to chase me and my small friends away. My grandfather had been a railroad engineer, and he told me stories of troop trains he conducted to Russia during World War I. A head-on collision with another train ended his career and left him nearly blind. One day he took me to see a locomotive that had stopped on one of the side tracks of the station. I was allowed onto the conductor's platform, where the engineer opened the heavy metal door to let me peek inside the roaring furnace in the belly of the engine.
The sound of steam engines starting off from the train station was as much a part of my everyday life as was the ticking and chiming of the grandfather clock in the living room, or the cackling of chickens in the backyard. In contrast to Tab, all kinds of trains stopped at Kleinheubach —not just passenger trains but also trains filled with Catholic pilgrims on their way to Kloster Engelberg, the monastery on the other side of the river, or trains organized by the Nazi Workers' Party for outings. Some of these latter trains were festooned with flags and swastikas and carried workers from the industrial regions of Germany to the Main Valley for a few days of parading, speeches, and relaxing in the countryside.
Music played an important role in our household. In 1900 my grandfather had founded a men's choir in the city of Mannheim. One of his brothers, my godfather and namesake, was a violinist who played his way from the resort town of Baden-Baden to the movie house orchestra of the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco during the 1920s. It was he whom my father had followed to San Francisco, where they both played violin in the same orchestra, as well as in the Paramount Theater Orchestra in Oakland. My cousin Lore was a brilliant piano and harpsichord student at the conservatory in Nuremberg. I was pitted against her during one of our dreaded competitive family recitals. She played Chopin's “Minute Waltz” with ease, while I managed only a halting version of Mozart's “Rondo alla turca.” Enraged at my incompetence, my father told me that I had embarrassed both of us in front of the entire family. After that I came to detest piano practice even more than I had before.
Though he was usually absent, my father loomed large in my mind. He was not just another peasant villager huddled at the radio listening passively to the happenings of the outside world. Rather, he was an active participant in “important events,” organizing visits of workers to our rural region in his KDF capacity. He came home on weekends and tried to make up for his lack of paternal presence during the rest of the week by intensifying his surveillance of my progress in grade school. I usually fell far short of his expectations without ever really understanding what he wanted of me. There were so many things I did not understand, and no one, including my father, bothered to explain them to me. I couldn't understand, for example, why the letter q was not independent like the other letters and always had to be accompanied by a u. When I was told to sing zweite Stimme (second voice), I thought I was to somehow split my voice and sing two different tones at the same time. My teachers couldn't understand why a musician's son was so lacking in talent.
I remember once misspelling the German word for “little tree”—Bäumchen—three times, and my father began to rave that I would never amount to anything. Lessons with my father very often ended up in a beating. When I finally began to read a little, he arranged for my second-grade teacher, a friend of his, to give me a primer full of anti-Semitic stories. By the time I was seven I could read enough to see that all twelve verses —one for each month of the year—on our sentimental kitchen calendar began with the word “Deutschland.” When I asked my grandmother why none of the verses began with “England” or “Frankreich” or “Italien,” she replied, “Das kannst Du nicht verstehen” (You can't understand that). As I had already done in relation to music, now, in relation to my schoolwork, I withdrew into my own fantasy world where I could control what happened.
When I was nine years old, six years after my mother died, my father decided to remarry. He discovered that the respected village blacksmith, Heinrich Zink, had an unmarried daughter. When he married Maria Zink in 1939, the comfortable intimacy I had enjoyed with the kind grandmother who had raised me for six years came to an end.
For about nine months after the wedding and while my father had civilian work in the small village of Trennfurt downriver, the three of us lived together as a family—patriarch, wife, and son. I was very unhappy. My thirty-four-year-old stepmother and I developed a kind of statistical game in which we tallied the evenings my father spent with us at home versus the number of evenings he went out, not to return until long after we were both asleep. I remember our findings: for every ten evenings he was absent, he spent one with us at home. Although he was no longer a full-time employee of the Nazi Party, he remained friends with his Nazi cronies, some of whom I knew by name. They spent their evenings carousing in local taverns, well-known Nazi hangouts. I knew that my stepmother despised his friends, and because of his absenteeism, I began to grow disillusioned with him. Later, when I was older, my disillusionment came to encompass the political and moral spheres as well.
Despite the free time he granted himself carousing, my father must have decided that his life was too domestic, because he volunteered for the German army in 1940. Before he left, he arranged for my stepmother and me to move in with her family back in Kleinheubach. Then, except for an occasional appearance during his military furloughs, my father disappeared for the next seven years.
The move with my stepmother, whom I called “Mama,” to the small house of the village blacksmith changed my life. My stepgrandfather Zink arrived in Trennfurt to pick us up driving a wagon pulled by two cows. We loaded our belongings onto it, and the slow journey of about 8 kilometers up the valley to the blacksmith's house took the rest of the day. Once settled in my new home, the seasons of the year organized everyday life. I learned to work in the Zinks' fields, cutting and baling hay in the springtime, weeding potato fields, picking blueberries in the forest—a backbreaking chore —and harvesting rye and wheat in early summer. In the fall we picked apples and dug up potatoes with hoes. We used hoes for this task because my stepgrandfather believed that a cow-drawn plow would damage too many potatoes.
Despite the hard labor in the fields, all went well with my new extended family. I was completely accepted and well treated by the Zinks. My stepmother, much younger than my grandmother, was better able to continue the task of my upbringing. It is clear to me now that my father married Maria Zink so that she would raise me, but she never communicated to me any resentment because of it. Quite the opposite: she was loving and kind. Although I provided my new family with an additional farming hand, it was my stepmother more than anyone else who urged me to study hard in the Gymnasium (the equivalent of a college-preparatory high school) I entered in nearby Miltenberg, a few kilometers upriver.
More important to my upbringing than their interest in my education, this new family of mine was politically opposed to the Nazis. The Zinks' opposition to Hitler's regime was clear and at times openly communicated with family members and their closest friends, but never outside a carefully circumscribed circle. They loved to tell anti-Nazi jokes in their down-to-earth lower Franconian dialect. I remember one that my stepgrandfather told, one for which he could have been arrested:
Question: “Was hod der Hitler dem Mussolini g'sacht?” (What did Hitler say to Mussolini?)
Answer: “Wenn's schepp geit mit Pole, /duschd du widder mauern und isch widder mole.” (If things don't go our way in Poland, you can go back to masonry and I to painting.)
The Zink family had a long memory. Feuds with other families were never forgotten, but neither were the misdeeds committed against the Jews. I remember that when a particular Nazi thug returned from the war with his left arm amputated, my stepgrandfather maintained that it had been the very arm the thug had used to tear the sheets out of a ledger that listed his debts to a Jewish store. He had seen him do it from the other side of the street. The Zinks were righteous people who attended church on Sundays but did not pray during the rest of the week. I shared a room and a double bed with my step-grandfather. Every night after getting in bed next to me following his hard day's work in the blacksmith shop downstairs, rather than say a prayer, he uncorked a bottle of prune brandy, took a big swig, and
