LITMIR.BIZ

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the small village of Trennfurt downriver, the three of us lived together as a family—patriarch, wife, and son. I was very unhappy. My thirty-four-year-old stepmother and I developed a kind of statistical game in which we tallied the evenings my father spent with us at home versus the number of evenings he went out, not to return until long after we were both asleep. I remember our findings: for every ten evenings he was absent, he spent one with us at home. Although he was no longer a full-time employee of the Nazi Party, he remained friends with his Nazi cronies, some of whom I knew by name. They spent their evenings carousing in local taverns, well-known Nazi hangouts. I knew that my stepmother despised his friends, and because of his absenteeism, I began to grow disillusioned with him. Later, when I was older, my disillusionment came to encompass the political and moral spheres as well.

      Despite the free time he granted himself carousing, my father must have decided that his life was too domestic, because he volunteered for the German army in 1940. Before he left, he arranged for my stepmother and me to move in with her family back in Kleinheubach. Then, except for an occasional appearance during his military furloughs, my father disappeared for the next seven years.

      The move with my stepmother, whom I called “Mama,” to the small house of the village blacksmith changed my life. My stepgrandfather Zink arrived in Trennfurt to pick us up driving a wagon pulled by two cows. We loaded our belongings onto it, and the slow journey of about 8 kilometers up the valley to the blacksmith's house took the rest of the day. Once settled in my new home, the seasons of the year organized everyday life. I learned to work in the Zinks' fields, cutting and baling hay in the springtime, weeding potato fields, picking blueberries in the forest—a backbreaking chore —and harvesting rye and wheat in early summer. In the fall we picked apples and dug up potatoes with hoes. We used hoes for this task because my stepgrandfather believed that a cow-drawn plow would damage too many potatoes.

      Despite the hard labor in the fields, all went well with my new extended family. I was completely accepted and well treated by the Zinks. My stepmother, much younger than my grandmother, was better able to continue the task of my upbringing. It is clear to me now that my father married Maria Zink so that she would raise me, but she never communicated to me any resentment because of it. Quite the opposite: she was loving and kind. Although I provided my new family with an additional farming hand, it was my stepmother more than anyone else who urged me to study hard in the Gymnasium (the equivalent of a college-preparatory high school) I entered in nearby Miltenberg, a few kilometers upriver.

      More important to my upbringing than their interest in my education, this new family of mine was politically opposed to the Nazis. The Zinks' opposition to Hitler's regime was clear and at times openly communicated with family members and their closest friends, but never outside a carefully circumscribed circle. They loved to tell anti-Nazi jokes in their down-to-earth lower Franconian dialect. I remember one that my stepgrandfather told, one for which he could have been arrested:

      Question: “Was hod der Hitler dem Mussolini g'sacht?” (What did Hitler say to Mussolini?)

      Answer: “Wenn's schepp geit mit Pole, /duschd du widder mauern und isch widder mole.” (If things don't go our way in Poland, you can go back to masonry and I to painting.)

      The Zink family had a long memory. Feuds with other families were never forgotten, but neither were the misdeeds committed against the Jews. I remember that when a particular Nazi thug returned from the war with his left arm amputated, my stepgrandfather maintained that it had been the very arm the thug had used to tear the sheets out of a ledger that listed his debts to a Jewish store. He had seen him do it from the other side of the street. The Zinks were righteous people who attended church on Sundays but did not pray during the rest of the week. I shared a room and a double bed with my step-grandfather. Every night after getting in bed next to me following his hard day's work in the blacksmith shop downstairs, rather than say a prayer, he uncorked a bottle of prune brandy, took a big swig, and started snoring almost immediately.

      There was a maiden aunt in the Zink family who wore several petticoats. For some reason, known only to her and her brother, the blacksmith, they never spoke to each other. She was cloistered in a room apart from the rest of the house that no one was allowed to enter. Through her curtained window I could see the dried herbs, flowers, and fruits that hung from her ceiling and walls—preparations that were earmarked for use against every conceivable ailment that might befall family or friends. Aside from practicing her herbal arts, she wrote poetry and over the years produced more than a hundred pages of neatly handwritten poems that celebrated every feast in the family and village. At the end of each poem, she signed off with the words “Heil Hitler!”

      To the irritation of her fastidious brother, this aunt had her own plot of land just outside the village that had the appearance of a jungle compared to the neatly plowed fields that surrounded it—the perfect place for children to play hide-and-seek. This Schlßtante— “Castle Aunt,” so called because she had worked for the Prince of Lowenstein, whose ancestral castle stood near the edge of the village—was beloved by every child in Kleinheubach. Her pockets were always filled with candy. I felt privileged to be part of the family of which Schloßtante was a member. She would take me on walks in the late evenings and teach me the names of the constellations, everything from the Big Dipper to the Pleiades. She had dialect names for some of these constellations, animal names such as hen, horse, or cow, that replaced the more erudite Greek terms. For her, the Milky Way was the road outlined in the sky by God so that the good people could find their way to heaven. I am sure she believed that everyone in Kleinheubach would get there, except for her brother. After the war, she took care to cut the “Heil Hitler!” inscriptions neatly off the bottom of her countless poems with a pair of scissors.

      About the time my father left for the German army and my stepmother and I moved to her parents' house, I turned ten and was drafted into the boys' division of the Nazi youth movement, the Jungvolk. Precursor of the Hitler Jugend, or Hitler Youth, membership was required of all non-Jewish boys. Gentile girls had to join the Jungmädchen and then the BDM (Bund deutscher Mädchen). During my early teens, I developed an interest in singing, a skill encouraged by the Jungvolk. When I was thirteen and a half, I knew more German folk and marching songs than any of my peers and was rewarded for this accomplishment with the post of Singführer (song leader). On rare occasions when I still touched the piano, I played passages I liked very slowly and rushed through those I didn't. I tried to teach such fluctuating tempi along with the lyrics and melodies of the Nazi songs to the boys in the Jungvolk. But because we were supposed to march at a steady pace while singing these songs, my idiosyncratic “rubato” style was not welcome. As quickly as I had been promoted, I was disqualified and demoted to simple marcher.

      My demotion was not due to my erratic tempi alone. My buddy Ludwig Bohn and I had such a bad attendance record in the Jungvolk that we were accused of undermining the morale of the entire group. Ordered to defend ourselves at the Hitler Youth headquarters at Miltenberg, we arrived in our everyday clothes and were immediately reprimanded for not wearing uniforms. When we were asked, “Do you place any value on your ranks?” Ludwig, completely intimidated, became flustered and answered, “We place no value on our ranks whatsoever!” When the group leaders angrily mistook his confused answer for impertinence, Ludwig quickly corrected himself to maintain the opposite: “We place enormous value on our ranks!” The budding Nazis in charge decided that we were too young to be punished, but they threatened to punish our parents instead and demanded the address of my father. They already knew Ludwig's father's address. I said, “My father is away fighting the war.” My insolent answer infuriated the bullies all over again, and they literally pushed us both out the door and down the long flight of stone steps. But this was the end of the matter. There were no repercussions for Ludwig or me or our families.

      Once a week we had to show up for roll call, or Appell, as it was called, which was followed by Nazi indoctrination, marches, and paramilitary field games. Everybody did exactly the same thing—sang in rhythm, marched in rhythm, shouted in rhythm, and recited quasi-religious cant about the high points of Hitler's life. There was hardly time left for my usual fantasies. Just to insert a contrary element into these rigid routines

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