The Hands
of War
The Hands
of War
A Tale of Endurance and Hope, from a Survivor of the Holocaust
Marione Ingram
SKYHORSE PUBLISHING
Copyright © 2013 by Marione Ingram
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street,11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.
Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.
Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.
Photographs are from the author’s personal collection unless otherwise indicated.
“Gomorrah” first appeared in slightly different form in Granta (issue 96, 2006) edited by Ian Jack, and The Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace and Robert Atwan.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ingram, Marione, author.
The hands of war : a tale of endurance and hope, from a survivor of the Holocaust / Marione Ingram.
volume ; cm
Summary: “During World War II, Marione and her family miraculously escape the firestorms of Hamburg and seek shelter with a contact in the countryside who grudgingly agrees to house them in a shed for more than a year. “--Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-62087-185-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Ingram, Marione. 2. Jews--Germany--Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Germany--Personal narratives. 4. Holocaust survivors--Biography. 5. Germany--Ethnic relations. I. Title.
940.53’18092--dc23
[B]
2012033052
Printed in China
For those we loved and lost,
and for Sam and Noah
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men . . .
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war
—Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 1, by William Shakespeare
CONTENTS
Foreword by Keith Lowe
Preface
Chapter 1: A Child of War
Chapter 2: Mother’s Story
Chapter 3: Poisoned Air
Chapter 4: Awakening
Chapter 5: Gomorrah
Chapter 6: The Moon in Hiding
Chapter 7: Liberation
Chapter 8: Refuge on the River
Chapter 9: Uri’s Story
Chapter 10: New Worlds
Chapter 11: The Children of Blankenese
Acknowledgments
About the Author
FOREWORD
Marione Ingram is an extraordinary woman. As a survivor not only of the Holocaust but of the Hamburg firestorm, she is a rare witness to two of the most significant episodes of the Second World War.
I first read her memoir of these events one Halloween, and it struck me that this was a strangely appropriate time to do so. While all around me the neighborhood children were preparing for the sanitized horrors of the evening, I found myself immersed in something altogether darker. As a child, Marione suffered threats and insults from her neighbors, who were far removed from the playfulness of trick-or-treating. Other seven-year-olds would taunt her with the suggestion that she would soon be sent “up the chimney.” The atmosphere in her native city of Hamburg eventually became so poisonous that her mother tried to commit suicide—something that Marione herself witnessed, and which still haunts her today.
She and her family were only saved from the Holocaust by sheer luck. A few days before they were due to be deported to a concentration camp, the British and American air forces began a bombing campaign that caused enough confusion for her family to slip through the Nazi net. But if this was a lucky escape, it did not seem so at the time. The bombing of Hamburg was an extremely traumatic event that turned Marione’s entire neighborhood into a furnace. The tarmac in the streets melted, people burned as they fled the flames, and hurricane-force winds generated by the fire were strong enough to knock grown men off their feet and suck them into the inferno. Marione witnessed these horrors from the bottom of a bomb crater, where she and her mother took shelter from what we now know to be the worst single bombing raid of the European war, and the greatest man-made firestorm the world has ever seen.
In the confusion that followed the bombing, Marione and her family escaped. They saw out the rest of the war in hiding, living in a shack in the woods belonging to one of her father’s pre-war Communist friends. The hunger, desperation, and loneliness she experienced during those two years were almost beyond description, and placed unbearable psychological strains on her family. Yet they survived. And not only survived, but since the war Marione has flourished—as an artist, a civil rights activist, a wife, a mother, and now a grandmother.
Like most survivor memoirs, this is a tapestry of vivid recollections, impressions, reconstructed memories, embellishments, and hearsay, but buried within it is a deeper truth: the experience of what it felt like to be there at the time. One must admire the fortitude that this extraordinary woman has shown, both in managing to survive these events and in having the courage to record them here for posterity. From the comfort of our twenty-first century world we can only thank God that our own children have never been called upon to exhibit the same kind of bravery.
Keith Lowe
Author of Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943
PREFACE
This book is intended as a remembrance of family members and others who were killed because they resisted the Nazi regime or simply because they were Jews. To tell their stories, and those of some who survived, I have reconstructed from shards of memory scenes that I witnessed as a child in Hamburg, Germany, or heard about from parents and others who were there.
More than half a century after leaving, I returned to Hamburg and tried to retrace my flight through its streets during one night of Allied bombing that took forty thousand lives—a horror I had relived and set down during nights of near total recall in the 1950s. I also placed small stones on the nameless marker in the park where family members and thousands of fellow Jews were assembled for deportation to death camps. A cousin who is not a Jew reminded me that she had come to our apartment the day after my mother had received such a deportation order and had attempted suicide. Another relative told me that an uncle’s suicide had been caused by his arrest for resistance activities in occupied France.
