“Our neighbour brought in the newsletter with your ad,” says the caller, “she thought I should take a look at it, in case I wanted to respond. Your friend Hilde gave me this number. My name is Frank Hornung, and I am a bit of a history buff. Also, I was a last-minute member of the local Home Guards way back when. But I mustn’t raise your hopes. It’s entirely possible that I have nothing of value to add to your research.”
Anna sits in Maya’s comfortable chair, a writing pad on her knees and pen at the ready.
“Everything you might have to say is very important to me,” she says. “Thank you so much for getting in touch. You’re the first to respond. Would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself?”
At twelve o’clock sharp the next day the doorbell rings, and here is Frank Hornung, with his wife Helga in tow, two beaming pensioners whom Anna is taking out for lunch, the place to be their choice.
They drive north, along the old auto route 96, still seamed by the mixed wood forests of her childhood, that had been impassible for two generations of Berliners and their northern neighbours in the outskirts. For ten years now the door has been open, the wall torn down, the terrible death strip, with the dogs as well as the watchtowers, removed. Anna remembers well the never before experienced feeling of euphoria, hers as a witness from across the ocean, and theirs, as they walked about with huge smiles on their faces, celebrating a freedom they had thought they might not attain in their lifetimes.
In 1990 visiting Berlin, and while the checkpoints were still in place, she and Maya, with two ecstatic dogs in tow, bicycled right up to a uniformed guard, who wanted to know where they lived, and when Maya pointed casually behind her, had waved them through. How astonishing it had been to come to a small village only ten kilometres from her childhood home, and to see each and every one of the old single-storey houses in place, grayer and sadder, to be sure, but minus garish advertising in the local store.
And minus ugly hasty additions to the village panorama, thrown up by new money. These were soon to come, along with the renovations, urgently needed to save a very old building substance.
People in open doors, and walking along the cobble-stoned street with shopping bags, had looked at them in astonishment as they pedaled on.
Yes, they remembered Margit Müller, who had lived with her family in that house right over there, said two women, but she had moved to Berlin in the late fifties with her husband, and after her parents died they had all lost touch. So Margit, the round-faced girl with the jolly brown eyes and quiet voice, sitting next to Anna in high school, had not been shut into the DDR, the east German state under Communist rule.
Frank and Helga had. But this is ten years later. They and their family are doing well, the grandchildren thriving and full of hope for the future.
Frank and Helga skillfully use their chopsticks, Anna her fork and spoon, as they tuck into very good-looking German/Cantonese food.
“Our experience in April of 1945 was very different from yours,” Frank is saying. “We had a lot of military units in and around here, and, of course north of Birkenwerder and Oranienburg. These northern towns were to be defended to the last man. We’ll go to our house later for coffee, if you agree, and I’ll show you my archives. I belong to a small local group of amateur historians.”
Just then the door opens and two lanky teenagers in jeans, Nikes and reversed baseball caps stroll in. Thomas is the grandson, the computer aficionado, and Michael the next-door neighbour.
“We KNEW you would take her here,” Thomas laughs, but the boys claim they have to go to soccer practice, and cannot stay. Anna watches as Michael picks up his skateboard outside and they stroll along the clean, well-groomed street, indistinguishable from a couple of kids in a North American suburb.
“They study English and French in high school now,” says Helga. “We had to take Russian, of course.”
“Not such a bad skill to have,” says Frank, dabbing at his mouth, “but I have brushed up my English lately. It’s coming along. I can read reasonably well, just speaking is still awkward.” And they talk about how we acquire language, starting from birth, and how we can amazingly tuck away memory of another tongue for decades.
Anna relates the story of how her Mother, born and raised in Hong Kong for the first three years of her life (lovingly fussed over by a Chinese Ama), but never connected with the language since, had at the age of ninety sat in a Chinese restaurant with her children. As they ate their soup, a middle-aged Chinese lady, carrying her coat over her arm, emerged from an office and called a few words in Cantonese to her staff, then headed to the exit. Mother looked up, called out some cheerful words, uttered without the slightest hesitation, and continued eating. All of her children stared at her in amazement.
