“I loved the Nazi party!”

“I loved the Nazi party!”

–bits of the most interesting conversation I’ve ever had. Liesel is a German woman living in Switzerland who lived through World War 2 as a German citizen.

She was 7 when the Second World War started and was ten when she moved out of Frankfurt for the countryside.

Starting with the highlights:

Her mom came home distraught once because she had seen Jews packed into cattle cars at the local train station. “It’s impossible, those are people” her mother remarked. “But what could she do?” Liesel asked us, “she couldn’t write a letter to the newspaper.”

“I loved the Nazi party! My older sister was a member of a youth program and they did all sorts of things, like hiking trips and group meetings. I couldn’t wait to join.”

“Think of the young German soldier. He was taken from his education and forced to do terrible things. He was a murderer, yes, but he was also a victim.”

She remembers hearing Hitler speak, but when she listens now she can’t believe people liked him so much.

She recalled Goebbels, “one of Hitler’s ministers” and said that no one in her family really knew what was going on, which was very common. “Propaganda hadn’t existed before that, we didn’t see it coming. They didn’t know about the killings because it didn’t come through the radio.”

Her father hated politics, didn’t like any politicians, and avoided it until his boss asked him incredulously, “you aren’t a member of the party?” and after that, for fear of his job, he joined.

She didn’t know any Jews, but she was aware that they had to wear stars.

None of the teachers who taught during the Nazi regime could be teachers afterwards. So there was a major shortage. The old teachers needed to be “re-educated.”

Other super interesting stuff in more chronological order:

One of her earliest memories was being scared when she heard planes going over. Her mother said that there was going to be another war and that was very bad. But as the war progressed and the armies were progressing, they became invested and supportive of it. They didn’t know that Hitler was trying to enslave the entire world, but they kept a map in their house and marked off all the battles won and new advances after victories.

Her older sister was very patriotic and supported the regime. After she found out what had been happening, she felt like her youth and enthusiasm had been betrayed.

“We were all so poor that we thought it was normal. I was so young that I felt it even less than other people. We were so much poorer than poor people today. Her older sister was so hungry that she would go down at night and eat a little more of the bread than they had marked off” (they literally marked loaves of bread because they had to last so long). Their mom would then give them all a little less with the next bit.  “The poor have it far worse now because they see what all the people around them have.”

“Each family got a ration voucher card. They cut off little squares to get food and supplies.”

Her family moved to their relatives’ house in the countryside after the first major bombing of Frankfurt. But she did experience (before she left) the tunnels running between basements to the bigger shelters underground. In the countryside she lived off milk and potatoes, much more than people in the city got to eat.

Her family doctor lived in a town that was also in the countryside, but was big enough to be worried that it might be bombed. He wrote a letter and ended up moving his family in with them. The younger daughter, who was around Liesel’s age, slept in a bed with Liesel, which was perfectly normal. The older daughter slept in her sister’s bed.

She mentioned that in the countryside town the secondary school was a train ride away. But they were afraid it would get bombed because it could have been for transporting supplies, so they started a school in her smaller town. Since so much was destroyed in the cities and so many people fled to the countryside, they kept the school up after the war. Liesel pointed out that, even though her house was never bombed in Frankfurt, they were very lucky to have had family in the country.

The allies used bombs that made fire to burn houses, and while people were running from their burning homes, they would come back down and use bombs that changed the air pressure and made people explode from the pressure.

[This is reminiscent of “double dipping” the term for when drones drop one bomb on a suspected “militant” and then drop another one shortly after. The intent is supposedly to make sure the first person is dead but in effect the second bomb kills the doctors and townspeople who come to inspect the damage and maybe help the person who was bombed.]

After the war:

2 million Germans died coming back from the East. Liesel believes that many people thought that Germans didn’t deserve to live.

Her dad came back to Frankfurt first. There had been three families living in their three room flat and when one of the families moved out her dad went back. Then her sister moved back to do some schooling and be a teacher. Then Liesel came back to go to university (which was free everywhere in Germany) while living at home. She always worked, even from when she was younger. She kept the money and used it to buy food when she ate away from home at the university. She lived with her sister in the flat for a little while but soon her sister was married and having children.

There was starvation and many, many people went hungry. Even worse than during the war. She thinks that it was intentional, that the allies thought that Germans didn’t deserve to live.

“The old money was useless because there was nothing to buy. When they issued new money they gave everyone 60 marks no matter what, and we all started from there. After that, the shelves had goods in them and we could buy things again. But chocolate was 5 marks, so I didn’t have chocolate until I was fourteen. I remember buying a cheap postcard with a drawing on it just because it was fun to buy something with money.”

I pushed her on the idea that there was no store of old wealth and she noted that you could trade in the old money, 10 units for 1 mark. And if you had a bank account, if the money had been put there a long time ago you got a slightly better cash-in rate.

[that makes sense to me, because someone depositing 100 units before the hyperinflation was a much larger real deposit than 100 units just before the new currency was introduced.]

Still, many people had nothing if their homes were destroyed; especially those who didn’t have bank accounts and kept everything in their houses including their money and possessions. Her family, during the early air raids, always kept suitcases packed with necessaries and money and such.

Even with the new money after the war, they had to apply to get things. Once her mom applied to get Liesel new shoes, explaining that she had grown. It was granted and they went to the shoe store, but they didn’t have anything that was the right size so they went home.

