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152 D Chapter Forty-Three d more illegal aCtiVities My mother decided to visit her son, now a private in the Wehrmacht, stationed in the small garrison town of Neuruppin. At this point of the war, civilians were not permitted to ride trains without special permits,certifying that their trip was of the utmost importance to the welfare of the German Reich. I told her not to worry, assuring her that I could arrange for a permit to be issued in her name. After I used my stolen Gestapo stationary with one red and one green stamp, which stated “Reichssicherheitshauptamt” as well as “Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler,” to type a neatly forged travel order, I had no difficulty purchasing the ticket.Since I did not want to take a chance of having my mother refuse to leave under these circumstances, I handed her the ticket and the invaluable document through the window just as the train began to move. After her return, she told me that a train official and a military police officer with the rank of major had stomped into her compartment,taken one look at her papers,and stood in respectful attention. “Augusta von Sell travels on official business by orders of the Geheime Staatspolizei,” I had written.Although admitting that she came close to fainting, she managed to give them a stern look with her Prussian blue eyes. One morning, there was a crumpled piece of paper in our mailbox, covered with my father’s handwriting. How it had gotten there remains a mystery. The contents were heartbreaking ; he informed us that his deportation to a concentration camp seemed imminent; most of his cell neighbors had already been dragged off. “At least,” he ended, “my transfer will save you the ordeal of the trips to the prison.” He wrote that his bleak cell, with a little grated hole for a window too high up for a view, had no radiator, a disaster now that the temperatures had dropped. By far the worst were the nightly air raids; the political prisoners were not permitted to seek safety in the shelter. As soon as the siren sounded, the ceiling lights in their cells, usually burning night and day for added discomfort, were turned off. This brought an immediate invasion of a regular army of bedbugs. Collecting all my wits, I asked to speak to Wipper in the Französischestrasse Gestapo headquarters. After voicing my complaints, he gave me a hurt look. Shaking his head, he informed me in an indignant tone that, while the circumstances were admittedly regrettable , it was not he who was to blame, but my father himself; as soon as he admitted his Destruction unlimiteD 153 guilt he would be moved to another, bug-free cell. There were no plans to transfer him to a“camp for reeducation”; he would stay in prison until after his trial. In the meantime, the alleged bugs, these nasty little fellows, had the beneficial side effect of miraculously speeding up confessions. At this remark he smiled benevolently. I swore that some day I would get even with him. My contract with the municipal theater of Essen did not last two months; most of the days and nights were spent in local air raid shelters. On the first of September, Hitler, the greatest strategist of all times, ordered all theaters closed. I was rather sad because Essen, in spite of all the bombings, was a pleasant place. The chief director, after recognizing me as a kindred spirit, confided that his brother had been executed, as a consequence of July 20. While male actors were swiftly sent to the Eastern front as cannon fodder, the women faced induction into the“Flak”or munitions factories. The premiere of Shakespeare’s“The Taming of the Shrew”was postponed until after the victory.I was profoundly sad to leave the ruins as well as the ensemble of the Essen theater,having enjoyed,in sharp contrast to Danzig ,the total absence of Nazis.It was no secret that even during the prewar years,Hitler knew better than to appear in the Ruhr region, particularly in the notoriously“red”city of Essen. On the train back to Berlin, Schatzi and I shared the compartment with a rather interesting man in his thirties. He was healthy looking yet not in uniform, which at this point of the war was not only rare, but outright suspicious, so I assumed that he had to be a member of...

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