1982, Germany

By Elizabeth Rosner

Long-distance, I tell my father that I want to go to Germany, and I want to go there with him. He says maybe. We’ll see. I don’t know.

When my occasional questions become persistent, he asks me for the first time in my life if we can talk about something else. I have to touch my lips with my fingers to understand that I am pushing too hard; he is asking me to stop. So I stop. I tell myself that he will talk when he is ready. And six months later, we are preparing for the trip.

He has been discovering yellowed envelopes stuffed with photographs, his mother’s old postcard collection, certificates telling incomplete stories of births, marriage, divorce. Lost in this paper world, he remembers, in spurts and rushes. An “allergy attack” pours sadness through his head, though he won’t admit it.

“Look at this.” he says. I wonder what “this” is.

At the last minute, we almost cancel: there is a crisis at work, it’s impossible for him to leave, all the planning is no good against catastrophe. He can’t tell me the truth – that he wants to change the subject, change directions, change everything. The night before our flight, he says we can’t go, and I wait for him to decide that he can do it: turn with me toward the edges of what is dark and hidden.

The past is holding him back, pushing him forward. And we go.

Our hotel is on Schäferkampsallee, a street in Hamburg where my father used to live. From the cab window, he points and says he doesn’t remember the street being this wide, says he is surprised the trolley cars are gone. I imagine spidery arms reaching into a tangled web of charged wires, tracks embedded in cobblestone streets, electricity crackling overhead. We listen to the silence.

My father is a German who will speak no German, and I, forbidden to learn it in school, studied Spanish instead. There were no German products in the house, not for 25 years after the war, not until he bought that steel-blue Krups shaver to hold against his cheek in the harsh bathroom light after another almost forgotten nightmare.

“You’ve got to admit,” he said, “Germans are good at what they do.”

The subway, he tells me, still smells the same: overripe fruit and wet leaves and salty air damp from the sea. At Gänsemarkt, we rise, blinking into the sunlight, and my father points to a bakery across the street.

“They make a special pastry I’ve never found anywhere else in the world….” He looks for the nearest place to cross, as if he were an eager child promised a favorite sweet.

“It’s called a binnenstück,” he explains between mouthfuls.

I take a small bite of cream, butter, and honey.

“Too rich,” I murmur, and he agrees, wrapping the rest into a napkin, then into the shoulder bag he carries everywhere, stuffed with newspapers, magazines, books, maps. Ballast for this journey.

We take a ferry ride on the Alster, and his expressions change like the sky. “I came back here once, thinking I would spend a weekend just visiting the city. But I felt so lonely and strange, I didn’t even stay overnight.”

Ghosts were everywhere, as was the sound of broken glass under his feet. We pass under several bridges where children stand waving and giggling; the ferry passengers all smile up at them. My father looks bitter, as though thinking, yes, they can grow up here as if nothing happened.

“Over there,” he says, pointing, “we used to play along that bank. I fell in once. Not long after that, we weren’t allowed to go swimming anymore.”

We glide past mansions whose rose gardens slope gracefully toward the water’s edge. “It’s almost beautiful,” he says.

The first time I hear my father speak German, I merely listen in surprise. Later, in a restaurant, when I have to ask him to translate the menu, I realize how frustrating it is to hear him conversing so easily while I sit mute and uncomprehending. And I think that he is a bit annoyed about having to interpret everything for me.

“I still don’t understand why you never let me learn German when I had the chance,” I say.

He sighs and looks at me. “Because you would have started speaking it around the house. You would have wanted to practice the language, and you would have wanted to learn more about Germany and its culture. Eventually, you would want to come here, and you would like it here. You would come here and like it, and perhaps want to live here for a while.”

He tells this story as if it were the only possible plot.

“So here we are,” I say. “It’s a lovely city, and I do like it here. You seem to like it here too.”

“You see?” he says. “Now do you understand why I didn’t want you to come?”

A police van is parked across the street, and a pair of binoculars tracks our progress up the front steps. Inside, a huge-bellied bald man and another younger one watch my father get a prayer shawl and step into the sanctuary.

I’m looking for the women’s entrance when the young guard asks me something in German and I say, “Sorry, I only speak English.”

He wants to know if this is my first time here and why I’ve come. His accent sounds Israeli. I tell him I’m visiting with my father, who used to live here, and he wants to know why we didn’t announce our arrival.

“I didn’t know we were supposed to announce anything, “ I say. He wants to see my identification, wants to know if I’m Jewish, and he’s looking for evidence in the pages of my passport, saying, “You have no proof.”

We look at each other. “I speak Hebrew,” I tell him in his language, “Is that enough proof?”

He gives me a twisted smile and says, “Sometimes, it is enough.”

My father insists on taking me to see the red-light district and won’t say why. I follow him reluctantly, turning down an unmarked alley and waiting for the ultraviolet glow to make sense, but when he starts walking back toward me saying, “I made a mistake,” I head for the street.

I’ve had enough. That’s when it happens.

Because I’m turned away, I hear the clatter of her spike heels but don’t see her hand reaching out. Then there is the astonishing splash of her orange soda down the back of my dress, her laughter, my helpless hateful gesturing because I can’t curse her in any words she’ll know, my skin flashing lavender in the gloom, my sticky rage at how long I’ll remember this night.

