1975, Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts

By Anne Joyce-Brandt

I was 17 when I met Lena, a waitress at the River Landing diner where I worked my senior year of high school, serving coffee and homemade desserts to the local businessmen and tourists.

“She don’t talk much,” the owner said to me, nodding his head toward Lena on my first day, “but she’s kind.”

Lena was tall and thin, and walked gracefully back and forth from the coffee station to her booths, her thin silver hair pinned neatly at the nap of her neck. She wore pink lipstick that she occasionally took from her apron and rolled across her thin lips when walking between customers. Her black uniform was freshly pressed, and she wore beige support hose and white nurse’s shoes, and she spoke with a heavy German accent.

Lena rarely spoke to me during our shifts together and often sat at one of the corner tables by the window overlooking the river as she smoked long brown cigarettes. I often talked with one of the cooks, Jimmy, also a high-school senior, and watched him grill bacon burgers with cheese or fry fish sandwiches for late-afternoon customers.

Lena ignored our conversations as she hurried by us with empty coffeepots and dirty dishes from her tables on the way to the kitchen. She did not want to hear such silly stories of high school, she said one afternoon, when Jimmy forgot the tomato on her tuna salad.

“You kids,” she said, “you don’t know how lucky you are to be talking about proms and fancy dress.”

Working in the afternoons allowed me time to study before the dinner rush, as long as my side work was done, and I OK’d it with Lena. One afternoon, just before Lena ended her shift, she sat across from me at the waitress table in front of the grill where Jimmy was frying bacon and I was studying for a history exam.

“What are you reading?” Lena asked, searching through her handbag.

“History,” I said. “I have an exam tomorrow.”

“On what?” she asked.

I hesitated, knowing that Lena was German.” The Holocaust,” I said.

Lena looked at me and sighed. She rose from her chair, poured herself a cup of black coffee, and sat across from me. She took a small liquor bottle out of her handbag and poured the clear liquid into her mug. She stirred it slowly and licked the spoon.

“So, what do they teach you about the Holocaust at Catholic school?” she asked, lighting one of her long brown cigarettes and inhaling deeply.

“Right now, the concentration camps and, ah, you know … the extermination of the Jews.”

“The Jews,” she said softly, “only the Jews? They don’t teach you about the others?”

I did not know about the others.

Lena grew up in the small village of Dachau in the beautiful Bavarian countryside. It was a town once known for its 19th century painters.

“It was a beautiful village,” she said, “with fountains, an 18th century castle, rolling hills, and lush green countryside.” In the spring and summer, flowers bloomed from window boxes and town gardens. Lena worked in her father’s bakery.

“We led a peaceful life,” she said. “I was just a young child when Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and used an old factory on the outskirts of town to house prisoners.”

“Who are the others?” I asked.

“The others,” she said, shaking her head.

They were people who were considered a threat to the government: communists, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholic priests, trade laborers, homosexuals, petty criminals, prisoners of war and, of course, Jews. They were ordinary people who were considered enemies of the state and were forced to wear different-color triangles on their prison uniform so all could see what crime they had committed.

“You have seen the yellow pointed star that the Jewish prisoners wore, haven’t you?” she asked.

I nodded my head.

“Well, there were other colors for the other prisoners. Pink for homosexuals, red for communists, brown for gypsies, blue for foreign prisoners, purple for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, green for the German criminals and, of course, the yellow star for the Jews.

Lena turned her head and waved to the last few customers leaving the empty diner. Then she told her story.

At first, we did not know what was happening in the camp, and we were warned to keep away. But then Hitler invaded Austria, and more trains carrying prisoners were arriving in Dachau, especially late at night. We read in newspapers about a training station for the SS (Schutzstaffeln) guards and the construction of new barracks, and then we read about Poland.My parents were very frightened. We knew that something was very wrong, and there was talk in the village of what was happening at the camp, which had grown to include 37 barracks for prisoners.

“Their burning bodies,” I heard my father whisper to my mother one night. You could smell it. Every morning, every night, the stench came rolling into town, and it would make you sick. My mother sprayed her expensive perfume on my kerchief and tied it around my nose and mouth when I walked to school.

I was not the only one. The smell was worse on windy days. Our information came from those villagers who worked in the camp delivering supplies or conversations overheard by the SS officers’ wives, who came into the local shops. Of course, I was just a young girl like you, but I heard stories of mass executions, torture, and typhus. Those who were not forced to work were used for medical experiments.

I heard such terrible things. I saw terrible things.

Days before the camp was liberated by the Americans, thousands of prisoners in striped uniforms were evacuated from the camp and forced to march through the village toward Wolfratshausen. We heard that the Americans were coming.

My father and I watched through the window the men - mostly men guarded by the SS and German Shepherd dogs. The men - some were so thin, most too weak to walk. They stumbled on the road and were beaten if they fell. Some looked at us, their eyes so big and wide.

“Their starving them to death,” my father said.

My father hurriedly gathered all the loaves of bread he had in the shop and ran to the street with them. My mother called after him, she was so frightened.

My father waited for a break between guards before he handed out the bread. But some men did not take the bread. They looked frightened. Just as he was reaching out to give a loaf to a young boy, just as the boy took hold of the bread, a soldier shot him in the back of the head.

“Now you can bury him,” the soldier said to my father, kicking the boy’s body to the side of the road.

My father fell to his knees sobbing. “Why does no one come? Where are the Americans? You are a witness to this madness, Lena,” he cried.

Lena’s eyes swelled with emotion, and her voice cracked as she continued to speak. “All of this,” she said, “makes me ashamed to be German.”

After the war, she said, “people called us cowards and criminals for not helping the prisoners. But what could we have done? We would have been punished ourselves. We lived in fear. I left Dachau two years after the liberation of the camp. I met a soldier - he was Italian and grew up in the North End (of Boston), and we had a son.”

“Have you ever gone back home to Dachau?” I asked.

“Home?” she asked, shaking her head.

I got up from the table to wait on two women who had been seated at their corner booth. Lena put her sweater around her shoulders and took her empty coffee cup and placed it on the counter.

“Annie” she said.

I turned to look at Lena.

“You won’t forget what I told you - about the others, will you?”

Anne Joyce-Brandt lives in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, with her three daughters and two dogs. She received her master’s degree in literature from the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 | Email This Post

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