Aamie's War: Women and Children
On the German Homefront

By Marga Dieter

What they're saying about AAMIE'S WAR

"Profoundly moving I couldn't put it down!"

Zella Brown, Cofounder of One By One
Jewish German Reconciliation Through Dialogue

"A compelling and sensitive personal account, at times charming and tender, at times grimly upsetting Honest, painful and necessary, this book offers an important perspective rarely read in America. An important addition to the human saga of war and the tragic condition of mankind in all it's paradoxical complexity."

Lawrence Lowenthal, Director of the New England Region
American Jewish Committee

"Marga Dieter captures so well the thinking and heart of a little German girl caught in the ravages of the Second World War."

Joan Ecklein, Former Co-Chair of the Boston Chapter
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

"These poignant experiences of an innocent, bright and lively young girl, acutely remembered by an adult woman, and told with sensitivity and a wonderful sense of drama, will fill the void left by the silent generation of Germany's war children."

Barbara Eskin, Moderator of the German Book Club
Goethe Institute, Boston

Bombs, destruction and emotional devastation form the backdrop for Aamie's childhood on the homefront in Germany during World War II. What might seem crushing to most little girls is just everyday life for her.

In a neighborhood where the walls are plastered with posters proclaiming "THE ENEMY IS ALWAYS LISTENING!" and people live by the secrets they keep, any revelation of her mother's sentiments against the Nazis is a danger to her family's very survival.

Her father, in the Navy, is eventually captured and serves as a POW, until Aamie is nine years old.

Her mother's struggle to maintain their family and raise two teenage boys, who are members of the mandatory Hitler Youth program, within the turmoil of war-torn Germany drives her to physical and nervous breakdown.

Yet Aamie, with the support of her Greek Chorus of celluloid dolls, ponders and overcomes these obstacles with an irrepressible tom-boy spirit.

An intensely told story of a wartime childhood, this book is a reminder of how children's emotional lives play out against the horror and destruction of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 27, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595839469

Marga Dieter

Marga Dieter was born on the eve of World War II in Germany. She has taught German, French, and English in high school, college, and corporations in the U.S. and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Aamie's War is her first novel.

Book preview

Reviewers talk about  AAMIE’S WAR

"Marga Dieter has written a compelling and sensitive portrait of a young German girl, coming into consciousness during the horrific days of World War II.  Her personal account, at times charming and tender, and at times grimly upsetting, offers an important perspective — rarely read in America — of the experience of German citizens caught up in the ravages of war.

Dieter’s subjective account is an important addition to the human saga of war and the suffering endured by all its participants, both victims and perpetrators.  Her book provides a crucial expansion of our ever growing knowledge of the tragic condition of man, in all its paradoxical complexity. This book is brutally honest, painful and necessary.

Lawrence Lowenthal, Director of the New England Region

American Jewish Committee

"Germany’s war children, largely ignored and voluntarily mute for many years, are finally speaking up.  The ‘Forgotten Generation,’ as Sabine Bode refers to it in her analytical study with that title, finds voice in two recent books by German-born writers. ‘Don’t Ever Leave Me,’ by Angela Thompson, and now ‘Aamie’s War,’ by Marga Dieter.

"What was it like to be born into a world of hidden shame and devastating loss?  How was it possible for a child to ‘grow’ in an environment of destruction?  How could a child make sense of events which were beyond comprehension?  Marga Dieter does not simply answer these questions.  Instead, she invites the reader to see that world from the perspective of an innocent, bright and lively young girl.  She makes us empathize with little Aamie.  I was touched by her love and trust, moved by her losses - and I delighted in her victories!

These poignant stories, experienced by a little girl, acutely remembered by an adult woman, and told with sensitivity and a wonderful sense of drama, will fill the void left by a silent generation of Germany’s war children.

