My Brother Willi

My first memory of my brother is when I was three years old and he grabbed me and made tracks on his skis down the hill from our house to get away from my mother who was unhappy with something I had done. He was 13 years older than me and he was my protector. Soon after, he was drafted into the army. He was 16 at the time and we didn’t see him until after the war ended 3 years later. We didn't know whether he was dead or alive, whether he’d survived or given his life for “Fuehrer und Vaterland.” He returned on my birthday in 1945. He was 19 years old and he was a wreck.

I’ve been thinking about him lately. His name was Wilhelm, Willi for short, and he’s been dead for two years. I loved him. He was named after my father’s oldest brother, who fell in Russia during World War I. He was my friend. He was a forester and game warden like our father and his father before him. He was the last to choose that profession in our family and he was an original.

But before I get into the story of my brother, a little background might be in order. I’ve already discussed his dexterity in rolling cigarettes with one hand and his willingness to flout authority in providing food for our table after the war in other stories touching on my brother’s life. I knew him for 67 of his 80 years here and I can’t recall ever seeing him in a suit and tie. He felt most comfortable in jeans or in his green forester’s uniform. He had the chance for advancement to the upper levels of his profession, but he chose not to, because that meant giving up his outdoor job and moving into some office in the city. My brother was one of the most unpretentious people I have known. Some might say he was naïve. He cared little about world affairs or politics or the size of people’s bank accounts. All he ever wanted to talk about was his dog, hunting, his job and his family, in that order. He was happiest out in the bush and was very good at what he was doing. He was an accomplished woodcarver and turner and an expert designer of high-quality hunting knives, which he built from scratch. And he was a fine shot. I know none better.

My parents were not overly religious. They went to church once or twice a year, usually on Christmas and at Easter. Non-Catholic churches were far and between in this very Catholic part of Germany where we lived. It took an hour and a half to two-hour walk each way from our house to the closest Lutheran church, on the road to Fulda down in the valley.

This routine changed after my brother came back from the war. What happened was that as the war drew to a close and the Russians were about to overrun Berlin and we had not heard from my brother in months, my father made a solemn promise to his Lutheran God that he would go to church every Sunday for the rest of his life and be a true believer, if God would see fit to bring his first-born son home safely from the war. He kept his promise. He became an elder of the church and insisted that I had to accompany him to church every Sunday.

I had no choice. Every Sunday morning after my brother’s safe return home, rain or shine, my father and I would walk to church down the mountain and then back up the mountain. My mother stayed home to cook the Sunday dinner, which was the most important meal of the week. It was the only day of the week we ate meat, except during Lent, when my mother substituted fish, usually carp, sometimes eel.

My mother was an excellent cook and she outdid herself on Sundays. Sunday was dumpling day. It followed a strict routine. First thing Sunday morning, my father and I had to prepare the potatoes. A sizeable number of them had to be peeled and grated. The shredded spuds were then stuffed into a white linen pillowcase and, with the help of a wooden stool stood on its front legs to slant the seat, kneaded, squeezed and pummeled on the slanted stool surface to extract all juices as well as the starch into a bowl. The liquid was discarded; the remaining starch became one of the components of the dumplings. This prep job took about an hour of intensive labor. After my father and I were off to church, my mother took over the cooking. In Germany, the main meal is served at noon and in our house Sunday dinner was at 1:00 o’clock sharp and usually consisted of venison roast, red cabbage and gravy, to go with the homemade raw potato dumplings. After walking ten kilometers to and from church, my father and I were starving and ready for this feast. It wasn’t unusual for us to devour 10 to 15 fist-sized dumplings at one of those meals.

Now let me tell you a few things about my brother. One of the things you need to know to form a mental picture of him is that he held the world record, if there was such a thing, of dumpling eating. He once ate 42 of them. You wouldn’t know from looking at him. He was one of those tough, sinewy, lean guys who can eat all day and never gain a pound. True, those world-record dumplings were not Bavarian raw potato dumplings. They were Prussian dumplings, called “Dampfknoedel” (steam dumplings), much smaller and oval shaped and made with yeast and flour, not potatoes. These dumplings were the staple in the house in which my brother took room and board after the war to make up his high school finals. The landlord was a Lutheran minister, but from the north of Germany, ergo the very un-Bavarian flour dumplings. You could knock somebody out cold with Bavarian dumplings, like my mother made. They were substantial and required a knife and fork to subdue. Leaven dumplings, on the other hand, were soft and could be attacked with only a fork. Still, 42 is not bad, even if they were not real dumplings. It was a number that called for respect. The best I ever did was 12 of my mother’s dumplings, about the equivalent of 24 Prussian ones.

Another thing you need to know about my brother is that he never went to church. He thought of preachers as charlatans. His church was the woods in which he spent most of his days and many nights. He was totally in tune with nature.

