When Joachim translated my remarks to the other men, there were belly laughs all around, but nobody lowered their guns. And so—mi madre!—I was taken prisoner. As I said, I remained at sea for five months. It wasn’t easy for me to adjust. My first days onboard I was green from seasickness and lurched around like a borracho. I banged my head on pipes, handwheels, bulkheads, you name it. The crew nicknamed me Bluterguss for all my bruises. The humidity, even for an islander like me, was intolerable. Everything was slimy, wet, moldy, including the food. I felt as if I were trapped in the neck of a bottle.
Soon my homesickness grew worse than my nausea. When I thought of Mami picking pebbles out of a colander of rice, or Oscarito staring up at the rafters from the small straw bed we’d shared, it was all I could do to hold back tears. I dreamt of papayas with lime, fried plantains, coconut ice cream. Once, I woke up to the croaking of Cuban tree frogs and had to shake my head free of the sound. And I swear, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre appeared to me on the stormy seas! Cuba was Germany’s enemy, having sided with the Allies and harbored Jewish refugees. But nobody onboard held this against me.
Most of the crew wasn’t much older than me, but they had long beards and stank like Señora Portuondo’s backyard goats. Happily, they were glad for my company—clapping me on the back, shouting Gut! Gut! for any little thing I accomplished. Even dour Captain Wruck warmed up to me after a while. The U-boat patrolled the Eastern seaboard from Newfoundland to the Caribbean. To my surprise, the Germans regularly snuck ashore on enemy territory—Florida, Virginia, New York—to replenish their supplies and commit acts of sabotage. In July, they blew up an electrical plant on Long Island, and we watched the entire shoreline go dark except for the flames leaping to the skies. Another time, Joachim brought back a dozen stolen hams still warm from their smoking shed.
The submarine got as far north as the tip of Greenland, where we met up with a secret refueling tanker. The icebergs defied imagination—a flotilla of gleaming peaks of all sizes, drifting in the pale green waters, translucent under the twilit summer skies. How did this world exist on the same planet as Cuba?
A host of daily drills and maintenance tasks took up most of our waking hours. I became keenly interested in the fifty-ton storage batteries that kicked into gear whenever the vessel submerged (the hammering diesel engines operated when we surfaced, or when we were at periscope depth, which recharged the batteries). Tobias, the top mechanic, taught me everything he knew about the batteries. Reliable but highly toxic—they leaked poisonous chlorine fumes when damaged—the batteries were the submarine’s lifeline as well as a deadly threat. One of the radio operators, Ulf, also took me under his wing and let me listen in on the hydrophone, which could capture the sound of a ship’s propellers seventy miles away.
In the rare quiet hours, I learned to play chess and card games like Döppelkopf and Skat. I taught Ulf and Tobias basic Spanish and learned some German myself—a torturous language, if you ask me.
We had several close calls with British and American destroyers (our U-boat sank over fifty thousand tons of cargo while I was at sea)—not to mention a serious control-room fire. But nothing was so nerve-rattling as when the Allies began using twin-engine patrol bombers against us. The fact that enemy convoys now had their own air defense crushed the Germans’ ideas of U-boat warfare—and sank dozens of their fleet. In no time, there was a cemetery of iron coffins on the ocean bottom. Nobody, least of all the captain, ever expected to be shouting Flugzeug! on the high seas and then crash-diving for cover.
During one particularly ferocious battle with a British warship, we were trapped for twenty-two hours at a near-hull-crushing depth of 280 meters. The steel shrieked, valves blew, deck plates jumped, and the boat was plunged into complete darkness. Bombs and depth charges detonated above us, sending shockwave after deafening shockwave. The bilges flooded and kept us ankle-deep in water, oil, and piss. Everyone was half-suffocated, shivering, sick with fear. Who knows how many Hail Marys I said? I’m telling you I could feel my heart beating under my tongue! As we waited, condemned, in our underwater tomb, I felt closer to death than to life. Créeme, it was a miracle we survived.
