THE SUMMER of OUR INNOCENCE Tales from My Childhood 1933-1949
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THE SUMMER OF OUR INNOCENCE Tales from my Childhood 1933-1949 Rolf Gross Pacific Palisades 2011 Table of Contents 1. Breslau and Glatz 1933-1936 2. Glatz 1938 3. Habelschwerdt 1937-39 4.The Year of the War 1939 5. Der Mutterberg 1939 6. Father and Mother 1939-40 7. Pimpf 1941-44 8. The War Drags on 1941-1945 9. Total War 1944-1945 10. Armageddon 1945 11. Our Flight from the Russians May 1945 12. Habelschwerdt under Russian Occupation 1945 13. New Perspectives 1945 14. At Fourteen the Bread Winner of my Family 1945 15. Life under Polish Terror 1945-1946 16. Silesia Becomes Polish 1946 17.Our Deportation May 1946 18. Life at the Hesedings 1946 19. Moors and People 1945-1946 20. Gelnhausen June 1947 Cover: My mother with her children, Habelschwerdt 1941 This collection of stories was first written for my daughter Susanne in 1982. For this edition it has been edited and enlarged. 1. Breslau and Glatz 1933-1936 Grandmother Hammer, The birth of the Twins, A Chamberpot, Clausewitz Strasse 15, Tante Irmgard, Unser Führer, Der Heilige Florian, The Götzhof in Glatz She was a big woman who frightened me when I was a young boy by her monumental snoring at night. A comfortable, round face with a full mouth, which she had even in her old age, full white hair that she wore in a bun at the nape, but let down at night, all made her appear warm and trustworthy, only the ironic twinkle in her small, brown eyes gave me a warning that she was quite able to destroy me with her sharp tongue. I loved her dearly, my grandmother. She is the true archetypal woman in my life, the "One-Who-Knows". She is the origin of all my best sides and of some of my greatest 2 handicaps. She bequeathed her eidetic mind to a number of her many grandchildren, but to me she also gave her vitality and her thirst for life. So perhaps it is no surprise that the earliest memories I have, are connected with her - or was it because she protected me from the fear that the arrival of the twins put into me? For I had been sent to Breslau into her care when, after I had been my mother's only child for two years, two siblings arrived at the same time, threatening my singular position. The twins were born in Breslau late in November 1933. A faded old photograph of the family taken in the garden in Glatz shows us five. My mother full and fertile on a wicker chair on the left concentrates all her radiance at the little bundle of Gerhard in her lap. My father sporting the infamous, fashionable brush of a mustache on his upper lip, wearing nickel glasses and gray breeches holds Christine. I stand in the middle between them, robbed of all my self-confidence. It must have been in early summer 1934, the lilac bushes behind us with their intoxicating smell are in full bloom. Toilet training on a frightening commode having failed, Großmutter put me on an enormous, white, enameled chamber pot, with which I learned to slide expertly around her living room. With special fondness I remember the lion's claws on the feet of the heavy dining table. Großmutter laughed that she should tack a mop to my pot and get a free polishing of her parquet. There was a large doll with many petticoats and lace panties from which dangled, cotton-filled cloth legs that were sewed to the body at a very unrealistic angle. She had porcelain hands, one with missing fingers. The doll had belonged to my mother. There were also a yellow, horse-drawn mail carriage complete with a postillion with a handlebar mustache painted on his porcelain head, and a mechanical mountain of Bethlehem with a crank on the back that my uncles turned to make the shepherds run in circles, the smith swing his hammer, and the angels fly. These marvels had been made by my mythical grandfather, who had been a mining engineer in Oberschlesien, before he had died twenty years earlier. It must have been just before Christmas, because this was the only time when these old toys were ever taken out. I slept on the green sofa in the living room that had been turned by Uncle Gerhard with the open side to the wall, so I would not fall out. At night before falling asleep I listened to the conductor pedaling the bell of the clattering tram as it rounded the street corner downstairs and to the ticking sound of the gas meter in the dark hall of