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60. Help from Many Sources
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206 D Chapter Sixty d help from many sourCes Soon after the occupation of Berlin’s western sectors by theWesternAllies,and with the help of Louis P. Lochner, my mother had been able to obtain what in those days could only be compared to a passport to heaven,the“red”identification card reserved for“Victims of Fascism ,”issued to surviving Jews and those Germans who could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that by resisting,they or their families had suffered under the Nazis.Upon presenting my father’s discharge papers from Nazi prison, she was duly registered by the American authorities, her house was declared exempt from American occupation, and she received special ration cards, exceeding the meager calories allotted to the greater part of the population . The fact that old Nazis were crawling out of the woodwork like vermin, grumbling about my mother’s privileges, which included going to the head of the line wherever lines formed, did not bother her in the least. If necessary, she just yelled back at them, a twelveyear period of forced silence having accumulated a rather astounding vocabulary for a lady of her upbringing and social standing. We soon found ourselves in the bizarre situation of being victims of Bolshevism as well as Nazism. A succession of Russian refugees, in exile since 1917, came to occupy some of our upstairs rooms. A Duchess, who resided with her husband of lower nobility, was very likeable, except that she stole like a magpie. Hiding the loot in the sanctity of one of her rooms left me with only one solution.Whenever they left the house, in order to retrieve the “tsapptserapped” items, I simply opened their locked door with the help of an old skeleton key, and stealing back what she had taken became a daily routine. At that point it dawned on me that tsaptserapping had not been invented by nor was it limited to the Bolsheviks. My mother and I lived huddled together in Anna’s former room next to the kitchen, the only one fitted with a makeshift stove, which served both for heating and cooking, despite serious difficulties in obtaining anything burnable. Once we let the fire die out, it was almost impossible to relight it for lack of matches, newspapers, or any other paper. With a pipe leading outside through a crudely cut hole in the plywood that replaced the glass pane, wind blowing from the west filled the room with black clouds of biting smoke. Feeding the stove needed all our wits, so we gathered wood from felled or fallen fir trees in the forest, painfully chopping it from the stumps, carting it home in our rickety little wagon, once the pride and joy of two happy children. These activities did not exactly serve to improve the look of the Grunewald nor that of our hands, which began to show painful and unsightly Destruction unlimiteD 207 frostbite.For the first time,Germans had a taste of what it was like to be starving or freezing to death in the bitter cold of winter.Throughout the war,that fate had been reserved for the “subhumans,”the population of the Nazi-occupied territories, bled dry over a period of six years. Even with our extra food rations and kind donations, we were almost always hungry. Before my return to Berlin,there had been days when my mother realized that she had no choice but to offer some of her belongings, which had not fallen prey to“tsaptserap,”on the black market on Potsdamer Platz. These items included Meissen porcelain, silver, and my prized possession,the portable phonograph encased in beige leather.Reaching the market by public transportation took hours,until she found herself amidst a bustling,bickering crowd. Prepared to be snatched in a surprise police raid and hauled off to the nearest precinct ,she,the offspring of fourteen noble ancestors,sat on a pile of bricks,playing“GoodyGoody ,”one of my favorite records,to Russians and their buxom matkas flashing their silver teeth. After endless bargaining, my treasure was exchanged for a thick slice of bacon and a few loaves of black Russian bread. It was shortly after my arrival in Berlin,through one of her mysterious connections,that my mother discovered what seemed like the key to the proverbial land of milk and honey. Somehow, she had gotten wind of the fact that whatever food the American Army did not consume was burned in a well-guarded...