On Being German: A Personal Journey Into the German Experience

By Doris Pena-Cruz

In the second half of my life, my thoughts and feelings have centered around one thing: the Holocaust. In my younger years I avoided that subject, be it in literature or in entertainment, whenever I possibly could. That was not easy. Television was full of programs in which Germans looked stupid and heinous. My own children watched these things

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creative Harvest
• Release date: Jan 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637958957

Doris Pena-Cruz

Doris Keating Pena-Cruz (nee Bor Dasch) was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, Germany in 1937. During the second World War her family had to flee from the Russians. Her childhood was spent in Bavaria. Later she emigrated to America, after a stay in London. She now lives in Boston with her husband, and has three children and seven grandchildren.

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Introduction

In the second half of my life, my thoughts and feelings have centered around one thing: the Holocaust. In my younger years I avoided that subject, be it in literature or in entertainment, whenever I possibly could.

That was not easy.

Television was full of programs in which Germans looked stupid and heinous. My own children watched these things with glee; I fled into another room. Since I have always read a lot, I was at least aware of the avalanche of books that were published about the Holocaust. Still, I kept my blinkers on. I firmly told myself that it was not my business, since I was just a child during that time.

Sooner or later such an attitude will have to come to an end. It did for me after I fled a difficult marriage and finally began to examine my life. This was a slow process, aided by a patient psychiatrist. Now, years later, I want to write about my life and about the conflicted feelings such a search will cause in a woman of German nationality.

Not long ago I asked my young stepson what came to mind when hearing the word German and without hesitation, he answered: evil. This little interview happened in 2010, sixty-five years after the end of the war. Many history books, which I was then finally reading, told me the same. Movies I compelled myself to watch were even worse.

I grew up in Germany during the war and afterward, then left for England in 1954 at the age of nineteen. I have no memory of monsters or idiots walking the streets. Many people were kind and helpful even though their own lives were in peril. Even in the total upheaval after the war ended, there was decency among the German people. What I experienced as a child and what I was reading as an older woman could not be reconciled.

My childhood was shadowed by propaganda from the Hitler regime. This was all encompassing. From the way people greeted one another to the way German babies had to be brought up was all guided and ordered by the Nazi regime. What the German people knew about the world beyond Germany or how they spoke to one another, at least at any public forum, was controlled by the regime. Posters along all the streets, speeches by our leaders, everything written by the press or expressed in other media, was propaganda.

As a child during the war years, I experienced my German neighbors as helpful and good.

Now, the world views Germans as brutal and cruel. This is again the result of propaganda.

Germany had a brutal regime. The Holocaust did happen. Millions did die in a terrible way. But I don’t think you will find many evil monsters in Germany.

* * *

The first part of my story describes my family, where we came from, and what happened to us in the years from 1933 to 1954. It then follows my life further into a new country and then a new continent. We were average people. We moved in average circles. We had an extraordinary life. What I will tell is truthful and simple.

The tumult of my own feelings calmed as I read German history, the history of the Jews, and a massive amount of Jewish literature. I have included a brief history of Germany because it belongs in this effort to understand how the Holocaust happened. The Jewish literature helped me most of all, because I had a prejudice against the Jews, planted in Hitler’s time into a helpless child’s brain.

In the last part, I describe how I have come to terms with being German.

My reading has helped me understand Hitler and the way he succeeded in misleading the German population, even including his own inner circle.

My life and its many adventures have forced me to think about these heavy subjects. I have no regrets.

1

I was born in Tilsit, East Prussia; the year of my birth was 1937. Germany was on the threshold of its descent into chaos.

Eight years later, many millions of people had died in horrible ways. Millions of Jews were murdered. Millions of soldiers of many nations died in battle. More than two million German women and children died under the bombs of the Allied forces, as ancient cities were turned into rubble.

More millions had to flee their homes, often forever.

When this madness ended in 1945, Germany was carved up. Some parts of it became Russian and Polish. My hometown, Tilsit, was renamed Sowjetks, and became a new Russian settlement. My grandparent’s hometown, Koenigsberg, became Kaliningrad, also part of Russia. We, and millions of other Germans from the regions given to the victors, were categorized under the title Vertriebene: those who were driven out.

