My Name Was Five Read online

  MY NAME WAS FIVE

  A Novel of the Second World War

  Heinz Kohler

  Copyright © 1979, 2004, 2009 by Heinz Kohler

  To the memory of my parents,

  who gave me so much.

  and to my wife Linda,

  who inspired me to tell the story.

  Preface

  If you love to learn about history, here is a powerful tale of war and its aftermath carefully crafted from eyewitness accounts: When a private plane crashes in Florida in 1991, the surviving pilot makes the strangest of remarks. “It was World War II,” he says. The National Transportation Safety Board attributes the accident to a collision with birds, but one stubborn investigator insists on going further. Before long, his inquiry reveals how the pilot’s past had trailed him on his last flight and vividly brings to life a terrifying slice of history–the story of a German boy who grows up in Berlin before, during, and after the Second World War; sadistic teachers just call him Five. The boy’s father, an opponent of the Nazis, ends up in a concentration camp and later in a penal regiment that marches through Russian mine fields to clear the way for regular troops. In contrast, one of the boy’s uncles is a fervent Nazi in charge of cleansing Hitler’s capital of every last Jew; another uncle revels in the governance of Paris. A favorite aunt, a confidential secretary at the Gestapo, is horrified by all she knows about the “final solution.” The boy’s mother is the one who keeps him sane when Spitfire guns kill his best friend standing right next to him on a bridge. But worse is to come: bombings and firestorms, the senseless sacrifice of children and old men in the battle of Berlin, the Soviet occupation, along with rape, murder, hunger, and disease, and then the emergence of a new kind of tyranny yet. In the end, we come upon an unexpected twist that shows how the consequences of war can emerge decades later and in faraway places.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1. The Arrest

  2. Shards and Whispers

  3. Aryans All

  4. The Acacia Tree

  5. Crystal Night

  6. The Yellow Uncle

  7. Hail to the Victors!

  8. The Incorrigible One

  9. Blackout!

  10. The Prophetess

  11. Cemetery Plants

  12. Magicians

  13. The Greifer

  14. Christmas Trees

  15. Traitors Everywhere

  16. Firestorm

  17. The Birthday

  18. The Plot

  19. Buried Alive

  20. Cricket Song

  21. Village Idiot

  22. Christianity

  23. Lichtkind

  24. People’s Storm

  25. Werewolves

  26. Thunder

  27. Gallows

  28. Mongol Dance

  29. Rampage

  30. Paying Tribute

  31. Typhus

  32. Jutta

  33. Chain Reactions

  34. Bread Winners

  35. Hooliganism

  36. Metamorphosis

  37. Misgivings

  38. The Intelligentsia

  39. A Spark in the Heart

  40. Escape

  41. A New Life

  42. Hypochondria

  43. Revolution

  44. Trapped

  45. The Wall

  46. A Perfect Flight

  47. The Crash

  Appendix: NTSB Accident Report

  Acknowledgments

  Afterword

  Reviews from Early Readers

  About the Author

  Prologue

  In the spring of 1991, a private plane crashed in shallow waters near Key West, Florida. There were no fatalities. About a year later, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a report on the incident, but questions remained. As one witness had noted, the surviving pilot, when first interviewed, had made the strangest of remarks: “It was World War II,” he had said. But look at the conclusion of the NTSB account that is reproduced here; it makes no mention of the pilot’s initial reaction.

  The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows:

  An inadvertent in-flight collision with birds while on final approach, resulting in the loss of aileron and elevator control as well as engine power. It was confirmed that sea gulls and other birds feed actively at dusk, flying in flocks low over water, between sea level and 500 feet. Dr. Carla Dunn of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, identified one bird retrieved from the cockpit as a Black Vulture (Coryagyps atratus), which weighed 75 ounces.

