The Last Year of the War, page 25
I didn’t belong in this place into which I had been dropped. I hadn’t been the enemy.
I was innocent and had been treated unfairly.
My universe had been reduced to our little corner of Stuttgart, and my eyes saw only my own woes. Perhaps I am even now rationalizing how I could have been unaware of the extent of the brutality at the Nazi-controlled concentration camps, and what had been happening to the deported Jews and other innocent people the Nazis had hated. Herr Goebbels didn’t tell us about the killings in his weekly radio addresses, and the news we got at Crystal City prior to coming here had always been late or censored. In the four months we had been in Germany, I hadn’t seen a camp or any incarcerated people. Perhaps I didn’t think I needed to see them because I knew—or so I thought—what it was like to be taken from your home, labeled an enemy, and dumped into a detention camp fenced by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. But the truth was I didn’t know the horrific extent of the brutality because I hadn’t bothered to ask or consider or listen, even when the opportunity to inquire presented itself.
There had been a discussion one day in the watch shop, a week before it was bombed, between my uncles and Papa. They had been talking about the report of the Soviet liberation of a labor camp called Auschwitz the last week of January. But I hadn’t been able to understand the entire conversation, so I’d tuned it out. I had chosen not to hear—or ask my father later about what would soon be known as the worst of the Nazi concentration camps in terms of death toll. Most of the buildings at Auschwitz had been destroyed before the German forces fled, but in the ones that remained a staggering number of personal belongings were found, including more than a million articles of clothing and seven tons of human hair. Only seven thousand starving prisoners were liberated by the Soviet army. Later we would learn that more than a million had died there.
When we started hearing the radio broadcasts detailing the liberation of death camps all over Germany and Poland, I was sickened by what I’d been refusing to ponder. It nauseated me that about the same time I was feeling melancholy about there not being enough sugar for Mommi to make me a cake for my sixteenth birthday, American troops were liberating the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, only a four-hour drive from where I sat feeling sorry for myself and sharing a box of birthday raisins with Max. The Americans freed more than twenty thousand prisoners at Buchenwald, but more than thirty thousand had perished there. The Americans went on to liberate Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen—all of them places of suffering and death.
“Did you know?” I asked Papa when we heard the first radio broadcasts about the camps after the surrender, after the airwaves were no longer controlled by Nazi officials. “Did you know the camps were like that?”
He was so slow to answer. For several seconds I thought he hadn’t heard me. “It didn’t matter what I knew or didn’t know,” he finally said, his voice weighted with sadness.
Mommi was sitting in the room, listening to the radio, too. So was Max. But I only saw my father in that moment. My hero father. The best man I knew. A German man. His answer stunned me. It had to matter what he had known.
“How can it not have mattered?” I replied. “All those people, Papa! They did nothing wrong.” I felt tears of anger and shame sliding down my face. “How can you say it doesn’t matter what you knew or didn’t know?”
“Because I could not stop it, Elise!” Tears were trickling down my father’s face now, too. “I could not stop what was happening. No one could! I couldn’t stop it when we were still in the States and I couldn’t stop it here! So I did the only thing I could do. The only thing.”
I could think of nothing Papa had done in response except volunteer us to come to the very place where these atrocities had occurred.
“What? What did you do?” I said, half in a whisper, half in a sob. Mommi said my name softly, but I ignored her. “What did you do, Papa?”
My father hesitated only a second or two. “I made faulty fuses!” he said, his voice cracking and making me shudder. “And I taught you how to make faulty fuses!”
Papa dropped his head into his hands. Those hands that I loved. His good, capable hands.
I saw then, perhaps never more clearly than in that moment, how my father’s hands were just stronger versions of my own hands. They were the same as any man’s hands his age. The same, the same, the same. The same as those of the innocent man in the death camp and the same as those of the Nazi soldier who’d raised his rifle and shot him dead. What made the three men different from one another was not their nationality or the shape of their hands or even the blood that flowed under the skin of their fingers. What made the three men different was how they chose to think.
We decide who and what we will love and who and what we will hate. We decide what we will do with the love and hate. Every day we decide. It was this that revealed who we were, not the color of our flesh or the shape of our eyes or the language we spoke.
Papa had indeed brought us to this country where these terrible atrocities had occurred, but the land hadn’t done the killing. Humans had done that, by choice.
I slid off my chair, went to my father, and circled my arms around him. He leaned into me and reached up to touch the side of my face, cupping my cheek and touching the tears there.
“I think I understand now,” I whispered.
Perhaps he knew what I meant, that I understood he was not first a German man or an American man. He was first just a man. Perhaps he knew that I was beginning to understand that it was a person’s choices that defined his or her identity and not the other way around.
Or perhaps he only knew that I understood making those slightly defective fuses was the only act of defiance he could make and still keep Mommi and Max and me safe.
But he whispered to me, “I think I do, too.”
* * *
• • •
All during the rest of that May and June, Max and I stayed close to home, venturing beyond the flat only when no occupational forces were out and about, and then only for a few minutes and in the company of our parents.
