How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  ‘We – yes, we! – are the real SS!’

  43.

  Just ask the Führer

  Ellen’s confidence in Walter was not misplaced. He was drafted into the Luftwaffe, where he quickly rose to the rank of Staffelkapitän, commanding a squadron of pilots. At first, he was stationed near Berlin, so it was easy for him and Ellen to be together when he was off duty. In his longer periods of leave they repaired to special Luftwaffe holiday homes in Bavaria and Saxony. Hitler was Walter’s world; and Ellen’s life was blissful within it.

  Sometimes, Klaus said, his jingoism was too much for her, such as when he returned from his first mission in France and placed the bloodied helmet of a dead French solider triumphantly on the kitchen counter. She was not going to tolerate that vile trophy in their home and threw it out. But he was with her only briefly before he was sent to Italy and then to Rommel’s army in North Africa, where he was transferred from combat operations to flying transport planes for resupplying ground forces.

  In a way, Klaus said, his father would have preferred to remain in combat. Destroying enemy planes and watching them spin out of the air was indescribably exciting. But flying clunky transport aircraft was dangerous too: three times he was shot down, and three times he survived.

  Recognition was swift. Walter was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, the Iron Cross First Class, the Honour Goblet of the Luftwaffe, and then, on 27 March 1942, the German Cross in Gold, which I had seen in the leather box in Klaus’s apartment.32

  Although the campaign in North Africa was heading for disaster, Walter was one of its young heroes. In December 1942, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross33 was added to his list of decorations. Three months later, Ellen told him that she was pregnant. And, on 21 July 1943, Göring promoted Walter to the rank of captain.

  It had been a heady twenty-four months, the cascade of joys interrupted only by Theo’s deportation to Sachsenhausen, which Ellen had witnessed when she went to the assembly point where he had been ordered to report and, from a safe distance, watched him disappear. Through it all, she continued writing Walter love letters of undiminished freshness. As the war progressed, the shortage of paper forced her to write on toilet paper in lipstick, but though she had to be briefer she was no less ardent.

  For Walter, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross and the promotion to captain didn’t just bring military glory. He was now entitled, so Klaus’s mother reported, to ask Hitler for a personal favour, through one of the Führer’s representatives.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, he knew what this would be: he would request permission to marry Ellen, who was now four months pregnant. He rushed to tell his closest friends in the Luftwaffe. ‘I am going to ask the Führer for permission to marry my girl! That is all I want of him!’

  ‘But why do you need permission to marry?’ they asked. ‘Are you mad? Anyone can get married! Ask for something that only he can bestow!’

  ‘But this is something only he can bestow,’ Walter answered. And he explained that Ellen was Jewish.

  The others were stunned. They had never suspected it of him – how could such a convinced Nazi choose a Jewish girl? Most dismaying to them, though, was the danger he was prepared to put himself in. ‘You’ve lost your mind, Walter! The Führer says he will grant any wish, no matter what it is. But he would never grant that one. Instead, he will have you both executed.’

  Walter’s comrades would gather round him when others were out of earshot to dissuade him from this absurd idea; but his indiscretion had almost certainly been his death warrant. One of them must have ratted to higher authorities, perhaps accusing him of wider disloyalty too.

  His superiors reacted with brutal speed. Walter was discharged from active service and assigned to test piloting, which was notoriously dangerous: you were trying out planes that had been rushed from design to prototype. And the loss of prestige was devastating. Instead of being transferred to a new front line or a position on Göring’s staff, Walter found himself sidelined to a role where heroic defence of country was no longer possible.

  His morale had already been deteriorating before his latest promotion. Ellen had noticed that he started getting strange after the trip back from the Balkans through Croatia. The brutality he witnessed there was no longer heroic; this was savagery, delight in inhumanity, the abandonment of all rules of warfare. It broke his will – and possibly his faith in the Nazi cause.

