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The baby carriage, in which she had kept her jewelry and some of her money, was stolen along the way, which meant the contents of the two rucksacks were all we owned. Whenever we came across a crowd, she brought out her string; we might be embarrassed to be tied to one another, she said, but we would stay together. Sometimes, at night, I heard her cry. Eventually we reached the home of a relative but discovered there was no room for us. Mother bit down her tears, and we virtually retraced our steps, winding up in a refugee camp near the Czech border; we would live there for the next two years and then would move to northwestern Germany. When she grew older, she would proudly tell of how she had brought the family through the trek of 1945 and the hard times that followed: it was her life's greatest achievement.
We did not hear from Father until Christmas 1949, more than four years after we had last seen him. He appeared on our doorstep like a ghost off some missing-in-action list. He had been captured by Czech partisans on the last day of the war, shortly after one of his comrades shot himself because he did not want to be taken. Father was turned over to the Americans, who handed him to the Soviets; he spent the next four years in pow camps in the Soviet Union. Mother never doubted he was alive. He returned emaciated, fluent in Russian-and bitter about having lost 10 years of his life. He was lucky: of the 3 million German pows held by the Soviet Union, many never returned. He died in 1976. My mother passed away in 1982.
For my generation of Germans, May 8, 1945, would come to mean many things beyond the immediate reality of defeat, rubble, hunger and humiliation. It would take time, but as we came to comprehend the evil of the tyranny that had collapsed before our eyes, as we learned about the Holocaust, the 55 million war victims, the rape and pillage committed by Germans, May 8, 1945, emerged as a day of liberation. We came to hope that it would mark the beginning of the road to building a new country in a new Europe, a place where former enemies would become friends.
When I retraced the first segment of our 1945 journey last month, I was accompanied by Lubos Beniak, a Czech friend made many years later. The weather this time was much colder and more blustery; the land was feeling the last breath of winter. Jablonec nad Nisou lay under a fresh coat of snow. It is a town of 40,000 where time seems to have stood still, except for the addition of a heavy-machinery plant and a few communist-era public buildings. The tram that used to run downtown has disappeared, and a new wing has been added to the elementary school I attended, but the old kino, which I recognized instantly, is still a movie theater. With the help of a city-hall official, who looked up the Czech name of the street on which we had lived, Lubos and I found our old apartment house. In my mind, I pictured an army truck outside the front door, a family stumbling aboard, but I was strangely unmoved.