FIVE

Roads West

Behold, I send an angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared.

EXODUS 23:20

The war was over, the Nazi death machine was dismantled, and Germany and much of Europe lay in ashes. Daily life for most Germans had become a struggle for survival. No one played the fiddle on the ruins. Lives were lived, not in the headlines or in the momentous decisions made far away in Washington, Moscow, and London, but in a bleak everyday full of deprivations. For me, in Germany, there was hunger—not starvation—and an all-pervasive disorientation. What would the days to come bring? And the year? And the future after that? Would the conquerors take revenge for what we had done? The eyes of the adults around me answered only in blank stares, gripped as they were by fear and apprehension. For many Germans, everything was chaotic and subject to change at a moment's notice due to any number of things —random luck, individual seat-of-the-pants initiatives, the capacity to hunker down, the ability to leap onto a train to get away or to go home, if home was still there.

What of my future friend? The farther east in Europe you went, the more evident the destructive effects of the war became. Right after liberation, life for Bernie consisted of scrounging, scrounging, and more scrounging—for food and warm clothes. The eyes of the adults to whom Bernie might have turned to answer questions about his desperate present or precarious future were no longer there. Those adults who remained were competing with him in their own search for food.

Thus, the dice were thrown for everyone in a new unpredictable game of chance. Two teenage boys —Bernie and I — in spite of disparities in our fates, stood on new playing fields, more similar now than before, to deal with the roll of the dice as best we could and to act as if we had a hand in determining our future.

During the first day of his liberation, after it became clear that their Nazi tormentors had fled, Bernie and a handful of fellow survivors found some red beets and cooked them up in a soup, just to put something into their empty stomachs. That night Bernie was gripped by a fever and fell very ill. The lice seemed to be winning the battle over his weakened body. Yet he joined the others the next day as the emaciated group spread out over the landscape in search of food. They stumbled upon a field of potatoes, dug them up, and ate them raw on the spot. Between 10:00 and 11:00 that morning a truck full of soldiers, with a white star on its side, arrived. Bernie called them “English.” In fact they were Americans, but in Bernie's world at the time, no such fine distinctions existed. The soldiers tossed sweets to the scraggly crowd that clamored in German for Brot. Late that afternoon the rumor spread that there was a German food storage depot nearby. The crowd hurried to locate it and looted it thoroughly. Bernie and Simcha found a can of Rindfleisch, or beef, intended for the German army. Bernie believes they must have used a door handle or some other metal object to force the can open. Without hesitation, they devoured its cold, greasy contents. Thus Bernie's first postliberation movable feast consisted of red beet soup, dirty raw potatoes, and greasy canned beef courtesy of the departed German army.

On the third day after liberation, Allied trucks arrived to pick up the aimless crowd of starved survivors and deposit them into barracks at the U.S. air base set up at Horsching, not far from Linz. Bernie and his fellow survivors, including Simcha, were sprayed with DDT once again, as they had been at their arrival in Auschwitz, to delouse them. Though housed at the base, the survivors continued to forage the countryside for food. Bernie was not always lucky in what he found. On one of his search-and-eat expeditions, he looted a large box from a warehouse and lugged it several kilometers back to the barracks. When he opened it, he found nothing but packets of rough German army toilet paper, a booty with low bartering value.

Although the survivors gradually put more and more days between themselves and their Nazi imprisoners, still their fragile health continued to deteriorate. Bernie himself was getting weaker and weaker, “falling apart,” as he puts it. Simcha also became very ill with repeated bouts of nausea. At one point, worried about losing him, Bernie raced down a flight of stairs in the barracks in which they were housed to look for an army doctor, and in doing so he lost his amulet, his prized identification tag that the kind silversmith, the Austrian inmate at Mauthausen, had made for him. Simcha survived. But the one tangible sign of an act of human kindness performed during Bernie's stay in the camps was gone. Even as he told me this, his sense of loss was palpable, and for a fleeting moment I had the irrational desire to get up and help him search for his amulet. I realized once again that Bernie is a man without mementos, without memorabilia or trinkets of any kind. And I think of the drawers and shelves in my home that store photos, letters, and tokens from the days of my youth.

The distinction between days began to blur for Bernie as his condition weakened. During this slide toward death, he happened to encounter a villager from Tab who had survived Auschwitz, including an infernal tour of duty working in the gas chambers. Most gas chamber workers were systematically killed by the Germans because they knew too much. As one of the few who survived, this man confirmed — definitively for Bernie — that his parents had been gassed. This news, along with the typhus he had contracted, the scant food rations, and the effects of the arsenic fed him by camp guards—all combined to make his spirit ebb further. Bernie lost consciousness. He remembers hallucinating about food and having nightmares about specters of death. When he regained consciousness, he found himself in a field hospital run by the Americans. His first thoughts were of Simcha. By now, he and his friend had reclaimed their real names, by which they could be recognized; the concentration camp number no longer counted. Bernie's weight at this time, at almost fourteen years of age, was between 26 and 27 kilograms, or about 58 pounds. I remember that when I was sick with tuberculosis at age twelve and a half I had weighed 70 pounds.

The condition of the two camp buddies gradually improved, and they were finally released from the sick ward and returned to their barracks. Bernie went on an exploratory trip to the nearby city of Linz, where he wandered by mistake into the Soviet-occupied zone. He had picked up some Russian words that he put to use now communicating with the Russian soldiers. Back in camp, rumors were spreading, which turned out to be true, that the entire region was to be incorporated into the Russian occupation zone. Now that the fact of his survival had sunk in, it was no longer just the search for food that preoccupied Bernie. As he began to realize that he might have a future after all, he started to worry about what would lie ahead. He thought about ways to go west, rather than east. He saw little reason to return to his native Hungarian village, and he knew that he would rather be in the U.S.-occupied zone should land swaps with the Soviets be made.

One day during the early summer months, Bernie hung around the Horsching airstrip where an airplane was being loaded with well-fed and neatly groomed children his age. Shabbily dressed, undernourished street urchin that he was, Bernie observed them enviously and then clambered up the boarding ramp unobserved and hid underneath a seat, even though he didn't know where they were going. But the boy to whom the seat had been assigned discovered and reported him. Bernie was taken off the plane and whisked to an office. He asked for mercy from the officials by pleading with them in his fractured German: “Vater, Mutter kaput. Nicht essen. Wohin kann ich gehen?” (Father, mother dead, nothing to eat. Where can I go?). Bernie was very adept at communicating, and his plea moved the officials to tears. Nevertheless, the airplane departed without him. The American soldiers in charge of the flight gave him some C rations to try to console him.

Something else, however, came along that would transport him to other places. One day, a contingent of smartly uniformed, armed men arrived unexpectedly. Members of the Palestinian Jewish brigade, this trim fighting force had put itself in charge of concentration camp survivors. They wore spiffy British uniforms with the leaping stag insignia. Their goal was to organize the survivors' clandestine exodus to Palestine. The astonished camp inhabitants were told to get ready for transport south. Soon they were loaded onto twelve trucks whose rear canvas flaps were left open as they departed. These flaps were carefully closed, however, as the convoy approached the Austrian-Italian frontier, presumably to avoid a confrontation with border authorities, whom Bernie believes were probably aware of the nature of the transport and allowed its passage unchecked. Except for the border crossing, the flaps were kept open so that Bernie and the other youngsters could see the beauty of the Austrian and Italian Alps as they rolled by. He was “blown away,” as he puts it.

After all his suffering for being Jewish, Bernie now came to know a proud group of young Jews not only in control of their destiny but also ready to guide others to a life of self-affirmation and dignity. But more important than pride for Bernie and his fellow refugees was the simple fact of being treated as human beings to be nurtured. He stood in awe before these uniformed Jews who for him were heroes, not victims. He became witness to a new chapter in Jewish history that was being written with their take-charge approach.

The truck convoy through southern Austria and over the Brenner Pass arrived after two days at Tarvisio in northern Italy, where the Jewish brigade set up camp. The young survivors were given medical care and all the nourishing and tasty food they could eat. Bernie felt he had “died and gone to heaven.” But this stay was short, as they were soon transferred to a huge refugee camp in Bologna, where they received little attention, skimpy food rations, and none of the amenities enjoyed in Tarvisio. Bernie was forced to sleep on the floor once again. Euphoria changed to depression. The Bologna camp turned out to be a holding pen. Although it was a far cry from Mauthausen, life here was still miserable. After all, they had briefly been shown a ray of hope that was no longer visible. Bernie tried to earn a little pocket money for himself by carrying bags. For one entire day he devoted all his energies to helping an Italian family with their luggage but received nothing for his efforts.

