Helene's Story Part I
Last year in Austria I met an exceptional woman. My husband, John, and I had been attending a weekly Bible study in a neighbor's living room, with its painted wooden furniture and immense green-tiled heating stove. One evening, however, an unusual sight met us as we pulled off boots and mittens just inside the door. On the table sat not the customary coffee and strudel, but. . .matzo. . . a lamb bone. . .a bundle of leeks. . . .
On the far side of the table sat a white-bearded man in a fringed prayer shawl. When the rest of us had taken seats, he began to speak - in American-accented English - relating this Passover Seder to the Last Supper of Jesus.
At his side an Austrian woman, nearer 60 than 50, translated his talk into German. Afterward, over coffee and pastry (which had been waiting after all in the kitchen), John and I introduced ourselves to the speaker as fellow Americans. He told us that all of his forefathers had been synagogue workers, and most of his family had perished here under the Nazis. It was to prevent future tragedies like the Holocaust that he and Helene, his translator, were doing these teaching programs.
I looked around at the clusters of young men and women, discussing what was clearly their first exposure to the Jewish faith. In the entire room only the four of us were old enough to remember the Nazi era. "You were here then, in 1938," I said to Helene, "when Hitler marched into Salzburg."
"I saw it!" She and her mother, she said, had taken a train to the city to join the thousands cheering Hitler's motorcade. "That's why I believe so in what we're doing tonight. "Germany, she said, had in some measure faced up to its history. "Not Austria. Here we still like to believe we were victims of the Nazis, not partners."
"We all do that," I said. "Nations, individuals - we try to gloss over the past."
"But if we don't bring our past to God, all of it," said Helene, "how can He heal us? I was a Nazi, you see. I believed in Hitler with all my heart. How could I have made a new beginning if I denied that?"
John and I exchanged looks of astonishment. For over 40 years, in repeated visits to both Germany and Austria, we had never before met a person who'd admit to being a former Nazi. So many questions did we have that we canceled our travel plans, to remain in Austria. How had it been possible for millions of ordinary, decent people to be deceived by Hitler? Here is Helene Obermayer's story.
The groundwork for the Nazi horror was laid, Helene said, with the collapse of Austria's economy after the First World War. Born in 1930, the youngest of four children, Helene couldn't remember when her family had been the sole occupants of the house in Puch, nine miles from Salzburg; by the 1930s the six Obermayers lived in a few rooms on the second floor, and the local police department occupied the ground floor. Helene's first memory was of beggars at the door. At least Helene's parents, both schoolteachers, had jobs when a quarter of the population was out of work.
Then when Helene was five, a speeding car struck her father as he pedaled his bicycle home from school. Helene's father was a mountain climber; with his tremendous heart and lungs it took him four agonizing weeks to die.
Her mother's salary barely put food on the table. The eldest child, Thusnelda, took a job as a store clerk, but rising prices gobbled up the few schillings she earned. Hermann, the next oldest, graduated from high school in 1935, a few months after his father's death. Like most young Austrian men, however, he could find no work.
Meanwhile, just over the border in Germany, the economy was booming through the efforts of a leader named Adolf Hitler. For decades people had been saying that the two German-speaking nations should be united: Why not now under this energetic man who was an Austrian himself?
The Austrian government, fearing overthrow, outlawed Hitler's Nazi party, but many Austrians, including Hermann, joined in secret. One night in 1936 Hermann had news.
Six-year-old Helene had got a fire going in the old wood-burning stove so that her mother could put on their meal of cabbage and potatoes when she got home from school. Hermann could hardly wait until the plates were served; one of his friends had been to Berchtesgaden, only a few miles away in Germany. "There are jobs there, Mama! And they pay in good German marks!"
"But the border guard?" his mother objected. Austrian troops patrolled the frontier.
Hermann shrugged. "I'll go over the mountain."
Helene nodded. Most mealtime conversation was over her head, but she did know about mountains. Before her father died, the family spent each weekend climbing. Her happiest memories were of sitting astride a pair of broad shoulders high above the clouds.
Enthusiastically Hermann described the fortified headquarters Hitler was building above Berchtesgaden. Hitler. . . That was another memory of her father - how he would stand a little taller when he spoke of this new leader of the German-speaking people. "Hard work and self-discipline," he would quote the Fuhrer, "will make us great again."
From then on the family saw Hermann only occasionally, always at night, and always bringing money. The police on the first floor of the building soon noticed his absence - and the fact that Mrs. Obermayer occasionally stopped now at the butcher shop. "Where is he?" they kept asking. "The moment he returns, he must report to us."
