Children to a Degree - Growing Up Under the Third Reich (20 page)

“Yes, you write, but not nearly enough. Please imagine yourself being 8 years old, unable to sleep at night because you don’t know what you did wrong.  Your classmates received a letter and you did not.” There was a loud murmur from the crowd but stopped again as Karl continued.

“Picture yourself in the shoes of your child being worried that something might have happened to you.” A teacher spoke up to defend the parents, saying that it is impossible to write every day, besides the postal service is interrupted from time to time and mail gets lost because of damage to the postal facilities.

Karl was undeterred. “I am not done.” He informed the teacher.

“I sleep with the children and therefore know what I am talking about. The issues you raised are no longer valid because I addressed them in the last camp and I hope that they will get initiated in all the camps.”

It seemed that the teacher took Karl’s answer personal.

“So you eliminated the damage to the postal service!” She nearly shouted.

Before Karl could answer, Herr Hartung intervened. “Let Karl finish, if he says that he has addressed the problem we should at least listen to him.” He waved at Karl to continue.

“Thank you,” said Karl, “I realized that the mail service was erratic and I placed all incoming mail on hold until Wednesday mornings. This way there is only one mail call per week and delayed letters have a chance to catch up. It also resulted in a much better mail call. Nearly all the children received a letter. It is the parents or relatives who don’t find the time to write once a week that I wish to remind how it feels when you realize that no one cares for you.”

“Why Wednesdays?” Herr Hartung asked who started to feel uncomfortable. 

“We initiated enough leisure activities to make the weekend interesting and something to look forward too. By deciding on Wednesday I broke up the week.”

The administrator nodded his approval.

“One more thing, please.” Karl was indeed not finished.

“Go ahead, Karl.” The teacher who had so rudely interrupted Karl before was all of the sudden interested in what else he might have to say.

Karl looked over the listeners. “I wish that I could force you to do this, but because I can’t, I need your voluntary help. Please give your children stamps and pre-addressed envelopes to take along with them. I initiated a ‘write to home’ evening on Wednesday night and on Sunday night. Some of the children don’t have stamps or the money to buy any. It would also be nice if the parents would give a small amount, like maybe five marks (German currency unit) to the children. This would allow me to take a group of students on an outing to the local stationary store and they would be able to purchase a picture postcard to send home.”

When Karl sat down he received a nice applause. Several of the parents came up to his chair to talk to him. Again he fielded all the questions to the best of his knowledge and by the time he was leaving he had a whole breast pocket full of addresses from individual parents who wanted him to pay special attention to their son.

This was kind of new to Karl and he decided to never attend another parent meeting without having Peter or some other sub leader on his side. There was no way that he could possibly fulfill the expectations by himself.

He wished that the parents and relatives would approach the teachers with their requests. However, the teachers conducting the meetings where seldom the ones who went along to the relevant camp.

Many of the camp teachers were the local teachers of the towns where the camp was located.

Seventeen

When Karl was leaving he was stopped by the KLV administrator. “Karl, I think that you woke up some parents. I will add a comment in your file. Goodnight.”

Karl was happy. It was the first time that he had spoken to a group of nearly 200 people. He had simply followed his father’s advice from a few months ago. He had allowed himself to think that it was possible for him to speak to a large audience. And it was.

“How did it go?” his parents asked when he sat down at the supper table. Karl was excited and told them all about the evening.

“I enjoyed it. I did not know that I could do that. Thank you, Pappa.”

“Congratulations, son. Don’t forget to build on what you learned tonight. Think about how many children will be affected. They will never know that it was you and your words they have to be thankful for when they receive an extra letter from home, but they will surely enjoy it.”

It was past 10:00 PM when Karl went to sleep. He was happy that Herr Hartung had indicated that he might be home for Christmas. Nobody had told him anything about the new camp’s location and he hoped that it was in a different part of the country he had been before. He was starting to love traveling.

