There had been a discussion one day in the watch shop, a week before it was bombed, between my uncles and Papa. They had been talking about the report of the Soviet liberation of a labor camp called Auschwitz the last week of January. But I hadn’t been able to understand the entire conversation, so I’d tuned it out. I had chosen not to hear—or ask my father later about what would soon be known as the worst of the Nazi concentration camps in terms of death toll. Most of the buildings at Auschwitz had been destroyed before the German forces fled, but in the ones that remained a staggering number of personal belongings were found, including more than a million articles of clothing and seven tons of human hair. Only seven thousand starving prisoners were liberated by the Soviet army. Later we would learn that more than a million had died there.
When we started hearing the radio broadcasts detailing the liberation of death camps all over Germany and Poland, I was sickened by what I’d been refusing to ponder. It nauseated me that about the same time I was feeling melancholy about there not being enough sugar for Mommi to make me a cake for my sixteenth birthday, American troops were liberating the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, only a four-hour drive from where I sat feeling sorry for myself and sharing a box of birthday raisins with Max. The Americans freed more than twenty thousand prisoners at Buchenwald, but more than thirty thousand had perished there. The Americans went on to liberate Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen—all of them places of suffering and death.
“Did you know?” I asked Papa when we heard the first radio broadcasts about the camps after the surrender, after the airwaves were no longer controlled by Nazi officials. “Did you know the camps were like that?”
He was so slow to answer. For several seconds I thought he hadn’t heard me. “It didn’t matter what I knew or didn’t know,” he finally said, his voice weighted with sadness.
Mommi was sitting in the room, listening to the radio, too. So was Max. But I only saw my father in that moment. My hero father. The best man I knew. A German man. His answer stunned me. It had to matter what he had known.
“How can it not have mattered?” I replied. “All those people, Papa! They did nothing wrong.” I felt tears of anger and shame sliding down my face. “How can you say it doesn’t matter what you knew or didn’t know?”
“Because I could not stop it, Elise!” Tears were trickling down my father’s face now, too. “I could not stop what was happening. No one could! I couldn’t stop it when we were still in the States and I couldn’t stop it here! So I did the only thing I could do. The only thing.”
I could think of nothing Papa had done in response except volunteer us to come to the very place where these atrocities had occurred.
“What? What did you do?” I said, half in a whisper, half in a sob. Mommi said my name softly, but I ignored her. “What did you do, Papa?”
My father hesitated only a second or two. “I made faulty fuses!” he said, his voice cracking and making me shudder. “And I taught you how to make faulty fuses!”
Papa dropped his head into his hands. Those hands that I loved. His good, capable hands.
I saw then, perhaps never more clearly than in that moment, how my father’s hands were just stronger versions of my own hands. They were the same as any man’s hands his age. The same, the same, the same. The same as those of the innocent man in the death camp and the same as those of the Nazi soldier who’d raised his rifle and shot him dead. What made the three men different from one another was not their nationality or the shape of their hands or even the blood that flowed under the skin of their fingers. What made the three men different was how they chose to think.
We decide who and what we will love and who and what we will hate. We decide what we will do with the love and hate. Every day we decide. It was this that revealed who we were, not the color of our flesh or the shape of our eyes or the language we spoke.
Papa had indeed brought us to this country where these terrible atrocities had occurred, but the land hadn’t done the killing. Humans had done that, by choice.
I slid off my chair, went to my father, and circled my arms around him. He leaned into me and reached up to touch the side of my face, cupping my cheek and touching the tears there.
“I think I understand now,” I whispered.
Perhaps he knew what I meant, that I understood he was not first a German man or an American man. He was first just a man. Perhaps he knew that I was beginning to understand that it was a person’s choices that defined his or her identity and not the other way around.
Or perhaps he only knew that I understood making those slightly defective fuses was the only act of defiance he could make and still keep Mommi and Max and me safe.
But he whispered to me, “I think I do, too.”
* * *
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All during the rest of that May and June, Max and I stayed close to home, venturing beyond the flat only when no occupational forces were out and about, and then only for a few minutes and in the company of our parents.
There was no mail service, no newspapers, no phones, no trains leaving our station. That I had gotten the letter from Mariko was a gift from the heavens. No other mail came for us. The occupational troops set up a curfew from sundown to daybreak. They patrolled the streets in their jeeps with guns mounted. If you were out after dark, you were shot, no questions asked. If more than a couple of Germans were seen talking together, even if it was to inquire about each other’s health, the French soldiers would yell at them to disassemble. There was little food to purchase. The French troops were confiscating all the meat from the local livestock farmers so all that was available to buy at the butcher shops were the parts of the slaughtered animals the French soldiers didn’t want—innards and brains and tripe—and there was no salt to cover up the disgusting flavor. Aside from the absence of air raids, the end of war hadn’t made day-to-day life easier; it had made it harder.
Many shops with anything left to sell were looted, and the French soldiers continued to prey upon women and girls. This situation with the French and also the Senegalese occupying troops was apparently not a secret. The new U.S. president, Harry Truman, wanted the French armies out of Stuttgart, but Charles de Gaulle, the leader of France’s provisional government following the liberation, wouldn’t withdraw his troops until after the boundaries of the occupation zones were finalized.
We knew from radio broadcasts and the occasional newspaper that Germany had been chopped in two by its victors, into East and West. East Germany became a communist satellite state of Russia. West Germany was occupied by Britain in the north, the region closest to the French border by the French, and in the south, where we were, by the Americans.
But as June lengthened and the days grew warm and long, the French did not withdraw. I hungered to be outside. My soul felt tattered after all that I’d experienced and witnessed, and the confines of the flat accentuated my restlessness to see and feel something lovely again. Though I had come to terms as best I could with the evil that had been done in Germany by evil people, I was not unaffected by those tragedies. I longed to hear laughter, see a wildflower, feel the sun on my skin.
I should have stayed in the flat like I had promised Papa I would on that June afternoon when I was alone, but the pull to be outside was too great. Papa had taken Max with him to the water-treatment plant, as my brother, like me, was itching to be anywhere other than inside our tiny apartment. Mommi had gone to stand in line for butter and eggs, as we had heard there would be a delivery of some near the end of the day and only those in the front of the line would likely be lucky enough to get any. I told myself as I stepped outside that I was only going to take one stroll around the block and that I would be back inside the flat in minutes. But once I felt the breeze in my hair and the rays of a glorious sun on my face, I hesitated to go back. Since the only people I saw out and about were a boy on a bicycle and two old women walking arm in arm, I decided to walk a second block and then a third.