The Woman from Hamburg (11 page)

When she came to, she understood that she was already at home, sitting at the table and holding her arms around a small cardboard box. In the box was Stani’s clothing and a tattered Polish prayer book:
We Sing to the Lord
.

Dark green, bright green, a stripe of blue, the tall roof of the hotel. Gizela washed dishes and cleaned rooms; the flat roof of the laundry—Gizela folded and packed men’s shirts …

The tourists’ favorite occupation was going for walks in the neighboring forests. The children’s favorite occupation was throwing pine cones at the tourists. The director of the school summoned Gizela: “Your son is throwing pine cones at our tourists.”

“All the children throw them,” said Gizela. “Why are you complaining only about my child?”

“Your daughter,” the director of the school said on another day.

“Your son …”

“Your daughter …”

“It’s because the other fathers,” Stefan explained, “were war heroes.”

Gizela was upset. The other children told stories about their hero-fathers—beautiful, noble stories. The fathers fired guns, primarily on the Eastern front. The fathers perished, but to the last drop of their blood … And what could her children tell them? That their father dreamed of being a number THREE or SIX? Could a father who ran barefoot around the barracks and prayed that one of those numbers … Could such a father be compared with heroes of the Eastern front? Could the son of such a father arouse kindly feelings in the director of the school?

(A woman from their village whose birthday is the same as Stefan’s sends him a greeting card every year. As a postscript she adds one sentence, always the same: “If it weren’t for the director of the school, you would have grown up to be a decent man.” Stefan already has twenty-odd cards from that woman and twenty-odd times that sentence as a postscript: “If it weren’t for the director of the school …”)

“Anyway,” the other mothers told the other children, “if his father was in a camp, there was a reason for it. Hitler or no Hitler, nobody was sentenced without a reason.”

After yet another incident when Stefan ran away from school, Gizela requested advice from pedagogues. These were pedagogues in the Department of Youth Services. They advised her to entrust her son to a reformatory. “He’ll wind up there sooner or later,” the pedagogues said, “but
if you hand him over voluntarily, it will be easier to get him out when he wises up.”

Stefan says he was in the reformatory for a year.

Stefan sits in an isolation cell, in a particularly well-guarded part of the prison known as the Maximum Security Section.

He’s been in this cell for twelve years.

After twelve years of isolation, the past has become blurred in his mind; space and time are foreshortened. It is sixty kilometers to the city where Gizela lives now; it seems to him that the city is nearby. It seems to him that he was in the reformatory for one year, but the documents in his case file—the case for which he’s serving time in the Maximum Security Section—clearly show that he spent six years in the reformatory.

The director of the reformatory was a pastor, a tall man with a puffy face and strong fists.

The pastor gave his charges three grades every week: for work, for studying, and for behavior. The lowest grade was six and the highest, one. If someone got even one six, he spent the weekend in an isolation room. There were two boards in it. You could sit on the lower board; on the upper board, you could rest your arms and head.

From time to time the boys in the reformatory would try to escape, but they soon returned, brought back by
the police. After their return they would talk about what was happening on the outside. One of the youths, who had run away to Frankfurt, told them that university students were protesting against the corrective methods employed in reformatories. A girl had written a film script about this, and some people wanted to establish a juvenile home with entirely different methods.

The screenplay girl was named Ulrike Meinhof, and the girl with the entirely different methods was named Gudrun Ensslin.

After Stani’s death Gizela petitioned the authorities: Her husband had died as a result of kidney disease; the illness was the result of his stay in a concentration camp. Stani W.’s four children, Gizela wrote, deserved compensation.

Gizela W.’s attorney was informed that he should apply to the Office for Compensation Requests in Baden-Württemberg.

The Office requested the records of Stanisław W.’s illness from the clinic.

The clinic was unable to confirm that Stanisław W.’s illness was a consequence of his time in the camp. In particular, the back of Stanisław W.’s eye yielded no conclusive evidence. The clinic requested an opinion from the Institute of Pathology.

The Institute of Pathology was unable to confirm anything.

The attorney appealed the negative decision.

Gizela W. wrote a letter: “Does the German state believe that my children should drop dead? I am not a beggar; I am fighting for what is owed me.”

