On Stout Hearts

I hope you enjoyed the little snapshots of life in another time and place that I’ve tried to share with you over the past several months. If you didn’t, I apologize for wasting your time. But sometimes it is educational to realize that we are not all that different from one another, no matter what our background, our religion or lack of it, our politics.

What was special about that particular time, apart from the fact that we were still alive after six years of total war, was the necessity to adjust, to make do with whatever was at hand to survive. It wasn’t so much every man for himself, because we were all in the same boat, it was the collective will to pick yourself up and go on. This was not a time to be faint of heart. True, there were many who gave up and if you did that, you were done for, because there was no safety net, no safe haven, no time out. Our money was useless, worth less than the paper it was printed on. The store shelves were empty. There were no government or social agencies to turn to for help. The only way to make it was to 1: live off the land; 2: barter for food and shelter, either your skills or your possessions, if you were lucky enough to have any left; to 3: work for the occupiers or to 4: steal, rob or kill. That was it.

In this kind of an environment, apart from the black marketers, the farmers were the best off, because they had food – eggs, butter, meat, potatoes, grain – for themselves and to trade. The roads and trains were jammed with people from the cities, schlepping whatever possession they had left, headed for the countryside to swap for the necessities of life. Farmers did not starve. Many a farmhouse sported fancy oriental carpets, grand pianos, rare paintings, expensive furniture, which people had bartered away for food. As long as you had something to trade, you lived.

And then there were the refugees from the East. They had nothing. Many didn’t even speak the language. They were not welcome. They were seen as annoying additional costs of the lost war. There was little solidarity with these outcasts of society among the locals, mainly due to the lack of food and the sorry state of the war-ravaged, bombed-out homes and apartments. Their presence stretched minimal resources to the breaking point. There was nowhere for them to live. The cities were bombed out and the countryside was jammed with the bombed-out residents of the cities.

By 1950, more than 8,000,000 Germans from the ethnically cleansed, lost provinces behind the Oder-Neisse line had flooded into war-ravaged West Germany, another 3.3 million into communist East Germany. In some villages, they accounted for a third of the population. Most arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They spoke dialects that sounded alien to the locals. Their cultural background was totally different from that of the natives. They came from urban centers like Danzig (Gdansk) and Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad) and Breslau (Wroclaw) and Tilsit (Sovietsk) and were dumped into farm villages, were their skills were useless. Most were Protestants and here they were tossed into totally Catholic hamlets and towns in southern Germany, where they were looked on as heretics. They upset what little equilibrium was left in towns and villages across the allied occupation zones. If you were a refugee, you were near the bottom of the food chain. You had to be resourceful, strong and tenacious. Many turned to the booming black market. Some traded their skills for food and shelter. Some thrived.

At the very bottom were the DPs – Displaced Persons. These were the survivors of Nazi concentration camps, forced laborers from every corner of Europe, the victims of the Nazi terror regime and those eastern Europeans who had sided with the Nazis during the war and were now stateless drifters. All sorts of people were roaming the countryside, some looking for help, some looking to help themselves to anything they could find. Some to seek revenge, to rape, to kill.

To survive you had to be strong. I’d like to introduce you to a couple of survivors I’ve known. The first was Abel Haselmann. He was vague about his past. He’d only say that he was from somewhere in the East. He spoke with a distinct Saxon accent. He was a runt of a man and a jack-of-all-trades. He had survived the war and the Nazis and had hot-footed it across the Iron Curtain in the summer of 1945 with only his shirt on his back, wandered into our village and decided to stay. At first, no one wanted to take him in, because he was Jewish and he refused to kowtow to the burghers. He went to the Americans, who ordered the village mayor to find room for him. He soon made himself indispensable.

If your electric coil for heating your beer was busted, you took it to Herr Haselmann to fix. If you are wondering why in the world you’d need to heat your beer, the reason for that bizarre custom was that in those days few practiced dental hygiene and most everyone’s teeth were in dire need of repair and couldn’t tolerate cold or hot. Everything had to be lukewarm – ergo the beer heater.

If your radio was on the fritz, your bicycle broken or a piece of jewelry needed fixing, Abel Haselmann was your man. He was an artist. He also believed that you never knew who might be sneaking up on you at any time and you always had to be prepared to make tracks fast. He never was without his identity papers and a wad of American cash in his pocket. He said that a person without a passport was like a corpse on leave. He never slept or so it seemed. No matter what time of night you passed his house, there always was a light on in his room. He liked to quote Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote: “To live without roots takes a stout heart.” Herr Haselmann definitely had one of those.

He once asked the headmaster of the elementary school in our village and my older brother’s future father-in-law and a true Nazi in his earlier incarnation, why it was that he felt the Germans were such a superior race, when in reality the Jews were much tougher, having endured and survived 2,000 years of persecution, pogroms and even the holocaust and were still here. He got no answer.