Those eight years—the years of my earliest childhood—have dominated the rest of my life, though I have not always been aware of that.

I have been poor and I have been rich. I have left Europe and lived a full and fascinating life in America. I have raised children and run a business.

Now finally, I feel compelled to make my private reckoning with the guilt of the Germans. Like many in my generation, I was ignorant of many aspects of the Holocaust.

After World War II came to an end, all the defeated Germans were obliged to watch movies showing the emaciated people who were found and liberated by the Allied forces in the various concentration camps operated by the inner circle of Nazis. I was seven years old when the heavy curtain of shame descended over a pitifully destroyed and demoralized Germany. I was eight years old in 1945 when, for all I could remember, I met a gaunt stranger, who was my father. He had been in the war for so long that I could not remember him.

Those days were extreme in their misery and cruelty. The whole world was convinced that one could not do enough to punish Germany, after the crimes against the Jews became known.

But what actual guilt did belong to the average German? Most people did not belong to the Nazi Party. Most people had no idea of the mass murders. A German proverb says mit gefangen, mit gehangen, meaning, when you’re caught together, you’re hung together. To me this sounds medieval.

Are we not innocent until proven guilty?

Germany had suffered loss of land after World War I, when the victors decided that she was the culprit in that conflict. In 1945, the devastated and shrunken country was reduced once again. East Prussia was divided and incorporated into Russia and Poland.

What remained of Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation. A large part was forced to become an almost colonial ally of Russia. It comprised the ancient German territories of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg.

It truly looked as though Germany could never again rise out of the ashes of this division, its devastating destruction, its crippling loss of life and infrastructure. That, at the time, was fully the intention of the victors, as it had been at the end of World War I.

When the Allies discovered the extent of the crimes against humanity, the death camps in Poland, the mass graves and the starved survivors, a heavy verdict came down upon my people: to be German was to be evil.

The initial measures in dealing with the vanquished country were punitive to the extreme. There was a plan that advocated the destruction of all industrial plants, allowing only agriculture as a means of survival for German people. Fortunately reason prevailed. This plan was abandoned.

In 1945 the Germans were a deeply traumatized people. They had lived through the reign of a madman, who seemed bent on the total destruction of a country which had been unable to deliver the culmination of his crazy dream of world domination. They had followed the Pied Piper into almost total destruction.

The Führer, Adolf Hitler, had led his land into this abyss and chose to die by his own hand in his bunker, miserably complaining that the master race had let him down.

They deserved to die, said he.

The earth where Germany had stood was to be scorched, to render it useless for any future use or benefit.

Those were his orders at the end. Then he died by suicide in his bunker beneath Berlin, which by then was a heap of ruins defended by boys and old men.

Hitler died like a cockroach, hidden away beneath the burning city. He died like a coward.

Above him, women were raped, died with their children, tried to flee—but there was nowhere for them to run. Soldiers tried to be faithful to a fatherland now overrun by foreign soldiers, coming from all directions. Some still believed in their Führer, to whom they had sworn a solemn oath of allegiance.

During Hitler’s reign, there were many who helped shape his glorified image. Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, an unwavering acolyte, helped create operatic performances: scenes of singing, marching soldiers, in the light of torches and giant lightshows to dazzle and seduce his captive audience.

Now, in 2017, it seems impossible to have a minister of propaganda. Does that not give the whole show away? Yet Hitler had such a minister.

His name was Joseph Goebbels. He was a small man with a crippled foot. He could write well and deliver rousing speeches. He developed inflammatory posters to rally the people behind Hitler. He incited the people to hate Jews.

When it all ended, he begged to be allowed to die with his Führer. His belief carried him through the ordeal of poisoning his six children before he and his wife committed suicide.

He, his wife, and other Germans believed in the Führer to the end. How was this possible? What was the ideology they defended?

What did they believe in?

Could the German population at large be complicit in mass murder? After all, until World War I Germany had been greatly admired as an advanced civilization.

