By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.
Emil’s voice cuts through the layers of my slumber like a buzz saw. It isn’t so much grating as it is insistent—overpowering! “Admiral Dönitz has called off the U-boat operations, Katrina. And the Führer isn’t fighting him on it. I will no longer be assigned to long days and nights away from you out to sea. We can be married now.” It is the same dream—too many nights the same dream! It punches me in the stomach! I jerk awake, gasping for air. “The middle of the night again,” I moan. “Emil, please let me be! Please, please go away!” But, it is useless. Nothing has changed in all these twenty years. I know from experience that I won’t be able to get back to sleep. Frustrated, I kick the quilt to the foot of the mattress and rise to my feet. “Coffee!” my weary brain insists. I paddle to the kitchen.
It has been a long weekend in Washington DC, perhaps the longest in its history—in the history of my adopted country as a whole, actually. This capital city of the United States is closed. Across the country, businesses and schools are closed; nearly everything is closed, except for high-alert security operations and transportation systems. The grief-stricken people of the nation are parked in front of their television sets to watch the unfolding events surrounding the assassination of President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It happened shortly after noon central time on Friday, November 22, 1963—only the day before yesterday! It seems like forever. A jolt to my consciousness in an unwelcome voice reminds me that the president is now Lyndon Baines Johnson. I don’t like the idea one tiny bit.
I am one of a large
community of ex-pat Germans in DC. Following the death of both of my parents,
and as I had no other ties to Germany, I immigrated to the USA. That was fourteen
years ago. I was fortunate to land a position right away with a German Language
Institute and Cultural Center here. Mr. Kennedy, at the time Senator Kennedy,
engaged the institute in helping him with his campaign for president,
specifically in appearing at gatherings of ex-pat Germans. I served as the
adjunct to him in that endeavor. I was taken aback when first he engaged me in
conversation about the Second World War. It is usually a topic that is avoided
in interchanges between Germans and Americans. I understood immediately that he
wanted all barriers between himself and me erased, a desire on his part I was
to see over time extended to all people everywhere.
The date of our first
meeting, a lunch meeting, was Friday, January 15, 1960, only two weeks after he
announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. I remember it so
well because it coincided with a fateful date earlier in my life. It was on that
exact date in 1944 that my then fiancé, Emil came up missing. He was a crew
member of the German U-boat 377 whose last radio report occurred on January 15,
1944. The submarine had departed Brest, France on December 15, 1943. U-boat
377, with Emil onboard, sailed into the mid-Atlantic, its return anticipated in
early February. When it failed to arrive, it was reported, ‘lost to an unknown
cause.’ Before the submarine set out on its mission, Emil had informed me while
on a short leave over the Christmas holiday of Admiral Karl Dönitz’s
discontinuation of Germany’s U-boat program in the Western Atlantic because of
a lack of success and heavy losses. Apparently, however, Germany was not so
willing to give up its U-boat program. It actually continued well into the
final weeks of the war.
In my
nervousness, and by way of an apology, I suppose, I blurted out this history to
the senator. His handsome face broke into a reassuring smile, and he said, “My service in the war was also spent on the
water, although on the Pacific fighting the Japanese.”
“The famous PT 109 incident,” I replied.
“Yes. That happened in August of 1943.”
“I knew next to nothing of Hitler and his
Nazis, or of the war,” I replied shamefacedly.
“You weren’t a member of a Hitler Youth
group?”
“My father was a farmer. We lived in an
extremely remote region of Southwest Germany. We lived our lives much as our
ancestors had done for generations, isolated from the country’s political
turmoil. We were aware of the war, but were able to keep apart from it almost
entirely. And then I met Emil.”
“And he was in it body and soul?!”
“He was a Nazi, a fanatical Nazi. For a long
time, I didn’t realize how dangerous he was.”
“And by the time you did recognize it, it was
too late—you were in love with him, I take it.”
I broke eye contact with the senator then and looked at my
folded hands in my lap. “Emil took it upon himself to indoctrinate me. It was a
point of honor with him. He saw the war from the perspective of a sailor and he
spared me no details about his ‘kills,’ as he called them—hundreds, thousands
of American merchant ships and Allied submarines blown to bit. I didn’t keep a
tally because the horror of the slaughter of all those young men on both sides was
sickening to me. After a while, I couldn’t stand the sight of Emil. I vowed that
if I survived the war, I would leave Germany.”
“Have you ever gone
back?”
“Someday, when both
Germany and I have mended a bit more.
“And Emil?”
“And Emil?”
“He haunts me still. Not a day goes by that I
don’t carry the burden of my convoluted feelings for him. The weight is heavier
because he lost his life.”
“I lost my big brother, Joe in the war. By
rights, it should be he who is running for president. I suppose in some ways
I’m doing it for him, although at times he was a royal pain in the neck to me.”
The senator chuckled and then was silent for a couple of minutes, lost in his
memories of his brother. “We must never forget that we are still in a state of
war. We are in the Cold War, and have been since the end of World War II. In a
way, it is just as insidious, maybe more so, because our enemies are so much more
difficult to see. I think of it as our long twilight struggle. When I am
president I intend to lead the way into the light.”
It was all I could do to keep tears from
pooling in my eyes. Finally he said, “We both have our war scars. What do you
say we leave it at that? Miss Berger, welcome to the righteous side of the
fight.” He raised his glass and reached it out to me. I clinked my glass
against his, and he added, “And now for the business of getting me elected
president. What do you have planned for me?”
I have lost this morning to my memories. I think about going
to Mass, but my watch tells me it is already too late in the morning to do so. I click on the TV. The president’s motorcade scrolls
across the screen as it has done for the umpteenth time during the weekend,
since that awful Friday, November 22nd morning. That gorgeous head
of the president, so vulnerable in the open-top limousine, slumps forward. His
wife in her Chanel suit and pillbox hat draws him to her. The president is
shot, and we learned soon thereafter, that he is dead!
The live television cameras switch to the
latest events in the continuing coverage of the president’s assassination. Cameras
are in the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters this Sunday morning. Before
our eyes, among a crowd of reporters and other onlookers, in handcuffs, young
Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s alleged assassin, is surrounded by police guards. A big
man in a fedora and dark suit steps forward from the crowd, raises a handgun,
and shoots Oswald. Pandemonium breaks out and then the shooter is wrestled to the
floor. Unconscious, Oswald is hustled to an ambulance and rushed to Parkland
Memorial Hospital, the same medical facility in which the president was
pronounced dead two days ago.
Wave after wave of shock, grief, outrage, doom
sweep over me! Hadn’t I left this kind of thing behind in Germany so long ago? What terrifying impacts will the loss of this president in
whom the American people placed such high hopes have on the country? I am heartbroken for his wife and their little children.
Was there a photograph of Jackie, Caroline, and little John-John in his wallet
when he fell? I think about his mother and father and his many brothers and
sisters, and his extended family, resilient and unstoppable people almost to a
one, but this will give them serious pause, undoubtedly.
I perch in rigid disbelief on the edge of my
sofa. “…Miss Berger, welcome to the righteous side of the fight,” JFK said to
me at our first meeting, one short sentence that took me in the
fold and defined so simply my role as an American, and as a German, when I return
to my homeland, someday.©
Note: the above is a work of historical fiction inspired by true
events
Image:
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Books by multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene are
available for purchase in eBook and soft cover at Amazon.com.
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