Barbara Eskin, Moderator of the German Book Club

Goethe Institute, Boston

AAMIE’S

WAR

Women and Children on the German Homefront

An Autobiographical Novel by

Marga Dieter

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

Aamie’s War

Women and Children on the German Homefront

Copyright © 2007 by Marga Dieter

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any

means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written

permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in

critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

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1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-0-5958-3946-9 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-0-5953-9549-1 (sc)

Contents

Aknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE: - FAIRY TALES

Chapter 1 - MUSICAL CHAIRS

Chapter 2 - SURPRISE

Chapter 3 - HOMECOMING

Chapter 4 - THE TRAIN

Chapter 5 - SECRETS

Chapter 6 - VOGELHEIM

Chapter 7 - THE ORACLE

Chapter 8 - FEAR

Chapter 9 - THE PRIEST

Chapter 10 - THE SHOES

Chapter 11 - REVENGE

Chapter 12 - BIRTHDAY

Chapter 13 - SALVATION

Chapter 14 - CHRISTMAS

Chapter 15 - CONFLAGRATION

Chapter 16 - EVACUATION

Chapter 17 - LIBERATION

Chapter 18 - MÄDCHEN !

Chapter 19 - OCCUPATION

Chapter 20 - LOSS

Chapter 21 - COFFEE

Chapter 22 - FAST FORWARD

Chapter 23 - HOMEFRONT

Chapter 24 - GUILT

Chapter 25 - HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Who Is That Little Girl On The Cover?

Dedicated to all the mothers and children in the wars of this world.

Aknowledgements

This book owes many things to many people, especially to those who sat in Jewish-German Dialogue circles with me where the idea was born.

My deep appreciation to my writing friends, Theresa Blagg and Daisy Scott, who enthusiastically bolstered my first attempts at writing. They shared many cups of tea and eased the passge with practical feedback to develope my writing style.

Throughout, it was the consulting and generous support of my husband and editor, Paul Wiers, that was crucial in finding the heart of the story. His attention to detail and reading yet another of my revisions helped pave the way toward publication. I could always count on him, right down to the design of the cover.

Finally, it is my amazing ancestors I want to honor; they gave me a life to love and write about.

INTRODUCTION

"Everything that happens in our family happens in relation to these events,

But the war itself is invisible."

Martha Cooley, The Archivist, 1998

Young children have a knowledge of the world around them - - thoughts and perceptions which they cannot express because they lack the necessary vocabulary - - these experiences are nonetheless remembered in their bodies as felt sense.

* * * * * * *

I was born in Germany at the beginning of World War II. My ears are tuned and my body springs to hyper-alert at the very first signal of danger. I cannot turn it off. Such is the legacy of a childhood on the home front.

After I grew up and realized that I was German in a Post-Holocaust world, I tried to understand, to make it make sense. But shame and guilt had their way with me. It wasn’t until I had a chance to participate in Jewish German dialogue that I found compassion. Of course for the Jews – but shockingly, to me, also for the Germans. Tell us more about growing up in the war! urged the Jewish voices from the other side of our circle.

It took years of sharing stories before we related to each other as human beings; before our dire and divisive legacy could be transformed, albeit not altered, but accepted and mourned. It is in this context that my adult is giving voice to the the felt sense of my inner child, a child of war.

And so, my story begins.

Marga Dieter, April 2007

PROLOGUE:

FAIRY TALES

September 1943

Life and death are but fairy tales of the gods…

We were in a hurry. Sigmund reached for my hand, pulling me along as he strode down the dingy, second-floor hallway to the Berens’ apartment. He was my big brother. We had come to give his friend, Karl, a turn with the math book the two boys shared at school. We had to be back for our Mittagessen - lunch - Mutti was preparing for us in our own apartment up the street; nobody kept Mutti waiting. I was always running to keep up with them.

Sigmund knocked on their kitchen door - solid, white and indestructable - German.

I liked Frau Berens. She was jollier than the other women in our neighborhood. Whenever Sigmund brought me along to see Karl, she flung her arms wide open to greet me with a belly full of laughter.

No answer. He swung the heavy door open.

Frau Berens was sitting at the table with Karl curled up on her lap. Sigmund smirked.

She was rocking back and forth, paying us no heed, her glazed eyes frozen on her son. When I closed the kitchen door behind us, I saw that it had covered a jagged hole in the wall, apparently blown out by one of the errant bombs which must have been intended for an industrial military target.

Otherwise, the kitchen looked like it always did, large and sparse, but cozy. The old stone sink and wash-board drain counter, set on a shiny, white metal base, the only cabinet in the room, huddled beside a gaping crack in the worn blue linoleum floor. Sauerkraut and potato fumes rising from a pot on the black coal stove in the corner pierced my nostrils and burnt my eyes. An eerie silence hammered in my ears, like the evening curfew that spread like a pall over our street and into my bed before the sirens cut away to summon us to action.

