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

Letters from Papa continued to be highly sporadic and brief, although in the early spring one arrived that had a little more information.

Dear Luise,

The denazification camp continues to be a better experience than I had feared or dared to expect. The Americans must have been very angry with Germans to treat us the way they did after we were captured. I can understand that now. It is interesting to observe that the British have even more reason to be angry, yet they have been nothing but courteous and just.

Camp life is very structured. We rise early to the sound of a loud bugle. Then we wash and we muster for what they call parade, which is a head count of the prisoners. I don’t think anyone has tried to escape though. Where would they go? Some days there is a short speech from the commander, Colonel Ross, and some days there is music. Sometimes bagpipes are even played. I will avoid tempting the censor and will not give my opinion of this aspect of British culture!

After morning parade, we have a short breakfast, usually of porridge, and then we go to class. We are taught history, politics, economics and moral philosophy, with of course an emphasis on the errors of the Third Reich. They do this very well.

Lunch is always a soup made from the scraps of last night’s dinner and then we are off to work. By work I mean actual manual labour, which is not something I am used to, but I surprise myself with how quickly I have adapted to it and even become good at it. We are told that the work will become more useful and oriented towards skills soon. Many of us in Category II were professionals who will not be permitted to return to our professions after we are released, so there is an intent to teach us trades that we can earn a living with instead. Sometimes we are taken out of the camp under guard to clean up debris from the war. So much was destroyed. It is very hard work.

The evening meal varies but is always nutritious. Sometimes we even have what they call “pudding” by which they mean dessert. Before the children become very jealous though I must emphasize that this is rare. After that we are free to read or write or play cards. I am very tired by the end of the day and I sleep very well. Curiously, I never dream anymore.

Your Wilhelm

What stood out to me most in this letter was the reference to Papa performing manual labour. This produced a comical image of him in one of his fine grey suits, with his polished black dress shoe set tentatively on a pile of bricks while he gingerly holds a shovel, looking deeply displeased, as if he has been asked to clean up after the dog. I knew he would not be wearing his suit in denazification camp, but I also knew that he would definitely not be wearing his Nazi Party uniform either and I was unable to picture him wearing anything other than one of those two outfits. Consequently my inner picture-maker selected the slightly less improbable of the two.

I think that malnourishment has had an effect on the formation of memories from this period. The events of 1946 and 1947 come to me as free-floating vignettes, rather than as crisply defined sequences with probable dates (or at least months) associated as before and after. In any case, I am reasonably confident it was in the spring, or possibly early summer, of 1946 that we returned to Leipzig for the first time since the end of the war. We just went for the day to see what we could salvage that might be of value. Mama, Paul and I took the train while Theodor stayed home to watch the others. He was considered a better choice for this role than I was, although I think I handled things quite nicely that time that Mama and Theodor went to Rochlitz.

The train was as crowded and uncomfortable as any I had been on. In fact I do not recall having a truly pleasant train journey at any point in my childhood. I remembered seeing gleaming, well-lit and well-appointed trains, with every window intact, when I was a small boy and was taken to the grand Leipzig train station to meet a visitor or perhaps see Papa off on a business trip, so I had direct knowledge that they once existed. But the pre-war world felt wholly fictional, even fantastical, as if the small boy version of me was himself a character in a storybook. The train went slowly to save on coal and also stopped frequently because of the state of the track, so a journey that would have taken under an hour in normal times now took two hours. Knowing this we took the earliest train so as to have a full day in the city.

Leipzig was unrecognizable. There had been so many more bombing raids since I left the city in December of 1943, and then the final battle last spring caused a tremendous amount of destruction as well. At least half the buildings were not standing anymore. Entire city blocks had been transformed into small mountain ranges of scree and rubble. Very few cars were on the streets and all of those were Russian. The train slowed even more as it entered the city, so I was able to watch as groups of children clambered on these mountains and picked various treasures out — bits of metal, occasional intact household items. Women pushed wheelbarrows down the narrow streets that had been cleared as passes. They appeared to be moving some of the debris away, but the task seemed to be of an impossible scale, as if ants had been sent to clean up after a housefire.

Everything moved very slowly,