After the scandal over her pregnancy, my father was tried and sent to a high-security prison in Essen. There he barely survived, eating grass and raw potatoes when he could get work in the kitchen. He also remembered sitting on his bunk talking to a fellow inmate across the way when a bomb suddenly fell on the prison killing the other man. Blood escapes, the brain cuts off, the body shuts down, and no life. Did my father ever want to give up on life? There were dangers from many sources as he counted his days in prison.
As I sit with Monika and her husband Manfred, trying to communicate with translation help from her daughter, Silke, her son, Benno, and his girlfriend, Marion, all English speakers, a special guest arrives and greets me warmly and excitedly. I am told she is a neighbor and knew my father when he was in prison in Heiden. Mrs. Schubert was a teenager in 1941. We sit in Monika’s tidy living room and Mrs. Schubert tells us what really happened.
“There were about thirty prisoners of war. They were the elite, officers, mostly, and from different countries—France, Russia, England, and of course Yugoslavia. Kosta was assigned to our farm. We all liked him right away. He was hardworking, handsome, and very friendly. We were not supposed to talk with the prisoners, only give orders, but we did anyway.”
I look at the photographs she shows us, of the barracks ringed with barbed wire. The five German guards even look relaxed. They are laughing, not the usual pictures you see of Nazi prison scenes.
A pleasant friendly woman, Mrs. Schubert has an almost square face accented by glasses. Her gray hair is nicely coifed. She wears a dark longish skirt and matching vest, with a shirt buttoned up to the top. We all sit on the two couches on either side of Mrs. Schubert, who is in an armchair; a large coffee table is between us. Yoshi, the family dachshund, sits near Monika on the floor. Everyone listens intently.
“I went into the barracks to take a look once. The prisoners had everything they needed. It was not cruel or severe living conditions. And Kosta was a very fun-loving man. He learned German quickly. He was assigned to our farm, and Agnes Berger was the daughter of the farmer next door to us. In Heiden, Kosta was treated like part of our family, the Meirecke family. We didn’t notice anything between them—the neighbor girl, Agnes, and Kosta—but we think it happened in the tool shed.”
She laughs lightly at this most serious moment—when Monika was conceived and my father’s serious troubles began, almost costing him his life.
The farms were large and elaborate then. Heimathaus, the farmhouse where Monika grew up, is now a museum. The main house and the barn, both large two-story buildings, are bricked and sturdy, nothing like our building in the Bronx, where my father’s elaborate tool shed was like a room of his own. Proud of his tools, he hung and arranged them with special care. I would sometimes find him there lost in meditation. Did his own tool shed recall the place where he had a romance with Agnes?
Mrs. Schubert pauses and asks me about Kosta. I tell her he died fourteen years ago of a heart attack, only a year and a half after my youngest sister’s death in a car accident. I tell them all about his love for animals and farm life, how he recreated it in New York.
My father loved animals, and especially pigeons and doves. At our house on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, we had grassy lots on both sides of the house. He took care of his birds and gave them a home. We moved there from a three-room basement apartment building where he was superintendent. For my father, I think the house was a chance to relive his peasant life in Serbia. He had a garden and even grew tomatoes. He raised chickens. He liked trading in chickens and getting different breeds, as well as collecting varieties of pigeons and doves. He had ducks and even peacocks A certain tenderness emerged when he was with his birds. He loved dogs too, but it wasn’t the same.
Our first dog, Lassie, was adored by all of us. Part collie and part Doberman pinscher, she was a black medium-haired, lighthearted dog with a white-and-tan ring around her neck. She loved playing with us children, shepherding us, making sure we were OK when we played in the yard of the six-story building we first lived in. She would even let us ride her like a horse. Once, she saved our building and our lives from a fire, when we awoke one night to her persistent barking and my parents found a raging fire in the boiler room. Lassie had puppies, several litters, which we fawned over until we had to see them off to other people.
“Oh yes,” says Mrs. Schubert, “he loved animals here too. He took such good care of ours. People said he communicated with them.”
When we moved to the house on Sedgwick Avenue, my father began getting German shepherds and a kind of darkness set in. He kept them outside, and they seemed to be his alone. There were two and sometimes three, and he would beat them to discipline them. It was painful to hear, and I felt an identification with them. In those years on Sedgwick Avenue, there was violence, distance, a preoccupation in him we never understood. His rage toward my mother and us older children seemed to increase and mirror the dogs’ situation. If the dogs were an acting-out of his Nazi prison camp suffering, then we were too.
I did not feel close to my father in my teenage years because he nearly beat me to death. My brother Tommy was very much abused and humiliated, too. My sister Nada somehow escaped with her friends, but one time he heartlessly shut her out of the house for being late. Besides the physical violence, there was yelling and paranoia and dysfunctional communication, and even an affair. By the time of her fatal car accident, my youngest sister Gina had managed to find an apartment of her own, which she shared with a friend. We, her siblings, had grown up and left, while she was alone with my parents. No matter how cherished she was as the youngest, she needed some relief from my father and the intensity at home.
Mrs. Schubert is surprised: “But he was not violent here. His reputation was so different. He was such a friendly, warm, good-hearted person. Everybody knew that.” She glances at Monika who says she never heard about a violent side of him and is shocked. I feel sad and wonder about these two Kostas—the one before the prison camp and the one after.
I wait at the edge of my seat for all the translation and clarification of details to settle. All my father ever said about his time in Germany was that he was a POW in Heiden and afterwards he was put in a harsh concentration camp. And this story: it was towards the end of the war when he was to be moved to another camp. During the transfer in the countryside, my father fell down feigning death. Convinced he was dead, the Nazi soldiers left him there. When they were gone, he ventured to move and then began to run. Soon he came to a small house and saw a young woman outside sweeping. He approached hesitantly and asked if she could get him some food and water. Then he asked if she could possibly get him a cigarette. She disappeared and he heard a male voice in conversation.
Regretting his foolish request, he chided himself for asking for the cigarette. When the door opened, he couldn’t believe his eyes! The man who stood there was someone he knew. It was one of his own Yugoslav troops, now living in Germany. After the initial excitement, the man and woman asked Kosta to undress outside because he was filthy and full of lice. They helped him until the liberation. He went on to serve in the postwar release of prisoners.