The large window at the opposite end of the room was blown out; a nice, clean view down to the back yard, where their gnarled old apple-tree had been decapitated. Suddenly my teeth chattered. A damp chill blew into the room. I pressed my face into Sigmund, ducking into the crook above his waist.

From the safety of Sigmund’s arms, I snuck a look at Frau Berens and Karl sitting together on that painted chair. She was cuddling her little boy, who was already taller than she was ever going to be. One hand clutched the neck of his light brown Deutsche Jungvolk - pre Hitler Youth - shirt while her other arm reached around his back to hold him close to her. When I looked up at Sigmund’s face, his brow was pinched beneath his carefully combed mop of blond hair. His smirk had given way to straight lips, drawn tight.

He brushed me aside and rushed toward his friend. I stuck so close to Sigmund that I almost fell over his feet when he stopped short and dropped to his knees in front of Karl and his mother, just shy of a rapidly swelling pool of blood. It oozed everywhere, seeping fresh and bright out of Karl’s side onto his mother’s grey apron, changing color as it rose up her flannel house-dress, spreading swiftly like spilt ink on blotting paper. Frau Berens’ head turned slowly toward us, like a windmill running out of air. Her wide, vacant eyes came to rest on Sigmund as she reached down Karl’s back for a better grip, trying to hold him tighter, to get him just a little closer.

Sigmund pushed both hands under his friend’s rear end and lifted the limp, slippery body up toward his mother. When he pulled out his hands, they were soaked with blood. He stared at them, glancing back and forth between mother, son and his hands, before his head started to shake like a drenched dog. As he turned to look at me, I could see straight into his deep chestnut eyes. They were floating loose in their sockets. His lower lip was clenched beneath his teeth.

What is it, Sigmund?

I tugged on his bloody sleeve, hoping he’d tell me that Karl just had to be taken to the hospital. It never occurred to me that Karl was never going to get up and poke me in the chest, just to get a rise out of me. It’s not that I hadn’t seen people die before. I knew that fire-bombs and artillery shells destroyed whole houses, burying the people in them. I knew because it had happened to three houses on our street. I knew we would die, buried in our nothing-more-than-a-root-cellar basement shelter, if a bomb were to drop directly on our roof. I’d even seen a man cut down like a sheaf of wheat in his wide open field at the edge of the city when a low-flying fighter plane strafed him.

But this was different. This was Karl! In the middle of the day… in his own kitchen … sliced up by shrapnel. Sigmund could have been there with him, explaining the geometry problems Karl couldn’t fathom. Only yesterday, Karl had studied at our kitchen table, tickling my feet whenever he got bored. I realized it could have been Sigmund in our kitchen. It could have been me.

My brother was still kneeling next to me, like an altar boy, before our version of The Pieta. His voice cracked, half man - half boy.

I have to take my little sister home, Frau Berens, but I’ll be right back.

Don’t go! Tell me what Karl said when you rushed home from school after the alarm this morning, Frau Berens pleaded.

Sigmund choked back tears. He said to come over after the bombers left.

She slumped over her son and began to weep. It was as if Sigmund’s voice had given her permission to cry.

He must have come looking for me here in the kitchen, she sobbed, instead of going right down to the bomb-shelter. She rocked back and forth, wiping her nose on Karl’s shirt. It’s my reward for being so stubborn, for not following the rules to take refuge in the basement. She wrapped her arm a little more firmly around his waist, the way she might have soothed his nightmares at a younger age.

Eyes still glued on Karl, Sigmund groped for me with his bloody hand, pulling me backwards, out of the kitchen and then quickly up the street, past the handful of houses we knew as well as our backyard. By the time we reached our front door, our hands were glued together with dried blood.

Now go inside, Aamie and clean yourself off. But don’t you upset Mutti. Just tell her I’m eating at Karl’s. He turned on his heel and vanished.

