One day Onkel Max announced that with the help of his carpenter brother he was going to build himself a thirty-foot sailboat. Having become used to the idea that there was nothing Onkel Max couldn’t do, my mother and I spent many weekends watching how, plank after plank, he turned his dream into reality. After about a year’s work we helped launch the sleek vessel, which he had named Kuddel (Platt for Karl) after his brother, then went along on its maiden voyage to watch Onkel Max sail and navigate the craft up and down the Alster with expert skill. After that, we went sailing practically every summer day, ending each sail with a social hour with friends at the Alster yacht club Onkel Max had joined.
To me, Onkel Max and my mother seemed the ideal couple, and I looked forward to the day when my two favorite people would get hitched and Onkel Max would become my dad. But that wasn’t meant to be. Even in my wildest dreams I never suspected that I was the reason Onkel Max wouldn’t consider marrying Mutti.
I had always known that Onkel Max, while not a member of the Nazi Party, was an avid Hitler supporter who approved of practically everything the Nazis did. That was all right with me since, in my immaturity and ignorance, I was as brainwashed as he. Mutti, knowing of his infatuation with Hitler, studiously avoided discussing politics with him, except once when she told him, after one of the Nazis’ customary fake elections, that she had not voted for Hitler.
“You mean to tell me that you didn’t vote for the man who has done more for Germany than any other living soul!” he shouted incredulously in an agitated voice that I had never heard before.
“The only thing your Hitler has ever done for me is get me fired from my job,” my mother shot back, equally agitated.
That brief exchange was the beginning of the end. Gradually, as Hitler’s influence grew, Onkel Max’s presence in our lives began to shrink, to the point where he no longer took us sailing or, for that matter, anywhere else in public. Finally my mother had had enough. One night, after I had gone to bed, I was awakened by the sound of Mutti’s angry voice in the living room. “I know what your problem is,” she shouted. “You are ashamed to be seen with us when your Nazi cronies are around. Well, you don’t have to be ashamed anymore. I want you to get out and never come back!”
I never saw Onkel Max again. Losing my hero—the man who taught me all I knew of what it might be like to have a father—left a painful void, coupled with a deep sense of betrayal, which took several years to subside. What hurt me even more than his leaving was his reason for leaving. No matter how much my mother tried to convince me that I was not to blame, deep in my heart I knew that the man I loved like a father, and who I thought loved me like a son, left because he felt he could no longer afford to be seen with me.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Growing up nondelinquent was not one of several options I had, but an ironclad, immutable mandate laid down by my mother. Having been reared in a large family by a hardworking, no-nonsense matriarch, she was not one to put up with bratty behavior. As a result, she never had a problem telling me “No!” and making it stick when she thought it was necessary to accomplish the main goal she had set for herself, which was to make a decent man out of me.
Sometimes her methods of instilling values in me and indelibly impressing upon my young mind that crime doesn’t pay were as creative as they were effective. It didn’t take me long to realize that her wheels of justice turned swiftly and inexorably. I especially remember an incident that happened when I was a little tyke of about five years.
We had visited one of her fellow nurses whose son, Kurt, was about my age. While our mothers talked, we played quietly in a corner with Kurt’s toy soldiers until it was time for us to go home. We had walked about five minutes when my mother noticed a small bulge in one of my pockets. “What’s that in your pocket?” she demanded to know.
“Nothing,” I replied in a voice that didn’t carry much conviction.
“Let me take a look,” my mother insisted, and reached into my pocket.
“You call that nothing?” she asked while holding up a little toy soldier. “How did that soldier get into your pocket?”
“I don’t know,” I replied feebly.
“You are a thief, and I shall see to it that you’ll go where thieves belong—to jail. But before I do that, we’ll go back to Kurt and you’ll apologize to him for stealing his soldier.”
Deeply humiliated by having been exposed as a thief and a liar, I followed her back to her friend’s apartment where I returned the toy soldier to Kurt and apologized sheepishly. But the worst was yet to come. After we were back in the street, my mother marched me straight into a nearby police station and addressed the desk sergeant.
“Officer, what do you suggest we do with this boy who has stolen a toy soldier from his friend?”
The officer looked down on me from his desk with a long, menacing stare that sent chills along my spine. “I think we should lock him up with the rest of the criminals,” he said finally.
By this time I was so horrified that I burst out in loud screams while begging the policeman and my mother to spare me. In return, I promised them never to steal again.
“I tell you what, lady,” the officer suggested, “let’s give him one more chance, but if you ever catch him stealing again, just give me a call and I’ll have him picked up right away.”
With a wink at my mother that I was unable to interpret, the officer told me that, at least for the time being, I was free to go. The ordeal conjured up by my mother’s creative intervention has remained etched in my memory as though it happened yesterday. I never again gave my mother cause to take the cop up on his offer.
MAKING ENDS MEET
Having watched her mother successfully rear nine children (another two died in infancy) by herself, my mother never regarded our situation as a particular hardship case or considered us as poor folks. Through prudent management of what little money she made on her job, and aided by a keen nose for bargains, she was able to provide us with all the necessities of life, including quality clothing, nourishing food, and even an occasional luxury, such as a visit to a movie matinee.
