Of Another Time and Place

by Brad Schaeffer

  But that night, my first night as a POW, I was still in shock from the staggering level of violence and bloodshed I’d left in the wake of my exodus from the war. But I also took comfort in the knowledge that four innocent people were indeed alive, just as I’d vowed to my hopelessly misguided friend Mueller, one melancholy morning before.

  I stood up and contemplated my comfortable cotton hospital nightclothes. The IV drip followed me on its wheeled stand as I hoisted myself to my bare feet and shuffled over to the doorway. The MP went to intercept me. I had to remind myself that I was now a prisoner of war on an American airbase.

  “Problem, Captain?” the gruff soldier said warily. He gripped his sidearm.

  I poked my head through the door to look up and down the barren hallway coated with sterile white light reflecting on an ugly linoleum floor. At the end of the hall I noticed an old Wurlitzer spinet piano on a wheeled base, which they used for entertaining patients. I made an instinctive move to exit into the hallway until I felt my guard’s hand on my uninjured shoulder restraining me.

  “Sorry, but you can’t leave this room,” he said. Then he paused. “You speak English? Uhh, sprechen Sie English?”

  “Yes, I speak some,” I said. “I was wondering if I could play your piano.”

  The MP shook his head. “I don’t think so. You ain’t supposed to leave your bed. Besides, you took a thirty-cal. to the shoulder this morning. Don’t you think you oughtta cool it?”

  I looked down at my burning shoulder and then to the American. “Bitte…please. I play. It has been a, how do you say, ‘a bad dog day.’”

  The guard softened at that. I was clearly harmless. “Close enough,” he said. “Come on.” With that he led me to the piano and even pulled out the bench for me. I groaned as I eased myself to sit under my guard’s curious eye. My shoulder let my arm move only with some shoots of pain, but I ignored my bullet wound’s protest and placed my hands on the keys.

  I could feel my confidence growing as I entered into the first measures of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, second movement. I was confident that I’d done a good thing. Confident that my friends were safe, that my future wife need no longer fear the deranged obsessions of a jealous and sadistic SS officer. And I was relieved that I was going to live through the war. As a prisoner of the Americans or British, yes. But alive nonetheless. As the music filled my world and blocked out all around, I felt the deep abyss of mourning for my family that existed now only in my memories. They were the victims of a nation led astray. Paul, so naive and young, never even got the chance to live. My parents, good and simple folk, didn’t deserve to die violently as they had. But the war took from us all. It was up to me to go on from this moment and make their sacrifices count. Deeper I fell into the notes and phrases that now surrounded me like golden leaves whipping around on a windy autumn day. And through these notes I reflected upon my lost nation. Upon the faces of men I’d known, mostly dead, who were on the wrong side of the wrong fight but were too wrapped up in it as I had been to see the truth. That I had an old Musikmeister and the woman who had harbored him in my life to show me the way was an extraordinary stroke of luck for me. That I could return the favor was my gift.

  Playing the piano before a soldier of my enemy was my last action as a German officer in the Second World War. The killing across the channel would continue unabated until May 1945. Millions more would die until the Western Allies and the Russians met on the Elbe, sealing Germany’s fate. Berlin would be razed to flaming ruins as the Russians exacted their final orgy of vengeance upon their brutal invaders. And Adolf Hitler, once master of all Europe and the center of my world, would be reduced to a cowering existence deep in his subterranean Führerbünker below the Reich Chancellery building. He would end his mad reign with a self-inflicted gunshot through the mouth, surrounded by his deluded henchmen, who remained under his spell to the very end as Götterdämmerung raged in the streets above them.

  No, Germany’s chapter was not yet closed. But my war, finally, was over.

  61

  Rachael beams at me while sifting through a torrent of emotions. I am indeed the man. All her concerns about wasting her time had steadily washed away as I unpacked for her my real story.

  “Well,” I say with my palms out. “There you have it. Shall I go on?”

  “I think I know the rest,” she says with a warm smile. She flips through her notepad to the writing on the last page: “You spent two years in Old Coulsden prison.”

  “That’s right. After my initial interrogation at Cockfosters, I was given a white patch, which they issued to those of us with no loyalty to National Socialism, and sent to the camp in Surrey. We were put to work building pre-fabs. They treated us well under the circumstances.” Oddly enough, a fond memory flashes before me. One I haven’t thought about in years. “We used to carve little wooden aircraft models and give them to the local children.”

  Rachael continues: “You stayed in England until offered repatriation to Germany in 1946. But you never went back to live there. Why not?”

  I sigh. How to explain this? “Amelia and I decided to stay here. Almost twenty-five thousand of us did, you know. We considered moving on to America, but I was able to get placed at the Royal Academy of Music here in London through the help of one of the English families for whom I did work as part of my captivity. Anyway, it made sense to stay. I didn’t wish to go back to Germany. And I’ll tell you why. Germany after the war was as Krup had predicted. There were no Nazis to be found. Oh, there were the Nuremberg trials of course, but that was just for the big fish like Göring and the like. But if I may extend the metaphor, do you know what feeds the really large sea creatures of the world?”

  Rachael nods. “Plankton?”

