The Greatest Childhood in the Rubble in Berlin

By Heidi Ebelt

The authors story is based on her life as she remembers it. It is set against the background of real historical events in WWII. Growing up during the last three years of the war in Berlin, the sirens, their endless flight on the trains out of and back to Berlin, became part of her life, there was no birthday party for the three year old and again the family was on the move, this time to live in a castle in Thuringia. All these events were accepted without questions or fear. In 1946 they returned to the old neighborhood which had become a rubble desert but soon transformed into the greatest childhood as her dying older sister insisted time again and again.

Most names have been changed to protect the living. I owe a great debt to my father and mother who have answered my many questions and I included their stories in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491812853

Heidi Ebelt

The author was born in Berlin ..........divorced. For fifteen years she worked as a bi-lingual secretary for large European firms. After the birth of her fourth child she enrolled in college, got her B.A. summa cum laude and then her Master's. While still in her thirties she began writing poetry and her first unpublished novel "War Baby". She now devotes her time to writing and traveling.

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© 2013 by Heidi Ebelt. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   11/09/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-1284-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-1285-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013916186

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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. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

Prologue

Rudolf Carl Virchow

Questions to My Father

Life During the War

Schloss Bockstadt

The Most Wonderful Childhood

My Sister Biene

Berlin, Germany

Halle, My Father’s Birth Place

The Funeral

Planning My Trip

Stettin

The Turkish Riviera

Antalya

Visiting a Hamam

Side

Navagat

Medusa

St. Nicholas or Santa Claus

The Outbreak

We Are Flying Again

Back in Pennsylvania

From the ashes in Berlin

TO MY SISTER’S ASHES

TO THE ASHCLOUD

A MEMOIR

For my sister with whom I shared

The greatest childhood

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

According to a bible passage we came from ashes and shall return to ashes. Ash Wednesday is celebrated by Catholics and when my mother married my father, a Protestant, he had to promise to let his children be baptized in the Catholic faith. In 1939 when my sister Biene was born, my father had a change of heart, and after many tears shed by my mom, he finally gave in and after I was born in 1942 in Berlin, my sister and I became Catholics. After a loud argument with my big sister, my father would say: You Catholics, you always have to fight!

After my sister Maria was born in 1953 there was no question about her religion and Maria was baptized before my mom was going home in the hospital chapel with two other babies. My sister was the only one crying.

I always assumed that I would not be cremated but as my relatives are dying off, cremation seems to be the burial of choice. The catholic church now allows it but the ashes must be buried and cannot be spread in the wind or sea or kept at home as it believes that the soul will reunite with its body at the end of time. I still prefer the old fashioned kind where worms gnaw on my flesh.

Ashes have played a role in my life from early on, growing up in the ashes of Berlin, attending one funeral after another and then ashes of another kind got a hold of me.

Prologue

Post-war photographs from 1945 show the devastation of the capital and illustrate the desperation of the survivors. The war ended on May 8, 1945, when Germany surrendered unconditionally and much of Berlin had turned into rubble. I have a photograph of our street before and after the war. An expensive car was parked in front of our building and a film crew was filming. This was long before my parents moved into the third floor in 1942, and the apartments had been split up. The photo showing the street after the war depicted hollowed out buildings left and right and our building as the only one standing.

From Wikipedia I learnt that more than 600,000 apartments had been destroyed and only 2.8 million of the city’s 4.3 million inhabitants still lived in the city. Half of all houses were damaged and about a third uninhabitable, as many as 10 square miles were rubble. The Western Allies had dropped 65.000 tons of explosives, and the total number of dead from over three hundred air raids, range from 20-50,000. Almost 1000 B-17 bombers of the Eighth Air-force attacked the Berlin railway system on February 3, 1945.