There was no mail service, no newspapers, no phones, no trains leaving our station. That I had gotten the letter from Mariko was a gift from the heavens. No other mail came for us. The occupational troops set up a curfew from sundown to daybreak. They patrolled the streets in their jeeps with guns mounted. If you were out after dark, you were shot, no questions asked. If more than a couple of Germans were seen talking together, even if it was to inquire about each other’s health, the French soldiers would yell at them to disassemble. There was little food to purchase. The French troops were confiscating all the meat from the local livestock farmers so all that was available to buy at the butcher shops were the parts of the slaughtered animals the French soldiers didn’t want—innards and brains and tripe—and there was no salt to cover up the disgusting flavor. Aside from the absence of air raids, the end of war hadn’t made day-to-day life easier; it had made it harder.
Many shops with anything left to sell were looted, and the French soldiers continued to prey upon women and girls. This situation with the French and also the Senegalese occupying troops was apparently not a secret. The new U.S. president, Harry Truman, wanted the French armies out of Stuttgart, but Charles de Gaulle, the leader of France’s provisional government following the liberation, wouldn’t withdraw his troops until after the boundaries of the occupation zones were finalized.
We knew from radio broadcasts and the occasional newspaper that Germany had been chopped in two by its victors, into East and West. East Germany became a communist satellite state of Russia. West Germany was occupied by Britain in the north, the region closest to the French border by the French, and in the south, where we were, by the Americans.
But as June lengthened and the days grew warm and long, the French did not withdraw. I hungered to be outside. My soul felt tattered after all that I’d experienced and witnessed, and the confines of the flat accentuated my restlessness to see and feel something lovely again. Though I had come to terms as best I could with the evil that had been done in Germany by evil people, I was not unaffected by those tragedies. I longed to hear laughter, see a wildflower, feel the sun on my skin.
I should have stayed in the flat like I had promised Papa I would on that June afternoon when I was alone, but the pull to be outside was too great. Papa had taken Max with him to the water-treatment plant, as my brother, like me, was itching to be anywhere other than inside our tiny apartment. Mommi had gone to stand in line for butter and eggs, as we had heard there would be a delivery of some near the end of the day and only those in the front of the line would likely be lucky enough to get any. I told myself as I stepped outside that I was only going to take one stroll around the block and that I would be back inside the flat in minutes. But once I felt the breeze in my hair and the rays of a glorious sun on my face, I hesitated to go back. Since the only people I saw out and about were a boy on a bicycle and two old women walking arm in arm, I decided to walk a second block and then a third.
The afternoon was so beautiful, it didn’t matter that battered buildings were all around me or that shards of glass and splinters of wood and bits of plaster crunched under my shoes. I was thinking to myself that in just twenty-two months I would be eighteen, and I could go where I wanted, live where I wanted. I would be walking different streets then because I had an American passport and an American birth certificate. In twenty-two months I would be strolling the sidewalks of Manhattan and I would be with my best friend and we would have the world at our feet and it would be whatever we made of it. We would no longer be at the mercy of decisions made by other people. I would be wearing perhaps a yellow linen suit and a crisp hat with silk buttercups and netting on the brim and my pumps would be gray and my handbag would match, and I would be wearing pearl earrings and lipstick the color of rubies. Maybe I would get a job at the New York Times with Mariko or maybe I wouldn’t. I didn’t care. It was enough to imagine that I wasn’t where I was and was instead charting my future with the one friend I still had and believed I always would. I did not hear the footsteps until it was too late.
I turned instinctively at the sound of movement behind me and was surprised beyond belief that two men in military uniforms were only inches from me. They might have had brown hair under their berets or black or blond like mine. Tall or short, I don’t recall. What I do remember is the cold gray of their eyes. I saw the anger and loathing and intent in their gaze on me even as, in an instant, one of them grabbed me with one hand and covered my mouth with the other. The second man laughed and said something to the first. I had always thought the French language sounded so beautiful, but I knew these were not beautiful words they were speaking.
Fear as cold as ice gripped me. As I struggled to break free, the first man pulled me into an alley littered with debris of every kind and slammed me into a wall, momentarily stunning me. During those few seconds when all I could see were stars, I was pulled farther into the alley and pushed to the ground. A scream lodged in my throat and I tried to wrench myself away. As I wriggled over sharp edges of garbage that bit into my skin, the hand over my mouth slipped, and the scream half erupted. A fist came down hard on my cheek and more dizzying stars filled my head. I felt my beautiful yellow linen suit being torn off my body. For a second, I forgot that I wasn’t wearing that yellow linen suit, that I had only just been imagining it.
The man on top of me, tearing at my blouse with one hand, spat words of hate, dousing my face with his spittle. He took his hand away from my mouth and the second man knelt to replace it with his own, surely so that the first soldier could have both hands free to now rake his fingers across my abdomen and yank on the waistline of my underwear. Desperate to get away, I squirmed, and he dug his nails into my flesh. But in those seconds when my mouth was uncovered I yelled, “Please don’t! Please don’t hurt me! Let me go! Let me go!” The man atop me backed up a fraction, staring at me hard. In that next moment I realized I had shouted at him in English. In perfect unaccented English.