Like most German women of her generation, she avoided going into debt, convinced like her mother that borgen macht Sorgen (to borrow makes sorrow). Consequently, she categorically never bought anything on credit. Instead, she was a great believer in layaway plans. All major household items in our home she acquired through this method, including her pride and joy, a foot-driven Singer sewing machine that converted into a handsome small wooden table when not in use. It was a source of immense pleasure and pride to her to know that there wasn’t a single item in our home that wasn’t paid for.
By example, my mother taught me the discipline of delaying gratification of my wishes, of which the biggest at the time was to own a bike. After she surprised me one day with the news that she had made a down payment on a secondhand but mint-condition bike she had watched me admire in the window of a downtown bicycle shop, she took me along whenever she made her weekly payments to give me a chance to look at and touch the bike that one day would be mine. Having already learned to ride on some of my buddies’ bikes, I was more than ready for the big event. Each successive visit to the shop stretched my patience to the breaking point, but didn’t diminish my joy of anticipation. On the day my mother made the final payment, she brought her own bike along so that we could celebrate my new acquisition with a joint ride home. I had imagined that first ride on my own bicycle countless times, but the actual experience surpassed my fantasy by miles. For weeks, I felt I was riding on clouds instead of two balloon tires, until it gradually sank in that this gorgeous contrivance was really mine.
Ownership of a bike opened up an entirely new life for me. Whereas before I had been largely confined to my immediate neighborhood, barring an occasional streetcar ride downtown, I suddenly had the means to transport myself to any part of the city and beyond. Consequently, each day after finishing my homework, I would set out with one or several bike-owni
ng pals and explore the city. On Sundays, weather permitting, my mother and I would bicycle to one of the picturesque Walddörfer (forest villages) that surround much of Hamburg and pick a cozy clearing in the forest where we would picnic on sandwiches and read to our hearts’ content. For Mutti and me, those quiet hours at the bosom of mother nature constituted the epitome of Gemütlichkeit. As we pedaled through the small towns with their handsome homes and neat flower and vegetable gardens, we engaged in one of our favorite pastimes, daydreaming of one day living in our own little house. With the exception of some upper-middle-class types, we knew of no one who had realized that impossible dream of homeownership.
SALZA REVISITED
I continued to spend my summer school vacations in Salza, but like everything else in Germany, Salza had undergone a noticeable change for the worse since the Nazis came to power. It certainly was no longer the friendly, idyllic little village I had learned to love. The boys I used to play with had become members of the Hitler Youth and, unlike my peers in Hamburg, pointedly avoided me. Their peasant fathers, who on weekdays wore dung-splattered coveralls, were strutting around on Sundays in brown SA uniforms and polished riding boots and were acting important. It was quite obvious that Hitler’s singling out farming as the nation’s most honorable occupation had gone to their heads. In addition, they had been told—and believed—that they were of superior stock because of their unsullied Aryan blood. Each was busy trying to outdo the other in demonstrating his blind devotion to Hitler and his policies.
Since Salza was a tiny community with only a few hundred inhabitants, it meant that meddling in other people’s political business was the order of the day. Thus, Tante Grete received dozens of discreet inquiries as to why each summer she and her family harbored a boy who she claimed was a relative but who looked like a fugitive from Africa. Once I overheard her tell Onkel Karl about the duplicity of a neighbor woman who, before Hitler came to power, had often let me sample her home-baked cake and other treats. The woman, whose husband had risen from lowly chewing-tobacco factory worker to weekend Nazi big shot, had taken Tante Grete aside and told her “confidentially” that she had it on good authority that having me stay with her family during the summer was definitely not in her best interest. Tante Grete responded that I was her husband’s blood relative and that she would never deny her husband’s own flesh and blood, no matter who didn’t like it.
On the evening before my return to Hamburg, we were treated to a strange spectacle. Dozens of young men carrying small swastika streamers marched up and down Salza’s Hauptstrasse, shouting and rabble-rousing and singing “Muss i denn zum Städtele hinaus,” the traditional German farewell song. Obviously high on beer, some were stumbling in and out of taverns while others banged indiscriminately with their fists on shop windows and doors. When I asked Onkel Karl what the ruckus was all about, he explained that the young men had just passed their muster for induction into the Arbeitsdienst (Labor Service), a compulsory year of mostly Reichsautobahn construction work, followed by a period of military service in the Wehrmacht (armed forces). Since it was possibly their last night as civilians, Onkel Karl explained, the police traditionally looked the other way and let them have one last fling.
“Why are they so happy when they have to leave and become soldiers?” I wanted to know.
“Because it is an honor to wear the uniform of your country,” responded Onkel Karl, an anti-Nazi but patriotic World War I veteran. “One day, when you’re grown, you, too, will become a soldier.”
Onkel Karl was right, but neither he nor I could have known at the time that when that time came, I would wear the olive drab of the U.S. Army instead of the gray of the Deutsche Heer (German Army).