Bernie and the others were moved again, this time to Modena, where they were housed in the Palazzo Ducale. Most of the huge building in the central square of this northern Italian town was occupied by the Jewish refugees, but one wing was used by the American army. After he had failed to earn anything from the Italian family, Bernie tried his luck with the Americans. He hung around with some other boys near the American gate to the Ducal Palace. The GIs passing through that gate in their jeeps represented everything that was enticing and far removed from the hunger and dreariness that still characterized his life. They were also a source of food, candy, and other good things that could be had through begging or performing services for them. By this time Bernie wore light summer shorts given him by an Englishman — a welcome change from the bulky trousers stripped off the dead German soldier. And since it was hot during this early Italian summer, he went barefoot. Several days went by during which Bernie advanced to the self-appointed post of unofficial doorman for the GIs. One day, a staff car drove up with four Americans inside. They turned out to be a team from the 88th Division, Fifth Army, in charge of repatriating prisoners, for the most part Italian civilians who had been arrested on suspicion of having collaborated with the Germans. As he had so many times before, Bernie approached one of these strangers and offered to carry his duffel bag. Entrusted with the bag, Bernie preceded the soldier into the interior of the American quarters. All the owner of the duffel bag could see as he followed behind the boy—as he was to tell Bernie later—was the heavy bag over small shoulders and bare feet underneath. This encounter would change Bernie's life forever.

For the next five days, after he finished his debriefing work, the twenty-four-year-old soldier, whose name was Charles Merrill, Jr., son of the founder of the renowned New York brokerage and banking house, spent several hours talking with the thirteen-year-old village orphan.¹ They spoke broken German together, the one language they had in common. Bernie poured out the story of his life to Merrill, who was deeply moved. On two visits to Hungary before the outbreak of World War II, the young Merrill had developed a liking for its people. He now gave the Hungarian boy food, bought him ice cream, invited him to restaurants, and took him to a boxing match. They took a ride in a horse-drawn carriage together. But most importantly, they became friends.

As Charles Merrill related to me later, perhaps a thousand survivors ready to show their tattooed numbers from Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, and other camps were there in Modena under British and American administration, along with some Palestinian Jewish soldiers who boosted their morale. What impressed him about the teenage Bernat was his energy, upbeat personality, and courtesy. He did not see in him so much the lost waif as I had assumed. Rather, Bernat Rosner appeared to the American GI as a youngster ready to take on the world, if only it gave him a chance.

Approximately one year had passed since the train with the Rosners on it had left Kaposvar for Auschwitz. Bernie had passed through the vortex of the maelstrom and emerged alive. And now, in July 1945, his life took a turn for the good. For the first time “since he left home,” as Bernie puts it, he experienced a human bond that provided him with warmth and support. But Charles Merrill was transferred in the line of duty, so he and Bernie exchanged addresses and bade each other farewell.

As he now tells me about his encounter with Charles Merrill, Jr., or “Charlie,” as he calls him, Bernie employs the present tense. “Now we'll see what happens next.” Only twice before in his recollection had a moment in his past overwhelmed the present so completely by its force: the body search of his mother by Nazis on the day the Jews were forced out of their homes and several months later at Mauthausen when he faced the notorious quarry steps. But this moment from the past in Modena made its appearance in the present tense as something benign and good.

During late summer 1945, Bernie, along with a group of other youngsters with the same background, was transferred to Piazzatore, a summer camp run by a Zionist organization for Jewish-Italian children. But the camp was to be shut down in the fall, and the refugee children would have to be moved again. The person in charge of the organization was Moshe Z'iri, a deeply committed Zionist, passionate about the fate of his charges and about the destiny of a country—Israel —not yet created. While the teenage Auschwitz survivors from Hungary had no idea what was going to happen next, Moshe Z'iri tried to manage the chaotic postwar situation to their advantage. He assured them that he would find solutions and places for them to go on their hazardous exodus to Palestine. And he did.

Bernie had never heard of the places they would see, Italian towns that became way stations in the refugees' uncertain movements. Moods of hope and despair were measured by the random quality of life these various locales presented. And finally, there was Selvino, a beautiful little town in the Italian Alps north of Bergamo where they arrived in September 1945. Here they were housed in what was originally built by the fascist regime as a resort for tubercular children. The name of this resort was Sciesopoli. An idyllic period ensued, sweet days in beautiful surroundings. Bernie was happy there, and fortune willed that he would stay a long time, almost a year and a half, until February 1947.

Shortly after their arrival in Selvino, Moshe Z'iri arranged a convocation to celebrate Rosh Hashanah with the spiritually deprived youngsters. It was their first opportunity to return to the religious traditions stifled by the Nazis before their internment. For Bernie and his Orthodox family, religious life had come to an end in the brickyard near the Tab railroad station. Moshe Z'iri wanted to lead these orphans back to familiar religious habits. But the service had to be stopped when the entire group of youngsters began to wail and sob. The rituals so long forbidden only brought forth memories of the terrible losses they had suffered, especially the loss of their families, with whom they had practiced their faith.

Despite this failed attempt at religious revival, for the first time since he was taken from his home, Bernie enjoyed at Selvino a predictable daily life, guided by a social order in which activities were arranged both for the good of all and for the benefit of the individual. He also enjoyed something approaching regular schooling. Selvino had a sizable library of Hebrew texts, including translations from European and American literature, and devoted teachers opened up a world of humanistic learning for him. He devoured these books, including a Hebrew translation of Irving Stone's biography of Vincent van Gogh. Another Hebrew translation, of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, made him aware of the existence of social inequalities in the United States. A generalized pro-socialist ideology, which implied a rejection of the capitalism that America stood for, guided the camp's leadership. Yet another kind of America reached the camp as well—the America of glamour. In films like Sotto il cielo di Hawaii, Hollywood stars like Alan Ladd and Rita Hayworth moved in a fabulous world of make-believe and wealth. The language of the subtitles did not matter —Italian, English, or whatever. It was the images that made a powerful impression of a magic kingdom beyond the horizon to the west.

The camp language at Selvino was Yiddish, a language understood by all in spite of their different European origins. Hebrew was vigorously promoted by the camp authorities, and Bernie was employed to teach it to his peers. The small group of Mauthausen survivors, six boys including Bernie and Simcha, spoke to each other in their native Hungarian. The mode of this instruction was quite different from the Orthodox rigidity of the Hebrew school way back in the village of Tab. Now Bernie was introduced to secular learning, and he loved it. There were even dances for the growing teenagers, and the forbidden activity of climbing the fence to explore the surrounding countryside. As weeks turned into months, a daily routine, so long denied them, reestablished a sense of normalcy in their lives.

The primary purpose of instruction at Selvino was to mold young minds to the Zionist cause, to inculcate in the survivors the image of a heroic “New Jew” who was ready to take the collective future of the Jewish survivors and make it part of what was to become the nation of Israel. This fervent message was presented with great intensity by their Zionist role model, Moshe Z'iri, who appeared to these impressionable young people as a towering giant. A model of leadership, he inculcated in the young Bernie a deep sense of his own worth. One day the entire camp went to Milan to attend a performance of Bizet s “Carmen.” Afterward, they participated in a Zionist demonstration advocating the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Moshe Z'iri was everywhere, dealing with the past, organizing the present, and preparing for the future of his young disciples.

It was after his liberation and particularly during his stay in Selvino that Bernie realized that religion had lost its grip on him. In this camp he was imbued with secular teachings and inspired by the tanned, muscular soldiers who discarded the demeaning, submissive behavior of the people in the Diaspora and the blind adherence to the belief that God will provide. God had not done so in Auschwitz. Furthermore, his Orthodox faith had been tied to his immediate family, now gone. Still, he learned that a sister of his mother had survived the Holocaust. She wrote him from the land that was to become Israel and exhorted him to return to the rituals and practices of his Orthodox faith. She asked him to join her in the ultraconservative religious enclave, Mea Sh'arim, that had been created in Jerusalem. But return to an Orthodox life held no attraction for Bernie, and he declined to join this aunt.

To the leaders of the camp, Bernie was a bright prospect-energetic, intelligent, able to think on his feet, and, more important, fluent in Hebrew. He also had a working knowledge of German and Italian. Above all, he had survived Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Gusen, and these sharp survival instincts made him a natural candidate for the exodus to Palestine. Camp chores were performed by the young initiates in such a way as to nurture a spirit of solidarity with each other and with the larger Zionist cause. Bernie was told—many times—that it was his duty to go to Palestine.

Yet he thought of Charlie, who had left him his military address. Bernie had written his GI friend earlier and gotten a reply toward the end of August. He took good care of this precious letter, and he and Charlie started to correspond regularly. To ensure his recovery to complete health, Charlie sent Bernie a box of Puretest Plenamin vitamins as a supplement to his camp food rations. To this day Bernie keeps the cardboard box that contained those pills —one of the first mementos he was able to save. The box now holds photos from the Italian camps.