  “That’s right. The smallest organisms. They have little appendages for flailing about in the water, but really their moves are dictated by the larger currents that move them. And they seem so insignificant until taken as a sum of the whole. More importantly, without them the giants cannot thrive. The Allies brought the whales to justice—most of them. The millions of enablers just disappeared into the fabric of post-war German society. They are still there, some of them, to this day. Although the younger generations have taken responsibility for something their parents and grandparents refused to acknowledge. You see, as far as I could tell from some of my correspondence with old friends, or when I would tour there, most of the older Germans felt that the war was a mistake…but not because it was an immoral act of aggression at the behest of an evil man. But rather they saw it as a bad thing for Germany, well, because we lost. A disastrous error in strategic judgment. The cries of the children of Sainte Laurie-Olmer and countless others like them from France to the Balkans to the Ukraine were lost on them. Their response when I tried to tell some of Johann Keitel’s crimes? Often a shrug followed by: ‘Well, it was war.’ After a while I just stopped telling anyone at all. I’m sorry. I could not go home and live as a party to the lie. My country was overflowing with Nazis until 1945. Where did they all go? Hmmm?”

  The reporter jots that down. Perhaps another story from this? Who knows. But it explains why she’s interviewing me in London, and not in Münich or Berlin.

  “Although you did visit Germany while touring, you never returned to Stauffenberg? You never looked for your parents’ graves? Someone must have tended to them.”

  It pains me to think of that lovely village on the Main. “All of Stauffenberg was effectively leveled. There weren’t enough people left alive to rebuild it. I believe it is a game reserve now or something. I don’t know. Even the cathedral was leveled. Only the Rathaus tower remains.”

  “And what of the Krupinskis?” she says with what I read as an almost mischievous look in her eyes. “Did you keep in touch with them?”

  “No. I spent two years in captivity with no real connection to the world outside of England. And Amelia was in a more awkward po
sition than I if you think about it. My role as POW was defined. And I was treated well by the RAF and US Air Force, who were naturally eager to interrogate an officer with such extensive knowledge of the other side. But Amelia, well, here was this German woman in the heart of England during a war against her country. A civilian on the wrong side of a line. Not a prisoner, but an enemy nonetheless. In fact, the authorities were not sure what to do with her. But then through an extension of the POW program, she was taken in by a generous old couple in Coulsden who’d emigrated from Austria years before and were citizens of the Commonwealth. They treated her like the daughter they never had. She learned English better than I ever did and was eventually accepted into the community. Meanwhile in Germany, my heroic death in combat over Normandy was reported and National Socialist accolades were posthumously bestowed upon me. Even Göring was said to be moved by my death. Anyway, not until I began limited touring of Europe did many figure out that Harmon Becker the pianist and Harmon Becker the dead flying ace were one and the same.”

  “Why did you not write about the Krupinskis? You have a publisher. Wouldn’t they want such a story?”

  I shake my head. “They’re a German military press. They needed no morality lectures from their authors. I suggested it to my editor once…as a purely hypothetical proposal. You know what he said? ‘Ach, Harmon. Enough of the Jews already. We need to get past that bit of unpleasantness.’ I guess I didn’t want to be the one to start pointing fingers at my own people. They would have just viewed me as a traitor anyway. ‘My country right or wrong,’ remember? I didn’t need the scorn. Maybe that makes me a coward.”

  “You’re not a coward, Mr. Becker,” Rachael assures me.

  “I wonder whatever happened to the Krupinskis?” I say with a distant look to the far windows. “Amelia heard Leo moved the family to America, but that’s all I know.”

  Rachael throws me a vulpine grin.

  I look at her, perplexed. “What? What are you smiling at, young lady?”

  She leans in. “Leopold Krupinski left England as soon as he could make arrangements and eventually settled the family in Lake Placid, New York, where he became a high school music teacher. He died in 1951 from complications due to pneumonia and his long stay in your wife’s attic. The climate of the mountains was not good for his damaged lungs, but it reminded him of his lost home. Constanze died ten years later. She would always say that the last six years of Leo’s life were the happiest for him despite his ill health, because he knew his family would live on. They did contact the US government to find your whereabouts, but many records were lost in a fire…and they didn’t exactly have software back then as backup. It was a frustrating experience for them, and they gave up and just moved on. The rest of the family drifted to New York City after Constanze died.”

  I raise my white brows in astonishment. So enthralled am I with Rachael’s unexpected denouement to my story, that I don’t even hear the knock on the door or the shuffling of Dora’s feet as she descends the stairs to answer.

  “How do you know so much about Leo’s family?” I ask. “I mean, why would you know? You’re the only person I’ve ever spoken to about this in such detail in decades. You must already know my connection to them, don’t you? What’s going on here?” I cough and then clear my throat. “I think it’s time you fulfill your quid pro quo and tell me why you are really here today.”

  She reached out to take my hand and calm this nervous pilot. What a change in attitude from her first condemnation of me as an old Nazi. I gaze down at her hand holding mine. It’s more calloused than I expected. She clearly lives life on the front lines.

