The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

must have heard something as they took some shots in my direction, but again no bullets came close.” Theodor took a deep breath and smiled at us. “The rest you know.”

Chapter Thirty-One

June 1945

Theodor stayed out of sight, mostly in the bedroom, for close to a week until we were sure that the Russians were no longer interested in capturing or summarily executing ex-soldiers, and certainly not young teen Volkssturm conscripts.

Fairly quickly their focus had shifted from revenge to reparations. Proclamations were issued stating that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was owed an incalculable debt for both the damage caused by the German invasion, but also for the costs associated with our liberation from our “Fascist oppressors.” Subsequently teams of Russian soldiers and officers began seizing anything they deemed of value. In particular they appeared to be focusing on art objects and industrial equipment. In addition, larger houses were ransacked for jewellery and silver and antiques, but they did not bother with little hovels like ours. The castle was emptied of any art that looked remotely valuable, and in town anything with an engine and any tools more sophisticated than a hammer or a shovel were confiscated as well. All of this was brought to the train station and loaded onto railcars. Then as the train slowly left the station, headed east ultimately to Russia one presumes, a team of German prisoners of war were ordered to dismantle the track behind the train, loading the rails onto it, one pair at a time. This was a very surreal thing to watch happen. Steel was valuable of course, especially for the post-war reconstruction, but this seemed an unnecessarily extreme measure. I was standing there with a few other grubby children like myself when a Russian officer saw us watching and said in broken German, “Russia move forward to future. Germany move backward to past!” This was perhaps as much the motivation as reparations. Back to revenge.

Now that Theodor was free to move about town, we had another pair of hands to help find food and also to find cigarette stubs, as tobacco had become an important impromptu currency. Full cigarettes were of course best, but we had learned how to make hand-rolled ones from the butt ends discarded by the Allied soldiers. The Americans in particular threw away cigarettes with up to a quarter or even sometimes half remaining! Occasionally they winked at us as they did this.

The informal market had dwindled to one or two farmers who showed up to town intermittently, the others having all fled the Russian advance. Some shops in town did have a few things to sell now, but the supply was still wholly inadequate. I was frustrated because I knew that I could find food in the forest across the bridge. There would be mushrooms for sure and the first berries would be out now too. Also by early June word had begun to spread that conditions were quickly improving on the American side of the river and that food had generally become much more available there. The bridge was still blocked and guarded, and I did not know how to swim, but Theodor did. He would not know where to go in the forest, but he could be sent to the market and to scavenge for cigarette butts on the other side.

Swimming the Mulde between the zones of occupation was strictly forbidden, but neither the Russians nor the Americans seemed especially intent on patrolling the banks, so as long as Theodor swam out of sight of the sentries on the bridge, he was usually fine. Even so, on two occasions he was spotted by a random patrol, once American and once Russian, and was shot at. In both cases they missed him, and in both cases so widely that their intent seemed to be to frighten him, not harm him. It did succeed in frightening him, but it did not succeed in dissuading him. Hunger, if sufficiently intense, trumps fear. Soon Theodor became a kind of water mule for Herr Rittmann and two other sets of neighbours as well. In addition to bringing food and tobacco back he also carried messages back and forth as an informal courier service developed. For example, Mama wanted to let Tante Karoline know that we were okay, so Theodor passed the letter on to someone on the west side who passed it along to someone travelling roughly in the direction of Mellingen until, remarkably, a week or two later it arrived at its destination.

Curiously during this entire period nobody spoke about what had happened to Papa, not directly anyway. Mama would occasionally preface remarks along the lines of “Without Papa we will . . .” but his death and the manner of his death were not raised. I thought Theodor would want to talk about it, but given what he had gone through, and given that he always looked tired and sad, I waited for him to introduce the subject. By the end of June, he still had not, so one afternoon when the two of us had been sent to collect wood for the cooking fire, I decided that it was up to me.

“Theodor, do you really think Papa did that? Killed himself?”

Theodor did not stop walking and he did not look at me. For a minute I thought that he would ignore the question. Then he spoke. “Yes, I think he did. I’ve heard that hundreds, even thousands, of Party officials did the same thing.”

“But why?”

“You read his letter — he just could not face Germany’s defeat. But honestly I think that it might have been more that he did not want to endure the humiliation of capture at the hands of the enemy. Remember that some of his heroes in ancient times — Socrates, Cato, Seneca — ended their lives this way. There is a sense of romantic honour about it for someone like Papa. What a load of crap though. I