-
A New Beginning in Germany
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Before the war, I had never been to Berlin, even though it was a center of culture. From 1931 on, when the Nazis were becoming powerful, we stayed away from Germany. Now the once mighty Berlin wasquite devastated. Whole neighborhoods were leveled, wiped out. Broken walls, broken buildings, broken streets, craters. The German bastion full of strutting Nazis was now swarming with Allied soldiers. Soon after Joel, Michael, and I settled ourselves at a refugee center , I went off on my own to see the Reichstag, the German parliamentary building, which wasnow partly in ruins. On the ground in front lay the bust from the statue of one of the kaisers, with feces piled on it. On one of the still partially standing wallswasa big sign in Russian, "Perfect work of the Soviet Air Force." Standing on the partial ruins of the Reichstag, an old German 133 a new begininig ingermant 134 After the Storm man was trying to explain the building's history to a group of about twenty high-ranking Allied officers—American, English, French, and Russian. I could tell by the expressions on their faces that nobody understood a word the old German was saying, so I offered to translate for the Russians and the French and apologized to the Americans and English for not knowing their language. But a French officer who spoke English was able to translate for them, so everyone was glad I was there. Actually, the old German didn't know a lot about the Reichstag, but when he mentioned that near the Brandenburg Gate—only about a three-minute drive away—Hitler's Reichskanzelei (chancellery ) wasstill intact, the officers became very interested in seeing it. When they insisted I come along as an interpreter, I was only too happy to oblige. On the way, the old German asked me if I was a Russian, and I said, "Sure. Straight from Moscow." I still wasn't ready to socialize with a German. There wasone burned-out armored car still in front of the Chancellery 's front doors, and MPs from each of the four Allied countries stood guard. We had a number of high-ranking officers among us, so no one dared to stop our group from going in. We first went to the Nazi Party meeting hall, an immense room with an extremely long table running down its center with maybe eighty or a hundred chairs still set up along its sides. We then went to the end of the hall and entered Hitler's big private office. Diagonally across from the entrance to the left was his desk and chair. A globe was on a little table to the right of the desk. In the film The Great Dictator there is a scene in which Charlie Chaplin, playing Hitler, contemplates a globe just like this one and uses it to dream about conquering the world. On the left wasthe entrance to Hitler's private washroom and a large black wall safe. The officers joked that the safe must hold all the diamonds and gold Hitler stole from across Europe. A very large and beautiful chandelier was hanging from the high ceiling. When I sensed that one of the Russian officers might be Jewish, [52.90.121.17] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:18 GMT) A New Beginning in Germany 135 something in me wanted to let him know that I was Jewish too. I found a wayof doing it by glancing at the chandelier and saying to him, "Sir, don't you think it would make a beautiful Chanukah lamp?" I could see in his eyes that he got it. It wasn't a big deal. I just felt I had found somebody, an officer and a Jew, whose family might have been murdered in Russia. Also in the room was a military bed that hung down from the wall on two chains, like a bed in a prisoner's cell. I don't know what it wasfor. Maybe Hitler used to nap on it. As we were about to leave, a German caretaker in a green uniform came in from the garden and casually mentioned that the bunker where Hitler committed suicide wasclose by. We all wanted to see it, so we went out into the garden, turned right, and went about fifteen steps to the entrance. We descended about twofloors into the concrete bunker in complete darkness, but since just about everyone was a smoker, we lit our...