Letters to My Beloved Ghost

Copyright © 2005 by George Lysloff.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[email protected]

27713

Contents

I n t r o d u c t i o n

T h e C a l e n d a r

P o e m s t o M y B e l o v e d G h o s t s

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

-6-

-7-

-8-

-9-

-10-

-11-

-12-

-13-

-14-

-15-

-16-

-17-

-18-

E p i l o g u e

A p p e n d i x

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

-6-

-7-

-8-

-9-

-10-

-11-

-12-

-13-

-14-

-15-

-16-

-17-

-18-

I n t r o d u c t i o n

Every time I look into the personal life of another, it reveals an involved and unique story. There is never such a thing as banality. It is rather a matter of how the story is told and presented.

It is very easy for anybody to feel overcome by the seeming sameness in the destinies in a larger number of individual life stories.

I cannot give in that easily to the destructive tendency of rejecting another person’s tale without first ascertaining myself of its contents, merits, and vicissitudes.

I initially ask Are we not in fact more similar than we are different from one another? When I review in my mind the unfolding of the average human life, I encounter a great deal that all have in common: gestation and birth, childhood, the early relationships—mother and father, siblings, family, clans, tribes, society.

Each individual goes through phases of hunger and satiation, illness and recovery, the years of learning, and going to school, accompanied by the gradual discovery of one’s drives, sexual awakening and love, but also violence, greed, and the pursuit of power.

Life brings on marriage, progeny, worries and insecurities, fears, the threats of the surroundings, as well as becoming acquainted with dying and death.

Ultimately one goes through the decline of aging with its pains and the final stretch into oblivion. All those parameters are everywhere and in everybody.

And yet each one of those others we speak about presents a different constellation in the details and configurations of his existence, and each life story of an individual is a unique conglomerate of events.

This is one of the stories of my life that I now can relate for those who may care to read about it.

The last time I spent a couple of days with Hedi, the girl I was in love with, was in September of 1949, a short and disappointing visit actually. She occupied a single room in a lung sanatorium where she had been sent for the treatment of suspected lung tuberculosis. I do not know if she was carrying a pneumothorax at that time. I believe she went through the procedure but cannot be sure.

She had been my friend for a number of years, my promised, or so I surmised after my first encounter with her, immediately falling in love with her, which had been in March of 1945.

When my family and I arrived in Ebern following our flight from the eastern provinces of the Reich and got settled in the house of Ms. Wina Dietz, Hedi happened to drop by, maybe a fortuitous event, or else out of pure curiosity. That first contact rapidly led to a close, frank, open friendship.

I knew she was seeking me out, and I reciprocated, and soon to me she became many different things, as I was reaching out for a hold, for an emotional anchor: she was a revelation, an ideal, an idol, she was a wish and a dream personified in one.

In the end, circumstances inevitably led to our falling in love with each other. I was a teenager yet, not quite nineteen; she had just left her own adolescence at twenty.

Times were most uncertain and remained so until the day when the war ended—that was on May 8—and suddenly we were living in a defeated and occupied country.

My family and I were refugees from the lost eastern province of Posen; we had no more home, no property, and no income; the future looked as bleak as one could imagine

This in a way is the documented story of my juvenile romance with a wonderful Bavarian girl, a romance which I felt was immortal as well as unique in terms of its impact on our respective lives.

There were high and low points in it; we both were young, inexperienced, raised in the belief in strict inner values, yet in other ways very dissimilar in our individual background and cultural upbringing.

In another place I related what transpired when I began to try and uncover what happened to Hedi since the time I last heard from her in all the years since 1949.

She went through with the initial plans that she had made to ensure a more promising future for herself and for her parents. In December of 1949, she boarded a plane in Frankfurt and flew to the former German Southwest Africa colony, now Namibia. There, after marrying Robert, she lived for several decades far from anything in a town called Otjiwarongo, where her then-bridegroom ran a huge 7,500-acre farm named Mon Plaisir.

Robert had gotten in touch with her over an ad he had inserted shortly after the war’s end, offering to have her come and help with the running of the estate, with the intention of eventually marrying her.

I am now aware that she held fast to those prospects from early on. Already in 1945, she had practically made up her mind to accept the proposal, evidently deciding not to engage herself too deeply with anyone, that is, with me, although I think she did care for me a great deal.

I refused to even consider the possibility of her becoming tied to another man; it conflicted with my dream of winning her over and getting married to her on some future day. I was and stubbornly remained in total denial, even after I had to openly recognize and acknowledge her wish and determination to accede to Robert’s proposal.

After we parted, she apparently made good with her plans, leaving Ebern and Germany behind almost two months to the day after our final get-together, as well as six weeks after my last letter to her, boarding a flight with destination Windhoek on the eighteenth of December of 1949.