The attorney regretted that Mrs. Gizela W. had written such an inappropriate letter.

The Office for Compensation Requests rejected the request because the deceased did not meet the conditions of §1.2, but suggested that she could petition for compensation under §167.

Eight years after Stanisław W.’s death the mayor of Cologne informed Mrs. Gizela W. that: The government of the Federal Republic of Germany had signed an agreement with the High Commissioner of the United Nations to the effect that persecutions based on ethnicity would be subject to new legal regulations.

The mayor of Cologne informed Mrs. Gizela W.: “There is no proof that the deceased was persecuted for political reasons, for reasons of race, belief, or ideology. If he was persecuted, it was for reasons of ethnicity. This compensation is not transferrable to the heirs.”

During her first prison visits Gizela used to say to the bullet-proof glass with the openings on both sides: “If
your father were alive, he would certainly not praise you for this. When the Americans liberated the camp they put a stick in your father’s hands and said, ‘Take revenge.’ And do you know what your father told them? ‘Thank you, gentlemen, but I am not suited for such things.’ ”

After his visits with his mother Stefan got into the habit of carrying on lengthy conversations with his father.

“They gave you a stick, not a machine pistol,” Stefan would begin. “It was only a stick. Why didn’t you want to take it from them?”

He wasn’t sure of his father’s answer. “I am not suited …” is not a sufficient answer, so he would start over: “No doubt you thought that the world had to change after Dachau. All right then, take a look at this world. Look at the fists of the director of the reformatory. Look at the two boards in the isolation cell. Look at me, sitting on one board and resting my head on the other. And remember, too, my mother’s face whenever she came back from the bureaucrats in charge of compensation. OK, so you didn’t want a stick, but I beg you, take a good look at my mother’s face.”

He addressed his father with growing indignation. As if there existed a connection between the director’s fists and the stick his father didn’t take, the bureaucrats dealing with compensation requests and the isolation cell in the Maximum Security Section.

From the life history included in the case records: He worked on a ship for a few months. For two weeks he was a machinist. He established contact with left-wing radicals. He took part in a demonstration against the Minister of Justice. He contributed his unemployment compensation to a fund for the defense of prisoners. He was connected with persons who were preparing a terrorist attack on the German Embassy in Stockholm. He joined the underground of the RAF—the Röte Armee Faktion or Red Army Faction.

From the case files: Members of the RAF rented several apartments in the area. They stole a yellow Mercedes and bought a white minibus. They prepared two Heckler & Koch carbines, one Polish-made WZ 63 machine pistol that took Makarov cartridges, one Colt revolver …

At 5:30 p.m. a blue Mercedes carrying Dr. Hanns Martin Schleyer and his driver drove up, followed by a white Mercedes with three policemen. They turned right, and then a yellow Mercedes drove off the sidewalk and into the roadway. Dr. Schleyer’s driver braked. Men leaped out of the minibus and opened fire on the driver and policemen; they dragged out Dr. Schleyer, who was not wounded, and drove off in a westerly direction. The attack lasted two minutes. The driver and the three policemen died on the spot. The driver took five bullets, one of
which was fatal; the first policeman was shot twenty-three times, two shots causing fatal wounds; the second policeman was shot twenty-four times, three of them fatal; the third, twenty times, three of them fatal—in all, a total of one hundred bullets. All the fatal shots were administered with 9-mm Makarov cartridges. This happened in Cologne, on September 5, 1977.

Hanns Martin Schleyer was the president of the Employers’ Association of the Federal Republic of Germany. In exchange for his freedom, the hostage-takers demanded the release from prison of ten RAF terrorists, among them Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.

On October 13 four Arab terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa airplane; they landed in Mogadishu and repeated the demands of the RAF.

On October 17 German commandos freed the passengers and killed three of the hijackers. The pilot died, shot by the terrorists.

Several hours later, prison guards in Stammheim found the corpses of RAF members Baader and Raspe, who were dead from bullet wounds. Gudrun Ensslin was hanging in a window. It was determined that she had committed suicide.

Two days later, Dr. Schleyer’s corpse was found in the trunk of an abandoned Audi 100.