“I didn’t know you could speak Chinese.” Anna finally said.
“Of course, I can’t,” said Mother.
“But you just did. We all heard you,” said Foffie, “and so did that lady. She looked very surprised. What did you say?”
“Nothing much. She had just said goodbye to the waitresses, and so I said goodbye and told her the food was delicious,” said Mother, who continued eating, entirely unimpressed.
Frank and Helga have never heard of such a thing, and Anna confirmed that she would never have thought it possible.
“If we had asked her some time, ‘Mom, how would you say in Cantonese that the food was delicious,’ she would have replied that she had no idea. And it would have been true.”
“Fascinating stuff, the brain. We know so little about it. Perhaps I should limit that to: I know so little about it,” says Anna.
“Nono, you’re not alone,” says Frank. “I believe scientists are struggling with a lot of unanswered questions where the brain is concerned.”
“It’s still language that fascinates me most, what seem to be separate sources from which we draw, the emotional and the intellectual. And how the mind deals with a foreign language, the way we process it, process information, move from one to another. I met a deaf person not long ago and fully realized for the first time that they don’t really have a ‘mother tongue’, but have to acquire the reading and writing of it as though it were a second language. Signing is their first, immensely rich and complex, form of communication,” says Anna.
They have pulled into a driveway, first opening a wrought-iron gate. A fence encloses a neat, well-kept flower garden, with crocus wilting, forsythia in full bloom, and a round cat snoozing on the mat at the entrance. It is a long, white stucco house, built by Frank many years ago, and added on to as the need arose and materials allowed, a tricky undertaking during the years before the Berlin wall came down.
Anna is ushered into the cozy living room, while Helga goes into the kitchen to make coffee and to cut up the home-baked cakes. Yes, German women of this generation all learned to bake heavenly goodies a few years after the war ended, as soon as supplies were easy to come by. (All except Anna, whose effort may or may not succeed to this day, a secret source of guilt. When she took a piece of home-made cake to the night concierge in her apartment building recently, he looked stricken.)
Meanwhile Frank has booted up the computer, has pulled a folder from a drawer, and offers her photocopies of newsletters, area maps, a diary, or at least excerpts from one, of a woman who wrote down her thoughts and feelings of anguish during the last days of the war and the first ten or so, following the collapse of the Third Reich.
Frank notices Anna gazing at framed photographs on the walls. Groups of men and women with their arms around each others’ shoulders, smiling at the camera.
“These are people from our Polish twin city,” he says. “We visit back and forth every year and keep in close touch. Helga and I have been very involved with this work for many years. We believe strongly in reconciliation,” he says, and looks straight into Anna’s eyes. “We can’t leave that to others anymore. Leaving the caring to others has brought the world an enormous amount of grief.” Anna nods, and is about to say, “how can we teach it? The caring?” but here is Helga with the coffee, and the folder is carefully placed on the sideboard for the moment.
When Helga leaves for her volunteer job later, they hug at the door.
“Don’t go yet,” Anna wants to say, “I don’t know anything about you. I have so many questions — what is your life like? How has it changed? What were your hopes as a child? How do men and women live together here? Where would you like to travel next?”
Then she realizes how much she does know about Helga already. A lot. It is a good story… And they will meet again.
“The Home Guards around here,” Frank explains, “were called out in the last minute. The older men had a day or two of training. It was assumed they knew their way around guns, and that was true for most, but the sophisticated hardware they received was out of their league. Fortunately, the ammunition never arrived, and so they just went home, as soon as the serious shooting started. We boys had some instruction also, but we were wanted to help put together the tank barriers, run errands, that sort of thing.”
“Were you billeted locally? How did that work?” says Anna.
