Chapter 2: Me, the continuation of my Mom (part one)
Although God gave me a penis, coming along with all those terrible masculine power hormones, who drive us men into this urge for senseless restless and limitless expansion and world-conquista, I definitely am the direct genetic continuation of my Mom, looking like her and being like her: a person, who is much more into dreaming and feeling than into – thinking and planning. The war had not only interrupted her promising high-school-career, which would have later turned her into an educated successful academic, the war had also terminated her father´s life much too early. Grand-Pa had died from the hard labor in the Siberian woods, where according to the communists’ judgment, a former Polish director of a wood-factory should be deployed to. With the generous help of Soviet secret police and trans-Siberian railway he and his family were transported to Siberia. After escaping in 1940 from Nazi-occupied West-Poland to Soviet-occupied East-Poland, where in the Galician capital of Lemberg my Mom continued to go to school, Grand-Pa had refused to accept Soviet passport. “What the hell!” he replied to the request of the new Stalinist authorities, “I am a Polish citizen!”, which was of course exactly this kind of inappropriate patriotic behavior that drove people in those times straight into some remote village of the Siberian wilderness. BUT – his heroic Polish stubbornness saved the lives of his wife and two daughters, since a few months later, when Hitler attacked Stalin to fulfill his lifelong wet dream of grabbing Lebensraum for the Arian race in the vastness of the Ukraine, Belo-Russia and Russia, Jews in the newly conquered cities and villages got usually killed right away.
With the “Götterdämmerung” (twilight of the gods) marking the end of the short-lived empire of the Nazis in 1945 and after having Poland so technically efficiently cured from its Jewish disease, those Jewish survivors, who had hidden somewhere out (some guy from my father´s village was hiding for two years in the grave of a Christian cemetery, isn’t this a great and smart idea?) or had escaped wherever, and were now returning to their former homeland, and underwent some more pogroms and killings, this time by Polish gangs. The train, in which my mother, my aunt and my grandmother travelled back from Siberia on, was shot at, sending a clear “Get the hell out of here forever and ever”-message. So out of pure geographical logic my mother was stranded in occupied and defeated Post-Nazi-Germany in one of those, so called displaced-person camps, which the British and Americans had built for those hundred of thousands of Jewish survivors on their way to the democratic West. She ran into my gorgeous terrible Dad and here she was: suddenly married to a guy, whom she had to speak Yiddish to in order to orderly communicate with him, since his Polish was far from perfect, a former proletarian and communist from a Shtetl, as you call those small towns inhabited by religious, Yiddish-speaking Jews, a world so beautifully pictured in the immortal dreamy paintings of Chagall. My father, who descended from an utmost poor and ultra-orthodox family, who cut his side-locks in his rebellious juvenile years and became a communist, for which, since it was illegal in pre-war-Poland, he was thrown twice into prison. Under Soviet-occupation of East-Poland in 1939 my father became a young functionary and director of the local culture house; escaped from the Nazi-Invaders, when they attacked the Soviet-Union in 1941, as far away as he could, travelling more than 3500 kilometers until Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan; stopped being a communist after realizing how the markets of Tashkent and its neighbor-cities in this remote oriental corner of Stalin´s war-shaken empire, that were never tolerated by the perverted communist ideology as something legal, were actually the only thing that kept life around him running, let him survive – and educated him to become a skillful trader. In her first life before the war my Mom would have most probably neither befriended the kind of person, my Dad was, nor most probably even met him. War ended in 1945, Germany´s infrastructure had been bombed into smithereens, and since there was no currency or banks, its black markets of the late 40s with their flow of US-Dollars, cigarettes and money-like-certificates, given out by the allied occupation forces, were a necessity in order to make trade of foods and some essential goods continue. Due to the training, he absolved during his time in Tashkent, my Dad quickly made it to one of the wheeler-dealers at the black market in Munich, which, like the ones in Berlin and Frankfurt, were more or less run by eastern European Jewish survivors. In the years later German historians did not really dare to lecture about this historic fact, because it would have sounded so awfully and indigestibly anti-Semitic. My Mom assisted my Dad, when the American military police or its German Hilfspolizei (auxiliary police) was raiding the place, hiding herself in public toilets, with a bunch of Dollars tugged around her belly, or within her décolleté. Life went on, throughout the Wiederaufbaujahre (year of reconstruction), Germany became rich and industrious and his widely appraised Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) proved that Hitler had been principally right about one thing: The world, at least in the second half of the 20th century belonged above all to Germany – and his war-ally Japan. The horrible 50s and 60s went by, economically successful, but for my Mom psychologically rather devastating. They could not immigrate to the US, being rejected firstly because of my father´s communist past, and then because my aunt, my Mom´s sister, was mentally retarded. With a bunch of business-partners, like him Jewish refugees, who somehow remained in Germany, my Dad took over bars in the red-light-district of Frankfurt, where the American GIs left their Dollars and then, around the time I was born in 1963, developed into a real-estate developer. After several miscarriages, bad treatment from my father, a lot of depressions and suffering and an unfulfilled and unhappy life most of the inner beauty of the intelligent Polish virgin, my mother once used to be, had vanished. She became just another “Polishe Yiddishe” frustrated, desperate housewife, complaining and worrying a lot all through the day.
(To be continued tomorrow…)