Above Us Only Sky (6 page)

6

Ingeburg Rosemarie Kischel

W
hile the Old Man is always talking about his Lithuania, I keep quiet. But I have a history. I am a person, a girl, a daughter, a woman, a wife, a mother, and now a grandmother. I am no less important, nor is my history.

My mother was named Emilie Vogel and my father was called Alfons Kischel. I was born in a hospital bed, my mother unconscious, a nurse pressing down on her stomach and a physician between her legs, his forceps gripping my jaw. The year was 1925.

Like my parents, I was intelligent, but I didn't care about studies. I was more concerned with making everyone laugh. I had a happy, well-to-do childhood with my older brother, Francis, two years my senior, but like anyone growing up in a country bent on war, we felt our happiness unraveling. As early as 1936, when I was eleven, we knew that things were not good. We were not blind, but everyone wanted to feign ignorance and believe in the nation. We were safe. No one was hungry. Father had friends, veterans of the First World War, who'd lost their citizenship because they were Jewish, but no one wanted to acknowledge what was really happening. Some of my mother's friends earned medals for having more than four children. We would laugh about it, how they deserved those medals because their children were rotten.

For forty years, I have listened to the Old Man's family history, hearing over and over about his shame at having to petition his uncle Joseph in New York for sponsorship to the United States. “Inge,” he said, “I did it for you. We had to get out of there.” But it was never for me. It was for us. Putting the weight on me lessened his shame.

There is no such thing as ancient history. I know it, but I try not to dwell on what I cannot change.

I met Frederick early during the war. Inside, he might've already become the Old Man, but on the outside, he was Frederick, handsome and fit. He was a sort of postal carrier, carrying documents, correspondence, and packages back and forth to Berlin. I was a nursing student, a practical joker. Tall, with dark hair and good teeth, my friends teased that I'd make a better actress than nurse. “Ingeburg is so dramatic,” they said. “She'll be the next great film star. Her smile is over the top.”

I met Frederick in a beer garden in the summer of 1942. He was there delivering a package to an albino wearing a brown leather eye patch. Immediately, I was intrigued. As I said, he was handsome, with sweeping dark-brown hair and blue eyes. I watched him. After he handed a paper to the albino, the man slipped it inside his jacket and remained at the bar.

“Stare much?” my friends asked.

“He's cute, isn't he?”

“Which one?”

“Stop it,” I said. I was proud of my smile, and I didn't shy away from showing it off.

The albino man left through a flowering archway that led out to the street, where there was a parade in progress. The sun was bright. Women and children, dressed in traditional lederhosen, tossed flowers at the marching soldiers. There was music, laughter, and cheering.

In the beer garden, I rested my chin in my hands and stared at Frederick. Because of the festival, our nursing instructor had dismissed class early. There were five of us out enjoying the weather in our blue starched uniforms.

Frederick turned around and saw me watching him. After finishing his pint and ordering another, he approached our table. It's funny to me now, how he was so young and full of potential. His black cap was under his arm. His cheeks were rosy. We had yet to share our war stories.

I was laughing. “He's coming over here!”

“That's what you get!”

He was foreign, but his German was good. “May I sit down?” he asked.

Despite his bright complexion, right away I detected his sadness and was drawn to it. Sadness was something I understood. I think it was why I was always trying to make everyone laugh. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I said, “Where are you from?”

He'd come to Germany after the army had “liberated” (according to the Germans) Lithuania, and he knew how to behave. Like the rest of us, he knew to say “Heil Hitler.”

When I asked about his family, he told me, “They're not around.” My brother and father weren't around either, so I thought that I understood. They were both fighting in the war.

I was flustered, but I wrote my address on a corner of my class notes and tore the paper. Frederick pressed it to his lips. In Berlin in 1942, apart from Hitler's speeches, it was hard to detect that there was a war going on. There were parties and parades. Everyone swelled with pride. There was nothing the Germans couldn't do. As a nation and as a people, we were truly better than the rest of the world. It was tangible.

In the garden, Frederick kissed my hand. I smiled for him. My friends exploded in laughter. After he'd gone, they teased, “You only like that boy because he's sullen. You like the quiet ones.”

I rolled my eyes, but it was true. On that first sunny day, I had this sense that he understood the war how I did. Like maybe we could confide in one another. We were pawns, victims of circumstance, pretending we weren't caught in someone else's chess match. Pretending that the butchers weren't sharpening their knives.

A few months later, Frederick told me about his family, how he'd marched across Poland and been assigned a bicycle. He'd taken an oath and sworn allegiance to Hitler and Germany. They gave him a black cap and an armband. He slept in the homes of strangers, traveling back and forth to Berlin, delivering papers and packages to men and women he didn't know, fearing for his life.

He was quick on his bicycle, and he was quiet. He didn't know what he was delivering, and he was never to ask or to look.

Ten years after the war, Frederick learned of his missions. He'd been delivering details of the Final Solution, the answer to the Jewish question, from Western Poland to Berlin. On more than one occasion, he'd unwittingly received papers from SS chief Heinrich Himmler—in charge of the systematic annihilation of European Jews. In Lithuania, he'd known a girl named Nelly. Her family had hidden him after his own family was murdered. She and her family had been part of this terrible solution.

