my back, I glumly walked beside Tante Möller the two blocks from our house to the school, across Am Markt into Hufnerstrasse, past the venerable straw-roofed farmhouse of Bauer (farmer) Lembcke, the only surviving reminder of Barmbek’s rural past. Lest I be thought of as a mama’s boy by other kids, I refused to hold the old lady’s hand, except when we crossed streets as she insisted on it.

  Her attempts to cheer me up with an account of her own “wonderful” first school day an eternity earlier became an exercise in futility. There was no way I could relate to the image of gray-haired and bent-by-age Tante Möller as a little schoolgirl even if I had tried. The closer we got to the school, the more miserable I became. Not even the sight of several fellow sufferers going my way comforted me. Like all German first-day pupils of the time, I was carrying a traditional Ostertüte (Easter bag), a brightly colored cardboard cone nearly my own size, which well-wishing neighbors and friends had filled with chocolate Easter bunnies, marzipan eggs, and other candy gifts. It was the largest Ostertüte Mutti could find, but even the thought of getting my hands on its delicious contents after school did little to dispel my gloom. After turning a corner, we stood in front of Kätnerkampschule, my new home away from home. Like all Hamburg public schools at the time, it was named after the street on which it was located, and consisted of two identical wings, one for boys and the other for girls. As I beheld its massive walls for the first time from close up, the old, fortresslike four-story structure assumed an especially sinister aura for me. The sudden realization that for years to come I would spend the greater part of my waking hours in this forbidding, cheerless edifice filled me with palpable terror.

  It a
ppeared that at least one of my new schoolmates harbored similar thoughts. He was screaming at the top of his lungs that he wasn’t going into that school no matter what his mother or anybody had to say. While I knew exactly how he felt, I was determined not to make a scene like that and thus draw unnecessary attention to myself. Taking advantage of the diversion he created, I handed Tante Möller my Ostertüte, quickly climbed the school’s broad steps, and, without looking back, entered the cavernous building. Once inside, I and my fellow first-day initiates were ushered along a seemingly endless corridor and into a first floor classroom. There, instead of the grim, switch-wielding male teacher I had expected to find, we were greeted by a pleasant-looking, plumpish woman with short-cropped gray hair. Like the other teachers I had seen in the hall, she was wearing a white smock.

  “Good morning, boys! I am Fräulein Beyle, your teacher,” she introduced herself with a friendly smile. “The first thing I want you to do is to find a seat on these benches and to sit down.” After selecting a seat on the back row, I carefully sneaked a glimpse of the other boys to see if any of them displayed any undue interest in me. To my great relief, I recognized several of my pals from the Stückenstrasse. There was Karl Morell, who lived in an alley just around the corner from me, and Karl-Heinz Ratje, who lived just down the street. As far as the other boys were concerned, they all seemed too awed by their new surroundings to be inclined to make fun of me or anyone.

  “Remember you are in Class 8A,” Fräulein Beyle continued. “From now on, you never talk, stand up, leave your seat or the classroom without my permission. If you have a question, or you need to go to the toilet, which is down the hall to the right, you raise your hand until I call on you. Does everyone understand that?