  Other factors contributing to the accident include 1) unsuitable terrain encountered during the forced landing, 2) the pilot being blinded by the setting sun, and 3) pilot fatigue after a long flight from New England, with a fuel stop at Norfolk, VA

  Note: A review of the pilot’s medical history reveals psychiatric treatment several decades ago.

  And there the matter might have rested forever. But when I happened to come across this story, I was too intrigued by the pilot’s initial comment to let it go. As executive editor of Modern Aviation magazine I had read hundreds of such NTSB reports and had developed a certain mistrust of them. To be sure, the board’s investigations tended to be thorough, and admirably so, with respect to the technical intricacies of aviation accidents, but I had long considered them to be lacking in psychological sophistication. Indeed, my own experience as a pilot had given rise to a regular column in our magazine that examined the psychological causes of airplane crashes. At the time of the Key West accident, for example, the column in question carried an article, entitled Get-There-Itis, which noted that many pilots were dying unnecessarily (along with their passengers) due to the foolish but common belief that they had to get there at a predetermined time. To be sure, the belief in question was often nourished by pilots’ fear of losing income or even their jobs, but such explanations didn’t make their actions any more acceptable. The urge to go no matter what blinded some pilots to the fact that their training or equipment could be unsuitable for certain flight conditions. Indeed, all of the past victims of this inner compulsion could have lived if they had just waited a day, or even a few more hours at times, till ice-laden clouds or violent winds and thunderstorms had moved past their route or till night had turned back into day! So you will understand why I pursued the Key West story.

  After locating the pilot back in New England and, I might add, after many frustrated attempts, I finally persuaded him to explore the strange thought about World War II that he had once expressed and to let me capture the result on paper. That project, it turned out, took nearly two decades to complete and gave rise to the forty-seven chapters of this book. Each one of them is based on a separate taped interview and, with a minimum of editing, has been transcribed in the pilot’s own voice, just as it was told to me. Many of these chapters are also illustrated with historical material that the pilot kindly provided. As you will see, the story begins well over half a century before the Key West crash and takes us to a place far removed from where the mishap occurred. In the end, I dare say, this book as a whole makes a far better accident report than the one that is fully reproduced in the Appendix to this book. But you must judge for yourself. So come with me to Germany and visit 1937 Berlin.

  Michael P. Scott, Executive Editor

  Modern Aviation

  1. The Arrest

  [February 1937]

  Where shall I begin? With one of my earliest memories, perhaps…I must have been about four and a half years old and I still haven’t managed to banish that scary night from my mind, almost sixty years later.

  I was lying in bed, in my room. The steel braces on my legs hurt too mu
ch and I couldn’t sleep. So I did what I always did and turned to my teddy bear. I imagined his being awake as well and together we listened to the pendulum on the wall clock. In the dim light, we watched the door at the top and waited for the cuckoo to appear. Three minutes to midnight; I was old enough to tell the time.

  But I never saw my singing friend that night. The bell rang and I heard pounding on the apartment door, voices of strange men yelling and the shuffling of feet. Something crashed on the floor in the next room and I heard my mother cry out. I wanted to get up and look, but I was trapped. The braces had been locked for the night. Someone pointed a bright light at my face. Then the front door slammed shut and I heard an army of heavy boots make its way down the stairs to the third floor, somewhat more quietly down to the second, and then I lost count. My heart was pounding, but my mother was there. She was weeping.

  “Where is Vati?” I asked.

  “Had to go out,” she said.

  She pulled down my featherbed and unlocked my braces. Teddy and I could sleep with her in the next room, she said.

  -----

  The next morning, my mother threw open all the windows, as she always did. Then she plumped up the pillows and the giant featherbed quilts. Together, we found a comfortable spot for Teddy, but not until I had dressed him for the day with his velvet jacket and pants and his shiny black shoes. As always, too, my mother gave me my medicine: one spoonful of white cod liver oil and a second one of orange Sanastol. Unlike Dieter downstairs, who balked at the cod liver oil, I liked my medicine. My father had said it would make me big and strong.