“Oh no. We went home for lunch and home at dinner time, and we slept at home, then turned up the next day. The command structure was all senior Hitler Youth people, not the army. We saw a lot of them, there were a lot of uniforms around here, but they had nothing directly to do with us.”
“And you were thirteen years old, Frank?”
“Yes, barely. The day after the heavy air raid on Oranienburg, March 13, I think it was, we were called out to go up there and help with emergency work. But when we took the city train, it couldn’t move past a point way short of where we were to go. The tracks were sticking right up in the air. So all the passengers jumped down and began walking along the embankment. When we came closer to the station, we could see the horrendous devastation. The entire area around the railroad station had been flattened. There were hundreds of DPs and I saw inmates from the concentration camp — we didn’t know who they were at first — all working to clean up the damage. We joined them and just did what we could in the place where we had come. It was very dangerous because there were a lot of unexploded time bombs, huge-caliber bombs, everywhere, going off at different times, killing a lot more people. Somebody reported there had been more than four hundred bombers, just for this raid on Oranienburg.”
“The prisoners, Frank, were you able to talk with them at all?”
“No, unthinkable. They were visibly afraid to get caught doing anything that was forbidden. Didn’t look left or right, so we hung back.”
“Did you work with the bombed-out population? Where did they put them?”
“I don’t know. They were mostly concerned about cleaning up the trackage, and that’s where we stayed all day. The fires were still burning, you know. They had dropped a lot of incendiary bombs as well. So, in the end we walked along the tracks again until we were able to get on a train in Birkenwerder. Came home close to midnight. My aunt was terribly worried, of course.”
“Yes, of course.”
“So on the final day, on Saturday, April 21, was it? You—”
“We were to report to a place, near the local school. The Russians were awfully close. They were lobbing continuous heavy artillery fire over our heads into the city. We knew they would attack any moment and all the people were in their basements with emergency supplies for several days. So I went out in the early morning with my friend Robert, and we got to the place, and waited and waited with some other kids. But when our leader finally arrived, all disheveled, he said there was no ammunition after all, and we should make our way home, along side streets, as fast as we could. We heard the fighting at the other end of our town, and could see soldiers around the tank barriers when we passed a major crossing, but we made it home, and quickly changed into civvies. It was pretty grim. There was sporadic fighting around here even after the heavy door-to-door and street-by-street battles were over, and the Russians had moved on, way into the city. There was still fighting over and around the Havel River for several more days, pockets of fierce resistance, they would have called it. But their tanks had moved on, most of the rear guard — infantry, supply trucks, horse drawn carts were all moving down this road.”
“Yes, I remember. Thousands of them, a long block from my house, but they also came through the woods, at least the tanks did, and then they got stuck at the auto route…” says Anna. “Go on, please. Who was fighting on the German side? Someone clearly did have ammunition.”
“Oh yes. Someone did. So many people lost their lives. So many Germans, Russians, Poles, and so many civilians.
“There seems to have been a command struggle, the SS, the army, a huge confusion as to who was really in charge.”
“Not to mention the party,” says Anna. “Did you know that, theoretically at least, all these units were under the command of the PARTY? The Home Guards certainly were, and what a total disaster that turned out to be.”
“No, they were looking for kids to bolster their dwindling numbers, all the time. Absorbed entire units of Hitler Youth kids and other army units into the SS. You know about the ‘Armee Wenck’? Hitler’s Fata Morgana, the army Wenck had ceased to be an army way back.”
“Yes, we were always hearing about Wenck, but nobody seemed to know where and how that was going to kick in.”
“The population was not informed any more. The radio didn’t work half the time because the hydro was off and the papers were lying, as usual. One never knew what to believe.”
“Have you any idea, Frank, how the victims were taken care of? Who went out and buried the dead? How did that work? Do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember people ran out of their houses and pulled injured neighbours and soldiers into their basements and gave them first aid as well as they were able. Some families dug deep holes in their back yards or just at the side of the road to make temporary graves. The wounded soldiers went to field hospitals and emergency medical outfits, as soon as there was a lull in the shelling. And families took wounded to the German hospital as well. It was a disaster there, of course, totally overcrowded. Ancient doctors and nurses came in to help, long retired, you know. People dying in the halls, never treated by anyone.”