By 1944 1.2 million people, among them 790,000 women and children, had been evacuated to rural areas but many evacuees made their way back into the city. Female labor was essential to keep Berlin’s war industry going so the evacuation of all women and children was not possible. At the end of 1944 the population grew again as refugees fleeing the Red Army kept pouring into the city. They were only allowed to remain for two days and were housed in camps but an estimated 50,000 managed to stay.

At the Potsdam conference that lasted from July 16 to August 2, 1945, the Allies divided Germany into four military occupation zones, French in the southwest, British in the northwest, American in the south, and Soviet in the east and our street fell into the American zone. About fifteen million ethnic Germans suffered severe hardships from 1944 to 1947 during their flight and expulsion from the Eastern European territories. They were mostly women and children and thousands died in forced labor camps. In addition over two million died during long marches, in resettlement camps, from starvation, from the cold, or were murdered, and over 165,000 were transported by the Soviets to Siberia.

Rudolf Carl Virchow

Rudolf Carl Virchow was the most famous physician of the nineteenth century. He was born in rural Pomerania in 1821 and in 1843 he received a medical degree from the university of Berlin. In one of his studies he concluded that there was no pure German race but only a mixture of differing morphological types.

In 1887 Virchow traveled with Schliemann to Hissarlik in Turkey where Homer’s Troy was excavated and which I would visit in 2012. In 1901 his eightieth birthday was the occasion of a worldwide celebration and of numerous receptions as far away as Japan and Russia. In 1902, the year of my father’s birth, he suffered a broken hip when falling from a streetcar and died several months later.

When on Christmas eve 2009 I learnt that my older sister had pancreatic cancer, it came as a shock. My relatives in Germany do not call except when my birthday comes around and I was upset about the lost time. I had called on Christmas eve and found everyone together at my niece’s apartment, not eating the traditional herring salad but potato salad, and learnt that my sister Biene was facing the knife at the famous Virchow Krankenhaus that very evening. Oh God, I should have called earlier. My mind drifted to the time when I was in the Virchow hospital for an operation.

I was a child of five when in 1947 I had developed an egg like swelling under my chin and my parents took me to the Virchow hospital to have a doctor look at it. I just remember a red rectangular brick building in the middle of nowhere which we entered and where we were immediately seen by a doctor. My parents had promised that afterwards we would all go to a restaurant and have a malt beer and envisioning this malt beer had made me eager to comply.

The doctor took one look at my neck, felt the huge swelling and I was told to say good-bye to my parents and my sister. I remember lying on a surgical table, as daylight was streaming through the window, and having a cloth placed over my face. Count to thirty! The doctor commanded. As a cold liquid was saturating the cloth, cooling my face, I showed off my knowledge of math but before reaching thirty, my tongue got heavy and the room vanished. My parents stood outside and could see everything through a window, watching the doctor cut me with a knife as I was told weeks later. I learnt from the Internet that 90% of the Virchow campus was destroyed in World War II.

When I woke up I was alone in a huge room, noticing the big bandage that encircled my neck and head and pulled on my hair. That night I could not sleep. The moon was casting a light into a faraway corner of the room and soon thereafter I saw a person climbing through the same window that the moon beam had pierced so easily as another, smaller person followed. They were shadowy figures, but then I recognized my mom and my eight year old sister, squatting on chamber pots, and I watched them in horror.

They were involved in a deep conversation but I could not hear anything and when I called to them, they continued as they seemed unaware of my presence. I became very frightened and pressed a button for the nurse who appeared right away. She switched on the light which made the ghostlike figures disappear and when I told her what had happened she smiled and told me that it had been a dream and to go back to sleep. I then fell into a deep sleep without the anxiety normally accompanying me later as an adult.

The following day my parents came to visit. My mother brought me a very tasty chicken leg which no other chicken leg could ever compare with, and my father had drawing paper, crayons and pencils since I had gotten quite good at drawing, so I would not feel so lonely. I told them about what I had experienced and they never doubted me. My mom acknowledged that what I saw actually happened and to this day it has remained a mystery.