  Later that morning, we walked to the hospital to get my therapy. Down four flights of stairs we went, past the front door of Harzer Strasse 82, so noted in black letters on a white enamel sign, then right along the cobblestone path to the poster column at the corner of the street, left to the footbridge over the canal, and right again on the other side to the whitewashed building with the Red Cross at the door. I could have made the trip in my sleep, my knock knees notwithstanding. In fact, I didn’t know what the fuss was all about; I could walk as well as the next guy.

  “Hello Hansel,” the nurse said, “how are those bad X-legs of yours?”

  “I am just fine,” I said defiantly.

  They put me on the stretcher, made me lie on my back, and attached heavy bags of sand at strategic places along my legs. Nothing new there. My mother sat in a chair nearby. She kept drying her eyes with a handkerchief, sobbing ever so quietly, and I just knew it had something to do with my father having had to go out in the middle of the night.

  Once more, I watched a clock on the wall, but I distinctly remember not liking this one at all. Unlike the cuckoo clock at home that featured a castle set in a pine forest, the hospital clock looked like an empty plate, round and white. It had regular numbers, but I preferred the Roman numerals at home. My father had explained them to me. And this one had three black hands; one of them never moved at all, a second one jumped every once in a while, and a third one kept racing around with not a moment’s rest. But this ugly clock would do. I could tell when thirty minutes were up and it was time to go to the next room.

  There I learned to pick up objects from the floor with my bare toes–anything ranging from marbles to postage stamps–and the nurse was really happy if I could touch my lips with my big toe. Finally, I had to climb on the ball that was almost as tall as I, stand up on it, and try to make it roll on the shiny wooden floor from one end of the room to the other. When I failed and fell off, the nurse was angry.

  “What is the matter with you?” she asked. “Don’t you want to straighten out those legs?”

  When I succeeded, she was jubilant.

  “We’ll make you into a fine Prussian soldier yet!” she exclaimed.

  “The hell we will,” my mother said under her breath.

  -----

  We took the long way home, past Wildenbruch Park, where I fed the goldfish in the pond underneath the waterfall, while my mother sat on a nearby bench. She took out her Nivea jar and rubbed the cream on her arms, starting with her elbows and going down to her wrists and hands. She was always doing that, it seemed, and I liked watching her. When Mrs. Meyer walked up with Dieter, I was overjoyed. We found two snails by the edge of the pond and arranged for a snail race. Dieter had a golden coin with a red ladybug on it.

  “Ladybugs bring good luck,” he said. “Mama says so.”

  It seemed to be true; his snail won. But I didn’t care. I kept looking at my mother who was sobbing and talking with Mrs. Meyer. I felt scared, but Dieter let me borrow the coin and I took it to Mutti.

  “This brings good luck,” I said. “Don’t cry; when I’m grown up, I’ll marry you.”

  My mother smiled and squirted me with a bit of 4711, her favorite perfume. I liked the fragrance. Then we walked home together, downhill from the park and past the tram station where yellow streetcars kept turning into Harzer Strasse, wheels squealing underneath and electric wires sparking overhead, only to leave again, rumbling towards places in faraway corners of Berlin that I had never seen. I also remember Mrs. Meyer’s red scarf and red shoes, red just like the ladybug. And that she wore a brooch shaped like a parrot. That one was red, too. I didn’t know at the time that she did all that on purpose; she liked the Communists.

  “Where is Vati?” I asked.

  My mother told me not to worry. Mrs. Meyer and Dieter would come up to our apartment and we would all cook together. Also, Dieter and I could look at our favorite books. That afternoon, my mother baked a poppy seed cake and let me lick out the bowl. Mrs. Meyer made Rote Grütze, a delicious red pudding that tasted like raspberries and was served with sweet yellow vanilla sauce. Dieter licked out that bowl. My mother kept sobbing and talking about things I couldn’t understand.