I had already decided not to return to Salza the following summer, but that decision was purely academic, because the next time my mother tried to sign me up for the vacation program, she was told that only members of the Hitler Youth qualified for free transportation on the vacation train. Onkel Karl and Tante Grete insisted that I come anyway at their expense, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. Thus ended one of the most delightful phases of my childhood. The next time I returned to Salza a few years later, it was under totally unexpected and quite different circumstances.
MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL
It would still take years before I fully understood, and was able to permit myself to believe, that Hitler was an infinitely evil, morally corrupt psychopath. Desperately, I kept clinging to the government-promoted image of a benevolent demigod and savior of the German people. After each psychologically crushing blow dealt me by one of Hitler’s minions, I rationalized that I had been victimized by an overzealous Nazi underling who had overstepped his authority and perverted the Führer’s grand scheme. I simply could not get myself to blame the architect of the racist policies himself. Only after years of maturing and of being rejected, humiliated, and psychologically brutalized was I able to see Hitler himself for what he really was and as the ultimate source of my mounting problems. It was not until I reached my teens that the awful truth struck home. Until then, instead of putting the blame for my problems with racists where it belonged, I blamed myself. More than anything, I blamed my appearance—especially my African hair, which I had come to loathe. Although I had vowed not to let Wriede get the better of me, his and other teachers’ all-out psychological warfare against me had taken its toll. Under the steady barrage of the hated word Neger and the equally offensive Mischling, my self-esteem had plunged to a frightening low.
After a girl I had been playing with told me that I looked better with my cap on, I rushed home and did what I had avoided doing for some time, namely taking a long, probing look in the mirror. To say I didn’t like what I saw would be putting it mildly. The boy who looked back at me, I decided with brutal objectivity, was plain ugly. His nose was much shorter and wider than that of “normal” boys, and his skin, although smoother-looking than the skin of other boys, was several shades too dark to pass for a tan. Worst of all was the kinky hair. From my perspective, every day was a bad hair day. After experimenting for a while with my cap, I concluded that the girl had been right; covering my hair definitely minimized my African appearance and, therefore, improved my looks.
Convinced that if my hair were straight, half of my problems would be solved, I was ecstatic when I came across some information that seemed to have the potential of forever changing my life. I had read in one of my adventure books that members of an African tribe ceremoniously straightened their hair by dipping it in a concoction made from a sugarlike substance dissolved in hot water. So one day after school, I embarked on a strange, ever-so-secret mission, aimed at surprising my mother with my new straight hair. First I emptied my mother’s sugar jar into a small pot filled with water. Then, while stirring the mixture with a spoon, I brought it to a boil on our gas stove. After letting the syrupy concoction cool off, I massaged it into my hair as if it were shampoo, wiped off the excess with a towel, then waited impatiently for the transformation to take place. While waiting, I fantasized what my new life with straight hair would be like. Having just seen the movie The Elephant Boy, I envisioned my future looks to approach those of Sabu, the appealing Indian youth whose jungle epic had made him the darling of German moviegoers. I decided that once my hair was straight, I definitely would wear it longer, but under no circumstances as long as Sabu’s. Between daydreaming, I’d run my fingers through my hair to find out whether there was any change. There was a change, all right. The colder the concoction got, the stickier and messier my hair became, until it was one impenetrable, gooey mess. After waiting more than an hour for more promising results, I concluded that the experiment was a dismal flop and literally threw in the towel.
Fortunately, a few rinses in hot water restored my hair to its original kinky condition. But the emotional damage caused by my disappointment was much more difficult to repair. At first I decided not to tell my mother about the “incident,” but when she came home and demanded an explan
ation for my still wet hair and the empty sugar jar, I changed my mind and confessed.
Instead of getting angry about the wasted sugar, she told me how very sorry she felt for me that I didn’t like my hair. “Whether you know it or not, your hair is beautiful,” she tried to assure me.
“It’s easy for you to talk,” I told her, pointing to her lustrous, wavy dark brown hair. “You’ve got straight hair like everybody else.”
“I would give it to you if I could. I so much wish I could, if that’s what would make you happy,” she said, “but I can’t. So you just have to learn to like the hair you’ve got. One day, when you are older, you’ll understand and agree with me when I say that your hair is beautiful.”
There was nothing my mother could have said at the time to make me feel good about my hair and the way I looked. How could there be? The last time I had heard an impartial person make a flattering comment about my appearance had been what seemed to me a lifetime ago, while the last time I heard a disparaging remark was only that afternoon.
There were two aspects of my appearance, however, that I not only appreciated but was actually rather proud of, despite the fact that they were probably racial traits. One was my physique. Although I was of average height, I had a well-proportioned, athletic body with well-muscled legs and arms. The other was my teeth, which earned me many compliments, especially during annual dental examinations in school. Invariably, the examining dentist would invite the entire class, including the teacher, to line up and take a peek into my mouth in order to “get an idea of what absolutely perfect teeth looked like.” To me, this procession past my open mouth was my annual moment of glory. But nothing lasts forever. My annual teeth-modeling stint came to a gnashing halt one day when, to my utter disappointment, the dentist discovered two cavities on a molar that ended my claim to having “absolutely perfect teeth.”
Destined to Witness Page 12