Abel Haselmann was a heavy smoker. Like everyone else in those days, he rolled his own. He always had a cigarette dangling from his lips, the smoke causing him to squint and his voice to rasp. His fingertips were burned black. He grew his own tobacco plants, his ”lovely Virginias”, he called them, in the garden behind his house. In those early years after the war, there was a luxury tax on tobacco plants. Once a month in the summer, the tax inspector from the county finance department would bicycle the eight kilometers up the valley from the county seat and go from house to house to look for tobacco plants and to collect taxes on them.

Herr Haselmann had an early warning system in place. The first kid who spotted the taxman pushing his bike up the road of the lower village and warned Herr Haselmann got five cigarettes. Cigarettes were better than cash. You could trade them for just about anything. With such ample warning, Herr Haselmann moved his potted tobacco plants into the back of the garden, behind a fence, where he raised bantam roosters. These roosters were fierce. If anyone, other than Herr Haselmann, came close to their coop, they would attack, hitting the fence at eye level with their talons extended. Herr Haselmann never paid tobacco taxes.

The second survivor I’d like you to meet was Hans Dressel. He was from Upper Silesia, in present-day Poland. He’d limped into our village in late 1945 and offered his expertise as a grave digger. He also suggested that he should handle the chores of town crier. Our town didn’t have either, so they hired him for room and board. Besides laboring in the town’s graveyard, his other job was to announce the weekly village council decisions, upcoming soccer matches, important meetings and happenings throughout the village.

Herr Dressel was well into his seventies and had been a day laborer all his life and was barely literate. He was, what you’d call today, developmentally challenged. He had great difficulties reading the weekly dispatches. He carried a large hand-bell to announce his presence and then he’d try to read his bulletin. No one understood him, but he was a hit with all the kids in the village, who followed his every step and taunted him mercilessly.

He was just a step above the village idiot and he was hung like a horse. His Johnson reached easily to his knees. You could see it swinging inside his pants when he walked. It was huge. The kids were fascinated and at the same time abhorred by it and egged him on to show them what he was hiding in his pants. When Herr Dressel got fed up with them, he’d whip it out and shake it at them and chase them, sending them screaming in all directions.

The town council threatened him numerous times with dismissal, but they needed a grave digger, a job no one wanted to do, and he needed the work, because he had no pension, never having worked at a steady job in his life. He had found a nook in village life, by becoming part of the village entertainment and except for some of the more substantial matrons in the village and the Lutheran minister, no one took Herr Dressel’s behavior too seriously.

The third of these survivors was the Catholic priest, the Herr Curatus, who lived across the yard from our house. This curate was a short and very sturdy man who always carried cotton balls in his ears. He had appeared one day in the late fall of 1944. He came from the Banat, a formerly German region in Rumania.

This curate loved to drink and eat and could cuss better than most and he could do it in several Slavic languages. He also loved to play cards and he mostly won. Every evening, around 6 o’clock he appeared at the Golden Rose pub, down the hill from our house, to play euchre – to augment the measly take from the collection plate, he said – and to drink beer until, so some asserted, the cotton balls in his ears lifted and started to float off. That was the signal that he had reached his quantum and he got up and stumbled back up the hill to his house. Sometimes he passed out before he made it up the steps to his front door and his housekeeper, an old maid, who had a room upstairs in his attic, had to drag him inside and put him to bed.

The women in the parish didn’t like him very much and called him an “Unflat.” Literally, that means filth in the local dialect. If he had particular bad luck at euchre, the curate would swear worse than a Turk, as the saying went in those days. “Crucifix sacrament, another mass in the ass!” was his favorite (translated) saying. But the men more than made up for the local women's disdain. All the Catholic men in the surrounding villages, who had something special on their conscience, went to him for confession. He roared and hissed like an old tiger in his confessional, but gave everyone his absolution. This was important in those days, because without dispensation you couldn’t get communion on Sunday morning and everyone knew right away that you were a hard core sinner and the women shunned you and discussed your case from one end of the county to the other. It was worse than a communicable disease.

If one of his parishioners confessed to something which was too much even for him, he turned vulgar. “If you do that again, you dumb f…k, I’ll ban you from drinking beer for six months. Then you can swill water like your cows and you’ll end up with blue guts, you dumb ass!” he’d yell. An alcohol ban, according to his codex, was the worst punishment he could mete out and, to him, was much worse than eons of purgatory.

When the curate died, one of his parishioners, who had been threatened with frequent water cures, opined, that the Herr Curatus should be made a saint, since he’d performed the miracle of turning beer into water so many times.

We didn’t learn ‘til after his death that he wasn’t a priest at all. Apparently he had been a coachman in his earlier live in the Balkans and had decided to upgrade to a less arduous profession. All this came to light when his housekeeper went through his papers after his funeral. No one had questioned him, including his superiors. They were short of priests and he was ready to step in. He obviously knew his way around the Catholic rituals. The church after all was one of the pillars of rural society in those days and no one dared to question its decisions.

There is no limit to the imagination, when it comes to survival. You do what you have to do. I guess the closest you’d come in this country in comparing this spirit of survival is the hardships the early settlers here and elsewhere in North America had to overcome to survive. They had to live off the meager resources the land offered. They did not give up. They had stout hearts and iron wills.