Afterward, I keep thinking that what disturbed her was the idea of our being there together; she couldn’t have known that I was his daughter. But my father laughed too, as if it turned out to be a street of amusement after all, and he especially laughed at how hard it was to wipe away the traces of a German prostitute’s soda, at how this moment would stain my visit to the city that he had once loved and that had banished him, sending him nearly to his death.

What he wanted to show me, I think, was a place filled with shadows and drunks and whores, people who could hate me for no reason.

On our last night in Hamburg, my father’s kidney stone begins its excruciating departure, his body speaking of grief in its own language.

In the morning, when he finds a tiny dark granule in his urine, he saves it to show his doctor back home. We wander through the fish market among the gleaming silver of creatures parting forever from water; my father walks slowly, spent by the passing of the stone through the channels of his body.

High above our heads, I see a statue of a man in tatters, arms bound behind him, his gaze fixed mournfully on the city he is leaving behind.

In a rented car at Checkpoint Charlie, my father’s hands are clenched on the steering wheel. He wants me to keep looking in the glove box to make sure that we have our papers, tells me not to touch my camera, not even to think about touching it. We stay in line, answer questions, surrender our passports, wait for permission to cross from West to East.

My father studies a map that will guide us along the autobahn, past villages in hollows of lush green, past faded barns squatting beside freshly plowed fields, past a church spire pointing heavenward, all the way to Weimar, and then to Buchenwald.

“In June 1944, my brother and I were arrested – and actually given time to pack a suitcase. When we got to Weimar, we were held in jail overnight, and in the morning, we were put on a cattle train filled with half-crazy Russian prisoners who had been in those cattle cars for days. The train stopped at Buchenwald, and everyone got off. I said to someone there had been a mistake; we weren’t supposed to be sent to this place, and he said, ‘No, no mistake. This is the only place there is.’”

Eight kilometers away from town, along the edge of the Ettersburg forest, we find a parking lot beside red-brick buildings, no signs telling us where we are. My father says, “The SS barracks,” but they make up an apartment building now, and a group of sullen-faced teenagers sit there, waiting for a bus.

The entrance to the camp is no monstrous fortress but rather a cast-iron gate not much taller than my father with a message that is backward as we enter: JEDEM DAS SEINE (To Each His Due). We are the only ones here.

Facing a barren field of gravel, my father tells me that the prisoners’ barracks were torn down by the Russians in 1945. Shadowy patches of stone represent each vanished structure, but still standing is a low brick building with a single elongated chimney. In every direction, barbed wire scratches gray sky.

We study a photograph framed in black steel showing what the appelplatz looked like during roll call. The faces in the picture are blurred, and there are thousands of them: impossible to find him there. “I was somewhere in the back,” he says, pointing, “standing for hours to be counted, twice a day.”

We walk slowly, as though the air is a thick, unyielding substance. At the farthest edge of the camp, we enter a small building that is now a museum.

“This is where we were ‘processed,’ when we arrived. We were given numbers and prison clothes, and our heads were shaved.”

In one display case is a filthy blue-and-white striped uniform, breast pocket adorned with a patch and a number, also a pair of clumsy wooden shoes. And there are prisoners’ file cards, each with a small photo at the bottom – just like my father’s souvenirs. I think of that disintegrating paper, like wings of a moth turning to dust between my fingertips.

Back outside, into the dismal gray light. The only real color is the vibrant green of the trees steadily creeping toward the barbed wire. Looking back toward the entrance, I find that the camp has grown enormous; the gate seems impossibly far away, the SS barracks now part of the invisible world beyond the watchtower.

“Does it look larger to you now?” my father asks. “I guess we were always so weak and so tired, it took forever to walk from one side of the camp to another.”

He tells me about the last week before liberation, days that were “the worst of all. The uprising began the day of my sixteenth birthday. Someone woke me up and gave me his ration of bread as a present, and I hid it under my mattress for later. There was a lot of confusion that morning, rumors that the allies were very close. After an announcement for all Jews to line up, people began to disobey and to hide. The guards were panicking and shooting at everyone. Later, I managed to sneak back to my bunk to get the bread, but someone must have found it….”

He stops talking and stares at the dusty ground.

There is more of this story, pieces I’ve heard before: my father and uncle hid in the camp sewer system, then joined a group of newly arrived prisoners to disguise themselves with new numbers. A boy my father’s age found some bullets and tried to pry them open. He was killed instantly. And there was a night in which prisoners insane with hunger ate a dead body. But I won’t hear any of this again, not here.

Our shoes crunch in the gravel, even though I feel that we’re tiptoeing; it takes an eternity to climb the sloping hill toward the gate and to cross the appelplatz, where all the thousands stood and stood. At the same instant, my father and I both turn: we hear a sound carried by the wind, impossible and yet unmistakable, like the cry of 10,000 voices.

My father says, “Does it sound like people screaming?”

No more backward glances; we are through the gate and gone, driving back along the twisting forest road. There is only brief sunlight filtering through branches and no wind at all.

Elizabeth Rosner is the author of Blue Nude and The Speed of Light. For more about her novels, poetry, and essays, please visit her Web site.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 | Email This Post

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