“I’m an American! I’m an American!” I rasped, tears choking my words. “Please don’t hurt me!”
The second soldier, who had been poised to put his hand across my mouth, stared at me.
“What did you say?” he said, also in English.
He understood me. This French soldier spoke English. I dared to feel a flash of hope.
“I’m an American,” I sputtered. “I’m not German! I’m an American!”
The man who had been ready to violate me first let go of my shirt and sat back on his knees. But only just. He was not convinced. Or perhaps he did not speak English; he only recognized it.
“Why are you here?” demanded the second soldier.
I knew I could not tell him the truth. Because the truth was, I was the daughter of a man and a woman from Germany and I knew what that meant to him. And so I lied.
“I couldn’t get out of the country. I couldn’t get away. I was trapped here. I was trapped! I’m from Iowa. I’m not from here. Please let me go. Please!”
The first man spoke to the soldier who spoke English, who said something in return.
They both looked at me for a moment.
Then they stood.
“Go home,” the English-speaking soldier said. “You shouldn’t be here. The war is over. Go home.”
The men turned from me and left, not bothering to help me up or apologize, but I didn’t care. I just wanted them gone. I turned onto my side as heaving sobs overcame me, and I could do nothing but pull my open blouse to my chest and weep atop the trash and dirt and debris.
The words that had saved me echoed in my ears as I lay there. I’m not German. I’m an American. I’m not German. I’m an American.
Everything that I had just weeks earlier realized was true about people, both good people and bad, was still true, but none of us lived like it was. Those men had believed me to be German and therefore deserving of the worst kind of assault, despite my having done nothing to them. And they changed their minds when I shouted to them that I was an American, as if that alone was the reason not to rape me.
As my tears subsided, I became aware of where I was, and I knew that I needed to get home. I sat up slowly and my head swam for a moment. I ached everywhere: the side of my head from when I’d been slammed against the wall, my right cheek where I’d been hit, my shoulders and back from where I’d hit the pavement, and my thighs where the first soldier had hiked up my skirt and dug his fingernails into my flesh. Little scratches and scrapes peppered my arms and legs from the refuse I’d been tossed onto, and from the force of the men trying to subdue me and my struggling to get free.
I pulled at the sides of my blouse to close it, gulping air as I tried to calm my body. Every button was gone. I frantically looked around me for those buttons. I had to find them. I had to sew them back on before anyone came home. I had to get back to the flat. I had to wash my soiled clothes. I had to concoct a reason for my injuries.
I couldn’t tell my parents what had happened to me. They could never know, not just because I’d disobeyed Papa but because I was so ashamed at what those men had wanted to do to me and what I’d said to make them stop. Fresh tears blinded me as I scrambled about looking for the buttons. I found five of the six and decided that would have to be enough. I rose to my feet on unsteady legs, smoothing down my rumpled, dirty skirt and folding my arms across my chest to keep my blouse closed.
I half ran, half walked back to the flat, keeping my head down. My head throbbed and my limbs protested and I never raised my gaze above the sidewalk in front of me. When I got back to the flat, I took off my clothes, wishing I would never have to wear that skirt and blouse again, but I knew I would. I had so few, and I had to pretend that those two pieces of clothing had no special meaning at all to me.
My hands were still trembling as I plunged my skirt and buttonless blouse into soapy water in the kitchen sink. I began to cry again as I worked to get the stains out, remembering as I struggled to clean the marks how I’d struggled in the alley.
I had to stop thinking about it. Had to. I had to stop crying. I had to come up with an explanation for the swelling on my cheek, my slight limp, the scrapes, and the bruises that were starting to bloom.
I hung up the skirt to dry. Then I sewed the five buttons back onto my wet blouse, skipping the one for the last buttonhole, and hung it up, too. And then because no one else was home yet and because I needed my wet laundry to appear as nothing more than just that, I washed my pajamas and two pairs of socks and hung them up as well.
And as I did so, I practiced saying that I’d been bored and had gone upstairs to see Herr Bruechner and his little dog, but that I’d seen a mouse on the steps and it had startled me. I had fallen down the stairs and hit my head and cheek, and bruised my backside, but I was okay. Silly me. Silly mouse.
I was okay.
Mommi, weary from waiting for four hours for eggs and butter that she didn’t get, believed me. So did Papa and Max when they arrived home a few minutes after her.
Having my family all around me that evening forced me to stay onstage, so to speak, to keep up the ruse that I’d let a little mouse frighten me. But when the lights were turned out and I was curled up atop my blankets on the floor of the living room, it all came crashing down around me and I had to pinch the inside of my wrist to keep from screaming.
“Nothing happened,” I whispered to myself in between pinches.
I was afraid to sleep and dream of those men, so I lay awake for hours.
