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16 The Search W HEN SPRING FINALLY ARRIVED my spirits were buoyed by the return of Etzel from Soviet captivity and the news that, beginning in June, I was permitted to enroll in a veterans' preparatory course at the University of Gottingen. Though Etzel's return was by far the most joyous event, it was darkened by the message we received a few weeks later that Dieter, "the General," would never be with us again. His body had been found in the Harz Mountains where his unit had been caught in one of the final engagements of the war. We now knew that of us thirty-onezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQP Grofie Schule classmates six had lost their lives in the war. Etzel and I now lived through a few wonderful months until I left for Gottingen to begin my studies. We met almost every afternoon in his room and, over a black market cigarette and a cookie or two from his aunt, shared our everyday woes and our hopes for the future. His aunt and his uncle often joined us for a few minutes and encouraged us to raid their library and invited us to share with them their supper table—in those days of hunger and deprivation no small matter. I especially appreciated the wonderful dishes Etzel's aunt Elli prepared with the wondrous delicacies she received through the Jewish Relief Fund. It was during one of these meals, too, that I listened with rapt and horrified attention to the story of Etzel's aunt's survival. A local policeman and two Gestapo agents had knocked at the Biichers' apartment door at two o'clock on a cold February morning in 1945. When Otto Bucher opened, these men said to him they were there for his wife and would he, please, ask her to get dressed and come out. Etzel's uncle stared at the men and broke out in a desperate cry: "You beasts, you inhuman beasts. Your fellow henchmen came here last night and 215 The Search zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO took her away, and now you are back to mock me and pour salt in my wounds. Get out of my sight." The men allowed that there must have been some mistake and that they would check at headquarters. They turned around and went down the stairs. By the time they came back, Mrs. Bucher had been spirited away to a hide-out prepared long before in an attic in a business house on the Lange Herzogstrafie. There she survived the last few months of the war. "No," Etzel's uncle added, "it was not a miracle. Wolfenbuttel is a small town, and though I had never before seen the Gestapo agents, I had known the local policeman for years. He was the one who did the talking and who suggested to his colleagues that they better check at headquarters." During our afternoons and evenings in Etzel's room we spent many an hour trying to make sense of our lives as Jungvolk leaders and soldiers . We asked ourselves whether the love for our boys and our willingness to fight for our country had all been ghastly mistakes, whether there had been anything true and noble in our past at all, and whether there was anything left in which we could still believe and by which we could live. While we, as everyone else in those days, were hungry all the time, we learned that our spiritual hunger was at least as pressing or more so than the pain in our stomachs. Absence of food was no obstacle to talk, and the pain of physical hunger gave urgency to our conversations . We had seen for ourselves how hunger of any kind roused hate, greed, and envy and led to despair, betrayal, and violence. We now found that hunger also was a fount of love, friendship, and confidence. We recognized that it severely tested our bodies and souls, that it pronounced the harshest verdicts, that it lightened as well as darkened our lives but also brought the richest rewards. We learned that we did not stand alone in our search; that our friendship was a gift of inestimable value; that as we probed and explored we could detect glimpses of possibilities for a new world and a new life. Our spiritual pilgrimage extended over vast territories. In our quest for purpose and meaning we felt freer in our thoughts than ever before . We no longer had to consider tradition and stated norms. We...

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