In the autumn Bernie received the most important single document of his life — a letter dated November 4, 1945, from Charles Merrill, Jr., now discharged from the military and living in the United States. Already a married family man at twenty-four, the former GI now offered the Jewish-Hungarian concentration camp survivor an alternative choice and a new opportunity: “Wenn ich Reisemoeglichkeit und Visum fuer Dich bekommen koennte, wuerdest Du dann nach Amerika kommen wollen, um mit uns als unser Sohn zu leben?” (If I can arrange for travel and a visa for you, would you then want to come to America to live with us as our son?). Charles Merrill encouraged Bernie to make his own decision and ended with a generous offer of help, regardless of his decision: “Und ganz gleich, so Du bist und was Du tun willst, lasse mich bitte immer wissen, was ich fuer dich tun kann” (And whatever you decide and are and want, please always let me know what I can do for you). It is a strange irony that this most important letter in Bernie's life was written in German. Although grammatically imperfect, the proposal was a perfect example of humanity.

Even though the war had ended in August 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, in Europe chaos continued for a long time. In this chaos, a Jewish boy from Tab, Hungary, had to make the biggest decision of his life. On the one hand, he was being urged to commit himself to a collective and follow the call of the Zionist cause to Palestine. Bernie realized that even the utopia of a Zionist future would have disadvantages. To choose Palestine would mean, first of all, an internment camp on Cyprus to which the British authorities regularly consigned “illegal” Jews heading for that country. The thought of being imprisoned in yet another camp surrounded by barbed wire appalled him. And in spite of all the individual attention Bernie received at Selvino, he did not fail to notice that it was a collective force that attempted to mold the young concentration camp survivors. He was torn by an inner conflict between his sense of solidarity with and pride in belonging to a group of Jews who were no longer victims and his intense desire for personal freedom, his need to escape restraints, to not be fenced in physically or mentally. In his childhood, he had dreamed of a beautiful life to be lived if only he could follow the sun.

Now he discovered that certain things sat deeper in him than his pride and newfound solidarity with the Palestinian cause his Zionist mentor had outlined for him. He wanted to have a family again.

When Bernie accepted Charlie's offer, Moshe Z'iri's reaction was swift. In a passionate face-to-face encounter, the “shit hit the fan,” as Bernie recalls. Moshe Z'iri could be uncompromisingly brutal in pursuing his cause. Bernie was put under intense pressure to change his mind. He was accused of being a traitor and ostracized as an outsider. A rumor spread through the camp that Charles Merrill was planning to abduct Bernie to America and turn him into a Catholic priest. But Bernie stood by the risky decision that was certain to burn an important bridge behind him. And indeed, the road to a future in Palestine closed for him now. Yet it would take an excruciatingly long time before the American sponsorship could be implemented. It would not be an easy thing, and Bernie's decision to opt for America made life at Selvino more difficult.

By the end of 1946, Bernie was still at Selvino when a large group of Eastern European Jewish children arrived. These children, who had grown up in or escaped to parts of the Soviet Union the Germans failed to reach, had not been in concentration camps. They had different stories to tell than the smaller group of camp survivors whom Moshe Z'iri initially brought to Selvino and who were bound by their common suffering. By then, the total population of the children's home had grown to approximately one hundred fifty youngsters, and only a small nucleus of Auschwitz-Mauthausen-Gusen survivors was left. In late 1946 the time had come to say farewell to his concentration camp buddy, Simcha, who was headed for Palestine via Cyprus. They didn't know whether they would ever meet again.

When Bernie's stay in Selvino ended in February 1947, the roll of the dice was not favorable. He and the other Selvino veterans whose destinations were other than Palestine were moved to a huge, squalid refugee camp at Cremona, where life suddenly took a downward turn. Bernie grew increasingly depressed. By the autumn, however, a way out of the Cremona squalor finally opened up. In a letter, Charles Merrill encouraged him to contact an Italian woman in Lucca who had worked in the underground during the war. She had found an Italian family in Viareggio willing to accept Bernie as a boarder. The bill, of course, was paid by Merrill. This Italian family was welcoming and kind and gave Bernie an enduring feeling of warmth for Italians. Bernie's stay of several months in Viareggio ended his life in the various camps of war-torn Europe, from the Nazi death camps to several postwar refugee camps.

In the meantime, his sponsor worked hard to secure a U.S. entry visa for Bernie. In November 1947, two years after Bernie received Charlie's letter offering to sponsor him, papers were finally approved and Bernie made his way to Genoa to pick them up. Because Bernie possessed no passport, birth certificate, or other papers to verify his identity or origins, a special document for a stateless person had to be prepared by the U.S. Consulate to permit him to emigrate to the United States. He probably would not have been able to enter the United States at all had it not been for Charles Merrills persistent efforts and the substantial amounts of money he spent to cut through bureaucratic red tape.

Now America started to loom on Bernie's horizon as something tangible. With the Hungarian-English dictionary Charlie sent him, Bernie studied English feverishly. He took up the painstaking task of tackling Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island for the next six weeks. It was hard work. By referring to the dictionary, he managed to translate twenty-eight pages of the adventure novel — the best he could do to prepare himself for the next step in his life, a leap across the Atlantic to the United States of America.

Charles Merrill sent him money for the journey. Bernie planned to travel cheaply by freighter to New York, but Charlie wouldn't hear of it. Only a swift airplane flight from Europe to America would do for Bernat Rosner. So it happened that the dice rolled for Bernie once again—winning dice, this time. On January 17, 1948, two weeks before his sixteenth birthday, he checked in for a TWA flight in Rome that was bound for New York's La Guardia Airport via Geneva, Paris, London, and Newfoundland. He had papers in hand, some money in his pocket, and his sponsor, Charlie, in the New World. This time no Nazi thugs, no government officials or any of the myriad authorities, uniformed or civilian, good or evil, that had crossed his path over the years appeared to question his moves or to hold power over him. No one had the authority to prevent Bernat Rosner from boarding the airplane that would take him west.

At the end of the war, there were no dice to roll for me, or so it seemed at first. Physical mobility was restricted to the village and its surrounding fields and forests. Life as we knew it changed radically for Germans, Nazis and non-Nazis alike. For practical purposes, the outside world ceased to exist. Village elders went so far as to call a meeting to discuss whether it was possible for Kleinheubach to survive on its own, seceding in effect from what remained of Germany. It was thought that the apple harvest from the thousands of apple trees owned by villagers constituted an important trading asset that might assure economic autonomy. Although the meeting was held in the Gasthaus zur schönen Aussicht, with its appropriately ironic double meaning of “beautiful view” and “promising prospects,” nothing came of this village utopia.

The Americans did not permit Germans to bear firearms, with the result that hunting became impossible and wild boars descended from the Odenwald mountains to damage the spring crops in the fields. My grandfather tried to fashion metal bows and arrows in his blacksmith shop to shoot them, but no one organized a posse to go after the destructive foragers. Schools closed, and no one knew when they would open again. Many adult males either had been killed in the war or were missing in action. Most ended up in POW camps throughout Europe and North America. Some were on their way home by foot from the various collapsed fronts of the war. A few had returned before the end, dismissed from the army because of mental or physical debilities. The occupying American army posted a declaration on the village bulletin board that any harm done to a GI would cause the village to be razed to the ground. They displayed another poster nearby: an enlarged photograph of a mass grave in the Warsaw ghetto. That horrifying image of emaciated corpses hanging on the walls of the open pit has never left me.

All weapons and Nazi flags and insignia had to be delivered to the town hall. I decided to turn in my father s officer's dagger, adorned with an ivory handle and a silver oak leaf cluster, which he had left at home during his last leave from his Channel Islands post. As I carried it toward the town hall, an American soldier spotted it, hurried up to me, and ordered me to hand it over to him. He left the scene with this special memento of World War II stashed under his coat.

We, the young, felt an unfamiliar freedom from restraint. No more marching, no more uniforms, and, most of all, few orders from the adults, who were too busy with our day-to-day survival to perform their pedagogical duties. We let our hair grow long. During the first days after occupation, we hung around the American tank parked on the Hirschplatz, the village square, where just a few days earlier the last contingency of the SS had tried to rally the Volkssturm of Kleinheubach to defend the fatherland. Now the GIs sat on their tank and tossed candy to us. When our distinguished grammar school principal, the bald-headed Oberlehrer Kahlert, rode by perched high on his old-fashioned bicycle, we automatically raised our arms and saluted him with an accustomed “Heil Hitler.” The GIs found this hilarious, and all joined in shouting “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” over and over at our mentor, who pedaled away from the scene as fast as he could. Most of the soldiers were white, but the few black soldiers in the occupation force were especially friendly and nice to us as they tossed candy down from their tanks. While the village and our part of Germany obviously were controlled by the Americans, we, the village youngsters, believed that the streets and nearby fields and forests belonged to us.

