Kilroy Was Here

Most six- or ten-year-olds in my day had heroes, mostly cartoon or comic book heroes like Spiderman or Superman. My hero was Kilroy. You may not remember Kilroy or even know who he was. Let me give you a quick primer. Kilroy was our liberator, who freed us from the yoke of the Nazis, after bombing the crap out of the place first, of course. Kilroy was our Simon Bolivar, our George Washington. He morphed into my Svengali, subtlely and unnoticeably, at first, but soon had me under his complete influence and sway.

There was nothing sinister in this conversion. I was a willing acolyte. I bought into his spiel with an open heart and without coercion. I loved the attention. My infatuation with Kilroy grew when I became a teenager. Jazz and rock’n’roll replaced Hershey bars and hot chocolate. Kilroy became Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Bill Haley, Chubby Checkers and, of course, Elvis Presley. I had all their singles. My father despaired over my playing be-bop and jitterbug and rock-a-billy. He called it “Neger-Musik” and couldn’t understand why his youngest son would possibly listen to something so foreign and unstructured and “un-deutsch.”

This is the story of my relationship with Kilroy. It opens in the year zero, the year the war and our old life ended and our new life began. The year of the apocalypse. 1945. This is the year in which I first betrayed the country of my birth for a couple of Hershey bars, a few sticks of chewing gum, some slices of white bread and a few mugs of hot chocolate. You might say that I was bought off cheap. I look at it as a kind of religious conversion, as one of Kilroy’s unmitigated success stories.

It begins when the American graffiti ‘Kilroy was here’ replaced the swastikas and Nazi slogans on the busted walls and toppled columns of German cities. The war was over and ‘Hitler kaput’, like the cities, the Jews and Germany (what the hell was that anyway?). Instead Kilroy came to teach us about chewing gum and baseball and jitterbug and jazz and Coca Cola and words like democracy and the pursuit of happiness, whatever that was. ‘Kilroy was here’ were three words as splendid to us as those famous three words from the French revolution, on which Kilroy lectured us. Kilroy de-nazified us, re-educated us, became our best friend. All this, while I slept on red sheets, from which my mother had cut and burned the white circle with the four times broken black cross.

Here’s how Kilroy achieved this feat. Every week on Wednesday, the U.S. Military Government dispatched a ¾ ton truck with two soldiers to our village, whose job it was to re-educate us kids. To teach us about democracy, the triumph of good over evil, how bad the Nazis were.

Their plan was simple. They set up a movie projector and screen in our classroom and showed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons and U.S. newsreels. The cartoons were in black and white and in English and we couldn’t understand a word, but they were still pretty funny. The best part was that if we watched the cartoons, we received a mug of hot chocolate and a bun. We loved that hot chocolate. It tasted delicious. We had never tasted chocolate before. And white bread was something we’d never seen before either. It was exotic. White bread and chocolate was what America was all about to us. And sometimes, when we clapped really loud at the end of the show, the Americans would give us Hershey bars and chewing gum. They had to explain to us that you didn’t eat gum or we would have swallowed it whole. We all wanted to go to America and drink hot chocolate and eat white bread and chew gum every day, all day. For me it was an epiphany.

Let me put into perspective why those Hershey bars were such a big deal. During the war and the first three or four years after, not even Christmas was an occasion for special gifts. Typical Christmas presents for me and, I imagine, for most kids in that part of the world, were a handful of Filberts or walnuts, a bag of apples and, after the war, perhaps an orange (singular). There were no toys, no candy, nothing as exotic as chocolate. And we looked forward to those gifts. They were a big deal. We were happy with what we got, because the alternative was nothing.

Most of the kids I grew up with received no gifts at all. If they were lucky, they had a Christmas tree, with real candles, by the way. Birthdays were not celebrated – no birthday gifts. To receive a chocolate bar was a memorable occasion. To receive it from foreigners, who we’d been told were bloody killers of women and children, who were savages, whom we were told to fear and hate, was quite extraordinary.

It wasn’t that our bread tasted bad. It was just that it was made with rye flour, which sometimes was mixed with wood fiber (speak: sawdust) to stretch it. It came in six-pound round loaves, which my mother baked every other Saturday in the communal bread oven. Before I knew about white bread, I thought my mother’s bread tasted pretty good. But once I discovered Kilroy’s buns, it was all over for me with the rye bread. Rye bread was heavy and dark and it sat in your belly like a rock and made you feel stuffed. Since butter was hard to come by, I used to spread the cooled thick scum from boiled whole milk on a slice of rye bread to make it go down easier and to take the taste of sawdust away. Sometimes, for a special treat, my mother let me spread a little brown sugar on top of the scum. This scum tasted pretty good on rye, but it couldn’t compete with the flavor of those buns. You didn’t need anything with them, no milk scum, no sugar. They were soft and tasty. The hot chocolate was a bonus. Of course, you had to be there for the head count prior to the showing of the cartoons. If you missed that, no hot chocolate, no white bun.

We didn’t care about their rationale behind their gifts. We were happy. This is how Kilroy first corrupted us. From then on, we believed America and Americans were number one and our true friends. The misery of our past as forgotten, replaced by our longing for the next Wednesday morning.

Kilroy did such a terrific selling job that he coaxed me to live in his land of milk and honey and Hershey bars and Disneyland. Kilroy’s land became mine. He shared his magnificent home with me. He made me his brother. My past disappeared, replaced by the American dream, Camelot, the Promised Land. Kilroy offered me freedom and safety, a place in the sun. Kilroy and I became one and the same. Bound together by identical hopes and goals. Kilroy came to represent the white knight in shining armor, who rode forth to slay the wicked dragons of, first, fascism and then bolshevism. Kilroy’s hard work had paid off, at least for this ignorant kraut.

This unabashed enthusiasm for all things American dimmed only when Kilroy strapped himself into his B-52, loaded it with napalm and disappeared into the setting sun to write ‘Kilroy was here’ on the broken walls of pagodas and the ruins of other ancient cities.

This really tested our friendship and for several years I was adrift. I felt betrayed. Then I realized that there is no such thing as Camelot, that my American dream was no more than that, a dream, a veneer that hid some ugly truths. I understood that America was really no different from Europe. Only the context was different. It was a bit of a rude awakening for me. But I came to terms with my disappointment. I decided that I had to look out for myself and couldn’t afford to mope around. I had to concentrate on getting ahead with my own life and forget about the fake ideals Kilroy had imbued in me all those years ago. I guess I had graduated from the enthusiasm for and wonderment about the America of my youth to the reality of life on the ground, with all its pimples and boils. Our friendship fizzled.