Kerstin Lieff

I don't know why I did it. Was it the butter?

The freezer in my home when I was growing up never had anything but butter in it. One-pound bricks, packed top to bottom, back to front.

There was the soap, too. Was it that? The twenty-plus bars stacked under each of our bathroom sinks?

Maybe it was this: that, whenever I said my mother had been in a prison camp in the 1940s, the response, nearly always, was "Wow. I didn't know you were Jewish!" We aren't Jewish, I'd say, but even I didn't fully understand why she had been in a prison camp.

Or maybe it was simply the nagging thought that would not let me be: What if she dies and never tells her story? I could not accept this. It was too precious, this life lived während des Krieges, during the war—a phrase I heard so often as a child. She had to tell someone! And why not me? The eldest daughter, the one in her womb before she even made her final escape to the United States.

It was on a day, then, in 1999 that I did it. I asked her to tell me about her life. The part she had kept secret for so long. I was in my late forties; I had two grown children already. My mother, Margarete, was in her late seventies.

"Your stories will go to your grave," I told her. "Think how tragic would that be." And to goad her, I added, "Don't you want your grandchildren to know who you were?"

I asked, I say, but more accurately I begged. I knew most people had never heard this version of history. Most certainly I had not. I knew it had been a terrible time for her. So terrible, she only ever said, "Ach. We don't need to talk about those times." But because she was German, her experiences always seemed, in a sense, "wrong." She was from the enemy's side, and from the side of the war that lost, and so she was determined to suffer in silence.

As much as she never wanted to talk, her memories sometimes flickered to the surface anyway: "During the war, there was so little to eat ... In Russia, we had no warm clothes ..." When asked about the freezer packed with butter and the cabinets stuffed with Yardley soap, my mother would say, "Just leave me alone about this." Then she would turn away, not wanting to say any more. When pressed—Why can't we have pizzas in our freezer, or ice cream, the way our American friends do?—she would reply it was because she'd never again in her life live without something to put on her bread. And she would never again endure having to be dirty. And that was to explain everything.

But when I came home from school one day, announcing how I had learned about Germany and the Nazis, her face clouded over. "Don't ever say we were Nazis! My family would never have stooped so low!" I was confused. Weren't all Germans in the 1930s and 1940s Nazis? But she would not talk, and so I remained ignorant of this "other side" of German history until finally, as an adult, I begged her to tell me about those years.

It took her two weeks to answer my plea. Two silent weeks. No messages on my answering machine. Not even the ordinary "I've baked a plum cake. Come have a piece and a small glass of wine with me." There was not a word from her, and I should have found this unusual.

Then it came. Her phone call.

"I've thought very hard about your question. You know it's a difficult one for me." She always spoke German with me.

I was stunned. Had she really been thinking about this for two weeks? And still, I was fully anticipating her next sentence: We don't need to talk about those terrible times.But, to my surprise and my eternal gratitude, she said yes.

"I will tell you everything exactly as I remember it," she said, "but I will tell you only once. I think I can manage once, but I shall never again speak another word about any of it, so listen carefully."

I knew this would be a long, and difficult, journey into her past. What I didn't know is that I would spend three years listening to history being retold in a way I'd never heard it before. Told by a German—not a Nazi, but a German nonetheless. And a German who was only a girl when it all began. She was eight when Hitler came to power and a teenager during the six years of war. She was a girl who wanted to live a girl's life: full of good grades, sports, friends, and boys, all in a proper 1940s fashion.

When she consented to tell her story, we proceeded to spend our Sundays—nearly every one of them over the course of those three years—in her apartment having hours-long conversations while I kept a tape recorder running. These were cozy Sundays. She always had breakfast waiting, and it was always first class, in Mamma style. Her linen napkins, her cut-crystal schnapps glasses ("Of course we should have a little schnapps. It's Sunday!"), and her gold-rimmed white china. She would have plates of Schinken,German smoked ham, and liverwurst—my favorite—and cheeses. Edamer, Tilsiter, Limburger. And, of course, coffee. Strong. Very black, actually, to which you'd have to add cream, and the color, even then, would never get any lighter than milk chocolate.

We traveled to Berlin together during this project. It was an idea I had come up with, and she gladly said yes. She had not been back to the city she grew up in since she left it in 1947, when it was still mostly in ruin. She was thrilled. She'd be able to see her old classmates, and I would be able to see where she had lived and spent her days during the war years. We visited the boys'-school-turned-hospital on the Heerstrasse, where she worked as a medical assistant during the war; the Windscheidstrasse, where her home was, now rebuilt to look as if it had never been damaged; to Jena, where she had attended university; and to visit with friends from school and even from the Gulag.

