German Boy: A Refugeeâ??s Story

Chapter 13. A Winter Nightmare

186 Chapter 13 A WINTER NIGHTMARE W e moved out of our comfortable room the week following my grandfather’s arrest by the Communists. There was no use arguing with Paul. Some of Mutti’s women friends knew of a room with kitchen privileges near the train station, across from two sugar warehouses which belonged to the burned-out refinery. The move was easy and uncomplicated. We had so few possessions it was only a simple matter of packing our three suitcases again and carrying them to our new home. As we trudged through Strasburg, I thought about the many times we had made the three-suitcase trip—from Sagan to Berlin, from Berlin to Strasburg, from Strasburg to near Lübeck, to Strasburg again, and to yet another place in Strasburg. I saw no reason why this should be the last trip. Our new home was a simply furnished room with a table and four chairs, a bed on one side of the room, and a couch without a back on the other. A Schrank sat to the right of the door. There were two double windows with deep sills facing the street. In the winter of 1945, food became ever scarcer. I felt a sense of desperation pervading our lives. It seemed that people would do anything for a bite of food, a cigarette, or a drink of schnapps or vodka. Some would go to the police to turn in a neighbor for real or manufactured wrongs in the expectation that something good for themselves would come out of such desperate action. My family, like many others, had no stocks of food. We lived from hand to mouth, from one day to the next. When we thought of food, we thought of potatoes, rutabagas, and sour bread. Meat and butter were luxuries only rarely available, and then mostly on the black market. Oma spent most of her days with us. At night she went back to Paul’s in case Opa should return. She wanted to be there when he came back. On a grey day in late December 1945, the word was out that one of the town horses had died. We knew the next day there would be meat available from the horse carcass. I knew the horse the townspeople were talking about, a skinny old nag that had died of old age. In school my friends told me the carcass had been hauled to the one butcher in town and that it was being processed that night. I was up early the next morning. When I got to the butcher shop, the line was already long; it was made up mostly of women wearing ill-fitting grey or black coats and shawls wrapped around their heads to protect them against the bitter cold. Most of the women had sallow faces and missing teeth. There were no other children in line. I arrived at seven; the store would not open until one o’clock in the afternoon. The line grew longer as the morning progressed. The damp cold seemed to penetrate to my bones, and my feet felt like lumps of ice. A low-hanging cloud deck made the day seem even gloomier. The two women behind me talked incessantly. By eleven o’clock their talk turned to me. ‘‘He has lice,’’ one woman said to the other. ‘‘Can you see them?’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ said the other woman loudly, ‘‘one is crawling across his back.’’ She let out a loud shudder of disgust. I knew I didn’t have lice. We washed our hair daily because of the threat of lice from other children. Every afternoon Oma looked at Ingrid and me to make certain we were clean and had not picked up lice from other children. One of the two women started to complain even more loudly. ‘‘Why do we have to stand behind a louse-infested boy? We’ll probably catch lice ourselves, just because we want to put meat on the table for our hungry families.’’ The accusatory, loud chatter from the two women continued without letup. After a while, all of the grey-looking, shawl-clad, scrawny women in the long line stared at me, while the two women behind me kept up their accusations. Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. I did what they wanted me to do. I left the line. I arrived home in tears. Mutti rushed over to comfort me. I told her the story of...