Letter about Koblenz
1965 — Helfand was the fingerprint and background investigations clerk. O’Connor managed the documents cage for everything classified above confidential. I typed and mimeographed duty rosters, invented the monthly password list, and filed a never-ending stream of bunker security check lists after verifying hourly MP patrol signatures on every single one.
We didn’t shut down the Military Police operations office until noon that Saturday, but we were out the front gate in civilian clothes in under an hour. We’d had it with mess hall food. Even the better meals at the enlisted men’s club had begun to pall. Time to get “out on the economy,” as lifers call spending money off-post in Germany. In Helfand’s ancient VW with the tiny split rear window, we followed the valley from our post to a bright clean town with plenty of plate glass that sat at the juncture of the Mosel and the Rhine.
This was Koblenz, whose location made it a strategic target for Allied bombers in the Second World War. Few bricks were still standing one upon another when the shooting stopped. After all the ancient castles and small weather-worn villages we saw on armed convoys the town looked brand-new, as if the proletariat just moved in last week. It was hard not to be impressed they had rebuilt from the ashes to its present cleanliness and order in just twenty years.
We checked into a cozy gasthaus and ate downstairs in the combination bakery-bar: delicate pastry and strong dark beer in the same meal. A guy strongly resembling the American conductor Leonard Bernstein sat at a baby grand piano near the carry-out counter and played light tinkling Fasching music. From outside it sounded like fairy music.
We retired to our rooms early to get an early start on Sunday. Sunday was all we had before we had to go back. My bed was too short. But the down-stuffed mattress was so soft I sank almost to the floor, giving my feet room under the down comforter. Like all Germans I ever ran into, the gasthaus turned off all the heat at night. But I was snugger than the proverbial bug in a rug.
The early Sunday sun cast somehow-sinister shadows across a vast old multi-story stone building across the street, centered among broad snow-covered lawns and surrounded by rigorously pruned sentinel evergreens dripping icicles. Its ancient Teutonic style made it old enough to have survived the First War let alone the Second. A wide circular drive to its wide front stairs called to mind mirror-polished big black staff cars greeted by elite SS guards; barked commands and jackboots clattering on paving stones from goose-stepping troops on parade; and quiet gutturals behind drawn curtains to launch a panzer attack or execute thousands.
There was a big sign on the grounds: “Reichburo Department of Real Estate and Land Claims Settlement” was the translation. We learned they were still trying to unscramble the legal cats-cradle created by Nazis who, nothing if not orderly, passed laws to authorize their property thefts. I wrote a letter describing Koblenz to my girlfriend and got this reply:
“The city reborn out of the bombed ashes only helps to keep alive the terror I knew as a child. World War Two left an indelible print on my mind that no accumulation of years can erase. Living at Wright Patterson A.F.B. I knew a German or American plane at a glance. Soldiers were everywhere. I knew, when charged with the responsibility of running to the supermarket, to guard ration stamps and meat tokens with my very life. Blackouts were not fun though my parents made valiant efforts at levity. And the one thing that will always sicken me is the picture in a newsreel of stacks upon stacks of skin and bones, what was left of what were once human beings. I cried and cried and had nightmares long afterwards….”
