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Hans Kruppen was not the sort to dwell on his memories, a lot like myself. And like me, the moment and the future always tugged at his attention. Yet, during those moments of melancholy brought on by too much dark beer, two memories often dominated his thoughts. The first comes from when he was five years old and always begins with his spinster Aunt Ruth softly shaking his shoulder and whispering his name. He struggles up and blinks at the summer sunlight that filters past the blinds in his darkened room. Without a complaint, his bare feet shuffle across the fine wooden floor.
Down the hall and into his mother’s room. His father sits next to his mother’s bed, his hand holding hers. As usual, he is dressed in a business suit, with long coat and tie. Hans’s other aunt rocks in a chair in the corner and quietly blows her nose into a handkerchief. His mother’s pale face is slack. The white frilly covers barely rise underneath her shallow breaths. There were no other children in the room; his own birth had drained what vitality Golda Kruppen ever possessed.
He is guided over to the side of the bed and Aunt Ruth stands behind him with her hands resting on his shoulders. His mother’s eyes are closed. She had not been the center of his childhood; no doubt she wished that she had been. Sanitariums and doctors claimed too much of her time, but she always gave him gifts, toys and books and candies, and little hugs.
Only minutes later, she ceased to breathe.
His father took his hand and led him from the room, leaving his aunts to care for what remained. They went to the drawing room. The morning sunlight bathed the room, giving it a gay life and warmth that seemed so inappropriate for a memory of death and loss. A cold stove squatted in the corner next to an empty coal box.
He sat on his father’s lap, enclosed by burly arms. He distinctly remembered the odor of his father’s freshly laundered suit, the crisp tie and stiff collar. His father cried and Hans cried. Then David Kruppen began to mumble in a strange language, a litany of mourning and hope. Hans remembered the word Yahweh, but did not know what it meant. Years later he found out that it meant God. His father had prayed! A man who shunned religion and found strength in atheism had prayed.
That was the only time that he could remember his father hugging him or crying. From then on the hugs came from Frau Johnson, his nanny, or Aunt Ruth.
The next memory was of June 5, 1909, the proudest day in his father’s life. Hans was thirteen years old, awkward with puberty. Wanda from down the street had already treated him to his first kiss. She was Lutheran and they saw each other only at night when she crawled out her bedroom window and he slipped past Frau Johnson’s bedroom out the back door. It was so exciting, like being spies at a rendezvous. As a Jew he knew that his kind was not always tolerated by the neighbors and that her mother would beat her if she knew. Though Wanda was a fond, bittersweet memory, that memory rarely demanded his attention. In May, his father had completed the construction of a newer, larger factory. He had moved beyond making dyes to processing chlorine for industrial use.
The factory had been designed by an important architect who gloried in the forms and lines of steel girders and glass. Two long chemical plants with a smaller office building in the front. A rail line came up to the rear, bringing salt from the mines and taking away the highly toxic chlorine gas. The workers, some three hundred in all, stood in four long lines, like troops on parade, their clothes freshly laundered. David Kruppen stood in front, his own suit immaculate. Hans waited beside him.
Four officers of the German army drove up in one of those new automobiles. The points of their helmets made the tall men look like steeples. Even at his young age, Hans knew that the true heart of Germany was the army. Its conservative class of officers supported the Kaiser and brought dignity and glory to the nation. Even if the nation had not been at war since 1871, that great war had seen the humiliation of the weak French and the unification of Germany under the royal house of Prussia. Hans was well aware of all of this because their home was filled with books on the exploits of the Prussian and German armies. He also knew that Jews could not be officers.
The officers toured the factory, making compliments about the shiny machinery, and asking detailed questions about the potential of the business. Germany was the world leader in the chemical and dying industries and his father now had customers in sixteen countries. Hans remembered the pride on his father’s face and Hans shared in that pride. If the army accepted them, then anyone would accept them. They were not truly Jewish anymore. They were Germans.
These two memories so often surfaced during drunken binges while a student at the University of Berlin. He was studying to be a lawyer, but yearned to be an archeologist. Famous men were finding such fascinating artifacts amid ancient cities that had been lost for millennia, exotic faraway places like Troy, Assyria, Babylon, and Minos. His father expected him to inherit the factory and continue to run it. At the end of his second year of study, he returned home for the summer and argued once with his father about the subject. There was no resolution and for the next two months, he made a point to avoid the strong-willed man. While he could not face up to Herr Kruppen, he did not relinquish his defiance, either.
Tension filled the household for the rest of the summer, and outside the machinations of states began to tumble like dominoes. Armies mobilized and in the heat of August the continent rushed into war. Enthusiastic crowds of patriotic citizens surged through the streets of Frankfurt, singing Was blasen die Trompeten? and Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles. Hans was there with them, a stein of beer in his hand. The ecstatic sense of unity, an mystical union with his fellow citizens, filled him with a sense of purpose he had never experienced before. He enlisted in the army.
A couple of weeks later he was summoned to the local barracks to begin training. A recent change of policy now allowed Jews to become officers and, because of his education, he was selected to command a company. By the spring of 1915, he was a fresh lieutenant in a newly formed division. A train took them into Belgium and they marched the rest of the way into France. He strode alongside his company, proud of their smart uniforms, clean weapons, and fierce patriotism.
The sight of hundreds of marching troops strung along the road provoked a sense of invincible power. Such discipline, precision, potential to wield death. How could France stand against them much longer? They had whipped the effeminate Gauls in 1870, and though the Western Front was now stagnant, their superior morale and national character would surely crack the back of the Allies.
That night they bedded down with warm meals prepared by the cooking wagons. It was almost like a country outing, camping with his schoolmates. The enlisted men slept in large tents and he found quarters in an abandoned chateau with the rest of the officers. Before bedding down, he walked about his company’s bivouac to ensure that his soldiers were happy. Their jokes and general demeanor were familiar to him. They were just like the stalwart souls who worked at his father’s factory.
The next day they came to a village that was little more than ruins, their first symbol that war had passed this way. The sign outside the village was half-gone, and ended with “alans.” Bullet holes pocked the plaster walls of burned-out houses and stores. Craters marked the surrounding fields. There were no civilians to encumber a picture of desolation worthy of a great painting. Such a painting would have been even more dramatic if the church tower still stood as a solitary counterpoint for the scene. Alas, the tower was a pile of rubble. Glory had been found here, Hans thought to himself, feeling somewhat envious.
Beyond the village they passed a crude cemetery. Wooden crosses in neat rows marked each hero. Healthy green grasses had already started to cover the overturned soil. Two taller crosses presided over larger mounds, which Hans realized were mass graves.
That night they stayed in an abandoned village. Its homes were still intact and at least dry. In the distance thunder boomed, which according to a liaison officer was