Everything American, which until recently had been condemned as decadent, now had an enticing, glamorous aura. Before the collapse, school officials showed us a Nazi propaganda film designed to instill in us a hatred for American “decadence”—a clip of Benny Goodman playing his clarinet while young Americans jumped in the aisles of a music hall to syncopated rhythms. The somber Nazi commentary proclaimed that the Jew, Goodman, was seducing American youth and that we must defend ourselves against such dangers. Now that Benny Goodman's music had arrived, and Tommy Dorsey's band as well, we loved it, particularly because it still tasted a bit like forbidden fruit. We avidly memorized the lyrics to “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “Hey Bob a-Ree Bob,” only half understanding what we were singing but believing that this was truly America. One of the first German postwar hits was a love duet in which the lovers promised each other to move to Arkansas or Arizona and raise green beans together.

The Americans instituted an ineffectual denazification and reeducation program that included a questionnaire with 132 questions to be completed by all adult Germans. As I had the only typewriter in our street, I filled out a lot of questionnaires for our neighbors, who would give me a few details and let me invent the rest. Some questions were easy, such as whether or not an old woman had served in the Waffen-SS. Others were more difficult, for example, when it came to Nazi affiliations and sympathies. Everyone was classified into five categories, ranging from war criminal down to innocent. Most fell somewhere in the middle as sympathizers or activists, or as just plain folk who had kept their mouths shut. I received some food in return for my typing services and in some cases for my inventiveness.

The Americans had a hard time finding Germans politically acceptable enough to teach the young and required prospective teaching candidates to write an essay about the three persons they admired most in history. One of the candidates, whose essay I typed, told me that among the most popular triads were “Jesus Christ, George Washington, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt” and “Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein.” Apparently, all the candidates made sure that one or two on their list of purported favorites were Americans.

Many Germans wanted to believe at first that the clock had been reset to a “zero hour” (Stunde Null). It was a convenient way to forget that this German clock had been running punctually before and throughout the war, keeping time with the Nazi death machine. The fact was, the clock of the Third Reich had merely stopped at the end of the war, and the innocence of a zero hour was a form of self-deception that the Germans maintained for a time. The seductive glamour of America, exciting as it was for the young, could not dispel the general gloom. After all, the American presence had more to do with tanks than with films and music during the immediate postwar years. There was much talk about democracy and what it might mean. At first it was nothing but a term vaguely related in our minds to our collective bad conscience about our Nazi crimes.

A few weeks after the war ended, I was practicing my English with an American officer, a “chicken” colonel —a term I learned from a GI. The epithet derived from the small silver eagle insignia on his lapel. I stood next to the colonel's jeep near our village square. In the middle of our exchange, the American suddenly exclaimed angrily, “You Germans killed the Jews and you all knew about it!” I was shocked and recoiled from his remark. Instinctively, I denied this accusation to the officer's face, but what I was denying was the second part of his claim. I, along with my fellow villagers, had seen the photographs of the mass graves of the Warsaw ghetto that the U.S. Army posted on the town hall bulletin board. From these photographs, we all knew what had happened. I believed that we Germans had done it, but when faced with the accusation, I couldn't believe that people of the village I passed in the streets everyday—let alone members of my own family—knew what had happened in the concentration camps. Along with everyone else, I attributed the atrocities to some Germans, not all Germans—to the SS, above all, and, more precisely, to the SD, a specially trained elite within the SS. I had a personal reason to suspect them, because I came in contact with a group of such officers.

When the war ended, the Americans set up a temporary camp of SS prisoners in the park of the Lowenstein castle. Guarded by an armed GI, four of these prisoners were assigned to work in my grandfather's blacksmith shop on odd jobs required to maintain the camp. I inherited an Eisenhower jacket and a pair of U.S. Army boots from the American guard, who hailed from St. Louis—the only boots I had for the winter. I had outgrown the old German pair that had given me frostbite the year before. This soldier would leave his loaded rifle downstairs in the blacksmith shop while he came upstairs to spend time with my family to alleviate his homesickness. That unguarded rifle was within reach of the SS prisoners, all in their twenties, but they never dared to touch it. The anxiety they exuded was palpable.

At this point, ordinary German POWs would have had no reason to be so afraid in American hands. So I suspected that these prisoners were trying to hide something horrendous. They insisted that they had been part of a fighting unit that had had nothing to do with concentration camps. One claimed to have been an ordinary soldier whose unit was incorporated into the SS against its will. But his story did not sound credible to me. In fact, these young men, with abject fear in their eyes, groveled in front of me, a fourteen-year-old, who had no power over them. They oozed guilt and fear. I cannot prove it, but I am convinced they were guilty of atrocities. The world had turned upside down. Just three weeks earlier I had seen their likes, in smart SS uniforms, cocky and condescending, drive through our village ready to machine-gun anyone who disagreed with them. Now, at sunset and before the evening curfew began, I recall that many villagers collected outside the hastily erected barbed-wire fence in the castle park and threw food over to the SS prisoners, who evidently did not have enough to eat. I don't remember whether we gave anything to the four who worked in our blacksmith shop, but their American guard ordered them to stack our firewood for the winter, and of course they obeyed.

The red, white, and black flags were gone, and it was as if the swastika had never existed. Yet my village, like the rest of Germany, had been caught up in the collective madness, in the deadly mix of order and rage that characterized the Nazi movement. Divisions in the village, divided loyalties in families, and even fissures within individual souls characterized quiet struggles behind the scenes, struggles not visible in public.

When the war was over, everyone wanted to believe that no one had been for it. And no one admitted they knew about the Holocaust, or at least not its magnitude. After we all saw the pictures of atrocities, confusion reigned and a wide spectrum of reactions was voiced, everything from “Es stimmt nicht” (It's not true), to the “Ich habe Schlimmes geahnt” (I suspected as much; I suspected terrible things) of my stepgrandfather. Everyone asked, “Now what's going to happen to us?” What I heard most often was, “Others did it—the bad Germans.” The Nuremberg trials of the top Nazi criminals provided average Germans, imbued with a hierarchical sense of society, with a convenient excuse to rid ourselves of feelings of personal guilt or complicity. This deep belief in hierarchy also allowed even those directly implicated to hide behind the claim that they had only followed orders. I remember that the widely reported trials were received with relief in the village. Here they sat in the dock—fat Hermann Goering, rigid General Keitel, crazy Rudolf Hess, and all the others. They had done it. Good riddance. We are innocent. Let's go on with our lives.

Immediately following the war, for those who preferred to deny Nazi collaboration and to embrace the idea of a zero hour, the moment had come not to worry about the past but to start building the next Germany. The voices of those who had opposed the Third Reich were too few in Kleinheubach and too feeble for the most part to tell their story. They also feared they would be drawn into a new political arena they did not understand. And they had failed, after all, to make a difference when it would have counted. So why speak up now? They did not fit into the new social order that was being shaped. But village memories are long and precise. They are particularly adept at fixing on individual behavior that deviates from the norm, in recording and criticizing transgressions, remembered and handed down. For centuries the village memory has provided the backbone for local customs, as perpetuator and enforcer. It is as effective and normative as are the laws of the courts and the state.

For most villagers, politics was like the weather. Since you had no control over it, you accepted it. If hailstones fell on others, it was their problem, but you tried to protect yourself from whatever adversities threatened you. The Nazi movement was generally accepted in Kleinheubach. Many paid their party dues, and some became active collaborators. A few fanatics among the Nazi activists were feared by most people, however. Herr ter Meer, for one, had a nervous tick that contracted his chin and neck in a grotesque manner. Even to the friends he passed in the street on a shopping errand, he would jerk his right arm straight out in front of him and pull the outstretched hand right back to his chest in a rapid Nazi salute. Most people kept their distance, since he reported anyone he suspected of anti-Nazi sentiment, which included, of course, neighbors with whom he had any kind of dispute, political or not.

Among the other extremists were a couple who ordered their two sons to volunteer for the SS as soon as they were old enough. Both were killed on the Russian front, and the parents were proud of the “heroes” they had sacrificed for the Third Reich. It would have made no more sense to argue politics with people like that than to rage against a storm or a drought. They were more feared than crazy Herr ter Meer, because their sacrifice had given them a special legitimacy. The family “inherited” one of the finest Jewish houses on the Hauptstraße, and a question as to how they came into its possession would have put the poser at grave risk.