"It was an incredible snowstorm," she begins on the first cassette, "like one you only ever see in North Dakota, where a farmer can no longer find his barn. The snow fell and fell . . ." I find it surprising that her remembrances begin in 1946, nearly a year after the war was over, not with the oppression of Hitler's regime, nor the terror of the bombings in Berlin. She remembers the beauty of the Russian landscape, and she speaks of it all with fondness, even though the snowstorm occurs on the very day she first realizes she is on her way to a Russian prison camp, the Gulag. But, this was my mother. The woman knew how to tell a story.

She came from an era when storytelling was still an art form. In her family, her father and mother and she and her brother would sit around the dinner table—which, in her home, was also the parlor—and talk for hours. Her Papa would tell about his life growing up, how the family had lost even their house during the Great Inflation, and her Mutti would tell about her day at the equestrian club. Margarete and Dieter would listen attentively. Now, in her old age, as she told me about her life, this passion for storytelling was rekindled. I noticed how she took her time when she spoke. She set the scene. She'd describe a limp or a mustache as if that person were right in the room with us; or she'd stop in midsentence to sing a song or recite a poem that came to mind; often she'd speak in someone else's voice—her father's, or her brother's, for example—from remembered conversations.

But it was evident from the very beginning that she intended to tell her story plainly. She wanted no ambiguity. She said what she saw; she let me make the judgments, if there were to be any. She was an idealist in many ways. She wanted to believe in her fellow man and tried to see the good even when it lay deeply hidden. It showed when she spoke about the Russians, her captors, whom she described as sentimental people, even kind and fun-loving; while a "brown nurse," who by definition was a Nazi, was an "uneducated woman and poorly informed."

My mother also spoke of what she did not see—of what eluded her and confused her at the time. Most notably, she said she didn't learn about what happened to the Jews in Germany until after the war was over. At first I did not believe her. How could she not have known? Didn't all Germans know? I spent hours questioning my mother about this very issue. In the massive stacks of cassette tapes that resulted from our conversations, there is not one that does not include interruptions from me, questioning her about the Jews.

I regret this now, because I can hear a growing anxiety in her voice as she tried, again and again, to tell it exactly as she remembered it, leaving nothing untold, even her own ignorance or "stupidity," as she called it. And I can hear my interjecting voice, doubting her. There's a tone—I am ashamed to say—of disrespect for her answers. I believed what so many of us from the side that won the war want to believe—that all, or at least most, of the German people knew what was going on regarding the Jews, and that they turned their heads and did nothing about it.

My mother answered with empathy and sometimes a sense of guilt for what happened in her country during her generation. At times she broke down and wept for the tragedy she only learned of after the war was over. To my constant questioning, though, she only ever responded, "I would tell you if I knew. I really did not." For her, the insult, the realization that her country—a modern and educated country that had laws against killing—could have perpetrated such atrocities on any human was simply inconceivable.

The remembering and retelling of the cruel events of that war weighed heavily on my mother's psyche. She became depressed during our three years and often asked if we could skip a Sunday. She was having trouble sleeping, she told me. And then, in the winter of 2003, she attempted suicide.

It was the only time she ever did, to my knowledge, although, when hearing some of her stories, I could have easily thought, Why didn't she just take her life back then when things were so bad?

Her attempt to kill herself came two years before her actual death caused by congestive heart failure. Our country had just declared war on Iraq—for the second time, and for an unprovoked reason, as she saw it. There were several weeks during which I often had to correct her, saying, "But no, Mamma. This is Boulder, not Berlin," and she would not respond. Instead, with blank eyes, she would point her finger to the sky and say, "Just wait till the bombs start to fall! You'll see!"

Then, on July 12, 2005, she died, two days after her eighty-first birthday. It fell to me, as the eldest in the family, to clean out her apartment, making sure all three of her daughters received what she wanted each to have. As anyone knows who has lost a parent, this wasn't an easy job. I missed her terribly. Every corner of her very German apartment smelled like her perfume. Every cup and pencil still held her warmth.