I suppose you could say it wasn’t the worst adventure for a teenage boy. On my seventeenth birthday, the Germans got me good and drunk on what was left of their schnapps and failed miserably to sing the Cuban national anthem. As the war grew worse for them—the crew spoke openly of this, grounds for treason if they’d been found out—they agreed, at great risk to themselves, to drop me off back in Cuba instead of surrendering me as a prisoner of war. Had they been caught, every last man would’ve been executed, no questions asked.
Sí, I do believe that my allegiances shifted onboard—not for the Nazis, never—but for these good, brave men. Joachim, who became a lifelong friend, encouraged me to look him up in Berlin after the war. As a parting gift, he gave me his precious 7x50 Leitz binoculars.
Bueno, you can imagine my family’s shock when I returned home, looking like a crazy jungle man. I was ten pounds thinner, too, and swaying on sea legs but otherwise none the worse for wear. As I told them the story of my capture, they laughed as if it were the funniest joke they’d ever heard. But when they saw I was dead serious—and rattled off German phrases as proof—they were convinced that I’d somehow knocked myself on the head and lost my memory. What other explanation could there be? Oscarito, who hated ambiguity and aimed his words straight as arrows, put an arm around my shoulders. “I don’t give a damn what happened to you, hermano. I’m just glad to have you back.”
What could I say? Sometimes the truth is so outlandish that it’s better to let people believe you’re indulging in fantasy.
The next Saturday, my parents threw me a welcome-home party and invited the whole neighborhood. They pit-roasted a pig in banana leaves, cooked vats of black beans and rice, and baked enough flan to make our teeth ache. Tío Eufemio hired the best conjunto in town to play the changüís and guarachas that kept us dancing long into the night. When the party wound down, I walked toward the sugar mill, where my family had slaved for decades. In this world of sugarcane, time had stood still for over a century, one season following the next with barely a change. I thought of the U-boat batteries, how they’d saved us time and again, how they might save Baracoa.
I finally did visit Joachim. Not right after the war—that was impossible—but in 1957, after I made a fortune in industrial batteries. I’d studied engineering and designed batteries that kept everything in the sugar mills—from the crusher rollers to the centrifuges—operating without gasoline, or costly interruptions. I sold my patents to manufacturers in Brazil, the Philippines, even the U.S. It was because of those Germans that I became a self-made millionaire, Cuba’s king of batteries. Then the dichosa revolution happened and destroyed everything. I made a terrible mistake not leaving the island when I could.
Joachim married a Polish woman and had three daughters, one of them an albino. He looked more shrunken than he had on the submarine, probably due to the contrast in surroundings. Joachim taught Spanish—with a Cuban accent, imagínate tú—at a local high school and did so until his retirement. Now I’m here in Berlin for his funeral. Me? It took me forever to find a wife. I was almost fifty when I married a widow and adopted her six kids. I won over my Graciela with pink carnations. Cartloads of them. She didn’t believe the story of my kidnapping either, though she was tolerant enough and enjoyed my guttural impersonations of the crew. By then, I’d long stopped caring what people thought.
Let me tell you something else: I’m the exact same age as Fidel himself. We were born just two days and thirty miles apart in 1926. I hang on, praying he’ll go first. At home in Baracoa, I like to sit on my veranda at night, especially when the moon is full, and scan the horizon with my German binoculars. My wicker swing overlooks the sea, an
d sometimes I imagine that German submarine rising up out of the Caribbean, coming for me once more. But this time, amiga, I wouldn’t hesitate. I would willingly go.
Sophie Echt
Tomb
I was buried in a church graveyard for thirty-seven days but wasn’t dead myself. Not buried exactly but ensconced in a sarcophagus, the contents of which had been disposed of by my husband. This happened in the middle of the war. Now it is I who am burying my beloved Uwe in the same churchyard cemetery where he’d hidden me. I’m not sure where to begin, my dear. If there’s anything I’ve learned from studying Russian literature, it’s that you can’t rush a story.
