In the second year English course, under the Soviets (1940-41), we were eight students - four young men and an equal number of women. Nelly and Erica were friends from childhood and Martha and I were close since her arrival in Czernovitz, at the age of fifteen.
Erich was a local student, close friend of Paul Antschel (Celan), who was in the French section. The other three male students had come from Bessarabia. None of us had known them previously. Erich became a close colleague and friend of mine. We spent half a day in class, six days a week, enduring classes of history of the Communist party, according to the latest revision by the politbureau, Ukrainian and Russian grammar and "Preparedness for War," a military course, taught by a colonel and using regular guns and ammunition and English courses, too. In the afternoon, we did some of the assignments together, at my house.
He was not politically oriented at all. The only son of a successful lawyer, Erich was highly educated and widely read - he had not made up his mind what to do professionally. He definitely had a strong literary bent. We became very good friends and had a true understanding of each other’s ideas, even if they were not fully translated into words. A look sufficed. We had a kind of shorthand, an unspoken understanding.
Erich was tall, dark blond, blue-eyed, athletic looking. He looked the picture of health and well-being. Actually, he could be mistaken for a typical Northerner, German or Swede.
That school year differed from others because of the great difficulties that we, the local students, confronted. We had to learn, in record time, two new languages: Ukrainian and Russian. Dictionaries were non-existent and the textbooks were of poor quality. We grinned and bore it, with good humor and sarcasm. Looking around us, at our mediocre teachers and at the low level of the Soviet students, we really had so much knowledge and now, we needed to acquire knowledge of something completely different and this in a hurry, in record time, immediately, now.
He was honest and reliable, as a friend. I knew that I could trust him implicitly. We knew what to expect of each other, how much to rely on one another and what to expect from the strangers, from the others. In a time when friends could become informers, I knew I could trust him. If I expressed an unorthodox idea, according to the concepts of Stalinism, I knew it could go no further, it would never be used against me. That was no mean feat.
We prepared together for exams; some subjects were too boring to do alone. He was quick and highly intelligent. When I was sick, he or Martha would bring me the necessary notes from school.
When June 41 came and the war, the majority of the students went into evacuation into the interior of the Soviet Union - Erich left, too. Paul and myself were left without our dear Erich. In 1944, Erich returned to Czernovitz in uniform. He was in the military service and spent a few weeks back home. Again, I enjoyed immensely his lively company, but his easy going manner had been dampened. He had been touched by tragedy. His girl friend Erica, whom I had known well, had perished somewhere in the Caucasus.
In my house, he met Tamara, a girl with whom I was working at the Railroad telephone office. The two hit it off well. Soon he was transferred to a unit of people, who were fluent in foreign languages. It was a unit of translators, going West with the advancing troops. I hated to see him go, yet that was the pattern of the war years.
Tamara was anxious to see him off at the railroad station. I went with her to say "good bye." We knew that towards evening, there were purse snatchers everywhere. Yet, we dared go down to the station and kissed a dear friend good bye. As we walked toward the exit, somebody grabbed Tamara’s purse. She carried the obligatory "passport" and thus had to report the loss of the document to the railroad militia. I have never forgotten the contemptuous look and tone of that militiaman. Answering why she was there, he said: "Who goes to see off soldiers? Only prostitutes." Such despicable words. After all, the soldiers were their praised heroes.
Well, half a year later, I left Czernovitz; soon after Tamara left, too. We never saw Erich again. Erich became a translator at international peace conferences, first in Vienna then in Berlin. Somebody spotted him in the street in Vienna, but he made a sign, a finger on his lips, which meant:
"Don’t talk to me." He was afraid to be seen with a foreigner.
Erich settled in Moscow after the war and wrote for a German publication in the Soviet Union. He married a Russian woman. Whenever a former friend would visit him, at his basement apartment, his wife made him feel unwelcome. He felt cut off from all his previous friends and family. He died of a heart attack in 1974, at the age of 54. Shortly before his end, a childhood friend, Gustav Chomed exchanged a few letters with him. The tone of his letters was "lyrical, tinged with sorrow and regret," said Chomed.
I don’t know, it is a moot question, whether Erich or Paul would have been happy, had they remained at home. But home, as it used to be, did not exist any longer. Paul went to the West and felt "deracine," uprooted; the other to Moscow and felt "deracine" and we, the others who survived? We are all uprooted, just a matter of degree, depending on the individual sensibilities. We all remained D.P.s, displaced persons - yet the place, the home, the anchor, it itself had disappeared.
In 1987, my friend Rosl, who resides in Germany, visited me for a few days. She read my reminiscences and filled me in on some facts about Erich. In the 70s Rosl’s daughter was studying in Moscow. On a visit there, Rosl visited Erich, who was suffering from a severe heart condition and could not climb the stairs, was confined to the apartment.
When she saw him, he was alone and deeply despondent. He told her about his only daughter, who had reached the age when a teenager had to apply for her own "passport," the identification card carried on one’s person at all times. She had filled out her date of birth and other personal information, but when it came to "nationality," she asked her father what to fill in. She knew that he had come from Czernovitz, which is in the Ukraine.
In the Soviet Union, a person born in Uzbekistan writes Uzbek or if born in Armenia writes nationality Armenian and this applies to all the republics, but if he is a Jew, no matter where he was born, he has to write Jewish. This has never been a great asset.
When she inquired about his nationality, he answered her "Jewish." She thought that he was joking and repeated her question and got the same answer, whereupon she burst out in shrieks: "You are telling me that you are a Jew? You are telling me that I am Jewish?" The scream was of anger, disappointment, distress, fury and hatred. "That, he said, happened this week."
A few days later Erich died of a heart attack or of a broken heart.