Higher party members and SS members were put in ally-built concentration camps after the war. Her uncle (her mom’s brother) lived in the countryside. It used to be the case that when a farmer had sons he would divide up his land among them (or something like that which made the farms get divided) and so farms had gotten smaller and smaller. The Nazis made a rule that if you had a farm that was smaller than a certain size it couldn’t be divided. Her uncle’s farm was just small enough not to be divided and he liked that a lot, so he was a big supporter of the party. “People vote for and support what they know and what matters to them.” He was the village head of the party and when they got together to have meetings and stuff he would run them, but “he never did anything bad.” He was put in one of the concentration camps.

Getting into the SS was a big accomplishment. It meant that you were very physically fit and you had to pass rigorous tests. They had a family friend who made it in and obviously joined. It was an honor to him and his family to join. They didn’t really knowing what was really going on. After the war, his family didn’t know where he was for a long time. They sent letters back and forth that arrived very quickly so they knew he was close, but he wasn’t allowed to say where he was. He visited once and said: “do not ask me where I’ve been” and that he “didn’t want to talk about it.” He was in a very terrible place—he was in a concentration camp. He saw what he had done and the machine he had helped to build and he killed himself after he got out. He left behind a wife and three daughters. He was also a victim. He didn’t have a choice.

She also mentioned that there were a lot of intellectuals in the concentration camps and that they held operas there and other performances.

I asked her if she remembers the Nuremburg trials. She said she didn’t remember them very well but her husband paid close attention. He thought it was bad that they were punishing the generals. They were just doing their jobs.

In University, Liesel did a 3-month German-English reconstruction program in England working on a farm. When asked, she said it wasn’t weird to be living as a German in England at the time. But she was part of a group that talked about an Irish playwright. She met her first Jew there and he asked her is she knew what had happened in Germany. Even though she was very young when it happened she felt tremendously remorseful for what had been done to his people.

[This is almost exactly what I was doing when, as a Jew (though I didn’t mention it), I asked her if she had been in Germany during the war and prompted her to tell us about her experience. Reminds me a little of something my first college professor told our class: “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”]

One person she met in England said that Hitler’s only mistake was that he hadn’t managed to kill all the Jews. A few other people made similar remarks to her, though that was obviously not a common sentiment. It seems like even most of the people in Germany didn’t support that at any point, but didn’t mind the regime because they didn’t know about the bulk of what was happening.

Lisbon and Leiden

Lisbon and Leiden so far:

“Passport” is spelled “paspoort” but “vacuum” is still “vacuum.”

Some form of Japanese amphibian (I think it might be a type of salamander) is 7-feet long, or else the kid I sat next to on the plane was lying to me/ill-informed. He’s a 14-year old amphibian connoisseur who I asked for some fun facts.

Notes from going to the supermarket in Leiden. 1) I cannot fit on the back of a bicycle. 2) Oumou, a 5’6” woman from the Netherlands cannot successfully pedal her bike with me on the back up a hill. 3) I can pedal with her on the back and successfully got us most of the way to the store. 4) Oumou discovers that riding on the part of the bike where you’re supposed to store a sleeping bag is actually as uncomfortable as people have been telling her it is for years after riding there.

TAP Portugal airlines serve you a twix bar and a sandwich for breakfast. There are also Mars, Inc. sponsorship ads all over the Lisbon airport.

Lisbon is BEAUTIFUL. After metro-ing to the financial district and asking at least 7 different banks if they would exchange my dollars for Euros I finally succeeded in a really upscale hotel with an extremely nice custodian . Note: do not get directions from bankers in Lisbon. They will point you to a place down the street, then when you go in that direction and stop in another bank to try there and ask them for help, they will send you off in another direction entirely. This is a tiring way to spend a morning after you barely got any sleep on a red-eye.

After getting cash, I wandered into a nice church-looking building that is apparently a restaurant. Though the restaurant was closed, the guy illegibly scribbled out the name of some subway stops that I visit to wander around downtown. I have bad handwriting and I can tell you the things he wrote down were barely words. After eventually finding the stops he recommended on the metro map, I went to the first one and came out onto a beautiful intersection with mosaic tiles on the ground and a statue in the middle. It’s hard to take statue imitation pictures when you don’t have another photographer, so you’ll have to trust that I was mimicking the statue’s pose while I took the picture. This seems to be an unusual practice judging by the looks I got from the locals. Anyway, the streets had white buildings awash in sunlight, trees everywhere, and Portugese red roofs that look even cooler than they did from the plane.

When I left my friend the statue and walked towards his friend, the other statue, the breeze started to pick up and I turned left see (many blocks down a side street) the ocean and coast that had looked so gorgeous from the plane. I half-walked, half-ran down the giant hill of street with the cool wind off the ocean on my face and the 70-degree sunshine on my back and started laughing with a goofy grin on my face. I didn’t even know the city got that close to the ocean, and I couldn’t help but laugh at how epically surprising and awesome it was. On the way down I cruised by pastry shops and people laughing at the funny-looking tourist with the giant red frame-pack laughing to himself.

I spent a few minutes by the ocean before it was time to head back to the plane, to meet my friend, Eduardo the lizard-fanatic, arrive in the excellent town of Leiden to meet Oumou, her bike, and the setting of the next few days of my trip.