Seven months later, in 1978, Stefan W. was arrested at Orly Airport and charged with the abduction and murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer.

The trial took place in 1980. Stefan W. refused to testify about the abduction and murder, but he gladly expressed his opinions about the actual aims of the German bourgeoisie, the tentacles of neocolonialism in the Third World, and the Vietnam War, which revealed the true face of American imperialism. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

The terrorists were surrounded with hatred and fear. It was feared that they were producing an atom bomb and would want to use it. Polls showed a rapid rise in proponents of the death penalty. Gudrun Ensslin’s ten-year-old son was splashed with muriatic acid. It happened during his school vacation. The boy was playing; it was adults who threw the bottle. His face was burned. He was taken to the United States. American doctors performed three skin transplants. They were successful; the doctors were experienced because they had operated on soldiers who were burned by napalm in the Vietnam War. Not one cemetery would bury the trio of terrorists from Stammheim. People demanded that the bodies be cremated and the ashes scattered, or else that the remains be thrown into a landfill. In the end, they were buried in a cemetery in Stuttgart, at the mayor’s request. The mayor was Manfred Rommel, the son of Field Marshal Rommel, the Desert Fox from the North African campaign
and participant in a plot against Hitler. The mayor appealed to mercy. Because he was a Christian. Because among the dead was Gudrun, his neighbors’ daughter. Because long ago, in Ulm, Gudrun Ensslin’s parents lived two houses away from Manfred Rommel’s parents.

Mr. Ensslin was a pastor. After the war his daughters, Christiana and Gudrun, had asked the same question that Stani asked Gizela W.: “DID YOU KNOW?”

Unlike Gizela, the pastor knew. He knew the Stauffenberg conspirators; they belonged to his parish. He knew the circumstances of Rommel’s death in the nearby stone quarries.

His daughters were angry at him for not having denounced the crimes. He should have denounced them publicly, from the pulpit, during services.

The pastor explained that the Gestapo were present at services.

“That’s no reason to have kept silent,” his daughters replied.

Christiana Ensslin, her hair clipped short, with sunken black eyes and wearing a stretched-out sweater, lives with a terrorist who served sixteen years in prison and then was pardoned by the president. She is friends with a woman terrorist who is still in prison, but is already partially pardoned: she spends the nights in prison, while during the
day she sews costumes for
La Traviata
at the city opera. When she receives her complete pardon she will go on vacation to visit a Swedish princess known as the Angel of Prisoners. Christiana Ensslin is an activist in the Union of Film Workers. She fights for greater funding for women directors. She would love to finance a film about Rosa Luxemburg’s first day of freedom. It is 1918; Rosa leaves the Breslau prison, boards a train, travels to Berlin, enters the editorial office, greets Liebknecht, sits down at her desk, and starts writing. She is writing an article about the situation in Germany. That’s all very well, but who will go to see such a film? “I will,” says the terrorist who was in prison for sixteen years. “I will,” says the terrorist who sews costumes for
La Traviata
. “I will,” says Christiana, whose father did not condemn the crimes. “I will,” says Dr. Ronge, who translates for our Polish-German conversations. “I will,” I say, although I have no intention of going to see a film about Rosa Luxemburg’s first day of freedom. I say this out of sympathy for skinny, neurotic Christiana Ensslin. And that would have been the entire audience.

The Maximum Security Section was built especially for Stefan W. and his friends from the RAF. It is located in the depths of the prison, in Ossendorf, in the northern part of Cologne. No daylight enters the cells. The walls
are made of sound- and odor-absorbing materials. Keys don’t jangle, the combination locks don’t creak, and the coffee that Stefan W. brews has no aroma. Stefan has brought a thermos with boiling water and little jars to the visitation cell. He shakes out some Nescafe and sugar from the jars, stirs them for a long time, gradually pours in boiling water from the thermos, and makes cappuccino. The visitation cell is a concrete container, decorated with several pictures. They portray Peter the Great on his stone horse, a review of the troops on Senate Square, and a bridge on the Moika in winter garb. The pictures were put up by Stefan’s warden, a fellow by the name of Hemmers, who nurses a fondness for Petersburg.