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215 D Chapter Sixty-Three d grandmother In the Soviet-occupied zone,the facilities of former Nazi concentration camps,like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, continued to be used after 1945 by the Soviet administration, which,after 1949,turned them over to the East German Communist regime.Falsely declared as places of “detention and reeducation” for Nazis, they also served as prisons for all those under the suspicion of resisting Stalinism. The truth was that, behind the concrete walls with barbed wire on top, in the run-down, vermin-infested barracks, long-term prisoners were kept, among them women, children, and even Jews. On the iron gates at Sachsenhausen , the cynical Nazi message “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work will make you free”) greeted the newcomers; in Buchenwald “Jedem das seine” (“To each his own”). The number, nature, and location of the NKVD camps, on the other hand, was kept top secret. Their mere existence within East Germany was vehemently denied, first by the Soviets and later by the East German authorities,dismissed as fantasies of the“Fascists.”The first official and authentic information came out only after the reunification of Germany in the fall of 1989. Some of the camps with their mass graves had simply been ploughed over, planted with grass or corn; in the case of Jamlitz, housing developments were swiftly erected to cover all traces. After my father’s disappearance, my mother decided to seek out the whereabouts of my grandmother.Had she survived the inferno?Walking the twenty kilometers from Berlin, she found the house where the general’s widow had resided, intact but occupied by Soviet officers and their families. Somehow, she was able to locate her mother-in-law at the other end of Potsdam in a shabbily furnished little room that the eighty-five-year-old woman now shared with Martha, her servant. After being thrown out of their home, with no place to go, Martha had propped up her mistress in a little wooden cart and pulled her through Potsdam in her long search for a roof over their heads. Although my mother succeeded in withholding the devastating news of her last son’s fate from his starving, bedridden old mother, she was not able to prevent a“well-meaning” friend from sending a note of condolence.Soon after,my grandmother succumbed not only to malnutrition and the cold, but the shock of the news. She was buried in the family plot among the “caste” she had been part of, in the ancient cemetery in Potsdam-Bornstedt, at her husband’s side and next toAdolf,the third son,whose remains had been returned to his parents from France after World War I. My mother used cigarettes to bribe a carpenter in Part two 216 Dahlem into carving a wooden cross for the grave, which she carried across her back from Berlin to Potsdam, later maintaining that now she was able to identify with Jesus Christ on his way to Golgotha. Not even a month later, the cross was stolen, most likely to be used for firewood.This theft so enraged her that she marched straight into the lion’s den,my grandmother ’s old apartment, now occupied by a Russian major. After ringing the bell she was, to her amazement, courteously ushered in by the stocky master of the house, his buxom wife flashing her silver front teeth in a friendly grin, and an extremely well-behaved little girl with a pink taffeta bow in her hair. Sitting on my grandmother’s sofa, my mother spent a most enjoyable hour with Russian tea, cake, and more vodka than was good for her, in the company of three jolly Muscovites . Encouraged by the vodka and hospitality, she decided not only to spill the story of the stolen cross, but to go all the way. Noticing that practically all of my grandmother’s belongings were still there, she boldly asked the officer, who had mastered sufficient German, why he, obviously a man of taste, bothered to surround himself with all these dreadful old pieces of junk? She, in fact, would be happy to take the stuff off his hands, relieving him for instance of the monstrous Steinway piano, the two-hundred and fifty-year-old desk clock, (a personal gift of Maria Theresa to one of my forefathers), the mahogany desk (pure Biedermeier style), and other outmoded Rococo items. She could see that he was obviously a modern man, a high-ranking officer of the victorious Soviet...

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