In 1937 Thusnelda set her wedding date. Her fiance was a well-known violinist, and the family was delighted - except for fears for Hermann. Though the younger boy, Helmut, was now 15, Hermann would regard it as his solemn duty as the elder son to take his father's place at the ceremony. But the police, of course, knew this too.
An hour before the wedding Hermann slipped through the back door. The police were waiting for him. They arrested not only him, but Helmut too, on suspicion that they were members of the illegal Nazi cell. Mrs. Obermayer went downstairs to plead with the police. "Let the boys come with us to church. I give you my word they will return here."
So Hermann led Thusnelda down the aisle. Afterward, true to their mother's promise, Hermann and Helmut reported to the police. Upstairs, guests had assembled for the reception. Helene was passing a tray of cakes when the beatings began. From the room below came a thud, then a scream. Another blow, another scream. The wedding party stood frozen, no one speaking. The sickening sounds went on all afternoon. Late that night the boys were released, bruised and bleeding, but the rubber hoses had not drawn from them a single name of their Nazi comrades.
Next day Helene dipped the tail of her black-and-white terrier in a can of red paint, making him too a hero in the Nazis' red, white and black. From its hiding place among her hair ribbons she took out Hitler's picture and dreamed that, like her brothers, she would have a chance to suffer for him.
Then in March 1938 the Nazis marched into Austria. Her mother took Helene into Salzburg so that the eight-year-old could some day describe the great moment to her children. With thousands of others they stood on the Schwarzstrasse, waving small red paper flags bearing the black swastika in a white circle. As the motorcade drove slowly past the Mozarteum, Helene shouted herself hoarse. But when last of all, in a long open car, came Hitler himself, she was too overcome with love to make a sound.
As the Fuhrer had promised, there was soon work for all. Hitler's enemies attacked - he said that would happen too - and Hermann and Helmut rushed to join the army. Helene had to wait till she was 10 to don the black skirt and brown jacket of the Hitler Youth, her blond braids swinging as she marched.
It was at these youth meetings that Helene heard the Nazi claim that Austria's past miseries had been due to "the wickedness of Jews." To Helene especially this seemed plausible. Hadn't it been a Jew who killed her father? Rage blazed inside her as the leader explained that Jews were rich because they were thieves. That was why her father had had only a bicycle to ride, while Jews could go speeding about in cars.
Hatred for these people grew as strong as her love for Hitler. Helene did not know that she had ever actually seen a Jew, but she knew from the Hitler Youth posters what they looked like: fat, with greedy eyes, enormous noses and thick fingers covered with rings. She cried with relief when told that Hitler would not allow these evil men to hurt her anymore.
Girls in the Hitler Youth kept busy knitting socks and mittens for the soldiers at the front. Then in 1943 bombing raids struck Salzburg, and Helene's squadron was trained in rescue work. Salzburg's ancient cathedral was gutted; the house where Mozart grew up, destroyed. Digging in the rubble for survivors after each raid, Helene developed a new hatred: Americans.
It was their planes that were killing helpless people, destroying all that was beautiful. Austria was winning the war, of course; Hitler said so. It was frustration that made the Americans so destructive.
The raids only increased Helene's commitment. She was attending high school in Salzburg now. When the train tracks were bombed, she proudly walked the nine miles each way.
In 1945, with American land forces drawing near, Helene was trained to handle a bazooka. To her squadron of teenage girls would fall the honor of helping defend Berchtesgaden. Helene was eager to die protecting the Fuhrer. Any day now Hitler would unleash his secret weapon that would send the Americans fleeing back across the ocean.
And then. . .suddenly American soldiers were in Salzburg. Like other Austrian women, Helene, her mother and her sister, with Thusnelda's small children, fled to the mountains. For five months they hid out, living in a hut they'd built for mountain-climbing holidays, foraging in the fields for food.
But at last cold weather forced them back to Puch. The occupying American troops did not appear to be the barbarians the women had been led to expect; still, no decent Austrian girl would dream of returning their glances.
Thus for Helene the bleak postwar years began. Hermann and Helmut returned home disabled; all of her cousins, 12 young men, had died at the front. Thusnelda's husband, the violinist, came back shattered by years in a Russian prison Camp. Their daughter, Helene's little niece, died of typhus that winter.
Along with these losses went another. Betrayal by the man Helene had worshiped as a savior. In his speeches Hitler had assured the Austrians right up to the final days that they were winning the war. Now it was clear that he had lied. But. . .could a savior lie?
