The saga of Germans who despised the Nazi regime and struggled against it can be inspirational. Rhonda Lauritzen delves into that topic in A Child In Berlin (Post Hill Press). She does so through the lives of one German woman, Heidi Posnien, and her mother, Kathe Wypych.
The Posiens were German citizens of Polish ethnicity from the village of Mechtal, which was annexed by Germany after World War I, but which was transferred back to Poland following World War II and renamed Miechowice.
Kathe, an aspiring opera singer, gave birth to Heidi in 1936 when she was 22 years old. Her Czech husband, Alfred Machinek, was killed during the war and was never in the picture. Heidi was essentially brought up by her grandmother, known as Oma, while Kathe studied at the State Opera (Staatsoper) in Berlin.
From about 1940 onward, Kathe and Heidi lived together, experiencing the hardships and terrors of the war.
In August of that year, the British Air Force bombed Berlin for the first time, leaving 900 people homeless and forcing Kathe and Heidi to shelter in a basement for three long hours.
“The bombing was a life-shifting moment for Kathe,” Lauritzen writes. “She was already jaded after the (Wehrmacht) invaded France, followed by the Scandinavian countries. Now she doubted everything.”
Hermann Goring the commander of the Luftwaffe, had assured Berliners that not a single enemy bomber would reach the capital. Goring’s bravado would ring hollow as the war dragged on. During one month, in 1943, Allied air raids killed 3,500 Berliners, injured 3,500, and rendered homeless around 10,000.
This was not the sole problem.
With Europe suffering through the coldest winter in a century in 1941, supply trains froze to the tracks and could not deliver food. There were dire shortages of potatoes and vegetables, as well as coal, the main source of home heating.
Foreign forced laborers who worked in factories and at construction sites were a fairly common sight in the city. Czechs, Danes and French workers were treated decently, but Russians, Poles and Jews were mistreated. “They stooped with the burden of labor, caked with dust. They never looked up, like doing so might invite a whip.”
During the autumn of 1941, Heidi noticed people wearing yellow stars on their clothing. Kathe told her they were Jews. Early in 1942, Kathe and Heidi awoke to a ruckus on their street. Jews and Romas were being evicted from their homes. In an allusion to Nazi extermination camps in Poland, Kathe’s cousin told her that Polish Jews in villages had been evacuated and sent to camps.
Lauritzen implies that Kathe opposed the Nazi persecution and mass murder of Jews, but fails to spell out Kathe’s attitude toward antisemitism, an omission that leaves a yawning gap.
She is far more detailed in recounting Kathe’s affairs with men. One of her boyfriends, Werner, was a career army officer who was assigned to the personal staff of Magda Goebbels, the wife of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Werner invited her to accompany him to a dinner at which Adolf Hitler, the chancellor, would be the guest of honor. Kathe was introduced to him, and he nodded his head in apparent approval.
“Although Kathe had no interest in joining the National Socialist Party, she couldn’t help but find the evening thrilling and would certainly never forget it.”
A few days later, the State Opera building was bombed, leaving Kathe’s career in jeopardy. “Hitler himself ordered the opera to be rebuilt … He considered the opera essential for morale and wanted people to feel assured of a quick victory … She wouldn’t lose her job or her future.”
When she declined to join the Nazi Party, the State Opera manager threatened her with dismissal. Before she was sacked, Kathe found a tedious assembly line job at a factory. She did not last long, joining a group of black market dealers. They provided a valuable service. As Lauritzen puts it, “One simply couldn’t get by on what was available through the rationing system.”
In the meantime, Kathe met her next husband, a Swiss accountant named Richard Sauerbrey with whom she had a child. Sauerbrey served in the Wehrmacht, but Lauritizen neglects to explain why he joined the German army.
With Germany reeling, Goebbels delivered a fiery speech in which he called for “total war” and urged Germans to sacrifice even more. By 1945, the war was lost.
In Berlin, Kathe and Heidi waited with trepidation as the Red Army advanced. “For years, Berliners had been told that their city was impenetrable, but the truth was that Hitler and his generals had never planned for ground troops to get that far.”
On April 25, Kathe and Heidi were awaked by the shouts of a teenage boy, “Hitler is dead! The son of a bitch is dead!”
During the immediate postwar period, when they lived in eastern Berlin, food and coal were in short supply again. Kathe worked as a bartender.
In 1949, Kathe, Sauerbrey and Heidi fled East Germany, finding a new home in Stuttgart, West Germany. Heidi, having met and married an American soldier, resettled in the United States, where she became a clothing model.
Lauritzen tells their story compassionately and with an abiding attention to detail and nuance. Their lives, in many respects, were a microcosm of the trials and tribulations that Germans endured from 1939 until Germany’s liberation from Nazism.