Although I was allowed to read but not copy my mother’s official file and to dig for correcting and confirming facts at the University of Hamburg and its Institute for Jewish History, I do not pretend to offer a thoroughly researched history. Instead I have recounted my experiences as I recall them, aware that memory’s imperfections are compounded by time and that controversy attends just about every aspect of the Holocaust. I have also taken the liberty of reconstructing some events I didn’t see and conversations I didn’t hear, mixing memory with a desire to convey at least the outlines of the speaker’s personality.
In telling the story of Uri, a childhood fr
iend orphaned by the Nazis, I took the additional liberty of retelling part of the story of five hundred Jewish women enslaved by Alfried Krupp, meticulously documented by William Manchester in his magnificent history, The Arms of Krupp. Unable to recall or confirm key elements of Uri’s family tragedy, I portrayed his sister as the anonymous slave who turned back when three others made an escape from a Krupp compound in Essen. I included this fact-based fiction because Krupp’s unspeakable treatment of Jewish women was soon pardoned by the American occupation authority, and the record of his “crimes against humanity” was suppressed in postwar Germany.
The Hands
of War
Chapter 1
A Child of War
As a tree may be forced by fire or lightning to bloom in winter, a child can be compelled to become an adult long before it is time. I was such a child, a child of war, an anonymous target in a global killing contest among great nations, and human prey in a genocidal war within that war. Unlike those with an early talent for music or mathematics, I didn’t know that I was precocious, only that the imminence of violent death demanded an absolute commitment to life. In Hamburg, Germany, during the summer of 1943, it required even more.
At the center of the most devastating firestorm any war had ever spawned, the hatreds unleashed by the internal war against Jews ironically delivered me from the horrifying massacre of civilians by Allied bombers. Because my neighbors would not let me share their bomb shelter, I escaped through Hamburg’s exploding streets while they were baked like loaves of bread in an oven. Some forty thousand civilians, mainly women and children, were killed that night in what was by far the deadliest bombing there had ever been. The RAF commanders who planned and directed the killing called it Operation Gomorrah. They and their American counterparts kept at it for ten nights and days, punishing the city with successive attacks, slaughtering thousands more, continuing to bomb even after there was almost no one left to kill, covering my tracks with the ashes of the dead.
By the age of eight, I already knew better than to believe in miracles or to think that the bombers had taken the lives of so many others in order to save me from the hands of war. I also understood that I was different and yet not different from those who wouldn’t let me share their air-raid shelter, and that the differences they ascribed to me as a Jew were based on hateful lies. Usually I knew what was expected of me and did as I was instructed by my parents. Of course, even when I was aware that others’ lives depended upon me, I couldn’t behave like an adult all the time. A few days before the RAF launched Operation Gomorrah, my mother told me to take my baby sister, Rena, to Cousin Inge’s apartment in another part of the city and to wait for her there. But on the way I decided to disobey my mother, and I shall be forever glad I did.
My mother, three-year-old Rena, and I were living in a walk-up apartment in Hamburg, a proudly ancient seaport that boasted the busiest shipyards and bawdiest nightlife on the continent. My father was serving in a Luftwaffe unit stationed in Belgium, and another younger sister, Helga, was living on a farm outside the city. Despite the disquieting look in Mother’s eyes that day when I set out for Inge’s apartment, I was thrilled to be outside, unsupervised and in charge. It had been an unusually hot and dry summer but a salt breeze from the North Sea cooled my cheeks and seemed to calm Rena as I rolled her along inside a wicker carriage with spoke wheels and a handle as high as my chin.
Our street, Hasselbrook Strasse, showed few signs of damage from the scores of air raids the city already had experienced. Angling through the Eilbeck district toward Alster Lake in the center of Hamburg, the street was lined on both sides by shade trees and apartment buildings ornamented with sinuous art nouveau designs and stone faces that were much friendlier than the real ones I usually encountered in the city’s streets. After pushing the pram for about ten blocks, I hesitated at a small park where a wooden sign decreed that the sandbox, teeter-totter and swings were “For Aryans Only.” After sticking out my tongue at the sign, I climbed onto a swing and began kicking my feet toward clouds that were strung like bed sheets across the steepled sky.
Holding Mother’s hands before the bombings began.
Despite the delicious feel of the breeze under my skirt I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something had gone seriously wrong at home. Mother had cried most of the night and wouldn’t tell me why. I had never been sent on my own to Cousin Inge’s or been entrusted to take Rena so far from home. Although I had solemnly promised to go straight away to Inge’s apartment without so much as a backward glance, I couldn’t make myself continue. I climbed down from the swing and pointed the carriage back toward home. Hurrying past the bakery shop where I had once enjoyed strawberry and lemon ice cream in a crunchy pastry shell, I didn’t slow down until I reached our apartment building.