Riding his bicycle across Germany, Frederick carried details about the first three designated killing centers in Poland. Later, he carried information about the success of mobile gas vans, paneled trucks that pumped carbon monoxide into their locked confines. He delivered recorded numbers of dead, details on the evolution of murder from bullets to gas chambers. All the while, never daring to look.

To the Germans and to the world, he was a nobody, a patsy. He was a Lithuanian boy riding a lent bicycle across Germany. It was too dangerous to convey details of the Final Solution via wire communication. What if the plan was discovered and broadcast? How would the average German react? How would the rest of the world react? Hitler couldn't afford a changing tide. Already, the top SS chiefs knew that it was too psychologically taxing for an average man to shoot a woman or child at close range. That's where they'd started: copying Stalin's methods. But they'd evolved. They'd industrialized killing to odorless gas. They were doing the world a favor—exterminating the undesirables. Frederick was part of this master plan because he was nobody. He had nothing. When I think about how meaningless we were to the greater schemes, plans, and solutions, I cross myself and thank God for my son, who brought hope to my world.

Poor Frederick, though. I don't know sometimes how he has survived day to day with so much regret. For all the years I have known him, he's carried a sense of worthlessness and guilt. It pained him that he'd been afraid to look at what he was delivering.

Frederick was good to me. He was better than good. Two weeks after we met, my mother and I found out that my father had been killed in Tunisia. Two months later, my brother died in France. Frederick was the confidant I'd anticipated on that sunny June day. He took care of my mother, reassuring her, telling her that everything would be all right. He never believed it, I don't think, but he was good to my mother.

Sometimes we went to the cinema. My mother was bereft, inundated with medals and letters of gratitude, when all she wanted were her men back. She loved my father and brother so dearly. Frederick could never take their place, but he took my mother to the cinema with us. He patted her hand and said she was beautiful. He praised her garden that she loved.

The neighbor with the four kids was no longer something to laugh about. Her boys were sent to war, her husband wounded. As much as I sensed doom, I didn't understand what was coming, how things could get even worse. I stayed in school, anxious to treat the injured coming home. At least at the hospital I could do something helpful.

A month before the war's end, I was inducted into the army. We all were, I think. I was twenty. I remember that I shot a cow. My rifle just went off. “Give a girl a gun,” I told everyone, “who's looking for a thermometer, and see what you get. I think I shot the beast right where I'd have stuck that thermometer.” I was still using comedy to hide my grief. I had to be strong for Mother.

No one laughed. Nothing was funny anymore.

At night during the blackouts with sirens screaming, Mother tended her roses. She had so many varieties: sweetbriar, tea, and dog roses; the heavy smell of apples from the sweetbriars wafted through the air. In the darkness, Mother pruned and removed the slugs and beetles she could see. These flowers were something bright, something of beauty, something to covet in a world gone mad.

After the war, Berlin was divided among the four Allies: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Mother and I lived in the Soviet-occupied zone, and even though some of our neighbors had left their homes to stay with friends in the other occupied quadrants, my mother wasn't going anywhere. “Who's going to tend the roses?”

Then, with the war over and Germany defeated, everything went from bad to worse. I hadn't thought this possible. Already, I'd lost my brother and father, but then I came home from working at the hospital to find the lock on our front door busted.

“Mother,” I called hesitantly, and heard men laughing. I thought about going for help, but there was nowhere to go. The street was abandoned. Entering our formal living room, I saw Mother. She wore a slip, bloody around her unmentionables. I can't tell anymore about this part, except that one of the soldiers pointed at me. They were going to have their fun with me next.

My mother told me to go. “Get out of here,” she said. “Go now!” She had brown-cow eyes. Big saucers.

“Mutter!” Mother!
She was all I had left in the world. I didn't want to go.

“Du laufe!” Run!
she said.

But I couldn't move. Even knowing the soldiers meant to take me next, I couldn't leave my mother.

“Du laufe, Inge!”

“Mutter!”
I tucked my hands into the pleats of my uniform.

One of the soldiers came toward me. He was eating a slab of some kind of meat.

“Jetzt! Du laufe, Jetzt!” Now! Run, now!

I dodged him. Then another soldier, who'd been sitting on the floor cleaning his fingernails with a knife, crawled toward me. They both spoke to me in Russian. I looked for a way to take Mother with me, but she was not moving. I couldn't understand the men, but I understood their tone well enough. I knew that I had to go.
Fight or flight
is something that's since been explained to me. I flew, and I'm not supposed to feel guilty for it.

Who, I ask, is guiltless?

Instead of heading for the front door, as the soldiers expected, I ran toward the back of the house, through the kitchen, and across the yard. It was pocked with recently dug holes, men searching for valuables, my mother's roses trampled.

I was being chased and so I ran without thinking. Frenzied, I fell, knocking my lip against the wrought-iron gate; a metallic taste of salt and blood filled my mouth, but I never stopped. I didn't look back. I didn't think on it then, but I lost my pretty smile. My tooth was chipped and my lip split. I still have the scar.