There were the many low-ranking petit bourgeois Nazis as well, who tried to climb as fast as possible the social ladder the movement provided them. For their eagerness, they were openly ridiculed at times, not because of their politics, which would have been dangerous, but because their behavior was socially unacceptable and could therefore be attacked safely. At one point, all the Nazi youth groups joined with the NSKK (Nazi motorized brigade), the NSDAP, and the SA in preparation for a local parade in the spacious park of the Prince of Lowenstein's castle. When everyone was lined up and the Ortsgruppenleiter (head of the Nazi Party) of the village had to leave the premises for some reason, he ordered one of his underlings, a simple SA man, to take over temporarily. This fellow jumped to attention and clicked his heels so hard that he lifted himself off the ground. At the same time, in his excitement he shrieked out a command in which he used the wrong pronoun: “Alles hort auf mirl”—the equivalent of saying “Everyone listen to I!” Struck by his ridiculous posturing, we all started to snicker, and decorum deteriorated when giggles spread through the crowd. I know now that this ridiculous figure would have killed anyone, Jewish or Christian, for the sake of a permanent promotion in the party.

Finally, there was my grammar school teacher, Fraulein Gundelfinger, who had given me the anti-Semitic primer when I was in second grade. The morning after the party election of 1938, she entered the classroom to announce that thirteen Kleinheubachers had voted against Hitler. She had us repeat in unison, “Pfui, pfui, pfui!” (For shame!). One of the thirteen had been Hermann Bohn, of course, my buddy Ludwig s father. Hermann Bohn was a devotee of his World War I idol, General Luddendorff, who believed that the Bolsheviks, Nazis, Catholics, and Jews had united in a global conspiracy against Germany and that Hitler was merely the willing tool of these “forces” who wanted to destroy the German soul. Not only did Hermann Bohn believe these theories, he often behaved in socially defiant ways. He carted manure out to his fields on Sundays, for example, because he disliked the Catholic church even more than Hitler. He was someone you did not cross, because he was large and formidable. Aside from that he was the best butcher in the village; he made the finest Fleischwurst in the area.

Hermann Bohn's idiosyncratic delusional politics were not typical or representative of anything but his own eccentricity. There was, however, some serious, even if muted, resistance to the Nazi regime in our village. I remember a book printer, well known to me because he lived only two blocks from my grandmother's house. I could still just make out the large faded lettering on one wall of his house during a visit in 1999: “Josef Dier, Buchdruckerei.” In 1934, a year after the Nazis came to power, Herr Dier had the courage to publish the pamphlet that the Protestant parson of the village, Pfarrer Gottlieb Wagner, had written about the history of the Jews of Kleinheubach, “Ge-schichte der Jiidischen Gemeinde zu Kleinheubach a.M.” This text chronicled the presence of Jews in Kleinheubach from the first evidence in 1326 until 1933. Herr Dier was imprisoned for more than a year in the Dachau concentration camp for his antifascist beliefs.

During my father s heyday in the party, he once ran into Josef Dier and offered him a ride to the next village in a borrowed official car. As my father told us after the encounter, he wanted to know from someone who had been there about conditions in Dachau, so he asked Dier about his experience during this ride. Instead of answering, Dier insisted that my father stop the car immediately and let him out. Despite my father's repeated reassurances that he meant no harm with the question, that he was only curious, Dier refused to answer and again demanded to be let out. He walked away without a word. My father came home quite upset to have been considered a dangerous informer by a neighbor he had liked despite their political differences.

Years later, in November 1943, during my father's last furlough from the front, I was walking with him to the post office when we ran into Josef Dier. Dier was no longer quite the hunted person he had been before the war. He asked my father, “Well, Albert, do you think you'll win this war?” clearly implying that Germany would not win. Now it was my father's turn to leave the scene in silence. If he had agreed with Herr Dier, which he probably did by then, it would have constituted treason. And if he had reported Herr Dier, he would most likely have caused his death, which he certainly didn't want. I was old enough to know that their brief exchange next to our village post office had contained political dangers for both of them. My father no longer had the psychological upper hand over this brave dissident.

Once the war started, political conflicts that existed in the village became less important as people became more absorbed in daily concerns about the war and how it would affect them personally. The significant stories of resistance, such as they were, were lived out elsewhere, in the big cities—Munich, Leipzig, Berlin. At the end of the war, there was no time to reflect on what had happened. Josef Dier, however, according to village lore, waited patiently for Herr ter Meer—who had left with the SS during the German retreat in 1945 —to return home. It was said that when the returning Nazi passed by Dier's house, Dier greeted ter Meer, saying, “We've been waiting for your return.” Ter Meer was subsequently arrested by the U.S. military police and jailed for several months. But it wasn't long until he was freed, and he rapidly blended into postwar village life along with the rest of us.

In the first months after the war, everyone was caught in the consequences of the Third Reich, which produced within the shattered country an all-pervasive silence and a dull search for food, for lost relatives, for housing, for firewood, and for something with exchange value on the black market. A cold feeling gripped both body and mind, and the darkness inside mirrored the darkness of the winter nights.

Like many other families, the Tubach family was distraught. My grandmother cried every day for her missing sons and for grandchildren not yet found in the destroyed cities. Her house at the edge of the village was slated to be occupied by the American army, but when they saw my grandmother, my nearly blind grandfather, my aunt who was ill, and her daughter in the latter stages of a pregnancy, the Americans let them stay. The confusion was less profound in the home of my stepmother. None of the immediate members of the Zink family had ever participated actively in the Nazi cause, as some of the Tubachs had. There was no shattered faith. No political dreams had been destroyed with which they had identified. The Zink family's opposition to Hitler provided a sense of continuity to their lives. And there was work to be done in the blacksmith shop, horses to be shod, fresh wooden wheels to be enclosed in iron hoops, and, most of all, fields to be tended in the spring. The oddly comforting motto, “If you want to eat, you have to work,” helped to guide me through the chaos. I still remember the deep satisfaction I felt at the end of one autumn harvest day in 1945 sitting, tired from work, on the cow-drawn wagon that was filled with sacks of potatoes we had hoed up from our fields all day long.

School started again shortly before the onslaught of a bitter cold wave. In the unheated classrooms, the frost that stuck to the inside of the window panes when we arrived remained for hours before it thawed from our collective body heat. My “new” GI boots were also too tight for my frostbitten feet.

Despite denazification, the same teachers returned to take up instruction where they had left off before the collapse of our thousand-year Reich. Although the principal, an avowed Nazi, was no longer in charge of the Gymnasium, he returned as a regular teacher. German was his subject, and he regaled us with themes such as “What needs to be nourished in society must start in the family”—themes that resembled those of the Nazi period. They were just as irrelevant to our current reality as they had been before.

The history teacher returned as if nothing had happened since he stopped teaching nine months earlier. But the “Heil Hitler” greeting on his entry into the classroom was dropped in favor of a snappy “Grii B Gott” followed by a prayer in Latin. In spring 1945 he had ended our survey of European history with the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire, having arrived in our slow trek through European history at around the year 100 B.C. We had learned that morally pure Teutonic tribes, the Cimbri and Teutonici in particular, had swept in from the north to free the enfeebled Romans from their decadent ways of life. Now, at the end of 1945, the same teacher described the same Germanic invasion and the same battle of Aquae Sextiae, but this time he instructed us that the cosmopolitan Romans were defending civilization against the onslaught of the barbaric Teutons from the north. Where did he stand? I asked myself. He had switched sides without breaking his pedagogical stride. He lost all credibility in my eyes at that moment, and from then on, I devised ways of interrupting classes just below the threshold of detection. I brought an assortment of discarded cogwheels and bolts from our blacksmith shop and furtively rolled them on the floor under the desks toward the front of the classroom. They made a satisfyingly disruptive noise, but after several days the trajectory of these subversive bullets was traced to me, and I was nearly expelled.

Disorder held a fascination for me. I enjoyed it as a response to the monomania that had held most Germans in their grip: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.” As a native-born claustrophobic, the word ein had always bothered me, even before that “oneness” was shattered at the end of the war into millions and millions of individuals, all trying to escape the very unity that had been an essential element of the twelve years of mass hysteria. I had always felt different from my schoolmates, moreover, in a way that was visceral, not ideological. For one thing, as a small child I had lost my mother, this mysterious woman always described to me as die Amerikanerin, who was said to have exhibited her sense of humor at inappropriate times. She laughed, for instance, as I was told, the first time she saw a parade of goose-stepping soldiers. What's more, I kept on repeating to anyone who would listen that I was born in San Francisco, California. At the beginning of each school year we had to give our name, date, and place of birth, and I always was pleased that I could point to a birthplace far away from the Main Valley.