Sigmund knew I’d do everything he said. He was big and tall and fourteen, a little more than eight years older than I. When I saw my friend Karin with her father, I figured Sigmund was the closest thing to the father we didn’t have in our family. It was Sigmund who fixed the elastic that held my doll’s arms to her body. It was he who gave me half of his own small piece of the pork or chicken we got once a week for Sunday dinner. And it was Sigmund who made me laugh - jumping out to boo from behind the front door or twisting his handsome face into a gargoyle. Whatever he said, I believed him even more than Pater Schunk, our priest at the Cathedral. I couldn’t imagine liking anyone more than my Sigmund, except for the doll I got last Christmas, whom I named Frieda, which was my mother’s name - not one I ever got to use for her; she was strictly Mutti to me.

I couldn’t really remember my father. He had enlisted in the Kriegsmarine - Navy - to avoid conscription in the infantry before I was two years old. Whenever I asked why he did that, Mutti responded disdainfully, better that than canon fodder. Now he was stationed somewhere in Northern Germany. There was a picture of him in a crisp grey uniform on my mother’s dresser: JÜRGEN GUTMANN, Gefreiter — Petty Officer. I knew all about him because he wrote so many letters. My mother read them out loud at the dinner table. His was the fifth chair, empty.

Sigmund and my other big brother, Axel, who was only two years younger but much shorter than he, loved to talk about Papa so much that no meal was complete without some story about him. "He was the only boy in his grade smart enough to go to the Gymnasium -German college prep school. Of course our Mutti was even smarter, but her father wouldn’t let her leave the farm." Mutti would look demurely down at her plate.

School must have been much more important back then, I thought. My brothers often didn’t go if air raids threatened. And I knew that next year when I’d start school, I’d have to skip during times when I had to help my mother on the farm. At the rate I was going, there would be no Gymnasium for me, just like there hadn’t been for Mutti.

The boys knew so many stories, which tumbled out of them like coins from a piggybank. Take the time Axel got to go with Papa for a visit to an insurance client. As a kindness, Papa fixed a kettle for the woman of the house and she invited them to stay for supper. It was so late and dark by the time they left, that they rode the bike right into a patch of broken glass. With the gashed tire swooshing along the pavement, the walking was slow. It was almost light outside before they got home. As my brother glowed in the memory of that nasty night, Mutti rolled her eyes and waved him off with a sweep of her hand, looking only slightly less irritated than she probably had at the time.

To me, their stories were no different than fairytales - Sleeping Beauty’s family waiting for the charming Prince to come and release everybody from the cursed spell, this terrible war. I liked fairytales, they were my only books. But I was a bit worried about this one. Since I was certain that fairytales never came true, I wondered what that meant about my father.

Chapter 1

MUSICAL CHAIRS

September 1943

I was still standing in the same spot where Sigmund had dropped me. The heavy wooden front door to our building, with two small windows at the top, stood tightly bolted in front of me. There was no way around it, I had to ring the doorbell.

When Mutti, as tall as Sigmund, her carefully ironed white apron neatly covering her blue striped dress, opened the door for me, her piercing blue eyes gave me that once-over look. She could spot even the tiniest hair out of place. Two combs, one on each side of her thin, angular face, kept her thick blonde hair from spilling forward as she bent over to inspect my white knitted stockings. I held my breath and hoped the blood had not spattered. Keeping my hands safely in my pockets, I angled to head straight for the bathroom.

Axel sat dark and stubby at the kitchen table waiting for me to sit down so that we could eat our big noon-time meal, which was getting smaller by the day. Mutti had prepared semolina dumplings with stewed apricots and prunes. I loved the rich, melted brown butter with roasted bread crumbs in which she rolled the white balls before she carefully placed one on each plate.

Is something wrong? Mutti asked sharply, her forehead creased tightly.

Oh, no, I sat down quickly with a big smile, trying to ignore Axel’s drumming on the table. It’s not that my mother hadn’t surmised the terror all over my face, it’s that she knew it only too well. She hated surprises, especially the dreadful ones she couldn’t fix, which included all of my feelings. They did not fit the sense of duty she lived by and instilled in us. They rendered her vulnerable and could make her sick enough to go to bed and lock her door. Mutti was my compass and her moods the wind I sailed by.

No? Mutti was getting more vexed by the second. Then where is Sigmund? There’s something you are not telling me.

He said he wasn’t hungry, I placated, looking down to avoid her bewildered stare; in truth, we were always hungry. Her free hand pressed emphatically on her hip as she handed me my plate. But all I could think of was her hectoring tone. It was my pre-alert, like the first low gasp of an air raid siren, to remain calm and confident; when I looked scared, my mother got mad.