  Ironically, when Walter was promoted to captain he wasn’t only told that Hitler guaranteed to bestow on him a favour of his choosing. Göring’s grandiose certificate announcing the promotion with effect from 1 August 1943 also declared that the recipient ‘could be assured of the special protection of the Führer’.

  Two weeks later, on 15 August, the prototype that Walter was ordered to fly fell out of the sky, soon after take-off from Berlin’s Schönefeld airport.

  He died instantly.

  44.

  The Jew and the ex-monk

  It was never clear whether such crashes were due to mechanical failure or sabotage – or even whether they had happened at all. If the authorities needed a heroic explanation for the death of someone whom they had decided to kill, or who had embarrassingly committed suicide, the crash of a test flight, or some other accident, might be cited.

  Ernst Udet, one-time client of Ilse’s photographic atelier in Berlin, was a case in point. He was a hero of the First World War and one of the creators of the Luftwaffe, but he had gradually fallen out with Göring; and when Udet buckled under the pressures of bureaucratic infighting and his boss’s contemptuous treatment of him, and then committed suicide, Göring’s office issued a sombre announcement regretting that he had died while testing a new weapon. The regime even put on the spectacle of a state funeral. Who knows whether Walter Meltzer was really in that aircraft that took off from Schönefeld?

  Whatever the explanation, Ellen could no longer delay going into hiding. Walter had probably been her great protector, and with him gone she decided to vanish. The last time Walter’s family saw her was at his funeral. Though it was a sweltering summer’s day, she showed up in a large fur coat with which she tried to conceal the bulging evidence of Walter’s Rassenschande: the ‘racial disgrace’ of sexual relations between an Aryan and a Jew, which were prohibited by the ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour’. She disappeared as soon as the coffin had been lowered into the ground.

  That evening, she made for the remote countryside near Janowitz in Silesia, where, Klaus said, friends in the circle of the rebel cleric Pastor Niemöller had arranged for her to be hidden and to find forged identity papers. Four months later, she gave birth to Klaus.

  Ellen never loved anyone as she had loved Walter. In losing him, she lost her own life too; she became severely depressed, started drinking, and by the end of the war was an alcoholic.

  Then, in 1946, she met Friedrich Edelman. It certainly wasn’t more of the same. Far from being a Protestant, a Nazi, and a German, Freddy was a Jew, a Zionist, and an American. He had been born in Austria, fled to the United States when Hitler marched into Vienna, and was now back in Europe with the occupying US Army. But he didn’t intend to stay long in Germany. He wanted Ellen to move with him to Palestine, soon to be the State of Israel; and, in a striking reversal of the direction of travel in our family, he insisted that Klaus be raised as a Jew and no longer as a Christian.

  Ellen craved a new life after losing both Walter and her father, but not quite as new as this. Unhappily resettled in Haifa, she was soon reversing the reversal: while Edelman steered Klaus towards Judaism, she, at the same time, prohibited him to learn about it. She demanded that Klaus leave the room any time a Jewish celebration was about to start, even one as routine as lighting the Sabbath candles. Only when it was all over and the prayer books had been locked away was he allowed back in. In fact, she wanted him to avoid not only Judaism but Jews – something of a challenge in Haifa – and encouraged him to look on their Jewish neighbou
rs as strangers.

  Edelman quickly made plans to return to America, ostensibly to start a business, but possibly because he was finding life with Ellen unendurable. She was missing Germany terribly and had never found in Edelman the vertiginous sense of safety that Walter and his family had inspired in her. In 1952, she departed with Klaus for Munich.

  A few months after arriving back, Ellen met Heinrich Seidel. He was neither a Protestant nor a Jew, but a former Roman Catholic monk with a weakness for women and westerns. He made only one demand of her: Klaus had to convert to Catholicism.