The first postwar winter was not only cold, it was also dark at night. Two weak electric lightbulbs hung in our house —one in the living room and one in the kitchen. Our dwindling supply of candles was reserved for power outages. There was little to do, and everyone was involved in his or her private world. Only the laments of the women for their men who had not returned from the war punctuated the drab monotony of village life. At Christmas time we sat around the lamp in the living room making papier mache stars. The radio still stood in its customary corner. One year earlier, Goebbels's voice had blasted from it, exhorting the Germans to make greater sacrifices for greater glory. I looked for some guidance—very tentatively—because, young as I was, that shattering poster of the mass grave in the Warsaw ghetto that was mounted on the bulletin board of our town hall had planted a seed of caution in me about commitments to any cause, big or small. Ever since I came face to face with that picture, I have remained suspicious of collectives larger than a glee club or a soccer team and all institutions in which the levers of control are not visible and the controllers far removed. I am also deeply suspicious of individuals who are totally convinced of the correctness of their causes.

In this low-key chaos, some adults, those who had not compromised with the mass hysteria, began to stand out, providing me with a sense of continuity. There was my indomitably optimistic grandmother Tubach, who was the first to dry her tears. She kept on telling the rest of us that after years of anxiety, years of joy would surely follow. Her expressed belief that “soon carnival will come around again, and young people will start enjoying life,” still rings in my ears. And then there was my step-grandfather Zink, who did not crow over his avowed anti-Nazi stance once the political hyperventilation had come to an end. He continued to work hard and generally fell silent about anything outside his domain. And at school there was my fierce, partially lame English teacher, Herr Molitor, who drilled us in the English language. He was convinced that high academic standards were good for us and that English was the key to our future, if we were going to have one. I did not interrupt his classes as we struggled through Shakespeare's “Richard III,” barely making out the plot of the drama. We also learned Scottish and American songs, from “D'you Ken John Peale?” to “Way Down upon the Swanee River.” Every day he added several new phrases to our vocabulary, such as “to make a beeline for.” Even in those cold, dank classrooms of the Miltenberg Gymnasium, he made sense to me.

In the months after the war ended, mysterious strangers moved in and out of our village. Most of them had agendas we did not understand, and even if we had, we certainly would not have rendered up to them our newfound freedom from constraints. Some were church people who were trying to save our souls; others were Esperanto teachers who promised to teach us a lingua franca that would provide a gateway to the world, after, of course, we paid our dues in the form of edibles or goods with some exchange value. One day a civilian appeared out of nowhere and called the teenage boys together in one of the few elegant villas of Kleinheubach to persuade us to join his organization. He promised us uniforms, open-air activities, and practical skills. We retreated from the villa as fast as we could and only later learned that he was a representative of the international Boy Scouts, trying to transform our marching habits into harmless and useful endeavors.

In my free time, far away from school and grown-ups, I developed my own escape into a fantasy world that no one could touch. I appropriated some of the literature I had read, with Schopenhauer's mystic pessimism at its core, into my very own, private world of reflection and make-believe. My Meyers Lexikon atlas (volume 12) provided the geographic map for many an imaginary trip that I would trace with the pin of a needle to faraway mountains, rivers, and cities. I shared my private ruminations with very few friends. We agreed that the world around us was too stupid and brutal to get very close to it. Minimal work in school kept me from flunking out.

In spring 1948, when I was seventeen, my father returned home from the British prisoner-of-war camp where he had been held since the end of the war. He climbed off the train in Kleinheubach tanned and overweight. The suitcases he brought home were full of presents, including a box of English magic tricks for me as well as items valuable for bartering on the black market, such as cigarettes and flint stones. It was obvious from most of his stories about the war and the POW camp that he had taken his transformation from counterintelligence officer in the German army to British prisoner of war in stride, even made out like a bandit. With the violin that had served him well back in San Francisco's Golden Gate Theater in the 1930s (the instrument never left his side), he organized a POW orchestra that was invited to perform all over northern England. He delighted in telling how his orchestra used to play the melody of “Deutschland, Deutschland liber Alles” from Haydn's “Emperor Quartet” in a minor key and with slightly altered rhythms so that the British audience wouldn't notice they were performing a surreptitious dirge for the Nazi national anthem.

When I asked him about concentration camps, he told me that the British made the German POWs watch a film depicting atrocities. Some members of this audience of German officers shouted “Lies,” as my father reported, and one officer sprang up and covered the projector lens, complaining that they didn't want to be subjected to such things. Apparently, so had Heinrich Himmler, the top henchman of the Gestapo, who did not like to witness the very horrors he had ordered. Later in life, when I returned to the question of the Holocaust with more insistence, my father repeated this same anecdote, adding almost ritualistically, in sentences that remained unchanged: “It was the most terrible crime committed in history. But hardly anyone believed it. I was an intelligence officer and I didn't believe it.” Every time he produced this answer, it seemed as if he were formulating it for the first time and that it represented once again the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what he knew or did not know. At other times, when he was in a more defensive mood, he liked to point out that soon after being put into the Haltwhistle officers' camp, the British intelligence service arrived to inquire who among the German officers had fought on the Russian front. When two SS officers stepped forward, they were taken away “to serve Great Britain,” as my father put it, thus ending their war guilt (these officers were most likely going to be useful to the Western Allies during the incipient stages of the cold war). He believed that this bit of recall spoke for itself, and he never elaborated on it. But it was clear to me that with it he rationalized and exonerated the role he played during the Third Reich.

At home again, my father assumed his role as my guide and educator. As his first act, he rummaged through all my drawers when I wasn't home and found the secret diary that I had kept since I was twelve years old, into which I poured all my confused adolescent emotions. I discovered his perfidy when the diary showed up among my schoolbooks during a Latin class. He had read every line, marked up the pages in red ink with his own critical commentary, and added after the last entry, “If you were not my only son, I would call you the black sheep of the family.” It was obvious that he then planted the diary in my book bag, so that I would come across it during school hours. I felt violated and devastated. I destroyed the diary before I returned home. Since the notion of privacy as a personal privilege had not been developed in my generation of Germans, I lacked arguments with which to defend myself and remained silent in the face of his authoritarianism.

He finally provided me with a list of friends I could keep and others I would have to drop. I ignored the list. In my mind, he had become an intruder whose guidance I did not accept. His unchanged authoritarianism lacked legitimacy for me. The adult women with whom I and my peers had lived —mothers, grandmothers, aunts —had shown courage and tenacity. Even more importantly, we had seen them suffer hardships and mourn the dead. We had seen them weep. But my generation of young Germans was still hurt by and angry at the fathers and uncles who drifted back from the POW camps of Europe. What was there to emulate in them? Many of us felt that they had lost their moral authority, because they had been seduced by an evil regime. Some saw their returning fathers simply as defeated losers. Most of the returning men were disoriented, ill, and spiritually dead. Not so my father, who came on as strong as ever.

I could not communicate with him. He and I were ridiculed in the village when for a time we wrote letters to each other and mailed them through the post office while we lived in the same house. I could not raise with him the most important problem in my life that ran like an ever-present undercurrent at the time but now in the retelling seems oddly abstract and distant: I couldn't make sense of the world around me. Knowledge of the enormous violence that had happened just a few years before— bullets ripping open bodies, women gasping for their last breaths in gas chambers, planes dropping phosphorus bombs on children—that was now enveloped by silence, as if nothing had happened, robbed my life of purposeful direction. All I had was my inner world of daydreams, my friends, and sexual escapades and parties that formed an inchoate rebellion against the “infamy of what was.”

My father pushed my gentle stepfamily Zink—grandfather, mother, blacksmith shop, and all — aside. I felt trapped in my family, in school, and in my childhood village. Soccer matches and countless evenings of training to become a top-notch goalie did not add up to a life with a future. But with the arrival of the Americans, my dreams of escape had gotten a boost. The threads connecting me to my place of birth had never been completely severed. We had a collection of American comic strips, some sheet music for the piano, including pieces by Fats Waller, the silk American flag with which I had played my private games of concealment in the Jungvolk, and a whole stack of unwritten postcards depicting an early-twentieth-century train ride from the East Coast across the western plains to San Francisco. A picture of a train crossing the Utah salt flats was one of my favorites. And now America had come to me. By law I was eligible to return to the United States. But what would I do there? I had no skills beyond farm work and no professional goals. My schooling at the Gymnasium had no marketable value, and my average grades as much as my lack of funds would preclude university study. Besides, what would I study? Schopenhauer? It all seemed far-fetched. But I had a great-uncle in San Francisco, a musician by profession, who had become a special delivery messenger for the U.S. Post Office after the demise of the theater orchestras during the depression. Aside from this job, he managed an apartment building on Shrader Street near the “panhandle” of Golden Gate Park. I wrote this distant uncle and asked if he would sponsor me. After a month I received a positive reply. Now I was propelled. I had to go, never mind the absence of goals. After all, for years I had been tracing maps on my world atlas for amusement. The one subject I excelled in was geography. The time had come to trace a path west, not with a pin on a map, but with my own body, all on my own.

