Today, I got a book from amazon.com called War in the Ruins by Edward G. Longacre. This post is going to be filled with coincidences and a bit of resolved mystery from personal history with World War II.
When I was a child growing up, our house was saturated with World War II history as my father had been in the U.S. Navy as had his uncle and his brother. His father had been in the Merchant Marines but had died before the war. My father had served in troop transports in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and we watched Victory at Sea the way some folks go to church.
Dad was a big reader too, and a heavy collector of vcd's devoted to the war. We watched them all, so I knew quite a bit, but, as it turned out, not much about the end battles in Germany.
None of the movies we watched seemed to cover that either, now that I think of it.
In 1967, I married my teenaged sweetheart, after he was drafted into the U.S. Army. We were thrilled when he got his orders for Germany and not for Vietnam. My brother, in the U.S Marines was already in Vietnam.
So, we got married and I went to live in a small town called Heilbronn. I was only 21, and it wouldn't be too much a stretch to say I was like Alice in Wonderland, naive, innocent, inexperienced and full of wonder. We lived in the village not the army base because the swollen forces due to Vietnam had filled the army housing. We found this a great benefit, however as it provided a close hand experience with the culture and the people. Needless to say, though, it was somewhat isolating for me as my young husband spent a lot of time "in the field" and I was learning to speak German but it was a long process, and my language skills didn't progress too far from einkauffen (shopping).
Heilbronn was, to me, born and bred in Philadelphia, an impressively clean and tidy place. Also, the concrete atrium style housing was so new. People had courtyard gardens and window boxes filled with bright red geraniums. I didn't know anything and I couldn't really ask anything, and no one that I encountered knew anything about the past, or if they did, they kept it to themselves.
Just a few years ago, on a hunt for a vintage postcard from Heilbronn, I discovered the the old Medieval city of about a hundred thousand had been bombed into acres of rubble during the war. And then, the acres of rubble, underneath of which were market tunnels, had been turned into an end of the war battle zone between conquering American forces and a retreating "last stand" German rag tag army of boys, old men, and left overs from the Luftwaffe, the navy, the SS, and released prisoners, about a thousand strong.
Their last stand necessitated house by house and street by street combat on the part of the Centurymen American forces.
I can't believe that, not knowing anything about this event, only 22 years before, I walked those streets, and shopped in those little corner markets every day with people, many of whom must have been survivors of that battle, including our landlady, Frau Froeschle. She would have been around 50 then, and so she would have been in her early 20's during the bombing and the battle. Perhaps she had been married and her husband had been a soldier killed in the war. Perhaps she had lost her family in the bombing.
And my neighbor and friend, Trudy, who made her living off GI's as a kind of temporary full time wife, had parents who must have lived through all of that as well. I met her mother often, a woman in her 60's.
Two years I lived in Heilbronn, with never a guess about what devastation had occurred there so recently, even though a desolate spire of rubble stood in the center of the town left from the destruction of the Kilianskirche, a cathedral destroyed in the bombing. Truly, however, I think it is a mercy and a lucky break that I didn't know more, because I could go to this new and foreign place without preconceptions about the people and without awareness of the ghosts to taint my experience. Having been a child of the war, I couldn't have looked at those people with unbudging and friendly eyes if I had known it was a Nazi stronghold.
No comments:
Post a Comment