Mutti kept his plate for herself. The corners of her mouth turned down and her face flushed. She flipped her dumpling one way, then the other, the way a cat plays with a cornered mouse, teasing it, batting it, but not interested in actually eating it.

Ungrateful children. I slave away at my parents farm to bring home extras for you. What if you had to get along just on our rations like the rest of your friends? Well, eating at the Berens’ will serve him right. Do you think he will get food as good as ours?

She looked at me, waiting for a response. I told her dutifully that the food at Karl’s would never be as good as hers. But I could tell I hadn’t convinced her when she dismissed me with a wave of her hand before intoning our prayer.

"Dear Jesus – we’re here at your behest,

We ask you please to be our guest And share this food that you have blessed.

Amen."

I hurried through our Mittagessen so I could take off to talk with my dolls. I needed to talk to somebody and that wouldn’t be Axel. If he knew what I saw in the Berens’ kitchen, his chin would start to quiver, his eyes would dart wildly, he might even run over to Frau Berens and lecture her on how Karl’s death could have been prevented. No, I had done the right thing I told myself, allaying a slight pang of bad conscience. Let Mutti and Axel hear the bad news from Sigmund, Frau Berens, anybody but me; I had enough trouble already.

When I reached our Wintergarten, the unheated, glassed-in porch leading to our backyard, my three dolls cackled like blustering hens before their first feeding. They were anxious to get dressed and eat their Mittagessen. My favorite doll, Frieda, stood on dainty celluloid feet waiting in front of her wooden chair where I had left her that morning. The top of her head reached just above my knees. The only boy, Jürgen, was still in bed, he had crooked legs and spent most of his time on his back. Little Aamie sat erect and watchful in her wooden chair. She had come to live with me first so I gave her my name.

Mutti said my name was special. She told me that I had come along when everything else in their lives had fallen apart. And after two big boys … Papa was thrilled to have a girl and wanted to call me Love, Aimee in French. No way, Mutti said she had told him at the time. The French occupied our village, lived in all the best houses – not ours, but still - until nineteen thirty-one. Nothing of theirs, not even a French name, is coming into my house. I’d have plenty of chances to regurgitate this story as I got older; my name was a nightmare in school.

Since she liked the implication, but not the spelling, I became Aamie, a name most unusual in Germany. It suited Mutti’s bohemian taste; she was more at home in the city than the farming village they had left at their very first opportunity.

Frieda, my newest doll, was my shadow. She was always with me; she explained my family to me. Once I took off her pajamas, she was pleased with my performance at lunch. You did well, didn’t get yourself into a big hassle; I am proud of you. But don’t relax and look helpless, you know how that makes her lash out at you. That news of Karl is going to hit harder than a bomb.

Little Aamie, on the other hand, was clinging and frantic as usual, whimpering, You didn’t take us to the shelter with you. We heard that bomb drop over by the Berens. What happened to Karl could happen to us. We want to go to the shelter too.

She doesn’t know how bad it smells down there, I thought. My nose filled with the musty, dank odor of the old root cellar underneath our kitchen. I don’t know why it stank so much like rotting potatos. My mother claimed that after more than four years into this war, we had already eaten every single potato that had ever been brought into the house. Maybe there really was a dead mouse, at least Axel used every opportunity to terrify me with that horrific threat. I didn’t have the words to describe the stench that intensified from week to week as it mingled with the odors from the damp, dirty floor and the sweating white-washed walls. My eyes ached as I called up pictures of the dark, dank hole in which we spent so many nights. I really didn’t want my dolls to see where I had to go.

You mean all of you want to come?

Yes, you have to take us, we are part of you. Jürgen added in his usual sensible manner.

I can’t take you with me, I don’t have enough time to get down there as it is, I told them.

You’ll find a way!

They had to wait until after we buried Karl. My brother and five of his friends from the Gymnasium carried Karl to the cemetery in a wooden box. All of them were altar boys for Pater Schunk at the big Cathedral down the street.

Reviews for Aamie's War

[travis · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Another attempt to forgive Germans. When you have these disgusting people admit their families are guilty then their level of hell can rise a level above.