I went to the American Consul General's office in Frankfurt, where I met my first American government official not directly connected to the U.S. military. A vice consul, he was so myopic that his glasses seemed to me like the bottoms of Coke bottles. Later I wondered whether his shortsightedness was symbolic of U.S. policy on screening German emigrants at that time. In front of this vice consul in Frankfurt, I affirmed my U.S. citizenship based on my place of birth, and I relinquished my German citizenship, which, according to German law, was determined by “blood.” My Gymnasium education unfinished and with no money, I tore myself away from my family and village to make my way to an “uncle” in San Francisco, a half brother of my grandfather, whom I knew only from hearsay and our brief correspondence.

While we waited in the railroad station in Aschaffenburg for my overnight train to Bremen, my father handed me an empty notebook. He looked sad. I had always been told that in appearance I could have been his younger twin. I boarded the train and found a seat at the window. My father stood on the platform as the train pulled out of the station, and I stared at him until his figure vanished in the distance. When he was out of sight, I opened the notebook and leafed through the empty blue-lined pages. He intended it to be my new diary for the future. He knew that I had destroyed the diary I had kept since age twelve, after he had marked it up with his critical comments. He wanted me to start with a “clean slate” that would be filled by his expectations. He probably thought that to wipe things out was the best way to move through life without moral qualms and hindrances.

It was not the last I would see of him. A few years later he decided, over my strenuous objections, to immigrate once again and join me in California. I had grown apart from him during the war and during his years as a POW, and in the year we were together in Kleinheubach after his return, we became increasingly alienated from each other. He came back from camp as if the Nazi years had never happened. I believe he did not care whom he worked for as long as it brought him personal rewards. Once in America again, he married a woman twenty-five years his junior and had three children by her. He leased a popular beer hall in the Sonoma valley, called “Little Switzerland,” where, microphone in hand, he loved to sing “Sur le pont d' Avignon” to the accompaniment of his band. After a few years, he decided that Germany was a better place for him after all, and he returned in the early 1960s to raise his family and to teach German to American GIs stationed near Nuremberg.

But restlessness drove him to yet another twist in his picaresque life. After a number of years in Nuremberg, he befriended an American Church of Christ group and persuaded it to sponsor him and his family to return to the United States once again. To this end, he decided to become a Christian. Not that he pretended to be a Christian—this would seem an obvious inference, but it is too simple an explanation. Since pragmatic opportunism and personal belief were inseparable to him, being a Christian was a natural and sensible thing to do; it facilitated his return to the United States where he settled in Lubbock, Texas. Soon he distanced himself from the church that had helped him, calling it “hypocritical.” Then he proceeded to grow quite old.

During his Texas years, he never visited me in California, but I saw him once in Lubbock. When he was in his late eighties, he fell ill and seemed to be dying. He wanted me to come see him to “make up.” Reluctantly, I flew to Lubbock. When my half brother picked me up at the airport, he reported that our father was feeling better and didn't want to make up with me after all. I spent two days in his house passing the time in polite conversation. I departed thinking that I would never see him again and relieved that he had not wanted to “make up.” Indeed, I never saw him again.

Three years later, in 1992, surrounded by the wife and children of his third marriage, he died in Lubbock at the age of ninety, a person without a moral compass. He was a man too weak for the strong times he lived in; too eager to be someone important at all costs, even at the cost of his soul.

Yet as a child I had loved him. He made up adventure stories of a fictional hero who fought lions in Africa, looked for gold in South America, and almost died of thirst in the middle of Australia. My love of geography comes from those tales that he invented for me. Throughout his life he loved his violin, and he often claimed that playing it kept him sane. When I was a small child in Kleinheubach, he enjoyed telling me about California and what a wonderful place it was. He often said he regretted having left in 1933. I believe this to be true, since I remember him saying so, even early in my life, when the Nazis were at their height. How to reconcile his positive cosmopolitan American experience with his overriding opportunism and ambitions in the Nazi Party and the German army was surely the major inner conflict he had during this fatal period of his life. When I was an adult, he told me that he had suffered a recurrent nightmare in which he found himself the only person left on earth frantically searching for human company in empty streets. I hope that this dream came from some better part in him that he failed to heed in the way he decided to lead his life.

My trip from the Aschaffenburg train station to northern Germany on my way to faraway California was slow, since the train stopped frequently. The compartment was crowded with passengers who planned illegal border crossings into the Soviet zone of Germany, an undertaking that was becoming more difficult as the Iron Curtain grew increasingly impenetrable. These were, for the most part, people who had made an illegal visit to the West and were returning home. The conductor made his way wearily through the dimly lit compartment to advise them where to get off for the safest passage across the East-West divide. He asked everyone their destinations —Halberstadt, Magdeburg, Schwerin. Everyone was tired, laden down with bags and full of worries as they listened to his advice. When the conductor came to me, I replied matter-of-factly, “San Francisco.” People bestirred themselves to look my way. The conductor advised me, deadpan, that I should stay on a while longer before getting off. Everyone broke up laughing as the train continued through the night. I stayed on board until the end of the line.

On June 8,1949,1 left Bremerhaven on a converted freighter, the Marine Shark. Ten days later it arrived in New York Harbor.

Almost a year and a half ahead of me, on January 17,1948, Bernat Rosner debarked at La Guardia Airport, after a two-day flight from Rome. He forgot his exhaustion, since he was about to greet his American friend, the GI he had met in Modena, Italy. Bernie got off the plane and entered the airport terminal to look for Charlie. While the other passengers were warmly greeted by family or friends and headed purposefully for the baggage area, Bernie searched for the one face in this huge country that he should recognize. Would he, indeed, recognize him? And would his sponsor still recognize Bernie? Gradually, all the passengers, as well as the people who had come to meet them, moved away, and Bernie was left alone at an empty gate. He looked around and confirmed the fact—nobody was there to meet him. Standing in the terminal at La Guardia, Bernie started to cry. And for fifteen endlessly long minutes he continued to cry, until suddenly Charles Merrill hurried up to the gate and Bernie's life was transformed.

He had gotten stuck in New York traffic, Charlie explained to Bernie as they boarded a curbside taxi that transported them to downtown Manhattan. When the first skyscrapers came into view, Bernie could see only their upper stories lit up and thought they were mountains. The taxi ride through the canyons of this megalopolis brought them to Charlie's stepmother, a warmhearted, welcoming southerner, who received the Hungarian teenager in her elegant apartment on the Upper East Side. The following morning, having noted Bernie's shabby clothes, Charlie took him shopping at Brooks Brothers and outfitted him with a new wardrobe appropriate to his new station in life. Now Bernie donned his first vest and was decked out in the finest men's apparel. When they returned to the stepmother's apartment, he looked every bit the preppie that he was neither in spirit nor in training but would soon become.

Bernie's English was so minimal that Charlie had to translate their German conversations for the rest of the family. During one of their first meals together, Charlie's stepmother offered Bernie a huge dish of vanilla ice cream. Never having seen ice cream in that quantity before, Bernie thought he was facing a large gob of lard. He politely refused, to the surprise of his friendly host. But it didn't take Bernie long to figure out that lard was not consumed in this household and that his European tragedy had turned into an American fairy tale.

Charles Merrill took Bernie to St. Louis to meet his wife, Mary, and two daughters. In Merrill's family Bernie had, for the first time since his childhood days in Tab, the comforts of a home. For a moment he was able to experience them almost as his own. After his English was good enough, Bernie would tell the Merrills' eldest daughter, Catherine, the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves, a story she still remembers to the present day. Years earlier Bertha Rosner had told this tale from the Scheherezade to her small son in Tab; Bernie carried it in his memory through Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Gusen, and Gunskirchen to pass it on in St. Louis.

Yet the transition from an epistolary friendship to a face-to-face relationship on a daily basis was hard on everyone, particularly on the Merrill family, which had to adapt to the newcomer. So, after a few weeks, arrangements were made for Bernie to live in a dormitory of the Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis, a prep school founded by Charles Merrill in 1946. Bernie's class was made up of boys primarily from Tulsa and Dallas, but there was also a Pole, a Belgian, and a Japanese, the latter probably the first postwar Japanese student to come to any American school, as Merrill pointed out to me. Bernie's fear of having been rejected by the family was short-lived, as his loyal sponsor spent many hours with him, tutoring him privately. Bernie quickly felt at home in the nurturing environment of the private school, which sent boys on to prestigious Ivy League universities. During his first summer in the United States, he also met the patriarch of his new family, Charles Merrill, Sr., at his luxurious summer estate in Southampton, New York. As Bernie puts it now in his understated way, “I was used to adapting to new environments, and this one was by far the easiest to take.”

