I want to hear more from Mrs. Schubert.
“Well, about Kosta and Agnes, no one noticed anything in particular between them until Agnes’s sister was called as a witness in the trial at the end of 1941. Agnes was seventeen, underage, and the mother hysterically accused Kosta of rape at the trial. Whether he was convicted of sexual misconduct or of sexual relations with a minor, it is unclear. The fact that he was a Serb and a POW made the conviction a sure thing.”
The Nazis considered Slavs to be subhuman and put laws in place to preserve “racial hygiene and purity,” which meant that all Aryans were forbidden to have relations with non-Aryans.
“Because of her mother’s behavior at the trial, Agnes was never able to speak on her own behalf. There were two trials, in Borken and in Munster. Kosta was sentenced to five years and, luckily he was not sentenced to death. A scandal about the pregnancy ensued in the village. Agnes was sent to a convent to give birth to Monika, who was immediately taken away by Aunt Asta. Kosta was sent to a prison for criminals in Essen .
“Agnes’s parents were extremely upset, especially her mother. But he had no defense. He was a prisoner and he was a Yugoslav. It was against the law then. He was a friendly and handsome man. People liked Kosta. They called him Franz.”
Mrs. Schubert seems to enjoy talking about my father, and even remembering those hard times. Her eyes twinkle.
“After the liberation, Kosta immediately returned to Heiden and came bounding through the fields from the train station, even hugging people on his way. He looked wonderful, not starved and ragged. But he and Agnes had to meet secretly because there was still resentment. He came again after that, before going to America, to ask Agnes and Monika to come with him. She said no—it was just too difficult for her to leave the farm and her family.”
Only eleven years old when her mother died, Monika did not know many of these details until a year later, when Mrs. Schubert’s mother told her the whole story “in the kindest way.” Monika learned about the accusations, the conviction, and even the letters from her father that Agnes never gave her, and she began writing to him in New York.
When I first learned that Kosta had relations with a German woman during World War II, I thought how bitter it must have made him, about women in general and what it all cost him. Did he suffer from guilt those three years in the Essen prison and later with us? The incident in Heiden and its aftermath damaged him. He was a womanizer during their marriage, my mother has told me.
On this trip, I’ve found out that my father was not in a concentration camp at all, but a criminal prison, though with all the same horror stories of hard labor and harsh conditions. Toward the end of my trip, my nephew, Benno, takes me to Essen to visit the prison, soon to be torn down, so I can see the place where my father suffered so because of his mistake—a dark, stony place in the middle of the city. It’s so different from the farmstead where Monika grew up, where Kosta worked. I am glad to have breathed the the air of that place our father spoke of so fondly.
Before Mrs. Schubert leaves, she presents me with a letter from Kosta to her father, who used to visit him in the Essen prison. At the time it was astonishing that any German would do such a thing—visit a convicted Yugoslav criminal in the big city of Essen to bring him food and news. The Meirecke family must really have believed in him as a person and even loved him. The letter is in German in my father’s hand.
Monika was separated from her mother at birth and given to a nurse for two years, because her grandmother did not want her to bond with Agnes. When Agnes died, Monika was shunted from relative to relative, finally landing with with her Uncle Willy. Since Monika never saw our father except for the two visits when she was four years old, I ask after Mrs. Schubert leaves, “Are you angry or sad that you were orphaned and Kosta never sent for you?” She says, “There were many other young people in similar circumstances in Germany after the war.”
Monika, Manfred, and I take a walk around Heiden (which means “heathen”) and we come to a park with a large pigeon coop in the center. We stroll around and look at the different pigeons. I can say simple sentences to my sister and her husband because of Monika’s knowledge of Plattdeutsch, a German dialect directly related to English.
“Kosta loved pigeons,” I tell them. They like hearing about him from me. “He had many, many pigeons.” Monika and Manfred laugh and nod their heads. Was this pigeon “haus” Kosta’s inspiration for his pigeon coop in the Bronx? Later when we’re with Benno and Marion, so they could translate, I tell them the peacock story.
On Sedgwick Avenue, my father built a large coop for his doves under the porch, where I often sat writing and watching the sunset over the Harlem River. The rumble of murmuring doves below me escalated when he entered their abode to commune with them. I’d hear him cooing and talking softly to them, then he’d appear with one of them, rubbing the soft feathers on his cheek, his lips moving in intimacies. His gentleness with the birds was not like anything else. My mother envied it, as she told me in sorrowful moments of frustration with my father. They used me as an intermediary in their conflicts, and my mother often sent by into the lion’s den to help make peace. I feared his moods less as I learned to pump up my courage. He would tell me things to convey to my mother, in a rough way, nothing like his relationship to the birds.
Sometimes he tried to engage us in conversation about his various pigeons, bringing one down from the large green treehouse with many apartments. He said they created families. One time he pointed out a gay pigeon couple to my mother. He knew they were both males but noticed they were trying to make a nest, so he helped them out by donating a small egg from another bird. Though I don’t know how many birds and doves he had, there were many and he knew them all individually.
But the peacocks—oh the peacocks! They were special. In the process of trading birds, Kosta got a pair of them and built them a big cage. During the day they paraded around the lawn like royalty. Such magnificent birds! Sometimes they called out their typical peacock’s cry, even there in the Bronx. My father said they were very connected as a couple and that was how they had to be bought and traded.
One day the male with the beautiful plumes was stolen when he walked out of the yard following a chicken. A neighbor saw some young men throw a blanket over him to take him away. My father searched everywhere. He called the police and notified the Bronx Zoo. He couldn’t sleep for days after Major went missing. The pining female cried mournfully, missing her mate. Finally, after a couple of weeks, Major was heard sounding his fog-horn cry, while wandering into a house in Riverdale, an upper-class community not far from our neighborhood.
The Riverdale Press reported that when Kosta came to the house to pick Major up, “it was like a meeting of two old friends.” The large bird flapped his wings and jumped into my father’s arms when they saw each other, and my father was so elated that he couldn’t stop hugging the bird.
The farms in Heiden are so lush and green and abundant no wonder he loved this place. Having grown up in a Yugoslav peasant family, he was skilled with livestock and horses, workhorses very different from his army horse, Nestor. At our place in the Bronx he hung a picture of himself in uniform on the rearing Nestor, a dashing heroic picture from another era. He often talked of the farms and people of Heiden, especially the farmer he worked for, Mr. Mierecke. Mrs. Schubert’s kind father and brother and uncle were the only visitors my father had during his three years in prison.