My education and experience in Germany never touched on these questions. My parents never talked about the politics at the time of Hitler’s rule. Their own private trauma was recalled, personal hard times were described. The overarching politics and policies of the Third Reich seemed to be forbidden subjects.

Now my parents are dead, they can no longer answer my questions. While raising my children I lived a life of denial too. I did not read any books about the war. I did not watch movies about the war. As long as I could, the war, the Holocaust, was none of my business.

Had my losses not been heavy enough?

At a time when my personal life seemed to collapse around me, when a breakdown forced me to seek psychiatric help, I was finally forced to examine this vacuum in my conscience. I had made it to the age of fifty-two when I was compelled to give up the luxury of ignorance, the mercy of denial.

It was a long and thorny road. It held pain, fury, despair, hate. I’ve had relapses into denial. I have been at it for years.

* * *

My father was a teacher. I had two older brothers and a sister.

When I was born, Hitler was already in power. He envisioned Germany ruling the world. He believed the German people to be the super race. In order to have enough of this super race, he offered women privileges for having more children. His plans were so large that he knew he would need a never-ending supply of cannon fodder. But only he knew all that.

I have a suspicion that this was the reason for my birth.

As the mother of four, my mother received a mother’s cross, with a swastika. This entitled my mother to cut food lines and to receive extra rations. I now own this cross.

For my parents, life had been hard for years already. My birth made my mother a little more entitled.

In the early days of Hitler’s reign, my mother believed in him. He proclaimed heroic values and promised a future of progress and prosperity. He awakened pride in a people who felt deeply shamed and suffered from the sanctions and reparations imposed after World War I. Most of all, he wanted peace—or so he said, again and again. Between the end of World War I, when the Kaiser fled to Holland,

and the day on which Hitler made himself dictator, there was a brief interval of democratic government in Germany, the Weimar Republic. The republic lasted for fourteen years, from 1919 to 1933.

This government was splintered into a multitude of parties, too splintered to lead effectively.

Those years were chaotic, with civil war and famine, super inflation and fear. Those short years were the only taste Germany ever had of democracy. Previously Germany had been ruled by monarchies, and that form of government was all anyone had known.

Hitler had fought in World War I and had been decorated. Although he was an Austrian, he became an impassioned German nationalist. After the war, he gathered the young and discontented men around him who believed, like him, that Germany had been treated unfairly at the end of the Great War.

Many people were sympathetic to his years of struggle. When he became a political reality and a member of the parliament, he had a great following. The old war hero, von Hindenburg, was president of the Weimar Republic at the time.

Under great pressure from many sides, Hindenburg reluctantly made Hitler chancellor. It was then that Hitler showed his true colors.

Hitler cleverly used a fire in the Reichstag in Berlin to proclaim martial law.

He blamed the Communists for starting the conflagration, and a state of emergency was declared.

Now he had the power to murder or imprison the heads of all opposing parties.

From that point on, it was downhill with freedom and democracy.

Soon Hitler held all the power and he used it in terrible ways.

He declared himself sole ruler, dictator of Germany. At first, many people went along. The Weimar Republic had been too new, too chaotic for them. Since industrialization had occurred at an especially accelerated speed before the Great War, there were many people who did not understand the new social order. People lost the power of doing for themselves, as machines replaced their ancient trades and they had to move from the country to new cities of smokestacks and tenements.

Unlike Great Britain, Germany had been a mostly rural society until then.

Many people went hungry, most of them were afraid.

The Germans suffered under staggering war debt after World War I, as the Treaty of Versailles demanded huge sums of reparation to be paid to France. There was a meltdown of the economy. Finally there was a depression so severe that a wheelbarrow full of money was needed to buy a loaf of bread.

The bulk of the former army splintered into private militias, which created more havoc in a country rocked by civil unrest. There were fights in the streets. Lawlessness spread in the cities.

Hitler promised law and order. Hitler promised work for every German.

He built roads and railways; he got industry back on its feet. He told the chastised and demoralized German people that they were a race of heroes.

