Five Weeks at Humanitas. Manfred Jurgensen
They found me lying under dirty canvas covered in coaldust, tar and oil, with a tiny cracked valise by my side. Having eaten my provisions, an apple and a slice of dry bread, the night before, I had become increasingly weak and frightened in the damp, dark storehouse. After sobbing inconsolably I finally succumbed to sleep, overcome with dread and faintness. When the police asked me why I had run away and where I thought I was going I answered them quietly with one word: ‘Home.’ It didn’t work. I was brought back to a place where I didn’t want to be, where it became increasingly clear I wasn’t wanted. What others called my home wasn’t home. It was one of many early experiences discovering the unreliability of words.
Another memorable incident of those early years occurred in 1945 when Flensburg was inundated with refugees from the East. Germany was in the final throes of losing the war it had so arrogantly craved. Locals as well as those who had come to the Reich’s northernmost city on the run from the Russians were suffering terrible hardship. Food was so scarce people seized horse-drawn vehicles and even slaughtered the animals in the street. In spring public parks were raided for elderberries and rose hips; during summer and autumn a ragged band of the malnourished collected mushrooms, blackberries, raspberries, beechnuts and chestnuts in the surrounding woods. A new desperate kind of equality had come into force: the fear of starving did not discriminate. Stealing food even from children was soon a daily occurrence.
The town’s once popular local recreation area, St Mary’s Woods, turned into a no-go zone, as remnants of the army and deserters were on the lookout for each other. Learning to forage by myself at a very early age, I took to sneaking out of the house and going to St Mary’s Woods on my own. The small forest to the west of town held the promise of freedom and a threat of danger I found irresistible. The fear of the unknown added to my excitement. I took to the woods, as it were, in the full knowledge of where I was going. For all the perils, I knew I was out of reach of those closest to me who preferred not to acknowledge me, yet would not allow me to get away. At St Mary’s I felt released. I could breathe, laugh and talk, even if it was only to myself. Out here in the company of trees I was not beaten, screamed at or made to do things I didn’t want to do. My grandfather told me there’d been deer and stags here before the war, but now they’d disappeared, hunted for food. I became intoxicated by the aromatic smell of the trees and bushes, the chirping birds and the wind murmuring in the treetops. Longingly I watched squirrels race up and down trunks jumping from branch to branch at dizzy heights. Freedom! All my senses had come home. At St Mary’s no one would torment me for at least a couple of hours.
It wasn’t easy collecting raspberries. The best always seemed to be shielded by very large thorns. No matter how careful I was I invariably scratched my arms and hands. I ignored the pain as I licked the blood while eating the seductive fruit. On my torn skin the red of the berries mingled with the red of my blood. Swallowing them together was a strange feeling. I tongued my own blood as if it were part of nature. The woods and my body had become one. I lay on the ground listening to falling fir cones, the rustle of leaves, a nearby creek and the tapping of woodpeckers — a mixture of noises that sounded as if the wood were breathing. How peaceful the world could be without war, refugees and hunger!
But I hadn’t just come here to escape and feed myself. I was trying to gather enough berries and mushrooms for a family meal. I knew my mother cycled to surrounding villages trying to barter medical supplies for meat, potatoes and eggs. Usually the results of her trips were disappointing. With the end of the war and the arrival of more and more starving refugees, every man, woman and child prowled the countryside, foraging for food. Like many other children I was determined to play my part in supporting the family. It felt good knowing I could combine getting away from home with the search for urgently needed provisions. Coming back with a basket full of mushrooms and berries made me at least momentarily welcome. Claus, my younger brother, was staying with his grandparents while pre-war Holger remained in the apartment, making sure our two subtenant refugee families didn’t help themselves to edibles or valuable heirlooms. A week after the first refugees were forcibly billeted with us they stole my mother’s Brussels lace wedding dress. It reappeared months later around Neptune Fountain, one of many black markets that sprang up during those immediate post-war years.