She wrote me a terminal letter mailed during a brief stopover in Egypt, and that was the last time I ever heard from her.

Many years later, after my wife Wandzia began to sink more and more into the shadows of her Alzheimer’s condition, I decided to try and find ways of bringing those past years back to life.

Through the Internet I was able to get in touch with a number of people in Ebern, the town where I met Hedi in 1945. That was when I found out that she had passed away in 1996.

To me it was a devastating piece of news, coming on top of my having quasi-lost Wandzia to her illness as well. As I learned of her having died, I fell into a state of acute sorrow, accompanied by regrets and even guilt, as if I had been somehow partly responsible for the dying.

I traveled to Ebern and sought out a few people who had known her, as well as some surviving relatives of hers from the years of our romance. After returning to the United States, I wrote a book about my trip to Europe, which included my stay in Ebern; it was published in 2002, a book I gave the title of Pilgrimage.

The following pages are from my diaries of recent months in which I express many thoughts concerning issues and late insights regarding the destiny of my old and, to me, still-youthful and beloved Hedi.

I wrote those comments in the form of a set of letters, addressed mostly to her but sometimes also to other loved ones who died or, like Wandzia, faded away.

In parallel with those fictive letters, I added the actual ones I once wrote to Hedi in the years 1945 to 1949, thus creating a kind of then and now confrontation.

I shall relate later how those found their way back to me. I made these pages into a book that I decided to call Letters to My Beloved Ghosts.

A number of poems I wrote during and around those same years will become part of the story. I assembled them into a separate chapter called Poems for My Beloved Ghosts.

One of the important and difficult tasks I had to go through as I prepared my manuscript was the translating of the letters to Hedi from the German and the poems from the French languages into English.

The first was rather easy; I hope that the latter will satisfy the reader. In an appendix, I added the actual French texts of those poems for those who may wish to try and see how well I did in my English renditions.

T h e C a l e n d a r

After who knows how many eternities, I hold it in my hands once again, the old calendar that found its way back to me from the depths of oblivion; I caress its seemingly like new appearance. It reflects a tiny echo of the souls that entered it in some far distant past.

It still exudes the love and hopes I once held in my heart, the tarnished promises of a future filled with the tenderness of the girl I cherished and with the expectations of success and high achievements.

The calendar I regained from the darkness of more than half a century is once more a part of me. We were separated, not knowing if the other section of the duality we represented still existed.

Its pages are heavy with faded memories as they reach over to my perception of what has once seemed to be my destiny.

On the cover, written by hand in large figures, there stands the year, 1945; I recognize, below this witness of the fateful moments of my teen years, a bunch of forget-me-nots drawn and painted by an artistic hand.

The pages open to a sequence of my juvenile and sometimes gauche early poetic efforts, with dates attached to each single one of those products of my nostalgia of then, beginning with verses I wrote in the early months of 1944.

One after the other, the lines and rhymes evoke youthful faces and the barely nubile bodies of girls I had felt attracted to. I was seventeen going on eighteen when I composed those poems, written in French since that was my mother tongue in those days.

I mourned my native country, Paris in particular, that I had left behind to move to the eastern part of Germany with my parents in November of 1943, and I dreamed of Tania, the dark and mysterious Russian princess of my immature fancies.

I wrote about Lilia, a blond and lovely child, merely fourteen years old, a wonderful comrade and companion that often made me uneasy because of her blossoming femininity.

I longed for Ira, the girl from Minsk in Soviet White Russia, fresh and elegant, naturally fragrant and wonderfully spontaneous. I lost her when I had to flee from the East and never could find her again or obtain details of any kind as to her fate.

I met Ira in Posen two weeks prior to the collapse of the eastern front. She was an ostarbeiter (a forced laborer) working as draftsperson at the cartographic military offices where I too was temporarily employed, but my time there was for one month only, the result of my high school closing its doors for lack of pupils.

I quit my job at once when school started up again. Ira had taken notice of me, it seems, and I ran into her a few days prior to the Russian Orthodox Christmas at church. We found each other at once and were like old and close friends.

She told me a thousand intimate details about herself, gave me photographs of her, chatted of this and that, and I did much of the same. We walked in the late evenings in the winter snows, arm in arm, laughing and enjoying life. She liked me a lot, and I was sweet on her.

Russian Christmas day came; we celebrated it with many other people. It was a lovely and uplifting experience at the little Orthodox church in the Wilms Street. I was there with many friends my age, numerous children and their parents, as well as the priest Father Bogachov and his family.

We made music, sang, ate, and entertained the children. We exchanged gifts, and I received a small package from someone called I.P. It was a calendar, in fact the one marked with the aforementioned 1945 and the flowers in blue hand-painted in its lower cover part. With it came a couple of packages of cigarettes.

Lilia was there also, trying to get my attention. But I ignored her; I had time and eyes only for Ira. She looked stunning, dark haired, and Slavic faced.

That evening we celebrated until late. Once back at home, I studied the gift I had received. The flowers were forget-me-nots, and I suddenly realized that the initials I.P. were Ira’s. I had not thought of bringing anything for her and suddenly felt absolutely terrible.

She had given me a symbol, indeed a token of her caring for me, and I had acted a thoughtless boor!

I tried to look her up at the cartographic bureau, but it had just been evacuated, and there was nobody left there. I grew frantic, but the clock was ticking; the war caught up with us, and I never saw Ira again. She seemed to disappear forever and met her destiny, whatever it held in store for her.

By the way, so did Lilia, but the girl had her mother, and they probably made it to Vienna as they had planned.

Ira was practically a German prisoner of war. She lived along with many other Eastern Worker girls and young men from the USSR, in a large barracks complex right in town, with armed German sentinels on guard duty marching up and down by the entrance gate.

Did the Nazis evacuate them all to the Old Reich? Did the authorities get rid of them? Were they caught in the turmoil that lasted for another six weeks after the Soviets encircled and conquered the city in a terrible and bloody battle, finally to be captured by Red Army soldiers? I shall never know.

After fleeing Posen and a few stops later, my parents, with us three children, landed in the Lower Franconian town of Ebern on the twentieth of March. I gathered twenty-two or so of my French poems and wrote them down in the virgin pages of the calendar.

On the occasion of her twenty-first birthday, I presented it as a gift to the girl I had fallen in love with, a wonderful Bavarian girl by the name of Hedi, and it got to be the first of June of 1945.

Hedi left Germany for Namibia in December of the year 1949, where she eventually married and founded a family, and that was the last I heard of her in over fifty years.

It seems like yesterday. Hedi’s daughter, Sybil, who lives in Austria with her husband and two children and whom I had contacted and visited, wrote to me and said that she had recently been in Ebern visiting her aunt and cousin.

In the attic of their house, she ran into a case full of letters, pictures, and other documents that her mother had left behind when she decided to go to Africa. There it lay for more than a half a century.

In the box, Sybille found the calendar as well as the letters I had sent to my beloved, along with many other items that Hedi had stored away as she was looking forward to a new and hopefully better chapter of her young life.

I do not know if Hedi ever learned that I too got married as of 1950, which occurred nearly a year after she signified to me her firm and final decision to follow through and accept the South Africa offer of a household position and possible marriage to the young man of the house, the only son and heir to the large estate his parents and he were administering.

Sybille sent the calendar to me first, and I presently hold it in my hands, feeling overwhelmed by the symbolic meaning of that event.

It is now 2003. I last saw the calendar when I handed it over to the girl I loved in 1945, some fifty-eight years in the past.

In it I find echoes that make me catch my breath and get my eyes to moisten.

The calendar is a reflection of my soul as well as of the souls of Ira and of Hedi; it reflects my youth and theirs, as well as more archaic scents of some older and nostalgic traces of the incense of time: my dreams, my doubts, my insecurities and hopes and wishes.

It triggers pangs of acute pain; tears swell up; suddenly my heart seems to ache, overflowing with ancient longings, regrets, unsatisfied yearnings, and the void left by those who suddenly stopped to be there anymore, those where fate made a sudden jump.

The calendar reminds me of death, for there is Hedi’s destiny I bear in mind. I perceive also dimly the unknown fate of those others that shared life lines with mine, others that were brutally torn away from what might have once joined us.

And so, in all banality and simplicity, I feel like shedding inner tears (and some less virtual as well) about what was, what could have been, and what ended right then and started me on the road to the present. All those that I cared for and loved are now gone, and my calendar is a mute but potent reminder of the meaning of life onto death and oblivion.

I shall always think of all of you that I was close to, those who loved me: Mother, Father, Ira, Putti (my Posen aunt), Lilia, Ira, and Hedi, and an infinity of others whose ghosts are reflected in the pages of my calendar.

The following is the first of the sequence of letters I wrote to Hedi in the 1940s, letters that were sent back to me by her daughter, who I hereby thank with all my heart.

Those old letters will be in italics, so as to distinguish them from my more recent comments. After the text itself, I shall on occasion indulge in a few explanations and elucidation regarding some particular points that may otherwise remain unclear to the reader.

Rentweinsdorf, September 8, 1945

My dear, dear Hedi,

It is night outside, and I write dreaming of you, remembering yet another dream. Was that one reality after all? I do not know, but the dream was wonderful and as I