Post #74: An Iron Cross and a Menorah

25 Oct. 2023

The Buddha spoke a lot of conditions: things originate not out of thin air, but dependent on causal circumstances. He put equal emphasis on our choices: whether we can make intellectual sense of freedom or not, it is a fact of life that we cannot think away without tying ourselves in hopeless knots.

Conditions and choices, then. So imagine yourself born in 1921 in the Rhineland to a German mother and a Jewish father. That would make you eighteen in 1939, among the very first to be called up for another Great War that wasn’t supposed to happen.

The Nuremburg laws come into force in 1935, tightening the noose on German Jews; but since your parents were never married (an alleged wife on the father’s side, with talk of committal to an asylum) and you are baptized, you can still pass the tests, absurd as they are. Your father was once wealthy (he owned a junkyard during the First World War and profited handsomely), but the economic quagmire after 1929 and the race-laws ruined him. He escaped to Paris, impoverished and sick, it is said; but you cannot be sure, as you mother is tightlipped and there is no direct communication. (Evidence turns up much later of a knack for pretenses and deceptions, and of surviving the war perhaps in part owing to that duplicitousness—unbeknownst to his son, who went to his grave believing that his father was a straight fellow who died in a Paris hospital of kidney failure in 1938.)

Back to what we were imagining: you are the romantic boy-scout type—nothing to do with the paramilitary Hitler Youth, but running with a self-organized band of independent-minded young rovers around Europe who idealize Russia (not the Soviet Union, but Mother Russia, understand) and camaraderize around camp fires. They teach themselves to play the balalaika and draw the shapes of the girls they fall in love with on what instruments they can get their hands on. (Seductive but decently attired, it goes without saying.)

You don’t get into fights (that’s a different crowd) and you don’t go in for firearms—if you ever fired a gun before the war, it was incidental and didn’t impress you much. Loyalty to your friends is everything to you, and nothing worse than cowardice, not just before the enemy, but before anything. Your father is gone, your mother helpless, and you are on your own from the time you are a teenager. Running away is not an option; there is nowhere for you to go, and anyway it would only confirm, you seethe to think, the imputation of cowardice that the Jew-haters are all-too eager to pin on you. You’ll show them.

So what do you do? The uniform looks inescapable, one way or another, and you figure, quite correctly, that it will protect you even as it exposes you to danger. In the army, at least you will be judged by your actions. So you volunteer. First there is a labor corps, no fighting yet but already organized along military lines; then the army proper. You (my grandfather) won’t talk about this for forty years after the war, and even then only to your inquisitive grandchild (me), not your own children; so the details remain a little murky, but apparently you are sent to build fortifications on the Western front first, then you get moved to Poland, where you see horrors—even before the death camps have been built—for which don’t have the words when you try to describe them decades later. You insist that you never fired at anyone during the entire war; when you could not avoid shooting, you always aimed too high deliberately.

The more you prove yourself, you figure, the fewer questions will be asked. You eventually ship with Rommel to North Africa, where you deliver messages by motorbike and get severely wounded. You are lucky to recover, less lucky to get sent to the Eastern front next. Again, you volunteer for dangerous missions, and you end up spying behind enemy lines dressed as a peasant. You learn Russian well enough to pass for a local in a pinch, and you prove so daring that you are decorated with an Iron Cross. There’s a swastika on it, which you naturally detest, but it hardly shows against the black background of the traditional design, which dates back to the wars of liberation against the Napoleonic occupation and was designed by none less than Karl Friedrich Schinkel himself. The battles of 1870 were fought under its shadow as surely as those of 1914–18, and if anything remains of honorable German military tradition—you are far from alone in thinking—it attaches to the old cross, not the new.

Are you proud? It’s hard to say. Conflicted at best, I would say, but your personal record is nothing to be ashamed of. Your papers attest to your sterling credentials as a soldier, unworthy cause or not, and you are not here to kill anyone, only to live yourself. After the war, you will never show your decorations to anyone again, either the Cross or any of the others; but you never get rid of them either. You file it all away, quietly and tidily, and everything is still in pristine condition today, behind glass in a frame.

Your dilemmas are soon resolved by another perverse twist of history in the summer of 1943. Just as the tide is turning against the German armies, an order comes in from Berlin to remove “elements unworthy of military service.” Meaning a purge of half-Jews from the ranks, many thousands of them, up and down the military hierarchy, in plenty of cases serving with distinction to preempt questions about their backgrounds, just like my grandfather.

His superiors in the army see no fault in him, nor sense in the order; so they write him a fine letter of recommendation, stamp his papers with obscure legal code that would not attract undue attention, and send him home in his uniform—with a pat on the shoulder and some envy, I imagine, being seasoned enough to know what to expect from the coming months and years. Not many of them survived either the fighting or the terrible years as POWs in Russia. (What the Wehrmacht did with millions of captives on the Eastern front, in part by force of circumstance, in part by ideological design, is one of the darkest chapters of the war.)

Thus my grandfather lived, keeping up his valiant-soldier act during two more years of hiding in Cologne, sometimes more or less in the open, sometimes taken in by good friends from his campfire days. The old pledges still held; they would stick up for each other, come what may.

And so it happens that facing each other across my studio apartment in Bangkok in 2023 are two seemingly incongruous reminders of how strangely conditions and choices can combine in our world. On the one side, the Iron Cross that my grandpa filed away, unseen until we found it among his papers and effects when he died at 76, twenty-five years ago. (He is still sorely missed.) On the other side, facing it across the room, stands a brass menorah, the last tangible connection to my great-grandfather who went to Paris and vanished from our family’s view. As we only discovered very recently, he too made it through the war, amidst a thick web of lies and half-truths that are impossible to disentangle at such a distance. Police records indicate that he got run over by a truck, back in Germany in 1950, while taking a walk.

(In loving memory of my dear grandfather, Ernst Bohlen, and his best friend, Loreto Martinez, who helped him survive in Cologne.)