Indeed, for a while, things did look up for our country.

Hitler preached that Jews were exploiting the German nation. He insinuated that the Jewish people were dominating business, banking, and all forms of media.

Many people were ready to believe him. As far as they could tell, it was the Jewish people who had all the money in those days. It was easy to scapegoat them.

Many people flocked to Hitler’s side.

He had his opponents murdered or imprisoned and ruled through fear and intimidation.

In 1939, I was two years old and my mother had a mother’s helper, thanks to the Führer. The young girl came from our town and absolved her duty to the fatherland by learning how to be a mother and housewife. Hitler made all young girls serve the fatherland by helping to raise children for at least one year.

By then Hitler had invaded Poland.

My mother became suspicious. She did not believe in the trumped up reports of aggression by the Poles. Hitler had manufactured an incident to explain the beginnings of hostilities against Poland in which Germans in Polish uniform enacted an attack at the border to offend Germany. And puff went the love of peace. The wolf emerged, armed to the teeth.

Hitler’s speeches began to be hateful to my mother. She heard rumors of people being dragged away in the dead of night. There was Kristallnacht, when Hitler’s minions smashed the windows of Jewish shops and set fire to their synagogues. Many Germans got upset, and many Germans learned to be afraid.

It was not the general population that perpetrated Kristallnacht. It happened in the dead of night and the perpetrators were a rogue band of ruffians from the Sturmabteilung, the SA, Hitler’s bodyguard, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

However, citizens protested. Hitler realized that such violent transgressions could never be perpetrated openly again.

Hitler founded youth groups for boys and girls, specific to every age group. He put the children in attractive uniforms. They were told that they belonged to a super race. They were told their homeland was always in grave danger. Spies and evildoers lurked everywhere. They were told to listen for any remarks against their Führer, at home or anywhere. They had to report anything they heard, to keep their fatherland safe.

They were taught to raise their right arms, fully extended, and say "Heil Hitler." This was the standard form of greeting in Germany during Hitler’s reign. At first this seemed ridiculous—soon it was a habit.

People were immersed in spectacles of military might. Grand marches at night with music and the light of torches became common, and there was always the voice of the Führer. From loudspeakers, the radio, or in big cities, his voice reached every household. A fanatic dentist designed the new flag: red, black, and gold, with a huge swastika in the center. It was carefully calculated to convey a feeling of menace, power, and triumph. It had to out scare the red flag of the Communists.

In spite of all this military display, Hitler claimed in his speeches that he wanted only peace. Or so he said. All the while, in caves and out of sight, weapons and war machinery were being built with feverish haste.

My oldest brother was a member of the Hitler youth. He had no choice; all boys his age had to take part. He too was encouraged to tell superiors every little detail about his home life.

Was someone listening to short wave radio? It was strictly forbidden to own such a receiver. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) station could be reached that way.

There was no television yet. It was a little easier to brainwash an entire population.

The telephone was not safe. The Nazis listened to any call they cared to. Anybody on their list of suspicious persons was monitored constantly.

All the newspapers were under Nazi control. Letters to other countries were censored.

The government offered simple radios at low prices to German households. They became a good tool to spread Nazi propaganda. The only radio stations transmitted to people were the ones run by the state.

Hitler’s power reached into every household now. Many believed his words. After all, the treaties of Versailles and Locarno did give Germans good reasons to feel fear and anger.

Big posters and banners proclaiming ever more radical slogans appeared everywhere. We want weapons, not butter. Tanks must roll for victory. Later on, they read, Heads must roll for victory.

Heads did roll, but they were German heads: the ones who still dared to think for themselves, and then speak of their worries to others.

* * *

In the late thirties, our family and many others lived comfortably. The Great Depression was over. During the Depression, Germans had learned how to fear for their lives. Many had starved and people had lived in unheated hovels. Hitler fed these memories effectively, saying over and over that the Jews were responsible for every calamity. At first, life under Hitler seemed to get better.