My sister bragged about the malt beer but my parents assured me we would do it again but then we never did. Soon I was to get a roommate, an older girl who took all my crayons and then denied it. Three weeks later I was home and showed off my scar to all my play mates. My parents told me that I had been very brave and from then on I had to keep up the image of bravery which was to become more of a burden than an asset.

Questions to My Father

I had the foresight of sending my parents a letter full of questions in January of 1986, questions I had never asked when I was still living at home and that might go unanswered. My dad was then 84, my mom 72 and both of them were not in good health. As I was composing my questions, my thoughts went back to my childhood.

I was five years old and watched my mom throw away all my books and I begged her not to do it. She told me, we had to because they bore a swastika and we Germans were never again allowed to have a swastika. Could we draw one? I asked in disbelief. No, not even draw one. I was sad to see my books trashed since they were my only books and I asked my mom why. We had a very bad leader, a Mr. Hitler, who wanted to conquer the whole world. Even Turkey? Then we could move to Turkey? No, they would hate us. Was this Hitler once a baby? A baby could not be bad, I thought. Yes, he had been a baby.

Until I was sixteen I had never heard of the holocaust and our teachers never mentioned it. Then our class went to an exhibit and we were deeply shocked and disturbed. When I approached my mom, she answered sadly that she did not want to talk about this terrible time in her life and that they had suffered enough. She blamed her heart condition on the war and I did not pursue it.

It was also a time when my older sister and I had started to go to clubs and our lives were filled with music from the AFN station (American Forces Network). I wanted to see the world and felt claustrophobic at times being surrounded by the Russians. I left school at 16, went to a business school, then left Berlin at eighteen to travel to England and France and returned almost two years later. At twenty-two I emigrated to the United States, not intending to stay. Many years passed, I became interested in knowing more about WWII and my parents were getting up in age.

Now I lived in New York, and was enrolled in Hunter college, was writing a book, was the single mother of four children, the youngest four years old and being extremely busy I forgot about the whole thing. My father answered on more than one hundred pages, which I read with great interest, then put them away. Seven years had passed since I had last seen my parents when I visited Berlin in December 1989 for my first Christmas in twenty-six years in Germany and the 1989/90 New Year’s Party to celebrate the coming down of the Wall.

My father was wearing huge headphones, and he seemed to have lost interest in his surroundings. He was almost 88 years old. Once in a while he gave long one-sided speeches and then suddenly got up to retire to his room. My seven year old son jumped up and followed behind him, squeezing through the closing French doors. The key was turned and two hours went by. Then both of them appeared, smiling, and my father had become my son’s hero.

In 1992 my mother died, a few days after mother’s day, and my father became a recluse. I had come to the funeral but my father whose favorite, the apple of his eye, I had once been, cursed me. I had to find accommodations in my younger sister’s flat but kept on trying to see my dad. It was an extremely hot May, without any rain and after having walked for hours in the woods in the former East Berlin, I decided to stop at my father’s apartment.

This time he opened the door, looking elated. The sunlight was streaming into the living room and my dad asked. Is it morning? No, it’s afternoon. I answered smiling. He beamed. Something wonderful has happened. I had awakened from a deep sleep and then decided to write. He showed me a paper with his handwriting. It was as I remembered it, his beautiful script. My handwriting was nothing but chicken scratch before and now this! It’s a miracle.

We sat down and I told him that I had just come from the Mueggelsee, the largest of the Berlin lakes with an area of 2.9 sq. miles, and had walked for hours through the beautiful woods surrounding it. His face lit up. Mueggelsee, he repeated dreamily and then recalled with childlike happiness and sadness his friendship with his only friend with whom he had spent many hours hiking through the woods near the lake. I had heard the story before when in 1931 his friend who was then 26 and my father 29 went their separate ways because Emil had joined the Nazi party. Around the same time my dad’s father died on the 29th of December 1931 and his beloved mom moved back into her parents’ house.

My father told me that