Šebesta’s papers containing details about lacquers for Messerschmitt
The boy from Prague was defying the Nazi system by living in the middle of it all. Sharing details about his work in the defense industry made the defiance even more acute. He could not share this further fact with his best friend, as doing so would endanger him as well. It was risky enough for them both that Zdeněk knew Jan Šebesta’s real identity.
There was one photograph in the box that took me years to place. My father is in it, a mischievous grin on his face, one of two young men in shorts, at some park in front of a statue. My father looked so young and happy that I assumed it must have been taken before the war and left at the bottom of the box for sentimental reasons.
I realized that the other man in the photograph was Zdeněk when I finally found his passport photograph in a Czech archive. The photograph was of the two of them, taken on some outing during a summer day. Much later, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to locate the exact site of the photograph, so I used Google to look up statues in Central Europe. I scanned hundreds of online images until I found it. Any Berliner would have recognized it at once.
The Bismarck Memorial was moved by Hitler in 1938 to its present location in the Tiergarten, the principal park of Berlin. The imposing bronze of the first chancellor symbolizes German might as mythical heroes pose beneath him. Atlas signifies force. Siegfried forges a sword as a metaphor for industrial strength. Sibyl personifies learning as she peruses a book of history. Germania bears down on a panther to symbolize the suppression of rebellion.
When I finally traced Zdeněk’s son, he sent me the same photograph. His was stamped by the photographer and years later inscribed on the back with the words: Handa and Zdeněk, taken during an “educational” walk in Berlin. In the image taken by Otto Kohler in 1943, the two friends are standing in front of the Bismarck Memorial.
Two Czech boys with their secrets. Two pranksters grinning, in their shorts, in front of a symbol of German power.
Hans and Zdeněk in the Tiergarten in Berlin, summer of 1943
CHAPTER 14 Frightened Eyes
On December 10, 1943, Otto wrote a letter to say that his only worry is that your life may not be as peaceful as ours. A few days earlier, Ella had been admitted once more to the hospital in Terezín for emergency repair of her gallbladder. She wrote her children a brief note saying that before going into surgery, she had placed the photographs of the three of them, Lotar with Zdenka and Handa, by her bedside so they would be the first thing she saw as she came around from the anesthetic. She reassured them that she retained her iron will to live and asked them to focus on nothing else other than of the time that they will meet again.
She also entreated them to tell her something about her everything, her Handa. It seems she was in good spirits; after warning them not to laugh, she requested mascara and face powder. As always, she conveyed her gratitude and love. Even Otto sounded hopeful that this surgery would put an end to the ailments that Ella had suffered over the last eight months. He mentioned that with winter encroaching, his thoughts had turned to Zdenka, who hated the cold, and that he imagined her traipsing through a freezing Prague to Montana to handle the bureaucracy.
At the end of his letter, he added: We thought we would be able to spend these holidays together. Last year I cried all through them but this year I am not going to cry anymore. I hope with all my heart that you enjoy the holidays in peace and that we do too. I am certain that we will not remain separated for long. Only then, when we are again together, will we truly start living.
I will never know if Otto and Ella knew what Hans went through that December 1943. It certainly was not the peace that Otto had wished for him. There is no coded reference to Hans that I can find in the very few letters and postcards that remain from the period.
In November 1943, the British Royal Air Force led a series of air raids in a bombing campaign that became known as the Battle of Berlin. Newly developed fast-bombing planes equipped with radar technology enabled them to unleash increasingly damaging attacks on the city. Initially, the raids were conducted at night to minimize the inevitable losses from antiaircraft fire. Though Berlin seemed to withstand the attacks, the damage was devastating and widespread. Residential buildings, factories, churches, barracks, and warehouses were obliterated. The Charlottenburg Palace, the zoo, and the Tiergarten, where Hans had stood with Zdeněk the previous summer, were all bombed. Many structures and entire neighborhoods were destroyed. Between November 1943 and January 1944 alone, there were thirty-eight major bombing raids on Berlin. Thousands of civilians in Berlin were killed in those two months, and hundreds of thousands were rendered homeless. The war was far from over, but the city had begun the final terrible descent through fire into rubble.
Warnecke & Böhm and the surrounding area were bombed on November 22 and 23, 1943. My father was in the middle of it all, a period that he described in depth in the writings that he left for me.
When I narrate my father’s account of late 1943 and early 1944, I struggle to do it justice. It is better read in full as it was written, by an older man living in Caracas reviving memories that were then indistinguishable from the nightmares that woke him screaming in the night.
A visitor is welcomed at the gates of Warnecke & Böhm in Berlin in the late 1930s
Nietzsche wrote that what separates humans from animals is the ability to find one’s condition risible. Nazis tended to solemnity and humorlessness. They always showed what Nietzsche called “Tierischer Ernst,” a certain “animal earnestness,” a complete inability to laugh at themselves.
With every passing day I spent in Berlin, this became more evident. They could not recognize their own ridiculousness or indeed appreciate the absurdity of anything. Without imagination they were predictable. This realization enabled me to take calculated risks. I figured that by acting in an unexpected manner or in any way that ran contrary to their expectations, I could increase my chances of survival.
I must be clear. I behaved as I did out of an instinct to survive and not bravery. As was my intention, my colleagues found me eccentric. If they argued that the Germans were winning the war, I casually put forth a doubt, but without feigning much interest in the subject. At Warnecke & Böhm, as in all German factories, we were obliged to greet one another with a salute and a “Heil Hitler.” I refused to do this and instead would offer a simple but cheerful “guten tag.”
There were five of us Czechoslovaks in the company. I had convinced all in our group to adopt a similar approach. The others were tentative at first, but there is nothing like the comfort of numbers, united in nationality and hatred, to embolden one. These acts of mild insubordination confused the Germans, who expected absolute compliance but at the same time represented a problem that they could tolerate. This meant that the focus on Jan Šebesta’s very identity was less intense, and any slips might more easily be explained as being merely a consequence of the cussedness of a lowly Czech. Paradoxically, drawing a little hostile attention might help me, as long as it was always consistent with Jan Šebesta’s character—a naive young Czech who was useful in a lab.
We had been doing this for months, so when the political commissary finally called me in, it took me by surprise.