Authors: Ursula Hegi
“I told you I’d be driving a car soon,” he called out to Trudi when he dropped off a passenger at the train station, where she stood by the ticket counter with Matthias Berger.
“And there I thought you were talking about your own car,” she
snapped. Shaking her head, she turned to Matthias, who looked at her, startled. “That Georg Weiler …” she said. “When you take away the bragging, he’s just a coward.”
Matthias was on his way to enter the seminary in Kaiserslautern, even though Trudi had tried to persuade him to stay out and study music instead. Ever since Fräulein Birnsteig’s suicide, he’d spent far more time in St. Martin’s Church than in the pay-library, praying for the soul of the pianist. It was Leo who’d figured out that Matthias had found a new mentor, Herr Pastor Beier, who’d pounced on the boy’s hesitant questions about what it was like to be a priest with such enthusiasm that Matthias had been propelled into applying to the seminary though he was only sixteen.
“Your talent…” Trudi urged him once again, “it’ll be wasted there.”
But playing the piano only made him sad. Somehow Trudi felt she’d failed him. If she hadn’t kept him from entering her house during those years of hiding fugitives, he might have stronger ties to Burgdorf. Of his relatives, only a grandmother was left, too frail to see him off at the station. Trudi supposed that she and her father were probably the closest he had to a family. It hadn’t been until after the Americans had arrived that she’d felt safe telling Matthias why she’d had to send him away from her door.
“One day I saw a boy inside your window,” he’d said. “A small boy.”
“That must have been Konrad. He and his mother were hiding with us.”
“He ducked when he saw me.…” He laughed, an embarrassed laugh that made his green eyes go dark. “I remember thinking that you and your father must have found another boy to play the piano for you.”
“Oh, Matthias.”
“I was younger then.”
“It would have endangered you, knowing about them.”
The sound of the approaching train burst into the station, and the front line of waiting people slanted back from the edge of the platform as if singed by a hot wind.
Matthias reached for his suitcases.
“Promise to visit us.”
“I will. And I’ll write.”
“You have your ticket?”
“In my pocket.”
To keep herself from crying, she tried to make him laugh. “Did you know that I wanted to be a priest when I was a little girl?” She told him about the candles and the Latin chants, the apple crate which had become her altar, and the sacrament—circles of rye.
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “I’ve always thought you’re one of the most courageous people I know. You do exactly what you want.”
“But that’s just stubbornness.”
“To me it’s courage.”
Although the green Hitler statue had long since been removed by the Americans, people would stare at the spot where it had stood whenever they’d pass the
Rathaus
, remembering the unknown benefactor who had lost his life there.
Inside the gates of the cemetery, the town erected a marble monument with three tall columns that listed the names of the soldiers who had died for the
Vaterland
. Still, on days when the light fell just so and memory offered a brief lull, you could almost convince yourself that the war had never happened. You’d grasp at the good moments and tell yourself all was well, and if you didn’t look too closely for too long, you could deceive yourself, along with all the others who had been broken in some way, altered. And then just when it felt that your life was back to the way it had been, something would happen to remind you of your brokenness: a father might fracture his child’s arm while punishing her; a dog might get run over by a tractor; a young man might choke on a fish bone; an American officer might come to your door.
As the Americans carried on their investigations, teachers who’d been members of the
Partei
lost their jobs. There were trials, convictions. Some were prosecuted unjustly, others went free even though they were guilty. Several teachers who feared upcoming interrogations fled overnight with their families, abandoning their homes. One threw himself in front of a train. Others swore they’d only joined the
Partei
out of fear for their lives or because they’d been forced to in order to enter their profession or be promoted. Their behavior during the war years had been exemplary, they insisted. Once they’d been in the
Partei
, of course, they’d been afraid not to comply because they would have been sent to a KZ.
“Undercover freedom fighters,” Klara Brocker’s American would say to her after another day of questioning. And he’d take her down to the cellar where he’d thrust into her on the blankets he’d spread across the cement floor by the potato bin. “Did you know—my German
Fräulein
—” His narrow face would move above hers, his hair much lighter than his eyebrows. “—that your entire country—was filled—with undercover—freedom fighters?”