Some people were anti-Semitic to begin with. There was not enough personal contact with Jews to counteract the viscous anti-Semitic literature which flooded Europe in the nineteenth century and later. At that time, anti-Semitism was a problem not only in Germany. There had always been lurid tales about Jews. The Christian Churches had been responsible for great defamations. Jews were seen as money-grubbing parasites of Christian society.

Jewish people were extremely successful in Germany. They felt comfortable there. Eighty-five years before Hitler’s rise to power, they had gained the rights of ordinary German citizens. Many of them became professors, writers, composers, and scientists. Some of them won Nobel prizes.

But these people were less noticed than the rich of the business class. It was the latter group that incited envy and dislike among the poor in Germany.

Hitler loved monumental buildings. Many town halls, railroad stations, and schools were built in his pompous style. He also built new roads, including the then impressive autobahn, the first super-highway for the cars that were becoming mainstream.

He was the designer of the Volkswagen beetle.

People saw changes for the better all around them and gave Hitler credit for a better life and for jobs for everyone. At first he seemed the right man for the time.

When it became obvious how lunatic and grandiose his schemes were, it was already too late. The iron rule of a vicious dictatorship had clamped down on Germany.

2

When I was an infant in 1937, my parents moved with my brothers, Klaus and Peter, my sister, Gisela, and me to a suburb just a few bus stops from Tilsit. My father had been promoted to headmaster of a little school in Moritzhoehe.

In East Prussia, a teacher had some traditional perks. Usually housing was provided. Often the teacher’s house was built at the same time as the school building and was either attached or adjacent. Some land was provided, surrounding the home as a garden, as well as the use of a few fields. A neighboring farmer would cultivate the fields and the crops were shared. We enjoyed these perks and they gave us stability in hard times.

Our new house had a connecting door that went from our hall to the schoolhouse. Our home was simple but attractive. The house had a verandah next to the entrance and a spacious yard. A fence divided our yard from the schoolyard next door.

My father planted a fruit tree for each of his children. Mine was a peach tree, still too young to bear fruit by the time we were forced to leave.

On Sunday afternoons, my grandmother and Aunt Elly joined us for the customary coffee and cake feast. They were my father’s mother and sister. They lived in Tilsit and came out by bus. We had plenty of eggs and butter thanks to the rural setting, so there was always a lavish array of homemade cakes. My mother and grandmother competed with their cheesecakes. Every little change of recipe was discussed at length and with passion. Every Sunday we had a fruit tart and sometimes also a pound cake.

My mother made Windbeutel. This translates as windbags, which sounds funny but is quite apt. Little balls of puff pastry are baked. They come out of the oven big and hollow and are filled with a sweetened whipped cream. Mother used to bake little s-shaped necks for them and insert those, and then she gave them wings of whipped cream. Presto, swans! She floated her lovely swans on a silver tray. Swan lake.

Our favorite cake was a concoction called Bienenstich, which means bee’s sting. Its curious name came from our competitors when eating these cakes: bees simply loved the topping and one had to watch out when biting into one, because a bee might have gotten there first. To bake it, cookie sheets were lined with thin layers of fine, sweetened yeast dough. The topping was quite a bit of work. Almonds were peeled, finely chopped, and then toasted with butter and sugar, which was flavored with a vanilla bean. This was heated enough to brown slightly and then spread on the dough and baked. It was sinfully delicious.

As children, we would peer at every slice on the cake plate, trying to determine which had the best topping. Once you touched a piece, it was yours, of course.

The garden was thoroughly groomed every Saturday. My father made sure there was not a weed in sight. He lightly raked the soil of the flowerbeds and then watered them well. He removed all spent flowers. Lastly he raked the gravel paths into a neat pattern. I was usually napping when this was done, but my sister was allowed to help with all this and she still talks about it. Once my mother was resting in a lawn chaise and the two of them crept up on her and sprayed her with the hose. Gisela treasures that memory.

For me, looking back, the flowers in our garden were never less than perfect and in profusion. But so it goes with childhood gardens. On Sunday, the show was my mother’s: she had a number of pretty embroidered tablecloths. One of them would cover the old table outside, under the arching pear tree. From there it continued—out came the pretty china, crystal, silver, flowers, and then the gorgeous cakes.