The time had finally arrived for Bernie to develop his intellectual gifts to the fullest. No hostile forces, no dangerous circumstances, no mortal enemies stood in his way. Within a few months he was well established in his studies and fully integrated in his academic setting. He remembers a particular moment one early evening in March or April 1948 at the Merrills' home. He was engrossed in John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down when he suddenly realized, “My God, I'm reading English fluently!” By the time he graduated from prep school, he won the school prize for creative writing. From that moment on, he said, “I never missed a step.” Thus was his American persona born.

My road into American life was slower and less predictable. My first day in New York was spent at Grand Central Station, where I hung around the Traveler's Aid office waiting for the check my uncle in San Francisco had promised to send me. With a quarter left in my pocket and several German marks, I held my breath until the money arrived at Traveler's Aid via Western Union: $113 —$83 for the train ticket to California and $30 for expenses. I ventured out into the streets of New York and for a time was gripped by the fear that if I were to collapse they would sweep me into one of the huge garbage trucks rumbling by. I wore old knickerbockers from our family's prewar wardrobe, a Tyrolian hat, and a German version of the Eisenhower jacket that my stepmother had tailored for me, based on an American original. I felt quite snazzy until I became aware that people stared at me, obviously finding me much stranger than a turbaned Sikh who walked in front of me, whom they ignored but who was one of the most exotic sights I had ever seen. I was upset that I didn't pass for an American. I fled into the nearest cafeteria and tried to regain my composure. Once I arrived in Chicago the next day on the Twentieth Century Limited, I headed for the public baths in the railroad station, threw my hat and knickerbockers into a trash can, and put on the only other piece of apparel I owned, an old, dark blue pinstriped suit, a discard from one of my uncles. After that, no one took notice of me anymore.

I had a six-hour wait at Chicago's Northwestern Station before my train was scheduled to leave on its two-day journey to Oakland. These hours, as I walked around the city streets near the train station, defined my early years in America. I saw both the incredible poverty, the alleys with broken wine bottles and broken people, and only a few blocks away, elegant automobiles that glided along carrying well-dressed passengers. Everyone was absorbed in their individual pursuits and no one seemed to care about anyone else. The lesson was clear to me. I would either move up or down on this scale that distributed people according to their achievements and failures—and luck. On the train again, someone asked me what I was going to do in California, and I made up a story: “Fm going to study at the University of California in Berkeley.” Fat chance, I thought to myself, since I had neither money nor academic qualifications, not even an American high school diploma in my pocket. All I had was one address that I hoped would provide me with a good job—that of Agnes Albert, a San Francisco socialite, whose German husband my father became acquainted with in the POW camp in Great Britain.

The dice were rolling, but I had no idea how they would land. At least I was here, and on my way west, on an endless train ride through the vastness of the plains. In Nebraska, the North Platte River went on forever. Looking out of the window at another point, everything appeared to be covered with snow, although it was summer. I realized I was staring at the salt flats west of Salt Lake City. On the morning of the last day, the train stopped in the middle of a town festooned with neon lights. I looked out the window and saw just a few yards away a sign arched across the main street that read, “Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World.” By the time the train reached California, I was overwhelmed by what seemed to me the emptiness of it all. There had been no villages, church steeples, or cow pastures passing by outside every few minutes as on a German train. As we passed Sacramento, it no longer sounded like the city I had read about in adventure stories of the west; it sounded like a curse to a villager who had been condemned to live in distant exile. Once in the Bay Area, I felt I had reached the end of the earth—finis terrae.

When I stepped off the train at the Oakland station thirteen days after I had left Bremen, my uncle was there, standing right in front of my Pullman car. He recognized me immediately, because he, like all my relatives, thought that I looked just like my father. It was June 21, the longest day of the year, and as he drove us across the San Francisco Bay Bridge in brilliant sunshine, it was a relief to be with someone who did not regard me as a peculiar foreigner.

My uncle provided me with room and board, but it was obviously up to me to make something of myself. My first move was to make an appointment with the socialite at her Lyon Street mansion. Agnes Albert was pleasant enough in her elegant taffeta dress, and she recommended me to a cousin of hers, the president of the Hibernia Bank. When this polite gentleman realized, however, that I possessed no marketable skills, he recommended me to one of his friends, who ran a good downtown restaurant. But this friend, in turn, didn't have a job for me at the moment. When he recommended me to a greasy spoon at the beach where they needed someone to flip hamburgers, I decided not to pursue this downward spiral any further. Instead, I helped my uncle cleaning the apartment building. For pocket money, I scrounged around and came up with an assortment of odd jobs: digging roots from gardens, cleaning a warehouse on Bryant Street on weekends, and, at one time, distributing discount tickets for the Roller Derby to stores in the East Bay. On this job I walked from one end to the other of East 14th Street and then, a few days later, the entire length of San Pablo Avenue from downtown Oakland all the way to the town of San Pablo.

My uncle decided that without additional education I would get nowhere. He was a widower without children and something of a bohemian. He had never particularly liked my father, but one day he sat me down after several bottles of beer and said he had made up his mind that to spend some of his extra money on my education was probably a better investment than spending it at John Murio's bar up at the corner of Shrader and Haight. I readily agreed. Two years were going to be mine at San Francisco City College to earn an A.A. degree. When I began at City College, my English was so imperfect that I was required to take a remedial class. Toward the end of the semester, I was given a chance to demonstrate what I had learned, so I carefully prepared an oral presentation on the topic of German music. But I couldn't understand why my classmates broke out laughing when I began to discuss Beethoven's haunting “Moonshine Sonata.”

Embarrassed but undaunted, I passed Subject A and signed up for English 1A in the fall semester of 1950 with Ruth Somers, the teacher with the fiercest reputation at the junior college. When Mrs. Somers entered the classroom the first day, everyone was sitting around in a relaxed manner, paying only cursory attention to her as she placed her books and purse on the desk. Ruth Somers was a large woman with a booming voice. Suddenly it rang out: “So shaken as we are, so wan with care, / Find we a time for frighted peace to pant” The room fell silent in startled surprise as she brought us face to face with Henry IV, Part I. As I found out years later, she had been an admirer of Sarah Bernhardt and in her youth had wanted to become an actress. She had made it as far as some male roles in classical plays presented at the University of California's Greek Theater back in 1915.

She was the first authority figure I truly admired. I devoured English literature as fast as Mrs. Somers offered it to us, from Shakespeare to Hemingway. For the required term paper, I chose to write on Thomas Wolfe's You Cant Go Home Again. I was so engrossed in this composition that for two nights I didn't sleep, and it didn't dawn on me that the title was an answer to my situation in life. Then the defining moment came, my big break, my own “miracle of Modena.” Toward the end of the semester, Mrs. Somers returned all the term papers to the class except for mine. Instead, she devoted an entire session to reading it out loud as a model of a good term paper. After a few weeks, as that marvelous incident of recognition settled in, I began to believe in myself and developed the desire to study. To the extent finances would permit, I would study foreign languages, different cultures, and perhaps even psychology and anthropology to find out what motivated people. I began to believe that if you knew the causes of things, you would overcome fear. And perhaps I would one day teach at the very school where my mentor taught—San Francisco City College. It slowly dawned on me that I had found my calling. Now I devoted all my time to doing as well in my classes as I could in order to become eligible for admission to the University of California. When I succeeded at this, I felt that the dice had rolled me right into my new niche at the university in Berkeley across the San Francisco Bay. And, after all, my mentor had once been a student there. I had finally found someone whose footsteps I could follow safely, a good and moral person whose passions had to do with insights into people not with power over them.

As immigrant teenagers, Bernie and I began our new lives at different levels in the social and economic hierarchy. Yet in the end, we both were given an opportunity, no more and no less, to define our own futures and to succeed, based on our talents rather than our backgrounds. We only had to be smart and to work hard. The steps in Europe: some had led up and many down; some had led toward extermination and others nowhere at all. Here the steps were of a different sort, namely, steps forward, steps across and over obstacles, moves sideways around dead ends, steps and leaps into new adventures of the intellect and of the heart, as if a giant hopscotch matrix had been superimposed over the New World just for us. As we embarked on our American lives, both Bernie and I sang with Walt Whitman, “My ties and ballasts leave me /I am afoot with my vision.”