This was a good thing too because during the next 12 months he and his teammate Peter were ordered to visit camps throughout Germany and also through a part of Poland. Their instructions were mostly the same: look for deficiencies and install order in camps where the smaller children were ruled by bullies. While Karl was concerned with the daily hygiene, Peter was charged with instilling order when some unruly boys tried to rule the camp.

In the beginning it was a somewhat difficult assignment. Many of the intimidators were not only physically stronger than their classmates but they had also caught on that they could get away with almost anything by threatening the teachers.

Karl could see that there seemed to be a common denominator. Either the tormentors were children of highly placed Nazi members or they had an older brother or other relative who had told the kid that he could get what he wanted by threatening the teachers with reporting them as dissidents to the SS.

The threat alone was sufficient.

Karl shared his observations with Peter and the boys came to a simple conclusion. Well, it was not exactly simple because it took some groundwork but after a trip to the HJ headquarters in Berlin and explaining his difficulties to the Jungvolk leaders who were in charge of the sport programs, he had the green light to proceed.

“Let’s go and talk to the local HJ office,” Karl announced upon his return from Berlin. It turned out that the local units were only too happy to assist. They arranged with the local children many minor sport competition games with the camp. This was a big deal for the bullies of the camp who wanted to assert themselves right from the start. However, now they were not only up against their own age group but also against older kids. The local boys were in the minority compared to the camps but the older ones prevailed in scoring points, badges and trophies. Since age did not matter in the competition and the games were designed to further the natural abilities of the boys, it turned out to be a valid struggle to maintain any possible lead. Pretty soon the whole camp was a united force. Almost overnight, the formerly unruly boys became the able leaders of the camp children.

Peter was a master in devising competition games which ranged from soccer to long-distance team running with several balls, sometimes up to two or three miles without stopping or rotating the balls.

“I like our arrangement,” Peter told Karl. “You are most welcome to teach the children to clean up the bathrooms while I am enjoying with them the fresh air.” He threw a handball in Karl’s direction. It bounced off his friends head as he was trying to catch it.

“Leave me alone,” pleaded Karl. “I have my hands full to get them to brush their teeth, never mind cleaning the toilets.”

“Yeah, I feel your pain but this is no excuse for not being able to catch a ball.” He bounced another ball off Karl’s head.

“Ouch,” complained Karl, “you hit me right on my forehead.”

Peter shrugged his shoulders. “Of course I hit you on the forehead; you are standing right in front of me.”

As Karl went for cover he mumbled something about brawny bodies with underdeveloped brains, but he did not mean it. He liked Peter.

***

Because of the constant challenges and varying locations, the next 12 months passed quickly. By the time Christmas 1943 approached they had enough support from the KLV administration to spend a week home with their parents.

Peter’s family lived in Stralau, a suburb from Berlin. Karl hoped to introduce him to Harold, who had completed his second language course. However, Harold’s grandparents had invited their grandson to spend the Christmas week at their small house by Hamburg and Karl was unable to see him before the holidays.

He spent the last day before Christmas Eve trying to memorize a festive poem to surprise his grandparents. It was a tradition in the Veth’s family that they spend Christmas Eve by themselves at home. However on Christmas Day, they would visit grandfather Veth and on the second Christmas Day (Christmas consisted of two days in Germany) they would be home again. They never visited Karl’s mother’s parents. That’s the way it was for as long as Karl could remember.

Another tradition was that the children received their presents on Christmas Eve.  Karl wanted to surprise his parents with a present of his own and had been able to secure a small glass salad bowl with two serving spoons as a present for his mother. He had no wrapping paper and used a white towel to make it somewhat presentable. Then he took a plain sheet of writing paper and printed in big letters: ‘
For our beloved mother’
he signed it ‘
Karl
’ and then gave it to his 6-year-old brother, who had just learned to write his name. However, little 3-year-old Monika just doodled something below her brothers’ signatures.

