I'm Coming Home!

Route: Alexander Platz to Bed on Farina’s Kitchen Floor.

Distance: About 5 beers and 1 km.

Last night while sleeping, my mind stayed active. I was dreaming of all I’d been through in the past five weeks to lead me here to Berlin, the city where Grandpa spent almost a year after the war. Finally, this morning after waking up on Farina’s kitchen floor not feeling refreshed, it occurred to me that I had come full circle. It was here where Grandpa wrote the bulk of his letters home to grandma Vernice. He was thinking of her hoping to get home and start a future. I was thinking of her hoping to get home to be there at the end.
Strange universal chance had provided me with a friend who happened to live exactly where I needed to be, at the exact time I needed to be here. Farina’s apartment was at the center of Belin around 4 blocks from the train station. It’s is close to everything that I need in order to get ready to head home. At the moment where I lost grandpas trail in the forests of West Germany, something cleared a path to this great city, and the end of my story.
Sitting in a beirgarten, adjacent to a graffiti covered wall against which my trusty boxed up Long Haul Trucker rested, I watched the endless parade of hip young people moving past on foot, on bikes, on buses and streetcars. They all seem so effortless, and purposefully on their movements, as if they are all sure of where they are going and where they have been. They don’t seem to notice that they move through a city that, with one or two notable exceptions, was a wasteland after World War Two. Wasted living, wasted dead, wasted buildings and the crashed dreams of a demented madman.
The Berlin that grandpa came to in the summer of 1945, just after the end of hostilities, was this void into which would be pumped the life blood of two aspiring empires over the next 45 years. It’s plain to see, cycling through this morning to find a bike shop, that the city was completely and systematically destroyed. In a place with over 1500 years of human history, I have seen only a few buildings older than about 60 years. Certainly not more than I can count on both hands. Everything else in the center of the city is new. Everything.
Can you imagine New York City simply wiped away by fire and replaced with an unfortunate combination of western Modernism and eastern Soviet Bloc housing projects? Grandpa was here during those pivitol few moments when the war against the Nazi’s came to an end, and the one against Communism began. He would have seen the barbed wire being put up to mark the boundaries that would later be rendered in the concrete and machine gun towers of the Berlin Wall.
Back during April and May of 1945, when the Ruhr Pocket was split in two by the 7th Armored Division, the remainder of German Army in the west surrendered. They came in droves. The 7th Armored alone captured over 113,000 prisoners. While there were definitely holdouts who fought on for months, effectively the war was over by late April of 1945. VE day, the official end of hostilities was May 8th 1945.
The 48th, after being a spearhead unit during this final offensive of the war, was ordered to attack north and secure the area around the city of Hamburg, and it’s port on the Baltic Sea. At the same time the Soviet Army was racing west and was given about to sack Berlin.
When I say “Sack” I mean in the medeivel sense of the term. By agreement of the Allies earlier that year at Yalta, the American and British advance was to stop approximately 40 miles West of Berlin, while the Russians where to be given the city as a sort of prize of war in retribution for the horrible and protracted acts of brutality the Nazi’s had committed on the USSR.
Accordingly, as soon as they were able, the Soviet army moved into the city and fought a bitter and bloody battle put up by the last defenders, some of which were well trained and equipped SS troops who knew what the Russians would do to their homes and families. Once the inevitable victory had been won, The Soviets laid waste to the city. Massive and indiscriminate bombing, burning, mass rape and murder of German women, pillaging of cultural and monetary treasures, and untold millions of individual acts of violence were done over a two week period starting in late April and lasting until VE Day on May 8, 1945. This left a city already destroyed by allied bombing into a moonscape of smoldering death and violence.
As the war ended, grandpa was transferred from the 48 Armored Infantry to the 41rst Armored Infantry Regiment of 2nd Armored Division as a platoon leader. He went from Badow near the Baltic, straight down to Berlin and was charged with occupation of the city during the period directly following it’s fall under the Soviets usually referred to optimistically as when “order” was re-established. The transition from combat commander to occupation duty must have been tough because it closely mirrored the transition from unchecked violence to civilization that all of Germany was going through.
He mentions in his letters that it is hard to leave behind all of the friends, and the people he had come to know during his months in combat. By this time he was a twice- decorated officer holding the battlefield rank of 1rst Lt. He would later be promoted again and eventually return home holding the rank of Captain. I wonder at his thoughts as he left behind the family of his unit, all of whom he wouldn’t see again, and drove slowly into this destroyed and still burning city. How far from home did he feel at this moment? How would he deal with the fact that it would be a year until he finally saw home again?
This was the real end of the war in Europe. The Russians held a line with the Allies to the west of Berlin that, in time and with a few minor adjustments, would become the border of West and East Germany. West Germany grew to become a great nation with the help of the Allies and the support of the Marshal Plan. East Germany twisted in the breeze and became a political pawn of the USSR during the cold war, which some people say started as soon as the guns fell silent on the Western Front.
I’m writing this in the center of the old East Berlin. It’s right around the 20th Anniversery of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place on October 1rst, 1989. 44 years after grandpa came to the conquered Nazi capital, those wartime decisions which became physical and cultural boundaries were finally rescinded. Germany was one nation again, and a people could finally shed the spectre of the war.
All throughout this trip, as I passed battlefields both ancient and modern, I’m reminded that bad events in time are always related and always lead to other bad events; wars always lead to other wars. I’m reminded of something Neik said; that everything, every event and every person in the world, is connected like a huge circle of humanity. I wonder now if the same idea could be applied in reverse. Can good events on a mass scale lead to other good events?
Certainly, on this trip, I’ve been universally rewarded at most points by random acts of kindness and the essential good in humanity. This is not to say that there haven’t been challenges. I simply mean that whenever I travel like this, and let go of some of my need to always feel as if I’m in control of the situation, I always find that the world has a way of providing what is needed.
Grandpa certainly would have felt that he was swept up in larger events. He couldn’t wait to get home and his letters are numerous and filled with expressions of love and loneliness for home, for his wife, and for his future. He can’t wait to have kids, mentioning in one letter the name of my dad, John, as being reserved for his oldest son.
Grandpa finally came home in 1946 to Grandma, had six children, and became a successful lawyer in Seattle. Although he never talked about he war, and to my knowledge never met any of the friends he had made in the 7th Armored again, I am able through his letters to get a sense of the man he was. He passed suddenly in 1962 of a heart attack.
In a sense, I too am swept away in larger events by grandma’s passing. Because of this, the real end of my story has me sitting here in Berlin after a great journey, waiting to return home to my family, to grandpa’s family, just as he did 65 years ago. Everything is connected.