I went to her bedroom first, which also served as her writing and reading room. The window along one wall let in a soft northern light. She lived on the top floor of an apartment building and had a full view of our mountains and our picturesque city, Boulder, and here she would sit for long hours and read. Here, too, was her desk where she sat often to write letters. Long, thoughtful letters, mostly to relatives and friends still living in Germany. This desk, then, is where I started my job. Her drawers were neatly organized, so it was not difficult to sort: "keep" versus "discard," and there was a third pile for what I thought, perhaps, her grandchildren would appreciate: a china pen tray painted in gold leaf—an antique, surely German; a leather blotter; her fountain pen.

When I had finished sorting, there was still one drawer left to clean out. It was the last one on the bottom with all her unanswered letters and Christmas cards in it. I knew it would take time to go through, so I had left it for last. But when I opened it, I found something lying right on top that I'd never seen before. A book of sorts, with my mother's handwriting on it. I carefully picked it up. It was old; it had yellowed with time and looked, from the faded line across it, as though it once had a ribbon tied around it. Inside, on the first page, was her cursive writing, in fountain pen: Briefe an mein geliebtes Franzel während der Belagerung von Berlin—"Letters to my beloved Franzel during the siege of Berlin." In the bottom right corner she had written the place and date: Berlin, 15 April 1945.

I turned the pages. I was incredulous. Who was Franzel? From the first paragraph, where she wrote, "Was it to be the last time?" to the end, I was riveted. Might she have put the book of letters there only a few days ago, knowing I'd find it? But why, then, did she keep this secret from me all those years? Evidently she'd been in love. But who was he? Had the relationship pained her so much that even in old age she could not bring herself to speak of him?

I could not help but be amazed at the passion and the courage that burned throughout the letters as I read, and this thought came to me: I should translate them. Someone should hear what she wrote during the most harrowing weeks in Berlin in 1945. I wanted to believe she trusted me to make of her stories what I would. And the idea for this book was born.

I pulled out the cassette tapes, the ones with her stories, and listened to them again, now much more closely, one by one. I took notes. I asked myself questions. I transcribed, and then I researched. I began to read every book on the subject of that era and that war I could find: William Shirer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Albert Speer, Anne Applebaum—anyone who could give me more information about that time in her life, and that time in history.

Then I remembered something: On one of our Sundays, a later one when we were winding down and there was little more that she could recall, she had handed me a box. "I thought you'd be interested in this," she had said. The box contained documents, old family papers such as baptism and immunization certificates from her childhood in East Prussia. At the time, I simply thanked her, but asked her to keep it in her home. Somehow it seemed too old and too valuable—at least to her—to have it living in my home with dogs and wild grandchildren running around. I did not know then how important this box would become.

As I made an outline of the history of Germany before and during the Second World War and organized her stories around it, questions regarding time lines arose. Oh, what a blessing it was, now, to have that box of documents I so cavalierly told her to keep! In it, I found answers to so much that I was missing: a bundle of letters that her brother, Dieter, had sent from the war front. I found school report cards, and marriage certificates, the British interzone pass that allowed her, finally, to stay in West Germany. I found the Russian papers that certified her release from prison. And, to my disbelieving eyes, there was her Ahnenpass, the Nazi passport that certified her genealogy for the previous ten generations.

Another invaluable gift she left me was a number of photo albums. How they were preserved I can only guess. But now that I needed to confirm her stories, the photos were there. All of them. There were photos of the farm where she worked, of her Jewish friend, Hilde, and of her beloved maid, Bertha.

Little by little, as I transcribed and translated and cobbled together her memoirs, the arc of her story came into focus. I was introduced to a new woman, not the mother I had always known. She became a teenager who sometimes clashed with her parents and got herself in trouble. I learned of her longings, her disappointments in life, and her dreams. And, when I read her letters, she became a young woman in love. Evidently, she grew up to believe she would be her own person, free to pursue her passions and to make decisions based on her own values—something new for women, and something that may have given her the spirit to survive all those years of war and imprisonment.

Over the decades since 1945, the stories from wartime Europe seem to have organized themselves neatly into accounts of the good guys versus the bad, and understandably so. It was, to be sure, an era of extreme evil and heroism and persecution. Yet our many bookshelves dedicated to that era have left little space for the stories of the millions of others who also suffered but whose voices were stifled because they came from the wrong side of the war.

In this regard, to have been given a chance to peer into Margarete's young soul has been a profound privilege. She has left us with an important piece of history that is rapidly dying away, as fewer and fewer survivors and witnesses to that era remain alive. Hers is a testimonial seldom heard, one that had been silenced for more than fifty years.

Margarete would be happy to know, I am sure, that her stories and her letters, and her many years of unspeakable suffering, were not in vain. I hope I have done them justice.

—Kerstin Lieff