His other hang-up was that he hated officers as much as he did parsons. He thought of them as cancers which ought to be excised. He based this low opinion on his experiences during the war. I learned about his proclivities when I found out about the four German General Staff officers, who were hiding in one of my father’s hunting cabins in the woods near our house. This was toward the end of September 1945, five months after the end of the war. I told my brother about them. He was furious and went to investigate. He found that these officers, two major generals and two staff colonels, had stocked the cabin with food and wine and other delicacies the rest of us could only dream about. They were waiting for an opportune time to surrender to the Americans. In the meantime, they were living the life of Riley in that log cabin.

This cabin was about a mile from our village, 150 yards off the main road, well hidden in a little clearing. Every day, between four and five in the afternoon, an American patrol, consisting of two jeeps led by an armored personnel carrier would drive along the road through our village and into the woods beyond. When they got to the edge of the forest, they would speed up and open up with their mounted .30 cal machine-guns. They’d go at full tilt without stopping and spray the woods to the left and right of the road with bullets. They never hit anything. They were afraid of the “Werwolf”, a non-existent clandestine resistance force of Nazi die-hards, which was supposed to carry out guerilla attacks against the Allies, along the lines of the Russian partisans. The Americans never found any "Werwoelfe" or the generals’ hide-away.

My brother decided to end their vacation. He asked me to help him. His weapons of choice were Molotov cocktails to roust the generals and their flunkies. Of course, in those days we, as Germans, had no access to gasoline to make those projectiles. My brother had a plan. We would simply liberate the gasoline from the Americans who came to our village every week to re-educate us kids and to teach us about democracy by showing Disney cartoons. That was to be my job.

It was a major sacrifice for me to skip Mickey Mouse the next time the Americans came and sneak out of class and siphon gasoline out of their ¾ ton truck parked behind my school. My brother had given me a length of rubber garden hose and a liter milk bottle and told me to fill it. It took me a while to get the suction going, but after gagging and spitting gasoline a couple of times, I was able fill my milk bottle. I corked it and hid hose and bottle in the bushes behind the schoolhouse and snuck back into the darkened classroom. Mickey Mouse was in full stride. No one noticed my absence.

That evening, after retrieving the milk bottle and hose, my brother and I emptied the gasoline into green half-liter beer bottles. There was enough for four bottles, each about half full. He then ripped an old shirt of his into strips and jammed them into the beer bottles with one end hanging out. Molotov cocktails can be tricky. The rag has to be soaked in gasoline to ignite and if you’re not careful, they can blow up in your hand. My brother explained to me how to do it right. He’d learned how to from the Russians. I thought I could handle the bottles. His strategy was simple. We would sneak into the woods about a half-hour before the Americans’ daily sprint-through. When we heard their guns open up, we would toss our Molotov cocktails into the cabin and drive the officers out and into the arms of the passing American soldiers.

It was a good plan. When we heard the Americans start to blast away with their machine guns, we lit the fuse on a bottle each and tossed them through the window into the cabin. There was an explosion of fire inside. We tossed the other two bottles in for good measure and hid in the bushes to see what would go down. Nothing happened. The officers didn’t come out, the Americans raced past, blasting away wildly, but apparently saw nothing or if they saw, didn’t want to take a chance and stop and investigate. The cabin burned to the ground. We didn’t stick around, but went home and my brother told my father that he thought he’d seen a fire in the general direction of his hunting cabin. They went to investigate. I was not allowed to come. They were gone a long time.

My brother told me later that they’d found nothing in the rubble of the burned-down cabin. My father opined that the officers had probably been drinking and accidentally set their beds on fire and burned the place down and then fled in a panic. Neither one of them mentioned finding any bodies. The Americans came back the next day to investigate with reinforcements. They had seen the fire, but had thought it better not to stop, afraid of imaginary Nazi partisans. My father told them that he had no idea who had lived in the cabin. He assumed they were DPs (displaced persons), who had used the cabin as a hideout. I thought I knew what had happened in that cabin, but I wasn’t asked for my opinion. The officers had vanished into thin air.

Soon after, our paths parted. My brother went away to forestry school and we lost contact. I eventually moved across the Atlantic and disappeared into the U.S. Army. When I finally re-emerged, we started corresponding again. He helped me survive. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been totally broke in my first semester at university. He sent me $20 each month in his letters. He didn’t have much money himself. He had a family now. But he sent me what he could afford. He came to my graduation and later, after he retired, he traveled to North America almost every summer. We hunted together in the mountains of Idaho above the Snake River, the hill country of the Ozarks in Missouri, the swamps of southern Florida and in the Valley of 10,000 Smokes on the Alaska Peninsula. We spent weeks together most summers at my cottage on Kennisis Lake in the Haliburton Highlands north of Toronto. He was happy here.

I miss him.