Helene moved through her late teens in a fog of bewilderment. After high school she trained as a dental technician and got a job at an American military hospital. And here Helene had her second crippling shock. Hitler had lied about the war. Now at the hospital she encountered another lie. Several of the American Army dentists were Jews, the first she had ever met face-to-face. But. . .they were not fat, they wore no rings. They looked and acted, in fact, exactly like everyone else.
These shell holes in a mind and heart once filled with certainties didn't show on the outside, but year by year the inner emptiness grew. Helene struggled to fill it in all kinds of ways: in business success as she turned to marketing dental supplies, in music, and in skating and skiing.
Above all, in mountain climbing. Here alone, for a few hours, she could believe that life had meaning. On these rocky heights she could feel herself in contact with something nonmaterial. Spiritual. Helene's family had not been churchgoers, but the presence she felt was somehow sublime. Transcendent. And yet tender too, intimate, caring, like the love she'd felt from her father, long ago, on these same peaks.
She couldn't maintain it, this strange communion of the heights. She would descend into the valley - into the shame and horror that for 25 years made up her inner life. For Helene had seen photographs of the Nazi extermination camps. Many of her countrymen refused to believe they were genuine. Helene's brother-in-law explained that the camps had been created as propaganda by the occupation forces. Though it meant the end of his career as a violinst, he refused to renounce his Nazi ties. He died in 1968 believing to the end that the murder of six million innocent men, women and children had never happened.
But it had happened. Hideous as the truth was, Helene preferred it to the lies she had been raised on. Truth, it seemed to her, however hard, must be the thing that at last she could truly trust.
And then came the day that changed her whole life. Helene went to a business seminar in Germany in 1974. The speaker seemed so much different from anyone she had heard before. Afterward she spoke to the man and asked if he could help her with her problems. He told Helene that he was a devoted Christian and that Jesus was the only answer, saying, "Jesus is the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
Helene listened wistfully as he described the love of God as an unmerited gift: "We can do nothing to earn it." That, certainly, was true. No success in business or sports had freed her from the self-hatred that had blighted all her adult life.
"Is He real, this Savior?" she asked. Once before, she'd put her faith in a savior. "I have to know if He is real."
The speaker smiled. "Ask Him." And so she did, that night, alone in her room. "Jesus," she said, "I never again want to believe what is not true. If You are real, please show me."
She recognized Him at once. He was with her in the room, the Presence she had known so often on the mountaintop. So real that the rest of her life till that moment seemed only make-believe. So real she knew He would not let her go until He had made her whole.
Read Helene's Story, Part 2
Helene's Story by Elizabeth Sherrill is copyright 1990 by Guideposts, Carmel, New York 10512. All rights reserved.
If you would like to reproduce this story, contact Guideposts, ATTN: Rights & Permissions Department, 16 E. 34th St., 12th floor, New York, NY 10016, Permissions Editor@guideposts.org.
For more true stories of hope and inspiration, visit www.guideposts.org.
On the far side of the table sat a white-bearded man in a fringed prayer shawl. When the rest of us had taken seats, he began to speak - in American-accented English - relating this Passover Seder to the Last Supper of Jesus.
At his side an Austrian woman, nearer 60 than 50, translated his talk into German. Afterward, over coffee and pastry (which had been waiting after all in the kitchen), John and I introduced ourselves to the speaker as fellow Americans. He told us that all of his forefathers had been synagogue workers, and most of his family had perished here under the Nazis. It was to prevent future tragedies like the Holocaust that he and Helene, his translator, were doing these teaching programs.
I looked around at the clusters of young men and women, discussing what was clearly their first exposure to the Jewish faith. In the entire room only the four of us were old enough to remember the Nazi era. "You were here then, in 1938," I said to Helene, "when Hitler marched into Salzburg."
"I saw it!" She and her mother, she said, had taken a train to the city to join the thousands cheering Hitler's motorcade. "That's why I believe so in what we're doing tonight. "Germany, she said, had in some measure faced up to its history. "Not Austria. Here we still like to believe we were victims of the Nazis, not partners."
"We all do that," I said. "Nations, individuals - we try to gloss over the past."
"But if we don't bring our past to God, all of it," said Helene, "how can He heal us? I was a Nazi, you see. I believed in Hitler with all my heart. How could I have made a new beginning if I denied that?"
John and I exchanged looks of astonishment. For over 40 years, in repeated visits to both Germany and Austria, we had never before met a person who'd admit to being a former Nazi. So many questions did we have that we canceled our travel plans, to remain in Austria. How had it been possible for millions of ordinary, decent people to be deceived by Hitler? Here is Helene Obermayer's story.