That day at St Mary’s all the bramble bushes had been raided, with not a single blackberry in sight. Walking deeper into the woods I found myself in parts I’d never been before. To my delight I found clusters of small dark berries everywhere. A couple of large bushes had grown together, forming a thorny barrier against intruders. The shrubs carried so much fruit I was convinced we’d be able to live on my find for a week if only I could reach them. Glistening enticingly in the sun, the ripe succulent berries made my mouth water. What a discovery! I wondered why no one else had come here and picked them. Slowly, carefully, I lowered myself to the ground, anxious to avoid the thorny tentacles extending in all directions. As I came closer I was confronted with two unforgettable spectacles. Half the shining blackberries that from the distance looked so irresistible were in fact eaten up and covered in maggots. A much more frightening sight was the body of a dead soldier covered in flies and worms. He must have been dead for some time; like the berries, part of his face was already eaten away. A busy procession of grubs emerged from the collar of his uniform. The sweet smell of decay mingled with the spicy aroma of the blackberries and the rotting odour of the forest undergrowth.
Surrounded by thorns I couldn’t get up and run away. Overcome by nausea, I vomited. There was no relief. I still couldn’t escape. It was as if I’d been nailed to the place. I couldn’t avert my sight from the soldier’s corpse. Someone must have taken his boots and socks: his feet, covered in insects and worms, had taken on the appearance of decaying tree roots. Even without its swastikas I recognised the German uniform. The dead soldier no longer wore the Nazi belt proclaiming ‘ Gott mit uns‘. Perhaps somebody else had taken that too. How many wars have invoked God as the ultimate proof of righteousness!
I remembered having been warned of soldiers and deserters hiding in St Mary’s. That’s why I’d been told not to go there. But my hunger and the promise of food overruled these instructions. If I should run into a soldier, I thought I’d simply tell him I wasn’t his enemy because the war was over. Surely that would be enough. But the soldier I’d run into couldn’t talk any more. He was dead. He hadn’t been killed on the battlefield, but hiding in Flensburg’s woods, waiting for the war to end. Slowly I crawled back through the thorns, away from him, my lips tasting the bitter tears running down my face.
When I came home I found my mother had managed to forage a couple of turnips, half a dozen eggs and a handful of potatoes. Together they would also last us a week, and they were real, not a story like my blackberries. On the way back from St Mary’s I’d managed to collect a few flat mushrooms, a meagre harvest but enough to explain my absence on her return. I didn’t want to tell my mother and brothers about the dead soldier. They probably wouldn’t have believed me anyway. Whenever I tried to tell stories about soldiers and refugees, pre-war Holger would call out: ‘Lies! All lies!’
Strangely, despite the horrific experience of discovering the dead soldier, St Mary’s Woods remained the scene of many of my childhood fantasies. Unlike my deaf brother Claus, I had no natural talent for drawing. But in my loneliness I invented a place in the woods and sketched it as best I could in one of Peacetime Holger’s exercise books. I called my made-up forest settlement ‘Pilzburg’, a town of mushrooms. It wasn’t hard to draw their characteristic stems and domed caps. I designed rows of mushroom houses in streets and market squares. The centre of Pilzburg was a big, fat agaric mushroom with its prominent red-and-white roof. It was the post office where everyone went: ants and snails, birds and stars. They left letters and messages, most of them asking for the whereabouts of their relatives, for they were all refugees from another part of the woods. I could not give them different dimensions; birds and foxes, squirrels and caterpillars shared the same size. The population of Pilzburg was made up of what I was able to draw well enough to be recognisable. Admittedly, the birds were basically no more than sweeping ticks, the foxes turned out to look like curious sea creatures, my squirrels were indistinguishable from the tree branches on which they were sitting and the caterpillars could have been mistaken for crocodiles. Against that, the stars I drew really looked like stars — I didn’t yet know about the Star of David — and the sun and the moon always bore smiling