Necessary Lies(61)

In the photographs of Breslau that Anna has found in Ursula’s letters the towers of the Cathedral on the Oder Island have metal roofs on them. Shop signs display the names of their German owners, Eduard Littauer, Gerson Fr?nkel, Brothers Barasch.

In one of the photographs, an SA parade marches along Schweidnitzer Strasse. The street is packed with people, cheering, saluting the men on horseback and the marching troops. Anna would like to look at their faces, but they are too small. All she can see are outstretched hands. William’s mother, K?the, could be standing there, waving to the men. Houses are covered with bunting, adorned with swastikas and wreaths. On the other side of the photograph Ursula has scribbled: Did you know that there are mazes of underground tunnels underneath your Breslau, some still flooded by water? Who knows what’s still buried there! The pot of diamonds G?ring’s servant carried behind the Field Marshal, lest he had a sudden urge to dip his fingers in the stones?

In the next days, when she walks along Wroclaw’s streets, Anna carries these pictures with her, noting the changes. The convex art nouveau windows have been replaced by flat panes of glass, the spires of St. Mary Magdalene’s church have gone. In the antique stores of the Old Town, German artifacts still dominate the shelves, fill the insides of curio cabinets in Biedermeier style. Miniatures of Prussian officers with reddish beards and sideburns, buttons sparkling on their uniforms, pale glass lamps, oak coffee mills with wrought iron handles. Meissen china plates and cups, calfskin gloves, velour top hats, cigarette cases. “No export,” a note pinned to the red velvet cloth reminds buyers that no object produced before 1945 can be taken out of the country. To protect national heritage. The note is translated into German and English.


“K?the never speaks about Breslau,” she tells her brother who meets her one afternoon for coffee. “I’ve tried to ask her about life here, but she won’t say anything. Must be too hard for her.”

Her brother shrugs his shoulders and downs his espresso. There is a hint of impatience in their conversations these days, and it is growing. She has ordered a bottle of mineral water with her coffee, and she sips it slowly. “Whatever . . .” he says and looks away. Stories of Breslau do not interest him. He thinks that maybe Canada or William’s influence has made Anna too soft, too accepting, that she is forgetting the facts, the evidence of the past. “German skinheads with chains on their fists are waiting for our tourists,” he likes to remind her. “Right across the border. So don’t get carried away.” He has already chastised her for noticing the shabbiness of the streets, uncut lawns, uneven pavements. Mocked her sensitivity, which he considers newly-found, a frill.

“People could at least wash the windows and cut the grass,” she has defended herself, pointing to a withering rosebush fighting for space among tall weeds. “Or is this also the Communists’ fault?”

“I’d rather have this than police raids on uncut lawns, like they had in East Germany when the neighbours snitched,” he has said. “Face it, Anna. A Pole will never run around with a mop. Life is too short.”

He could have also told her that in Russia it would be even worse, and she wonders which answer would annoy her more. She has promised herself not to judge, but she has already broken her promise.


Dearest William, Stalingrad, of course, is now called Volgograd. I was allowed to walk around, to visit what the military maps indicated as “Ha?he 102,” the sight of the fiercest of battles. At the hotel I was told that in the spring of 1943, as the winter receded, the hill was pink from the blood of the dead. The people were friendly and helpful, even though they knew I was German. The roads are still muddy, and the fields are covered with sun-bleached bones, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, scattered for as far as I could see. Your father, if he is here, is just one of these skeletons. The contours of the trenches and dirt bunkers are still visible in the parched earth. I took pictures of the heaps of bones, arms, legs, pelvic bones or ribs, jaws with teeth. Skeletons with identity tags still attached, lying next to a rusted machine gun. A pair of hobnailed boots, still standing upright, even in decay

A young Russian man, Boris, quite wonderful, with ruddy cheeks and short, blond hair was my guide. Thanks to his ingenuity and a bottle of Johnny Walker, red label, we had an old jeep to travel through the fields. You would’ve liked Boris. Short, rugged looking, in black rubber boots, a soft smile on his lips. He pocketed a carton of cigarettes, a roll of American dollars, and a bottle of whisky with style! When I placed the flowers on the Mamai Mound, Boris unscrewed a bottle of Stolichnaya, and we drank straight from the bottle. He told me about a farmer he knows who still has a sack full of German skulls in his barn, and about how he, Boris, played in the bone fields when he was a boy.

Thanks to Glasnost, there will be burials. The Organisation for the Care of German War Graves will bury the bones and restore the cemeteries that the Sixth Army used until the final defeat. In the first months of the battle, the graves were still marked with an iron cross and a soldier’s helmet, but by now they have all vanished and will have to be searched for and uncovered. Boris told me that one such site has become a garbage dump and a landfill, another a patchwork of garden plots where the local citizens have erected wooden shacks and lattice fences.

It is the grave robbers, now, who come here. It’s good business. An identity tag brings five to ten dollars, an Iron Cross fifty dollars, a Ritterkreuz as much as a hundred. Even a rusted helmet will fetch twenty dollars, which is more than a worker here can earn in two weeks. Before I left, I shelled out more American cigarettes for Boris. Boris gave me the buttons from the army coats, for me and for you. I refused to touch the Iron Cross and the daggers, but the buttons we can keep, nicht wahr? Ursula