The groundwork for the Nazi horror was laid, Helene said, with the collapse of Austria's economy after the First World War. Born in 1930, the youngest of four children, Helene couldn't remember when her family had been the sole occupants of the house in Puch, nine miles from Salzburg; by the 1930s the six Obermayers lived in a few rooms on the second floor, and the local police department occupied the ground floor. Helene's first memory was of beggars at the door. At least Helene's parents, both schoolteachers, had jobs when a quarter of the population was out of work.
Then when Helene was five, a speeding car struck her father as he pedaled his bicycle home from school. Helene's father was a mountain climber; with his tremendous heart and lungs it took him four agonizing weeks to die.
Her mother's salary barely put food on the table. The eldest child, Thusnelda, took a job as a store clerk, but rising prices gobbled up the few schillings she earned. Hermann, the next oldest, graduated from high school in 1935, a few months after his father's death. Like most young Austrian men, however, he could find no work.
Meanwhile, just over the border in Germany, the economy was booming through the efforts of a leader named Adolf Hitler. For decades people had been saying that the two German-speaking nations should be united: Why not now under this energetic man who was an Austrian himself?
The Austrian government, fearing overthrow, outlawed Hitler's Nazi party, but many Austrians, including Hermann, joined in secret. One night in 1936 Hermann had news.
Six-year-old Helene had got a fire going in the old wood-burning stove so that her mother could put on their meal of cabbage and potatoes when she got home from school. Hermann could hardly wait until the plates were served; one of his friends had been to Berchtesgaden, only a few miles away in Germany. "There are jobs there, Mama! And they pay in good German marks!"
"But the border guard?" his mother objected. Austrian troops patrolled the frontier.
Hermann shrugged. "I'll go over the mountain."
Helene nodded. Most mealtime conversation was over her head, but she did know about mountains. Before her father died, the family spent each weekend climbing. Her happiest memories were of sitting astride a pair of broad shoulders high above the clouds.
Enthusiastically Hermann described the fortified headquarters Hitler was building above Berchtesgaden. Hitler. . . That was another memory of her father - how he would stand a little taller when he spoke of this new leader of the German-speaking people. "Hard work and self-discipline," he would quote the Fuhrer, "will make us great again."
From then on the family saw Hermann only occasionally, always at night, and always bringing money. The police on the first floor of the building soon noticed his absence - and the fact that Mrs. Obermayer occasionally stopped now at the butcher shop. "Where is he?" they kept asking. "The moment he returns, he must report to us."
In 1937 Thusnelda set her wedding date. Her fiance was a well-known violinist, and the family was delighted - except for fears for Hermann. Though the younger boy, Helmut, was now 15, Hermann would regard it as his solemn duty as the elder son to take his father's place at the ceremony. But the police, of course, knew this too.
An hour before the wedding Hermann slipped through the back door. The police were waiting for him. They arrested not only him, but Helmut too, on suspicion that they were members of the illegal Nazi cell. Mrs. Obermayer went downstairs to plead with the police. "Let the boys come with us to church. I give you my word they will return here."
So Hermann led Thusnelda down the aisle. Afterward, true to their mother's promise, Hermann and Helmut reported to the police. Upstairs, guests had assembled for the reception. Helene was passing a tray of cakes when the beatings began. From the room below came a thud, then a scream. Another blow, another scream. The wedding party stood frozen, no one speaking. The sickening sounds went on all afternoon. Late that night the boys were released, bruised and bleeding, but the rubber hoses had not drawn from them a single name of their Nazi comrades.
Next day Helene dipped the tail of her black-and-white terrier in a can of red paint, making him too a hero in the Nazis' red, white and black. From its hiding place among her hair ribbons she took out Hitler's picture and dreamed that, like her brothers, she would have a chance to suffer for him.
Then in March 1938 the Nazis marched into Austria. Her mother took Helene into Salzburg so that the eight-year-old could some day describe the great moment to her children. With thousands of others they stood on the Schwarzstrasse, waving small red paper flags bearing the black swastika in a white circle. As the motorcade drove slowly past the Mozarteum, Helene shouted herself hoarse. But when last of all, in a long open car, came Hitler himself, she was too overcome with love to make a sound.
As the Fuhrer had promised, there was soon work for all. Hitler's enemies attacked - he said that would happen too - and Hermann and Helmut rushed to join the army. Helene had to wait till she was 10 to don the black skirt and brown jacket of the Hitler Youth, her blond braids swinging as she marched.