When they were done Karl scrutinized the paper and decided that something was missing. He asked his brother for a green crayon and drew something resembling a pine tree branch on top of the letter. His drawing was awful. It did not look like a pine tree at all, so he asked his brother for more crayons to draw some colored Christmas balls on the branch. When he went into the bedroom to find another towel to wrap up the present for his father, his brother used the opportunity to draw some Christmas balls of his own and then handed it to Monika to finish the Christmas letter.

By the time Karl was back and able to pin the paper to the present it was a jumble of colors and even the original writing was hard to decipher. There was not enough time to do it over again so Karl reached for a pencil and wrote on the side: ‘Christmas branch’ and drew an arrow pointing to the green lines resembling nothing.

The wrapping for his father’s present, which was a wastepaper basket, was more difficult. Karl had seen wastepaper baskets at the various offices of the KLV administration and he thought that his dad might like to have one. The money for the presents came from the gratuities he sometimes received from various parents.

After Karl finished wrapping the basket he wrote again ‘
For our beloved Pappa”
on a sheet of paper. This time he just signed his name and wrote underneath
‘for the other signatures please turn over’.

He gave the paper with the blank side up to his brother.

“Here, Willy, express yourself.”

When he got it back, Willy and Monika had ‘expressed themselves’ on both sides of the letter. Karl looked at it with some dismay but then decided that it was ‘original’ and left it the way it was.

“Don’t open the presents,” Karl told his mother as he gave them to her in the bedroom. The Christmas tree was set up by his mother in the living room and none of the children were allowed to see it. Like every year, the Christkindchen (Christmas child) arrived exactly at 7 PM.

Neither Karl, Willy nor Monika had ever seen him arrive, but nevertheless the door to the living room opened on time and the children were allowed to enter. In the corner of the room stood a nice Christmas tree around 4-feet tall on a table. It was decorated with Lametta (tin foil) and colored Christmas balls. Karl was deeply surprised and astonished. His father was very modern and surprised his family with the first electric Christmas light set Karl had ever seen. It consisted of 16 white light bulbs in the shape of regular candles.

It was a beautiful moment when the children cast their eyes on the tree. Each of them received two shiny green apples and some cookies and a tiny bar of chocolate. Monika received a Kate Kruse Puppe (doll) with imitation hair. Willy received a wooden train set and Karl was happy when he saw several books.

Karl wondered where his parents had obtained the chocolate. It must have been magic because there was none available in the stores. After the family sang ‘Silent Night’ the children were allowed to sit down. Karl wanted to bury his head in a book written by Gunther Prien, a famous German submarine commander, when his father announced that he had another surprise for them. It was 8:00 PM and he turned on the radio.

After the usual OKW report, the reporter announced a special transmission from the city of Cologne. For 15 minutes the family listened to the wonderful deep sound of the church bells from the famous Cologne Dom (Cathedral). While the ringing of the bells was transmitted over the radio waves, the local church bells in Berlin chimed in. In spite of the cold winter night, Karl’s mother opened the window for a minute so that they could also hear the sound of the Ludwig church bells.

After the last sound of the gigantic church bell diminished everyone was quiet to savor the festive moment. In the spirit of Christmas, Herr Veth announced to the family that they were allowed to listen to another hour of a music program.

“Do you remember your Christmas poem?” Karl questioned Willy on the next day. He was itching to see his grandfather again and he was wondering if his little brother was ready to visit the grandparents.

“No,” said Willy. “Mutti said that if I make an honest Christmas promise, I don’t have to recite a poem.”

This was news for Karl. A long as he could remember back, he had always been asked by his parents to please the grandparents on Christmas day with a selected verse.

“What kind of a promise will you make?” he wondered.

“No, I will not tell you. It will be a surprise,” declared Willy. He was like Karl, ready for the short walk to the grandparent’s apartment. The Christmas day visit was nothing short of an annual ceremony and Karl was prepared and eager to get started.