The sarcophagus belonged to W. F., a coal magnate who’d designed and erected his final resting place while still in his thirties (he died at seventy-nine). Fortunately for me, W. F. had been a giant of a man and built his marble tomb to match. Four men of average stature could’ve rested in its confines quite comfortably. Even so, how could I have imagined sleeping inside it for a single night, much less inhabiting it for over a month? It was late in the spring of 1942. My husband had the good sense not to propose his plan ahead of time. Instead he presented it to me as a fait accompli.
I’d managed to stay enrolled at the university—nobody yet knew of my Jewish grandmother—though the Reich frowned upon advanced education for women. The goal for German women then? To become baby factories for the Fatherland. I, however, concentrated on my doctoral thesis, which analyzed the hypocrisies of social class in Ivan Goncharov’s nineteenth-century comic masterpiece, Oblomov. But when Germany attacked the Soviet Union the previous summer, all Russian-related research—scientific, political, and literary—came to a halt.
My husband saw the portents long before I did and busily prepared the sarcophagus. He’d been fretting over the intensity of the purges at the university, had heard rumors of labor camps and massacres in the forests of Poland. When I thought Uwe was in the library studying for his medical exams, it turned out he was chiseling air holes in the tomb through which he expected me to breathe. He furnished it with what he could—a flashlight, moldering pillows, a woolen blanket, books of Russian poetry (Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva), assorted comestibles (sausages, Volkenbrot, chocolate), and a tin waste pail.
When at last Uwe showed off my new quarters as if it were a cozy cottage, I cried, “Have you gone mad?” The next hours were impossible for him as he tried to bring me to my senses. My husband was a reliably rational, unflappable man—he later became a neurosurgeon of some renown—but as daylight broke and I still refused to hide in W. F.’s sarcophagus, he threatened to kill himself. Only then did I climb into the bone-chilling tomb.
Uwe promised to visit me every evening under the pretext of walking Friedl, a plump ball of fluff we’d inherited from our deceased neighbor next door. My husband brought me the day’s news, urging me to remain calm while he arranged our transit out of the country (to England, he hoped, where he had professional contacts). To stray bystanders it would appear that Uwe was talking to the dog, which dutifully held up its paw for scraps. Two days after my “burial,” the authorities came looking for me. Uwe told them that I’d fled without warning.
That first night in the sarcophagus was the longest of my life. My lungs burned for oxygen as I traced every centimeter of the tomb with my fingertips. Though I shivered, my skin felt scorched. I tasted the burial dirt. The cries of nocturnal birds tormented me. Better to die running, I thought, than like a rat in this hole. Had I been strong enough to push aside the marble lid (reading novels, even Russian ones, hadn’t prepared me for this), I would have tried to, but Uwe, in his genius, had secured it from the outside.
By the time my husband returned the following evening, I was hysterical. “Shoot me!” I begged. “If you love me, kill me!” But he refused to open the tomb or remove my waste. Rightly, he calculated, it would take me several days to settle in.
The second night was worse than the first. The stink was asphyxiating; time an incalculable weight around my neck. The trees soughed without diction or pity. The bones of the dead mocked me. Try as I might, I couldn’t focus long enough to read more than a line or two of poetry. What did poetry solve, I thought bitterly, when Hitler was annihilating the Jews? Action was what the world needed—warriors, not the wrecking balls of words.
When my husband opened the sarcophagus on the third evening, the rush of air overwhelmed me. I tried to escape, but my legs buckled. My clothes reeked as if I’d been living in the woods all winter. I sobbed, dazzled by the immensity of the starry skies. Uwe spoke to me as if I were a child, rocking me in his arms. “A few more weeks,” he whispered. “Isn’t that worth it to spend the rest of our lives together?”
By the fifth day, my anguish began to subside, and I forced myself to tackle one modest task after another. I pulled my hair back like a rope. Stooped over my flashlight, I memorized Akhmatova’s poems, translating them into German in my head. Twenty-first. Night. Monday. / Silhouette of the capitol in darkness. / Some good-for-nothing—who knows why— / made up the tale that love exists on earth.
