Ludwig Uhland, poet and lawyer, who was born, lived, and died in Tuebingen, where daughter Lynn once studied, could not possibly have imagined, as he wrote his Fatherland poems, that one day the street named for him would be littered with shards of broken glass from the shattered store fronts of the Jewish-owned businesses across the street, so visible from my second story perch.
Nor could he have imagined the acrid smell of smoke that smothered the neighborhood that November day in 1938, caused by the burning of the synagogue just a block away, the building intentionally torched, along with many such others, in retaliation for the murder, the previous day, by a young Jewish Parisian man, of a German Embassy staffer in neighboring France.
Becoming known as Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht was the moment that Jews in Germany, especially the three hundred thousand in Berlin, realized it was high time to leave their country to wherever in the world they could find refuge…..and we did. Movie mogul Carl Laemmle providing the needed Affidavit of Support, after my uncle’s frantic urging, allowing us to flee the country of our birth from Berlin’s Lehrter Bahnhof, which since 1871 had witnessed the burning tears of many departing families…..except, this time, no one knew if we would ever meet again.
January 12th, 1939, the date of our leaving, is deeply engraved in my memory, as is February 12th, 1939, marking our arrival in New York, and December 16th, 1951, the day I returned to Germany on the troopship ms Caalan, wearing USAF blue, calmly facing my expellers, thankful I had survived the Holocaust, unlike Rudi and Renate, my two best childhood friends, who, with their mother, had perished in the gas or, perhaps with greater mercy, were killed by a belching gun.
For three-plus years, as the Cold War raged, I was stationed within a few kilometers of Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain, in Hof/Saale, Germany, protected from a Soviet invasion by troops from the US Army’s 1st Battalion, 2nd Armored Cavalry, whose oft-sung fight song was “The 1st is First in the 2nd and the 2nd is Second to None!”
Here we wrested information about the new Soviet Union from returning German war prisoners, all of whom had been a part of the rebuilding of the country they and their comrades had destroyed.
They knew how long the runways were in the new Soviet airfields, how thick the walls were in the new factories what type of steel used in new bridges, to be better prepared for the next war coming with the new Soviet Union; build it up, tear it down, build it up, tear it down.
When the flow of returning prisoners ended, we switched to interrogating defectors, who came from east of the Iron Curtain, from East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, to find the freedoms they were denied at home.
And then, on the first weekend of 1953, in a small room in Hof’s Theresienstein, I spotted her sitting at a table with four or five other pretty young German women, and quickly realizing she was the prettiest of them all, asked her to dance…..and that dance changed my life and hers as well, leading to a wedding in Hof’s City Hall which in turn led to almost 70 years of marriage and four children, six grandchildren, five great-grandchildren……………….
All because the daughter of a German soldier and the son of a Jewish refugee family found love and a commitment to bring closure to each of their families about the events of that period in the world’s history that cost the human race more than fifty million lives, six million of them Jews like me.
Werner Salinger 15 June 2022
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