  “Mr. Becker,” she says with a glint in her light eyes, “I know about your relationship with the Krupinski family because I am Leopold’s and Constanze’s granddaughter!”

  My eyes widen.

  She startles me even more as she gets up and steps around the coffee table and leans into me, throwing all pretext of the professional journalist to the wind.

  “Oh, Mr. Becker!” she cries. And then to complete my shock, she hugs me tight and buries one side of her weeping face into my sweater. I am unsure what to do. Should I hold her? I opt to give her a soothing pat on the back the way Karl Becker often showed affection to his boys. She continues as her tears dampen my sweater. “My mother’s name was Elsa Azerad. But Azerad was only her married name. Her maiden name was Elsa Krupinski. And I’m alive and here today because of you and what you did for her!”

  I feel her sobbing intensify. It reminds me of when Amelia first cried as she contemplated my going off to war. But I can tell these are tears of joy and gratitude. I stammer as I try to contemplate the significance of this revelation. “But Elsa’s a little girl,” I insist.

  “Not anymore,” Rachael says, pulling her face off my chest. She wipes the wet part with her sleeve. “She grew up, married, had children of her own, and lived a happy life. I have no doubt she’d have died a little girl like Anne Frank in the gas chambers but for your courage. Pancreatic cancer took her last winter. She went fast. And it wasn’t until I stumbled upon your book by chance at a book fair just a month ago that I got to wondering. Same name. But no mention of Mother’s family? That made no sense. It can’t be him. Becker is a common enough surname. But also a fighter pilot and pianist named Harmon Becker? I kept coming back to your face on the cover. A good man’s face. And as I flipped through the pages, the timeline fit and I realized who you were. They’d all given up finding you. There was no internet in their day, remember.” She opens her palms up, alternately laughing and weeping. “But they raised a snoopy reporter. And now here you are.”

  Then another voice comes from the doorway. “Yes, Harmon. Here we all are.”

  I look up as Rachael wipes her eyes and then sits down beside me. She sees my expression go from confusion to ebullient recognition. Standing at the French doors with Dora at his side is a distinguished man in a finely tailored suit and tie; he is in his early seventies, though he looks a decade younger. His bronzed face is thicker than I remember and deeply creased, and his coiled black hair has gone white and thin, but I recognize the sharp eyes and intense demeanor immediately. Still so alert and bright. And still very much alive.

  “Jake,” I say, shaking. Jakob Krupinski nods and steps into the room with his hands extended out to me in affectionate greeting.

  I make a move to stand up, but he implores me to stay seated. He turns to his niece. “I’m sorry Rachael, but I couldn’t wait at the pub any more. I had to see for myself.”

  Though he had gone on to found a company that manufactured rocket engine parts—sold to General Dynamics in 1998 for an unholy sum—I still see that young boy looking at me with such suspicion from below the hood of that 1922 Ford so many years ago. Against his protests I stand to face him. He comes to me. We shake hands. A handshake is inadequate and it becomes a manly embrace. Then we step back and each view the other up close, through the lens of time.

  I notice he bears something in his hand. A rectangular case. I glance down at the curious item. It appears to be a leather jewelry box. Perhaps it’s a watch. It has that regal yet earthy smell of freshly tanned hide. “What’s this?” I ask. “A gift for me?”

  Jakob smiles at Rachael and turns to Dora, who stands in the French doorway observing the curious scene. She has her mother’s smile. “This is something that belongs to you, Harmon. My mother wanted you to have it. Constanze never got to give it to you herself.”

  I open the case and am astounded by what I hold in my hand. I cannot contain myself, and I fall back seated on the couch. “Oh my goodness,” I say. Displayed in this fresh case is my polished Knight’s Cross.

  “Jake,” I say.

  “You gave this to my father a long time ago. I think he understood why. And I know before he died he felt that you’d earned it back in a way. It belongs to you, Harmon.”

  “But I gave this to your fat
her,” I protest weakly. “To remember me.”

  “And now his son is giving it back to you. When I think of that entire hellish trek, I remember most the kindness you showed Elsa.”

  I clear my throat as I run my trembling fingers over the sharp points of the edges of the eight-point Maltese Cross. The smooth fabric of the ribbon. Like a man reading Braille, I feel the decoration’s every contour, from the embossed “1939” to the terrible swastika that serves as a reminder of the vicious depths into which we are all capable of sinking if the stars align and evil is offered the reins of power.

  But it also tells me that it takes just one person with courage and moral clarity to break the spell and lead generations into a better world. This cross then is Amelia’s more than mine. She was, and will always be, my champion. The bravest person I have ever known. Someone whose grit was matched only by her decency, made all the brighter in its contrast to a dark world in which she alone faced the crucible of defying Hitler. She was not my wingman…I was hers. These people are in my house today because of my wife, who is no more.

  “I only wish my dear sister were here to share this moment with me,” Jake laments.

  I extend my free hand to Rachael and she takes it in hers. “I think Miss Rachael here is a fine substitute, don’t you?”

  “She is indeed.”

  Jakob looks to his niece with adoration, seeing his own sister Elsa alive in her, and himself alive because of an unlikely pair of saviors a long time ago.