Without removing my sister, I parked the carriage in the stairwell and bounded noiselessly up five flights to our apartment on the top floor. When the door wouldn’t open and there was no response to my knocking and calling out, I thought with relief that Mother must have locked up and was on her way to Inge’s. But when I pushed harder with my shoulder the door suddenly yielded and I almost fell inside. Looking about I saw Mother slumped on the floor in front of the kitchen stove.
For a moment I just stood there, listening to the gas jets hiss like angry geese. Because she had a six-pointed yellow star on her dress, there was no one I could call upon for help. It hadn’t always been that way, but it was now late July in 1943, and those who might have helped in the past had long since been silenced.
“Wake up, Mother!” I pleaded repeatedly, shaking her and slapping her cheek. I even attempted to imitate my father by calling her by her first name. “Wake up, Margarete! Margarete, wake up!”
Trying not to inhale too much of the gas, I pulled Mother away from the stove, tugging first one limp arm and then the other. I managed to get her head and a shoulder into the dining room, but there her clothes bunched and clung to the carpet. So I took down the blackout drape that covered the dining-room window, swung back the glass pane and welcomed the air into the room and into my lungs. Mother was lying partially on one side but mainly on her back, with her eyes shut and her lips slightly parted. She was very pale and completely limp and I couldn’t tell for certain whether she was breathing. But I believed she was still alive.
At times I thought I could detect a slight movement in her chest, but the longer I stared the more uncertain I became. Putting my ear there was equally maddening. Just when I felt sure that I could hear a faint heartbeat, a rustle of cloth or some other noise would smother the sound. As I sat on the floor with Mother’s head in my lap, unsure of what to do next, I began to hear the faint sound of my baby sister crying in the stairwell below. Worrying that Mother might be cross with me for abandoning Rena, I slipped out from under her head and hurried down the stairs to fetch my sister.
While I was carrying Rena up the stairs, I was tempted to stop on the third floor and ask Frau Wiederman for help. Once she had been friendly and I had played with her daughter, Monika, who had adored holding my beautiful Kate Kruse doll. But after Herr Wiederman joined the Nazi Party and was made block warden, his wife had become the most vocal enforcer of the “Aryans-Only” rules, and Monika had wrinkled her nose, pursed her lips and declared, “I don’t play with Jew pigs!” So I kept climbing, believing they would more likely harm than help us.
Mother was just as I had left her. I placed Rena on the floor beside her, hoping that my sister’s cries of hunger would somehow awaken her. They didn’t. So I put a pillow under Mother’s head and began to look around for something that Rena and I could eat. I found a few potatoes, washed them and put them in a pot with water. Then I scratched a match and tried to light the stove, which caused a frightening flash and a loud pop followed by the smell of my singed hair. I tried again and again, until the gas ring finally produced a steady flame. When they were cooked, I mashed the potatoes and fed them to Rena. Afterwards, I changed her and put
her on the bed where all three of us slept when Father was away.
I wished that my father had been stationed in Hamburg instead of in Brussels. Because he was not a Jew but a uniformed member of Reichsminister Goering’s procurement command, and was also the most resourceful person anybody knew, I felt certain that he would have been able to save her. He’d been recruited for the Luftwaffe by a group of Storm Troopers who had beaten him almost to death—permanently injuring his kidneys—and given him the choice of joining up or dying together with his Jewish wife and children. Although his unit helped to keep Germans relatively well fed at the expense of the occupied peoples, he used his position to supply the top brass with fine cognac and other wartime luxuries and even to arrange for certain officers to have their portrait painted by a noted artist, his friend, Herman Koeller. Gaining first the confidence and then the secrets of these high-ranking officials, Father would then pass on information to contacts in the Resistance, many of whom were former comrades from his communist youth or people he knew from his prewar import-export business.
My thoughts turned next to my middle sister, Helga, with whose help, I thought, we would at least be able to move Mother onto the bed. Helga had been fortunate enough to inherit Father’s coloring— he was from the North Sea coastal area of Friesland, and like many of the people there had Viking blood in his veins. Helga’s light blond hair, blue-green eyes and pale skin were her Aryan passport, enabling Father to place her with a family that lived on a farm on the outskirts of Hamburg. There she was accepted without question as one more child from the city who was farmed out with relatives to escape the bombing raids.
My father, Edward Emil Oestreicher in 1939.
Before putting up the blackout drapes and shutting out the last of the light, I looked around the apartment, hoping to see something—I didn’t know what—that would help me to understand what had happened. Although I was a capable reader, Mother hadn’t left a note that would explain why she had decided to take her own life. But there was a photo album on the dining table which had been removed from its normal place in the living room. A few pictures had been taken out and left on the table, and the album was open to a group picture taken at a double wedding that must have been quite a fabulous occasion.