Not only the teachers were investigated. People all over town were afraid of being turned in to the Americans by their neighbors or children, of hearing knocks at their doors and being picked up, of not finding work or losing the jobs they had. It struck Trudi as an ironic and just parallel to what the Jews had suffered for so many years, and she didn’t feel any sympathy when people like Frau Heidenreich and her friends elaborated on their own suffering. Hadn’t they become the real victims? Hadn’t they endured separation within their families? Panic when the bombs had fallen? Many of them lamented the years without their children. While the Jews were treated like royalty, ordinary people like them were still persecuted, questioned about their political beliefs, although they’d had no idea what had really been going on in the KZs till after the war, and then they’d been shocked, no—horrified.
It became a scramble to get letters of recommendation from those who had not joined the
Partei
, people who had resisted the Nazis, though at the time it had seemed to everyone else like foolishness. But now it was good to know people like that, better yet if they owed you a favor.
The pay-library had never been so busy. People tugged at Trudi and her father, begging them to write letters that would testify to their impeccable character and prove they’d always opposed the
Partei
. And as they brought tales that proclaimed their innocence, tales they hoped Trudi would distribute, she felt used: as a storyteller, she knew the border between truth and lies, and she would circulate their tales with introductions like “This is what he would like people to believe.…” And then she’d speculate about what had really happened. If it was within her conscience, she wrote the letters, but she refused to back up versions of a fabricated truth, especially if they were connected to gifts. In those months after the war, she had more enemies and friends than ever before.
Frau Blau was less selective than Trudi about the letters she wrote.
“If we can help each other,” she’d say, “we may as well. Times are difficult enough.”
Two Protestant families in Burgdorf, who, it turned out, had also hidden Jews, felt more like Trudi and refused to whitewash anyone who had sympathized with the Nazis. One family lived next to the taxidermist. When he asked these neighbors to vouch for him in a letter, they turned him away.
“I can’t,” Trudi told him when he came to her.
“You hid Jews. I never turned you in.”
“You didn’t even know I had people here.”
“I knew. I saw them … coming late at night. Leaving with Herr Hesping. But—I didn’t want trouble for you and your father.”
She stared at him, realizing he was speaking the truth. “That’s not enough.”
“I lost my daughter too, Fräulein Montag.”
“About that I’m sorry.… But I can’t help you.”
He leaned across the counter, pushing two piles of books aside. His eyes were tortured. “Herr Hitler only wanted the best for us.”
“And look what we got. Just look what we got, Herr Heidenreich.”
“But he wanted the best. He did. If I can’t believe that—” He stopped abruptly. Shivered. “You have to admit, in the beginning he wanted the best.”
Though Herr Stosick, whose hair had never grown back after his son’s death, did not ask for her support, Trudi went to his house one evening and volunteered to write a letter for him.
“That’s kind of you, but I don’t think I need to impose on you.” He led her into the kitchen, where his wife was unraveling a moth-eaten cardigan, saving the intact yarn for socks she would knit.
Herr Stosick pulled out a chair for Trudi and urged her to sit down. “I have reason to be grateful to Herr Neumaier for keeping the membership money he took from my wife. Thanks to him, I can prove that I didn’t join the
Partei
So few teachers have been allowed back into the schools again … none of the ones who were in the
Partei
. Such a dilemma. I probably would have ended up having to join, but I kept saying that I’d already paid my membership fee.”
It sounded as if he’d regained some of his self-respect. “It’s my life, the teaching,” he said. “But I worry about the children. They don’t have the same kind of respect for their teachers as before the war. And
we have no schoolbooks, no teaching materials. Most of us teach from memory.”
One morning in October, when Trudi opened the library, Paul Weinhart’s elderly mother stood waiting outside, eyes swollen, fingers plucking the front of her tweed coat. “Paul—he has been arrested. The Amis took him in while he was delivering potatoes. You’ve known him since you were children, Trudi. Please—just write that he’s not the kind of person who’d harm anyone.…” She opened her handbag and thrust a pad of ivory stationery at Trudi. “Please?”