  The ten-year-old boy was duly transplanted from German-Jewish Haifa to a conservative Catholic orphanage in rural Bavaria in which Seidel worked as an orderly. There, he made friends with children who had lost their parents in the war and received his first Communion and his confirmation. Like me, he became an altar server.

  The new family had some happy times, in particular at Christmas. Ellen would send Heinrich and Klaus out to the cinema while she prepared the crib under their Christmas tree, laid a festive dinner table, and cooked a goose. When they got back from the cinema, they would put on their best suits and wait patiently in the corridor of the small apartment until Ellen rang a bell that summoned them into the living room. In the middle of dinner, Heinrich would stand up and read the story of Christ’s birth from an old Bible that she had had bound for him in pigskin.

  At Christmas, birthdays, or sunny weekends, the storm clouds over Ellen’s life would briefly part; but otherwise she was increasingly dogged by fears of persecution, and her alcoholism became crippling. She began to shut herself off from the world and often didn’t know which country she was living in. Like Ilse towards the end of her life, she became convinced that Nazis were encircling her and would turn her home into a killing zone. From the mid-1960s, she was barricading herself in her apartment and closing all the curtains ‘in case the Gestapo find us’.

  One day, Klaus found her standing on a chair, pointing frantically in the direction of a skylight. ‘They are going to come through there; they are on their way to get us; they are going to deport us,’ she screamed. As soon as she woke up in the mornings, she reached for the bottle. She was screaming in her sleep and she was screaming by day. In 1971, she died of alcohol poisoning, aged fifty-two.

  The Nazi, the Jew, the ex-monk: Ellen had been least troubled with Walter. But her letters to the young Staffelkapitän and the photos of them together seem to reveal something beyond delight in Walter for his own sake: namely, her euphoria at the primordial safety that she believed he could vouchsafe. His allure must have intensified as Theo became more isolated and depressed, unable to work, stripped of all civil rights, and finally deported and murdered.

  Walter’s passion in those letters and photos feels more subdued. His happiness appears inflected with unease, even doubt. Perhaps he was naturally reserved; but was he also concerned at the almost godlike safety that she craved from him? Did her love become a burden when he realized the power of that craving? Did he worry whether its fearsome appetite could want anything about him that didn’t satisfy it?

  45.

  The parrot and the bulldog

  Klaus has been telling me all this in his attic bedsit, while we drink coffee and eat Turkish cakes and leaf through old photos, interrupted repeatedly by Gregor the parrot. But after two days searching for a third dimension to my great-uncle Theo beyond my mother’s portrayal of the kindly bachelor living his blameless life with his mother and Hedwig, I badly need a break from talk about Jews and Aryans, the SS and nervous breakdowns, Göring and the German Cross in Gold, the Luftwaffe and the Sabbath.

  Occasionally Klaus and I try to change the subject and tell each other about our own lives. I discover that he is a judo black belt, a photographer, a painter, and an educationalist; that he has been a candidate for the far left in local elections; and that he is a tireless supporter of immigrants and minorities, especially Turks and Iraqis, in his Cologne neighbourhood, and has founded a community centre for Turkish women. Yet our conversation circles back compulsively to the heritage that has brought us together. And after so much immersion in that heritage, and its source in Theo, we are both worn down. He needs time alone and I decide to do some sightseeing, determined to leave history behind me.

  The buzz of non-European languages by the great cathedral feels liberating; but it isn’t easy for me to flip out of the past. As I pass a cafe, I spot a display of chocolate truffles in the window. I look closer to see what they are, then freeze in horror, hardly able to believe my eyes. ‘Pralinen Mischling’, a little sign announces: a racial hybrid of pralines! I double check. Of course, I misread it. ‘Pralinen Mischung’, it says: a mixture of pralines.