the apartment. It was a cavernous, fin-de-ciecle apartment on the third floor, full of dark Wilhelminian furniture. The four or five rooms surrounded a central hall, which being windowless was lit by three gaslights even during daylight hours. In one corner the chimes of a grandfather dock counted the hours, in the other near the door was the ticking gas meter. The mighty doors all had two leaves, and the ceilings were so high that Tante Grete had to climb on a chair to dust the candelabras. Tante Grete, one of Großmutter's sisters, who had lived with her since grandfather's death to help care for the five children. One small room contained the water-closet, the next one was rented to Fräulein Hundt, a rotund "old maid", whom I never quite trusted despite the candy with which she tried to bribe me. On Saturdays Tante Grete filled the enormous, portable zinc bathtub, of the kind that Marat was murdered in, with huge amounts of water that she had heated for hours on the kitchen stove, and I was condemned to suffer a thorough washing by her hands. I hated 3 Saturdays.... I remember Großmutter's apartment so well that I could still draw a floor plan with most of the furniture in their correct places, or describe the pattern on the frosted window panes in the entrydoor to the hall. I remember the names and faces of the other people that lived with her: Uncle Gerhard, Tante Grete, Fräulein Hundt, visitors like Brigitte and Tante Magda, but I cannot describe Großmutter to you. For four evenings I tried to revive her, to make her walk and talk to me again, to see her in her kitchen as I see Tante Grete, but all in vain. Then last night she appeared to me in a dream. The first thing I noticed was that she was not at all a big woman as I had thought to remember, she was really petite, with the small bones of my sister Christine. She was sitting in her dark gray and black dress in a shabby wicker chair that I remember so well, a worn bare cushion underneath and another in her back. I knew the cushions were there, because she had asked me to tuck them behind her many times. She had her hands in her lap and there was a smile around her eyes. Somehow she was on the balcony of the room at Tante Magda's house in Gelnhausen where she lived with Tante Grete during the last eight years of her life, but the room was the one in Breslau. I had trouble speaking to her because my voice was strangely choked, and she did not seem to hear me. Finally I shouted: "Großmutter, ich bin der Rolf, sag' was!" - Grandmother I am Rolf, say something, - but she didn't answer. And then I noticed that it was not really Großmutter, but - the Wolf from the picture in the book of fairy tales, from which my mother used to read to us! He was sitting on that chair all dressed up in a lace bonnet Grandmother had never worn and said in the high-pitched voice my mother used to affect in that story: "So daß ich Dich besser fressen kann." - So that I can better eat you up. - I knew, of course, at once, what had to be done, took out my knife and cut open the Wolfs belly. And out jumped - no, not Großmutter - but my mother and my beloved cousin Brigitte all white from the chalk the Wolf had eaten to raise the pitch of his voice! I woke up laughing - I do not often have such dreams - wondering at the strange ways of the mind. And this morning I suddenly realized that Großmutter in her chair is my Icon, that her image is not a picture of her but She. And that She is a part of me. And that this is the reason why I cannot describe her to you. When I understood that, I began to see much more, that she reappears, reincarnate again and again in my life: as my own mother, her daughter, who together with her raised me in the beginning, in Brigitte, her granddaughter, who at another time in my life taught me to love a woman, in my sister Christine, and in Susanne, Barbara's and my Californian daughter... Großmutter's name was Anna. And before my inner eye arise visions of the disturbing sculptures of Anna Selbstdritt "Anna-Self-Thrice" in the village churches of my youth showing Anna, the mother of Mary who is the Mother of God all in one. You could open these wooden figures to find inside Anna's womb Mary, inside whose womb was Christ on the cross. But clearer yet and closer to the truth, in Athens: Persephone and Kore raising Tripolemos between them on the famous stele from Eleusis..