  “But four years ago,” she said, “after they banned the SPD, they just killed those Social Democrats in Köpenick. Martel told us all about it! They tortured them to death; later their bodies were found floating in the Havel River, sewn neatly into sacks.”

  “This is different,” Mrs. Meyer said reassuringly. “Arthur is not a trade union man.”

  “What are Social Democrats?” I asked.

  “Hush,” my mother said, “don’t worry about it. Go show Dieter your picture book.”

  We went into my room where I had stashed my grandmother’s book under the bed. It was large and heavy, bound in red leather, and almost a hundred years old. My father had taught me to count and I knew that there were precisely 336 pictures in the book, not counting the one on the cover, which showed a massive chain of gray mountains in the back, a lush green valley in the front, and a castle on a hill in-between. The castle was surrounded by dozens of houses with red tile roofs and a light blue river flowing to the sea. The cover also had beautiful purple flowers, turtle doves, and a cherub on a bike. My mother’s own grandmother, my father had told me, had put together these pictures way back in 1858 after buying many cans of Justus von Liebig’s Meat Extract, produced, as the back of each picture testified, in Fray-Bentos, South America. Although I couldn’t read it at the time, Mr. Liebig assured his customers that “Liebig’s Meat Extract transforms the most watery soups and the most tasteless vegetables into lip-smacking meals. It’s indispensable in any good kitchen. But beware of cheap imitations! Look for the blue signature on the label.” I also couldn’t read the recipes found on the back of each picture, but my father had taught me to read the inscriptions on the front. That day, I showed Dieter the colorful pictures about the rain and the sun, about lightning and hail, windstorm and snow. In infinite detail, each picture showed elegantly dressed people in the streets surprised by armies of little cherubs working in the sky: pouring out buckets of water to make rain, shoveling coal into the furnace of the sun, and so much more.

  Our mothers kept whispering in the kitchen. We tried to join them, but they wouldn’t let us. So Dieter showed me his Struwwelpeter book. Unlike mine, it was a new and modern book, filled with brill
iant colors. We couldn’t read the stories, but Dieter had memorized the words. In addition, the pictures were clear enough. One was the story of little Pauline whose parents had left her alone at home with two sweet cats. When Pauline discovered a box of matches, the cats lifted their paws and implored her not to light them.

  “Father has forbidden it,” Dieter intoned, “meow meoh, meow meoh.”

  But to no avail. The dress caught on fire, then the apron, then a hand, the hair, the entire child! In the end, only a pile of ashes remained, along with a pair of red shoes.

  “Two cats,” Dieter continued, “shed streams of bitter tears. Mother has forbidden it.”

  I was scared.

  “I like my book better,” I said and ran into the kitchen.

  -----

  “Can people really burn up?” I asked my mother that night.

  “Of course not,” she said, “we just must be very careful with matches.”

  I didn’t feel reassured because my mother kept crying. I watched her putting on more Nivea cream and then combing her long, beautiful hair. It had the same color as the chestnuts I had gathered in the park and put away in a little box under my bed.

  “Can people bleed to death?” I asked.

  “Hansel,” my mother said, “why would you think such a terrible thing? You’ll be fine. Come and sleep in my bed. We can forget about the braces tonight.”

  But still I didn’t sleep well. I kept dreaming about that other Struwwelpeter story I had seen, about little Konrad who had been left home alone, warned not to suck his thumb. But when he did, there was pounding at the door and the tailor burst in with giant scissors and then he sharpened them and quickly cut off the boy’s thumbs! Konrad screamed and screamed and there was blood all over the floor. And, as the pictures showed, when his mother returned, Konrad stood in a pool of blood and both of his thumbs were gone….

  -----

  My mother never knew about my dream. As for me, it took ten years before I fully understood the significance of that day. In 1947, on the day I graduated from middle school, I came across a small pile of documents, carefully preserved in a chest of drawers, with a blue ribbon around them. One of them was addressed to my father: