Harry Wilkens on the Other Side of the
OUR SHTETL
"Hey, boy, where's the Stadwine?" was a common question asked by black GIs, still quite innocently called "negroes" at that time. And we innocent kids answered politely and showed them the right way. Only natives were able to understand that kind of English, because Stadwine meant nothing else than "Stadt Wien" -- City of Vienna", a night & day bar situated in the center of the town, but curiously outside of the usual Off-limits district. I still wonder how this was managed by the owners.
They were Jews, like most of the bar owners of the town. Their hot spots attracted most negroes of this side of the Rhine, most prostitutes of Germany within her frontiers of 1944, and most of the money of the then known world (oil sheikhs did not yet exist). These "Yidden" (most of them spoke Yiddish) were very kind with us native children and they used us for some errands and odd jobs. Like this we always were full of small cash, mostly dimes or 50 pfennig coins - a lot of money in the '50s and '60s. In the early '50s we got it even in the form of US Army money: US cent bills which were normally forbidden for natives, but nobody watched us kids, and it was good enough for us to give to a befriended soldier or compassionate US housewife to bring us something from the PX. This was especially easy if one had a grown-up sister or if mom was a war widow...
Negroes & Jews were our friends, and they felt it. But not all native kids were like us. Most of them were not able, or not allowed--or just didn't want--to have contact with those who really did rule their small world. One of them, on his bicycle, every time when he saw me in the street, shouted aloud: "Alter Judd!". But I was young, even not a Jew, and there were no young ones. And if there were, we insiders didn't tell it. I got one in my school class, a 11 year old girl. She met her brothers after school, and they usually were picked up by her father, a fat Oriental-looking Jew coming in his big car from nearby Sembach where apparently he made much dough with Americans who had their another airfield, smaller than that of Ramstein. This mishpokhe did appreciate my discretion...
Our "old Jews" liked to listen to records of Molly Picon, and like this I picked up her famous song wishing "As long as you are healthy" in its original Eastern Yiddish version "Abi gesint". It was and still is a real haunting tune for me, but at that time they liked more the otherwise English song "Bay mir bistu scheyn", sung by somebody else...
There was no more any synagog in town, and the Jewish bar and shop owners were more atheist than any "bundist" of the pre-war time. however, once I saw an older Jew (with his hat on) enter the very modest antiques shop of a middle-aged Jew (with his hat off), both talked in Yiddish. When another day I asked the shop owner if there weren't any "shool", he really went upset: he waved his German ID-card under my nose and screamed: "Ich bin Deutscher, kein Jude!!!", all this with his Eastern accent. He was much better off than other Poles who where not lucky enough to be "eingedeutscht", either by the Nazis in 1939, when they took over from the Soviets in former Galicia the more or less German speaking people whose ancestors where supposed to have immigrated in the 18th century from the Palatinate and other parts of Germany, or 10 years later, after the foundation of the Federal Republic, which even paid Wiedergutmachung, reparation money, mostly to upper-class people.
Many Poles and other Displaced Persons (DP), when they couldn't get a job with the U-Army, especially as auxiliaries, even in the US-Army itself, mostly as guards with a own grey "Polish" uniform), were hanging around in the streets, drinking cheap red wine. GIs called them "winos", natives called them "Wermutsbruder". It was a sad thing, and we children heard a lot of sad stories from those poor guys poured over the Palatinate after their liberation from the concentration camps or after they were kicked out by Uncle Sam. They were very friendly and still lucky not to be handed over to the Poles, or Russians...
Not to be compared with the fate of the Polish girls who came in order to dig gold in K-Town, Baumholder or wherever. Many of them succeeded in some kind of "Eindeutschung", before they were taken away by some black or white GI to the States--or thrown away back onto the domestic German meat market.
© Copyright Harry Wilkens 2002