The coffee table could have been a still life.

The memory of food, particularly sweet food, is not easily erased from a child’s mind.

A little incident that happened one of those afternoons was kept alive in our family stories; once as my grandmother was about to lift her coffee cup to her mouth, a pear from the tree above decided to drop and landed in her beverage.

Poor Omi had been so spotless before and was so very spotted afterward. Fortunately she was not scalded and she laughed it off.

There was another outdoor place where we sometimes took our meals. This was an outdoor porch next to the entrance overlooking the garden. It had a roof and could be used when it rained.

My parents had their second breakfast there. They might have porridge at seven in the morning, and then at ten they would enjoy a little open sandwich with cheese or ham, and coffee. But because of the war, coffee soon had to be Ersatz, a substitute brew made from roasted malt and the dried, ground root of chicory. My mother loved coffee but there were few imports available in Germany during the war years. Coffee became a cherished treat and then—a memory.

Near the barn there was a big sandbox. It was a popular place. Behind the sandbox my father had planted raspberries, not in neat rows but in a tangle of canes which were trained to a teepee to form a green fort with ruby highlights. They were the ever-bearing kind, so they seemed to be productive all summer.

We could crawl into this green tent and dream. The old barn to the north kept our teepee out of cold winds.

If the day was rainy the big barn sheltered our play. The loft was covered with straw just for us. A wooden ladder attached to the wall provided access. Two swings hung from the edge of the loft. My older brother Peter once hauled a lot of straw to the area underneath. He then pretended to be one of the Stukka planes he heard so much about and jumped down from the loft. He did not break any bones but he was hurting nevertheless and our teasing did not help.

My mother was quite slender but not very tall. She had shapely legs and a tiny waist, with nicely curved hips and a generous bosom. Her face was heart shaped with pleasant features. Her eyes were light blue. She called them washed out, but I thought they were lovely. Her forehead was delicately formed.

She was in charge of our lives. The house was entirely her domain and the garden was hers to harvest. She was gifted, practical, energetic, and resourceful. She made our clothes, at least Gila’s (as we called my sister Gisela) and mine. My mother was Mami to us, a common way of addressing a mother in Germany. She knitted and embroidered. She was a naturally good cook.

Like all housewives at that time and of that region, she would fill her cellar with the harvest of the garden and make jams, pickles, and jellies. Green beans were salted and kept in crocks; cabbage was shredded and made into sauerkraut. Apples and pears were stored in a frost-free corner of the basement. Potatoes and turnips were brought by the local farmer and lay in a great heap in the root cellar.

Our house and the school stood surrounded by the brook and fields. The nearest neighbors lived on a small farm, where Gila and I went most days to fetch milk. We carried our own shiny little aluminum cans with a lid and a handle. Often barefoot, we would amble along, sifting the soft white dust of the cart track with our toes.

The farmer was a friend of ours. He was full of banter, talking to us in the slow and broad dialect of East Prussia. "Na Marjellche" (Well, little girls). If he had the time he would tell us a story, or show us a new lamb or piglets. We called him Opa Schaefer.

Opa means grandfather. We were not related, but much like in Russia, East Prussians were inclined to call one another auntie or brother, grandfather or mother.

We were neighbors and a closely knit community. However, even as children, we were treated with respect because our father was the teacher.

A number of farms dotted the landscape. The dirt roads wound toward them like silky white ribbons in the green land. The house, barn, and outbuildings of the farms formed a rectangle; the courtyard within was often colorful with sunflowers, dahlias, and zinnias. The courtyard was also quite pungent with the big manure heap in the corner.

Manure was the farmer’s fertilizer, so it was treated with respect. The paved road that came up from Tilsit passed behind our house and went on toward the next village. Along the way it led to a large farm. East Prussia had many big land holdings. Some of them were the property of the Junkers, the local aristocracy. The great statesman Bismarck was one of them. Smaller farms belonged to old families in the region. My father’s ancestors owned such a farm, which his grandfather left to my father’s uncle.

