Ingo Schulze - New Lives

We were sworn in at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial, where, so we were instructed, antifascists of some eighteen countries had been murdered. During the ceremony we faced the obelisk with eighteen red triangles at its tip — created, it would seem, to help us count off our eighteen-month stint.

I tried to capture as much of daily life as possible. Military jargon, every terminus technicus , fascinated me. I was the only one who kept his brochures on “Being a Soldier,” which appeared monthly, each time in a new color. I often took down conversations in shorthand — dialogue was my weak point.

In early December we had six days of home leave, the so-called rest and recreation we were supposed to get every six months. Vera and I borrowed a?

Skoda and toured almost every castle, fortress, and church between Meissen and Görlitz, then sat for hours smoking and drinking gin and tonic (if it could be had) in cafés filled with older women.

Instead of being horrified at the sight of her son in uniform, my mother thought I was “a hoot.” My description of general conditions and the daily routine had reassured her. She could see how well nourished I was.

Vera, however, wept when it was time to say good-bye. I had forbidden her to accompany me to the train station, I didn’t want her to see me in uniform.

But why couldn’t we — or at least hardly any of us newcomers — sleep until six each morning? I would lie awake for a good while, listening to footsteps in the hall, to the clatter of the metal grill at the entrance, and held the illuminated dial of my watch up to my eye, as if afraid of over-sleeping. The seconds before the wake-up whistle were counted down by beeps from a radio turned up loud.

Once outside, doing calisthenics in the dark — followed by a run that turned into an incredible farting contest — I soon forgot my restlessness.

If an alert had been declared, the morning wait was worse. Officers in full uniform and smelling of aftershave blocked our access to the toilet, while noncoms drove us out of our quarters. Nothing but shouting, clanging, rattling on all sides, as if a huge hunting party were being organized. We ran outside and then along the road in front of the barracks, as far as regimental staff headquarters, then back again, where we finally had to fall in and undergo an endless inspection of our equipment.

On December 13th, 179however, an alert roused us out of our sleep. This time the whole regiment was throbbing. The noncoms, who couldn’t get into their clothes any faster than we could, didn’t want to believe what had happened and hesitated before opening the weapons store. Only after companies from the floors above us fell in did we get ourselves ready — bringing the chaos on the regimental streets to its zenith. I breathed in the exhaust from tanks that came clanking along the concrete slab road. Spotlights everywhere, an unrelenting din, columns of vehicles. I boarded our APC as if it were a cold-started ark. I felt neither fear nor opposition, nothing that could have prevented me from taking part in this decampment. On the contrary: even those of us at the bottom of the totem pole couldn’t help viewing the alert as a grand spectacle. We crouched beneath closed hatches, peering out through the embrasures and hoping that we could move out without officers. 180They were the chickenshits this time.

No sooner had we left the base than we turned off the highway. For two hours we followed country roads and woodland lanes. We kept banging our helmets against the vehicle roof. Some guys didn’t know what else to do, so they pissed into their mess kit.

As it began to turn light, we climbed out and camouflaged our vehicles. We were standing at the edge of a clearing. The staff sergeant on the APC in front of us was fumbling with the antenna of a black Stern recorder, attempting to adjust it. Since this evidently didn’t work, he grabbed the apparatus in both arms and spun in a circle like a dancer. We didn’t learn anything from him. Gunther, a pale towheaded Saxon, who for a waiter moved with a peculiarly wooden gait and grimaced with zeal during every drill, held his “Micki” radio up to his ear and immediately began spouting off in a whiny falsetto. What a piece of shit, and now of all times. Hadn’t he always said that they’d do better to work instead of rocking the boat, that got you nowhere, nowhere, everybody knew that, but now here we were getting mixed up in their shit. Then came the words “Polacks” and “lazy Polacks.”

I realized that what I had wished for had now come true. Every hour on the hour Gunther stomped off into the woods. The first snowfall hadn’t melted — a Christmas landscape with evergreens and animal tracks. Ten minutes later he would return cursing. Instead of the latest news from Radio Free Berlin, however, he treated us to cock-and-bull stories about what all he had experienced with the Poles. When the noon meal turned out to be roulades and red cabbage, with canned peach halves for dessert, there was no longer any doubt about the seriousness of the situation. Word was that the corporal had brought boxes of ammunition with him. Our convoy leader was the first one to pass around a picture of his wife. When it came my turn, I produced Vera’s photograph.

As night came on it turned bitter cold. Our APC was a cave of ice. We tried to keep warm by passing around hot tea — of which there was plenty — and doing knee bends. A few men sparred with each other. The hands on my watch had evidently frozen. At one point we tried lying down, packed man to man, on the ground in the woods, but that didn’t last long. I kept fingering my pants leg pocket, checking for my notebook — my amulet.

The order to remount, which came shortly after midnight, was a life-saver. The main thing was that the engines actually started. We’d been underway for about ten minutes when our lieutenant ordered me to get out and threw two flags down to me, which I was to use to guide our APC. I ran along a wall ahead of the APC. My feet were like stumps; I could hear their plunk, plunk, plunk against the concrete slabs. Amazingly enough I kept my balance. We passed a large gate — and it was only then that I recognized our barracks.

The strangest thing about this alert was the silence after our return. I didn’t hear any noise coming from the companies in the floors above us either. Men just set a stool down out in the hall and cleaned their weapon, noncoms did the same, and officers vanished without a sound. People made tea in their quarters, shuffled along in their underwear and down-at-the-heel gym shoes, and took their Kalashnikovs back to the weapons store, sort of like returning a spade to its shed.

That night I heard a cricket chirp. At first I thought I was hallucinating or that it was radio static. Maybe silence had lured the cricket from its lair by the furnace in the cellar and it had now taken up residence under our locker.

I’ve never read a single one of the over two hundred army letters I wrote to Geronimo. Whether they could help me describe those days for you better than I’ve been able to do so far is neither here nor there. It seems more important for me to observe that my memories of those weeks are wrapped in vagueness.

Just as martial law in Poland provided a post festum reason — beyond just personal irritability — for my restlessness before the wake-up whistle, I consider what happened to me at Christmas to be further proof that my frame of mind over the previous week and a half had been more than a mere mood.

On December 14th, the day after the big alert, my idyllic world fell apart. I slept above Knut, our driver and room corporal, a conspicuously short, but powerful, man, a weightlifter in one of the lightweight categories. His girlfriend had jilted him shortly after his induction, which did not, however, prevent him from constantly raving about her. Knut neither wrote nor received letters; once a month there was a package from his mother.