NONFICTION | Claudia Simone Franklin A Cartography of What is Left: A German Lyric Bavaria and Berlin 1945

NONFICTION

Bavaria and Berlin 1945

By Claudia Simone Franklin

From: A Cartography of What Is Left: A German Lyric

Because the Russians were coming on foot and the Americans were bombing relentlessly from above, my father was put on a train to the Black Forest. His school was relocating and, for a fee, would take along as many kids as possible. The Black Forest was safe. The Black Forrest was safer. It was February of 1945. My grandmother was a widow; my father was her only child — she wanted her son out of Berlin. Although the distance was less than four hundred miles, the trip took four days. The tracks and bridges had been shattered, blown up.

On the train, Father held onto a teddy bear and cried all the way to Bad Krozingen outside Freiburg. He had just turned eleven, skinny, small for his age. His father had died some months earlier. The Russians were coming. Why couldn’t he stay in Berlin with his mother?

Of the seven hundred kids at the school in Berlin, less than one hundred went to the Black Forest. My father was the

youngest. In Bad Krozingen, at the school housed in a hostel, food was scarce. Dinner consisted of two boiled potatoes.

During the first weeks, Father sat in a corner and wept. When it got dark, he could see bombs falling somewhere in the distance.

By April, they ran out of food, even potatoes. The kids were asked to beg from neighboring farmers. Sometimes, they were given one egg.

Classes were suspended. Hunting for food became a full-time occupation. With the help of other boys, my father grabbed a hen from a chicken coop. He smashed its head with a rock. They cooked it outdoors over a fire, ripped it apart, ate it mostly raw.

On May 7th, the war ended. On May 11th, my father heard that a group of boys, all older, were planning to run away, walk home. On May 12th, Father and a boy called Volkmar climbed out of the bathroom window in the middle of the night. The older boys wimped out.

This is what Volkmar and my father had with them: one deck of cards, one stuffed bear, three slices of bread.

In the dark before leaving, my father put on the wrong shoes. They were too small.

They walked from Bad Krozingen to Freiburg to Tübingen to Esslingen to Nuremberg to Bayreuth to Zwickau, passing in between Halle and Leipzig to Potsdam and onto Berlin. Four hundred miles. Maybe more. My father’s feet hurt, then bled through his socks.

A few times, farmers let them sleep in their barns. Sometimes, they were given food. Mostly not. Once, an old woman offered them a bed and a tub. Even in a war, people are kind.

They scavenged through the garbage left behind by soldiers. When you are eleven and hungry, leftover K-rations are delicious.

They slept outdoors. It was cold. They gave up, got up, walked on.

They walked through forests. They walked along highways, along the plodding convoys of American soldiers, trying not to get too close. They walked among the displaced, the millions walking home, or towards what was left of home. They walked alongside women and their children, and women walking alone, children walking alone, and the elderly, old women, old men, alone.

They found an abandoned baby carriage, put their belongings in it, and pushed it in front of them. Around Zwickau, they got a hot meal from the Red Cross.

Putting one sore foot in front of the other, my father no longer cried. Outside Leipzig, they got a ride in a cattle truck. Women. Children. Everyone reeked. The children cried. The women cried. My father did not.

They crossed a ditch of dead SS soldiers. Executed. Twenty, thirty, more. Bloody and bloated. The cadavers stank.

They were detained by the Americans and later, outside Potsdam, by the Russians. Lacking documents, Father and Volkmar begged older women to claim them as their own flesh and blood. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes not. The Russians put the boys in a camp. Many were sent to Siberia. My father and Volkmar were let go. The Russians kept the deck of cards. Russians — my father hated them for the rest of his life.

A few miles outside Berlin, Volkmar went his separate way. They didn’t see each other again until the 1980s.

Once in Berlin, Father didn’t know which way to go. Ruins and rubble as far as he could see.

The Russians had flushed hiding German soldiers out of the subway tunnels with water. Their bodies lay about the entrances, decomposing in the summer heat. The stench was

overwhelming.

It took a few days, but Father found his street. Togostraße. He had been so afraid, but the building was still standing.

People on Togostraße began hooting and yelling.

“Maria! Maria! Dein Junge ist hier! Er lebt!” Your boy is back. He lives.

She fell running down the stairs. So she said. She was walleyed and during the war years so thin. She ran, her hair loose, her feet bare.

There he was. Skinny but taller and alive. He had nothing with him but the bear, its nose pushed in, one eye and one arm missing.