“What happened with fallen soldiers that you didn’t see, in the woods, for instance?”
“I don’t have first-hand knowledge of that, but the Russians, they treated many German wounded when they were found, and released them to a civilian medical center after.”
“Yes, I know that happened to a few of our boys.”
“The Russians were very concerned about epidemics. They wanted the dead out of the way without delay, and they saw to it.”
“You wouldn’t have heard anything about a large number of boys among the casualties? In those woods, then?”
“No, Anna. I wasn’t involved. My aunt was terrified that something might happen to us at this late hour. They Didn’t let us out without absolutely needing to, to go for water, for instance, or to line up for bread somewhere.”
“There are so many questions I have. We need to correspond, if you don’t mind. I would really like to stay in touch,” says Anna.
“I think I have just found new friends,” says Anna, as she and Hilde sit down for dinner in Hilde’s cozy apartment, filled with flowers, as usual. “Our lives couldn’t have been more drastically different since that connecting moment at the time our world collapsed, but I feel that they are completely familiar. When we talked about our families over lunch, hopes, concerns - we were nodding at each other all the time. Didn’t have to finish sentences, this in spite of the fact that their past fifty years have been such an immense struggle, politically and otherwise. But they wouldn’t say that, wouldn’t complain, I don’t think. They are very positive people. I saw them interact with several neighbours, kids, waiters, they make everyone feel good, the same effect that you have on total strangers. The walking ‘humanity’, I don’t know how else to describe it, and strangely, they are the second couple of ‘Ossies’ where I observed this kindly, loving trait. But those terms, ‘Ossies’ and ‘Wessies’, that’s like a new Star of David, a shabby badge. I don’t really like it.”
“You’re absolutely right. Most people have dropped this from their vocabulary. It was a leftover from the euphoria of the unification, harmless at first, but then it acquired thorns.”
“Hilde, you had that gift even as a kid. I remember it so well, you spread good-will and a kind of optimism even way back then. Like Frank and Helga.”
“You embarrass me. I don’t know that I do that. It’s just following my mother’s orders to be myself. She told us that from the time we were in kindergarten. And she told her patients the same thing. Be YOURSELF. Anything else is unhealthy. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t socialize children, otherwise no one would want them around. But you know what I mean,” says Hilde.
“Yes,” says Anna, “but how many people are prevented from realizing that, and struggle and struggle for years to find out what that means. And others are terrified to succeed.”
Hilde looks up, with her mouth full, but can’t wait to swallow.
“Like my Jo! Son, not father. He lived with this double whammy, not knowing who his Dad wanted him to be, what hopes he had for him.”
“He’s alright now, though, isn’t he?”
They laugh. For years they have fretted over each others’ kids, their misfortunes, illnesses, long distance, and celebrated together at times of triumph.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” says Hilde. “Maya called just before you came in. She thinks she has a lead on Emma. She ran into Eva at the market who used to know Emma’s in-laws. She said that Emma’s daughter lives in Stuttgart, or Munich or close by. Maya is going to look into it.”
“This is GREAT news. Can you imagine, if we could finally trace Emma, maybe she would be able to fill in a couple of blanks, like last names I have long forgotten. There are no records of the kids, of course, since the entire operation was treated with such cavalier attitudes, but the adults I haven’t been able to trace either.”
“Well, Maya says she’ll let us know what she comes up with.”
“I’m just so grateful that you’re all so interested, and going to all this trouble for me. It’s so frustrating that I have to go home already. But there are so many things left dangling when you suddenly leave in an emergency like this.”
“You know what? You infected us with your project. We really ARE interested, even though two of us weren’t even in Berlin at that time, or rather BECAUSE we weren’t. Leave it with us.”