My dear, I grew well acquainted with my elemental self. The dimming of my eyesight heightened my other senses. The feathers in my pillow felt familiar, as if I myself had coaxed the geese into relinquishing them. Tightly wrapped in my blanket, I pictured the bleating sheep as they, too, surrendered their wool. I dreamt of trees and their skyward branches; the tangled rhizomes of nameless plants. In that icy marble lung of a tomb, I rationed my breath until it appeared as diaphanous as a veil. When I found it impossible to sleep, I pressed my lips to the air holes, sucking what I could from the spring.
Toward the end of my entombment (though I didn’t know then it was nearly over), I woke up to find a grass snake stretched out against my leg. It was my sole company for two days. I suspected something dreadful had befallen my husband and grew frantic with worry. I scratched at the tomb’s walls until my fingertips bled, knocked my head against its unyielding marble, anything to stop my thinking. The little snake wound itself around my ankles, first one then the other, gazing at me for hours with a calming, hypnotic air.
When Uwe reappeared, he was hobbling on a broken leg (the result of a bad fall off a trolley). Cheerfully, he offered me a basket of strawberries and some Pfefferkäse and, though it was already night, we picnicked under a linden tree. Then I coaxed him back into the sarcophagus with me. No matter his injury, my hunger, our fears—we made love as if for the last time. The very next day, our passage to England came through, and we escaped.
Our journey? Ah, my dear, that’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say that time changed us. Compromises defined us. Even devotion can wane then return with an unexpected ferocity. My darling Uwe succumbed to two affairs during our long marriage. Betrayal? No, no, no. I quickly forgave him both transgressions. It was the least I could do for saving our lives.
Anna Wildgrube
Criminals
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
When the ophthalmologist took a look at my cataracts and suggested lens implants, I said: I’ve seen too much as it is. Dr. Alves shrugged but said nothing more. Show me the surgeon today who has five minutes to spare for an old woman like me. But who am I to complain? The clock was my master, too, until I retired. Criminals paid dearly for my time—very dearly—to spare themselves public humiliation. Ach, such sporadic bursts of faux guilt and atonements.
Back in the day, there were next to no women in my line of work. The courtroom was a sea of men in sober suits. The trials of retribution from World War II went on for decades, beginning with the Spruchkammern and the ineffectual denazification courts. Incidentally, the Fragebogen—the Allies’ postwar questionnaire—was a joke. Who in their right mind would willingly admit complicity? In wartime everyone knew that if you stopped for mercy, you were as good as dead.
Th
ere’s no perfect crime, I used to tell my clients. But there is such a thing as a perfect defense. No matter how egregious their offenses, if I could demonstrate to the court that the accused were part of a larger flow of history for which they weren’t individually responsible, acquittals were certain. What did I argue? Essentially this: that a cog is not the machine. Dear Visitor, history can’t be erased, but it is definitely subject to negotiation. What did I instruct my clients to say? I was following orders. I was on furlough then. The Jews were all gone by the time I arrived. I knew nothing about that. Und so weiter. I lose nothing by telling you this now. So few of those who might still be tried are alive.
I grew up in Spandau, a nondescript suburb west of Berlin. Our sole claim to fame was that Frau Beckmann, our next-door neighbor, won the Mother of the Year Award in ’38 for giving birth to healthy quintuplets. A dazed Frau Beckmann was interviewed on the radio, and the Führer himself presented her with a medal for exemplary service to the Fatherland. Her oldest daughter, Frieda, was my best friend, and so I got to hold her mother’s medal, imagining the glory that could be mine. The Führer took a special interest in birthrates and marriages in those days, presenting Nazi newlyweds with a special wedding edition of Mein Kampf.
More specifically? Well, I remember a schoolyard fight between two “Aryans” and a Jewish girl early in the war. When the Jewish girl got the best of her attackers, they were incredulous: “You can’t fight back! You’re a Jew!” Soon afterward the girl and her family vanished. Neighbors squabbled over the furniture left behind in their apartment. That same winter, our school received shipments of coats and jackets from the Eastern front along with boots, cuckoo clocks, frying pans, blankets, candelabras. One of my classmate’s fathers was SS, and his family got first pick of the loot. His wife snapped up a chinchilla wrap, which she took to showing off, sparking the jealousy of the other mothers.
Here in Berlin Page 2