  I walk on, heading towards the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. Rather than bringing me into the present, the hubbub of tourists is only drawing attention to the vast vacuum that Hitler’s war still leaves. What on earth are they coming to see? A bomb site hastily rebuilt, much of it an eyesore? Copies of buildings that were reduced to rubble by one night’s air raids? How could people travel halfway round the world to wander these ugly streets and shopping arcades that are like gravestones of the old Cologne? I feel bereaved by the irreversible destruction that ripped the heart out of a great city and turned it into a necropolis – desolate at the loss of heritages that took centuries to accumulate.

  The bustle in a nearby tavern where I stop for a glass of beer is like the chatter of the dispossessed. Even the cathedral, which the bombers largely spared, can’t defy the irretrievable loss. The way it stands there in its stubborn vastness merely draws attention to the loneliness of the survivor in a desert of death.

  I have been to other German cities many times without feeling such pain and loss. I haven’t felt it as much in Berlin, that sardonic capital of guilt where, with its grime and inefficiency and cutting humour, Germany takes a break from itself. Nor in Munich, whose corpses stay more obediently in their graves than they do in Berlin. And still less in those places where ghosts seem well and truly silenced until a city hall committee orders them from their hiding places for a meticulously choreographed commemoration.

  But, of course, I’m mourning the destruction of my father’s world. My discovery of Klaus has brought me to the city where he was born, where he was raised and grew to adulthood, which he fled with his mother in 1937 when he was thirty-two, and in which, I’ve been told since childhood, no trace of him and his family remains – so no point visiting it. In my eagerness to solve the mystery of Theo’s secret life, I am simultaneously barging into the centuries-long history of my paternal ancestors in this part of Germany – and into the reality that the lives of my father, uncle Edward, grandmother Martha, and grandfather Ferdinand are as absent from Cologne as the bombed city itself.

  As I follow the tourist trail across the cathedral square, I am inadvertently retracing my father’s youthful tracks. For, my mother later tells me, he passed this way every day after he finished work – first at the Dresdner Bank, which had employed him since he left school at fifteen, and then, after his dismissal by the Nazis, at a small private bank owned by the family of Lilly Reifenberg-Lucas, the silent wife of our doctor, Ernst Lucas. After leaving his desk, he would become so absorbed in the paintings of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum that, my mother added with pride, he frequently had to be evicted just after closing time.

  He loved the old Cologne – its mordant, wise-cracking wit; its death-on-a-plate local dishes like Flönz and Himmel un Äd; the splendid wines that are made around it in the lands of the Mosel. On his first return visit after the war, sometime in the late 1950s, he walked into his favourite cafe two decades after he had last been there, and the now elderly woman behind the counter instantly exclaimed, ‘But you are young Walter May!’ She embraced him tearfully, fed him and my mother with as much cake as they could bear, without accepting payment, and then sent them away laden with even more – but not before recalling that he had been Cologne’s junior champion at Skat, one of
Germany’s national card games. And he had returned to the street in which his mother had lived before fleeing to England, but none of it had survived the Allied bombing.

  I am daydreaming that his favourite cafe was the one with the window display where I thought I’d seen a praline Mischling, when, turning a corner, I stumble across an old mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath, the ruins of which appear to date back to the eleventh century and are preserved under a wooden canopy in a small piazza within the cathedral’s shadow. Near the mikvah, a plaque commemorates the patriotism of local Jews in defending the town against invaders, after which the Jewish community as a whole was thanked for its loyalty by being evicted for nearly four centuries, returning only in the 1790s under French occupation.

  Then I notice a woman trying to explain to her two sons, probably aged ten and twelve, what a mikvah is and that Cologne was once a great Jewish centre, but ordinary Germans sat by while these fellow citizens, who of course had their own customs but were otherwise just like you and me, were expelled or killed. She’s doing her best to arouse their empathy, but they aren’t interested, or else they’re repelled by dark fates, or perhaps they believe that if people were evicted they must have done something to deserve it. Then one throws a pebble at the other – and, giggling conspiratorially, they flee the melancholy business of memorials and expulsions, tearing round the square, out of their mother’s control.