Trudi could see Paul’s face as though he were standing in front of her. At thirty, he looked the way he had as a boy—only taller, broader—and his toes still pointed outward when he walked. “Did your son send you?”
The old woman shook her head. “I haven’t seen him since they took him away … yesterday.”
I don’t want your son to know any happiness. No happiness at all
. But what Trudi said was: “I’m not the right person to ask.”
“You are in a position to help him. The Amis will listen to you.”
“I’m not the right person to ask, Frau Weinhart.”
“You were in school together.”
Trudi was silent.
“Why can’t you then?”
Trudi shook her head.
“What is it?”
“You are a good woman, Frau Weinhart.… I don’t want to hurt you. But I can’t write that letter,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “because I know that your son is the kind of person who would harm someone.”
The Buttgereits who, along with many others, had been
gehorsame Bürger
—obedient citizens—now claimed they had opposed the Nazis. As proof they offered the fate of their third-youngest daughter, Bettina. “A war heroine,” they called her, and retold the story of how she’d run up to the saddest of all trains with the bread to help the starving and how she’d been captured, wrestled to the ground, taken away forever with the prisoners.
“My daughter stood for what our family believed in,” her father would declare in Potter’s tavern, pounding his hand on the table, the same hand he used to raise in the
Heil Hitler
. “Any member of my
family would have done what Bettina did. And don’t forget—” Here his eyes would grow moist. “—don’t forget that my only son died, a victim of the Nazis because he was a cripple.”
His wife would tell you she had tried to be good to Jews whenever she could. “I spoke out for the Jews,” she’d inform you, “I did, as long as it didn’t put me in danger.” Yet, she still wore her golden
Ehrenkreuz der deutschen Mutter
—the cross of honor for the German mother—and didn’t seem to understand that wearing it implied support of Hitler. “It’s too valuable to throw out,” she’d protest. “Besides, I earned it.”
Trudi found it harder to tolerate cowards like Herr and Frau Buttgereit than fanatics like the butcher, who took pride in having supported the Führer. At least old Anton Immers was honest. Wrong, but honest. But she was getting fed up with all those who vowed that—although they’d been in the
Partei
—they had resisted in their hearts.
Hearts
. “They either don’t have hearts,” she told Ingrid one Sunday when they took Rita to the playground, “or if they do, those hearts are hollow.”
“My father’s heart is black.” Ingrid sat down on the bench, hands folded on her knees. “My father cuts up pictures. He keeps the faces, the bodies.”
Rita pulled at her mother’s black coat, but Ingrid’s eyes stared past her.
“Come,” Trudi said and lifted Rita onto the wooden swing. “Hold on tight. I’ll push you.”
“He cuts out
Hakenkreuz
pins from lapels.…” Ingrid’s voice rose above the squeaking of the swing chains. “He cuts out hands that hold flags. He cuts out the insignia on my brother’s and husband’s uniforms.…”
Ingrid’s husband, Ulrich, had arrived home from the war in May, found work with the railroad in August, impregnated Ingrid in September, and died in October, when a coal train derailed in Bonn. Ingrid was certain his death was her penance, that she’d been meant to be an illegitimate mother.
“But you’re a widow,” Trudi had pointed out to her the morning of his funeral.
Ingrid had shaken her head. “It’s God’s way of telling me he never accepted my marriage.”
As far as Ingrid was concerned, she had two illegitimate children—one already born and another expanding within her—and she fretted that this tainted her children’s status regarding original sin. “It has to be even worse for them than for children who come from blessed marriages.”
“The priest blessed your marriage,” Trudi reminded her.
“It was a coverup marriage. I already was with child. It would have been better for my daughter never to have been born.”
“Don’t say that.”
“For the new child, too … The sin begins with the parents. It’s passed down.”
Ingrid even felt responsible for the sins and suffering of her brother, Holger, who’d been a member of the SA and was a prisoner in an American camp near Würzburg. Before Ingrid’s husband had died, he’d taken her on the train to visit Holger. Though they couldn’t enter the camp, they were allowed to talk with her brother through the links of the fence. At first Ingrid didn’t recognize him—his face was gaunt, and his body was stooped like that of an old man.