In East Prussia farms went to the first son. The others had to learn a profession. My paternal grandfather was a younger son. As a young man, my father envied his cousins. All his life he yearned to own land and yet he never did.

My memories of the interior of the house in Moritzhoehe are sketchy. I have a picture in my mind of our playroom: it had a wall of shelves and cabinets where toys and books were stored. There was a soft rug. Two windows overlooked our yard and the barn. There was a big old stuffed chair which we climbed all over. It became a horse or a car or a cave, depending on our games.

The door led out to the downstairs hall, a stone paved dark passage with a big shelf mounted to the wall, fairly low, with pegs for coats above. The shelf held felt slippers in all sizes. We all had to change into slippers whenever we came in from outdoors.

Across from the nursery door was the entrance to the kitchen. I liked this place. It had a big black iron range, which was built into a long tiled counter. Under the counter there were two ovens, fitted with their own firing chambers, for baking bread or cakes and of course for roasts as well.

The range had a big enameled container fitted against its side. This had a neat heavy lid. When the fire under the range was burning to cook the food, this vessel was always filled with water. After the family finished their meal, there was plenty of hot water to do the dishes or to wash the children. A fire always had to do multiple duties. The tiled counter beyond this range was also the place where the dough for the bread or cakes could rise. It was always warm, and as a toddler I loved to sit up there, watching and listening and, of course, waiting for handouts of anything yummy, like cookie dough. Often there would be several big wooden bowls with mounds of dough rising beneath white dishtowels. We usually only ate the bread that was home baked. It was made with sourdough, a bit of it saved every week, and it was dark and fairly heavy.

I remember the dining room only partially. I am sitting on a high-chair at the table. A glass lamp in the center glows with amber light. The family sits around; there is a white cloth on the table. On it, a platter with rolls, halved and layered with butter, sliced hard-boiled eggs and a little cross of anchovy fillets. There is a big white china pot with hot chocolate. That must have been a Saturday night, because only then did we have the soft bakery rolls.

I know there was a study for my father. I have a memory of a shiny desktop. I look down and see my sister’s face. She looks very sad.

I never questioned this tableau until I was grown up. If I looked down at a shiny surface, then it would mirror me, not my sister.

I knew that Gila was missing our father painfully. He was a soldier in France in 1940. She would cry about it. She did even run away when he had to join the army, to try and find him. I clung to my mother instead.

Gila and I had a little bedroom together. It had two little dormer windows looking out to the front yard. It was the second floor of the house, but the roof was pulled down low, like many in East Prussia.

When I was barely two, I climbed onto a chair to look out the window. I saw my father down below. There was a paved walkway between the school and our house. He had just entered our yard through a little gate.

I leaned out as far as I could and fell onto the roof. There I rolled down a little way and got caught by the rain gutter. My father had seen my predicament and stood there holding out his arms—I fell, but landed on my head right on the cobbled path. There was a moment of terrified silence—and then I screamed. That was one time when my parents welcomed the noise.

Since I was noisy enough I was declared unhurt and fortunately it must have been so.

* * *

Gila remembers my mishap, too, but her feelings were less than sympathetic: she felt jealous because my frantic father held me in his arms, admittedly an unusual event.

At that time having a bathroom was a luxury. Ours had a big white tub with a big cylinder behind it for the hot water. To take a warm bath one had to light a little gas ring under this cylinder and wait for about an hour. No one minded this because until then baths had been a matter of lugging in a zinc tub and filling it with water heated on the stove. This bathroom had a toilet and a sink and was tiled in white.

Not too long after I fell from the roof, I felt grown up enough to go to this bathroom by myself. Once inside, I started to fiddle with the key. It turned quite easily. So I went about my business and returned to the door—but now it was locked and the key did not want to turn. I got frightened and started to call for help. My mother came. She tried to coach me to wiggle the key out or turn it, but she sounded scared herself and in my panic I could do nothing.

Normally this would not have been a big deal, but my father was in bed with pneumonia. At that time this was often a fatal illness, because we did not