If Anyone Calls, Tell Them I Died by Emanuel (Manu) Rosen

Author:Emanuel (Manu) Rosen [Rosen, Emanuel (Manu)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789493231146
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers

The American soldier and his driver parked their Jeep in the plaza in front of city hall in Menden, when the soldier heard someone calling his name in a Westphalian accent he had not heard in eight years:

“Martin Mendel!”

It was Martin’s friend from elementary school, Walter Kordier, who was half Jewish and had spent part of the war in a forced labor camp. From here, Martin rushed to his grandparents’ house. The shop window of the shoe store on the ground floor was covered with wood planks. Upstairs, Martin found his mom’s parents, Sally and Malchen Leven. They had changed in the past eight years (three of them in a camp), but they certainly were not the emaciated survivors Martin had seen crawling in the snow in Dachau a few months earlier. His grandmother Malchen had grown up in the countryside and knew how to identify mushrooms and other edible plants. For a while, she’d also worked in the camp’s kitchen.

There were also acts of true kindness in Menden. When things turned bad before and during the war, their Catholic neighbors, the Stracke family, would leave food on the steps of the Mendels and the Levens after dark. Else or Malchen would bring it in after a while. Now Martin and his grandparents paid a visit to the Strackes and brought some canned food and dried fish that Martin had stuffed in his jeep. And as they were all sitting in the living room, enjoying American chocolate, somebody suggested that the young folks do something that they used to do as kids. And Martin and the two Stracke girls who were about his age put their roller skates on and skated around town like in the old days. And I imagine the three of them, an American kid in uniform and two German girls, gliding along the streets of Menden, and Eddie the blue jay circling above.

Then Martin went to see the Samsons’ store, which looked like a dusty, empty tuna can, years after its content had been consumed. The sign Samsons Bettenlager was faded but still legible, and Martin found a cardboard sign that Ernst had made just before they left, announcing the sale of fabric leftovers. Franz takes Mechtild and me to see the street corner where the store used to be, and it strikes me how indifferent I am. The building is nice and clean, but I feel no connection to it. Martin told me once that he immediately feels creepy when he’s in Menden. Franz always tells him how he belongs to “good old Menden,” but Martin said he didn’t feel part of it. I know what he meant. I feel more connected to Hamm, maybe because I have been there before, and my mom and Eva were there, maybe because of Mechtild and Paul Otto. There’s something distant in Menden, perhaps because it’s linked in my mind only with Hugo. My mom hardly ever mentioned the place, and it seems to me that even for

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