It was at these youth meetings that Helene heard the Nazi claim that Austria's past miseries had been due to "the wickedness of Jews." To Helene especially this seemed plausible. Hadn't it been a Jew who killed her father? Rage blazed inside her as the leader explained that Jews were rich because they were thieves. That was why her father had had only a bicycle to ride, while Jews could go speeding about in cars.
Hatred for these people grew as strong as her love for Hitler. Helene did not know that she had ever actually seen a Jew, but she knew from the Hitler Youth posters what they looked like: fat, with greedy eyes, enormous noses and thick fingers covered with rings. She cried with relief when told that Hitler would not allow these evil men to hurt her anymore.
Girls in the Hitler Youth kept busy knitting socks and mittens for the soldiers at the front. Then in 1943 bombing raids struck Salzburg, and Helene's squadron was trained in rescue work. Salzburg's ancient cathedral was gutted; the house where Mozart grew up, destroyed. Digging in the rubble for survivors after each raid, Helene developed a new hatred: Americans.
It was their planes that were killing helpless people, destroying all that was beautiful. Austria was winning the war, of course; Hitler said so. It was frustration that made the Americans so destructive.
The raids only increased Helene's commitment. She was attending high school in Salzburg now. When the train tracks were bombed, she proudly walked the nine miles each way.
In 1945, with American land forces drawing near, Helene was trained to handle a bazooka. To her squadron of teenage girls would fall the honor of helping defend Berchtesgaden. Helene was eager to die protecting the Fuhrer. Any day now Hitler would unleash his secret weapon that would send the Americans fleeing back across the ocean.
And then. . .suddenly American soldiers were in Salzburg. Like other Austrian women, Helene, her mother and her sister, with Thusnelda's small children, fled to the mountains. For five months they hid out, living in a hut they'd built for mountain-climbing holidays, foraging in the fields for food.
But at last cold weather forced them back to Puch. The occupying American troops did not appear to be the barbarians the women had been led to expect; still, no decent Austrian girl would dream of returning their glances.
Thus for Helene the bleak postwar years began. Hermann and Helmut returned home disabled; all of her cousins, 12 young men, had died at the front. Thusnelda's husband, the violinist, came back shattered by years in a Russian prison Camp. Their daughter, Helene's little niece, died of typhus that winter.
Along with these losses went another. Betrayal by the man Helene had worshiped as a savior. In his speeches Hitler had assured the Austrians right up to the final days that they were winning the war. Now it was clear that he had lied. But. . .could a savior lie?
Helene moved through her late teens in a fog of bewilderment. After high school she trained as a dental technician and got a job at an American military hospital. And here Helene had her second crippling shock. Hitler had lied about the war. Now at the hospital she encountered another lie. Several of the American Army dentists were Jews, the first she had ever met face-to-face. But. . .they were not fat, they wore no rings. They looked and acted, in fact, exactly like everyone else.
These shell holes in a mind and heart once filled with certainties didn't show on the outside, but year by year the inner emptiness grew. Helene struggled to fill it in all kinds of ways: in business success as she turned to marketing dental supplies, in music, and in skating and skiing.
Above all, in mountain climbing. Here alone, for a few hours, she could believe that life had meaning. On these rocky heights she could feel herself in contact with something nonmaterial. Spiritual. Helene's family had not been churchgoers, but the presence she felt was somehow sublime. Transcendent. And yet tender too, intimate, caring, like the love she'd felt from her father, long ago, on these same peaks.
She couldn't maintain it, this strange communion of the heights. She would descend into the valley - into the shame and horror that for 25 years made up her inner life. For Helene had seen photographs of the Nazi extermination camps. Many of her countrymen refused to believe they were genuine. Helene's brother-in-law explained that the camps had been created as propaganda by the occupation forces. Though it meant the end of his career as a violinst, he refused to renounce his Nazi ties. He died in 1968 believing to the end that the murder of six million innocent men, women and children had never happened.
But it had happened. Hideous as the truth was, Helene preferred it to the lies she had been raised on. Truth, it seemed to her, however hard, must be the thing that at last she could truly trust.
And then came the day that changed her whole life. Helene went to a business seminar in Germany in 1974. The speaker seemed so much different from anyone she had heard before. Afterward she spoke to the man and asked if he could help her with her problems. He told Helene that he was a devoted Christian and that Jesus was the only answer, saying, "Jesus is the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
Helene listened wistfully as he described the love of God as an unmerited gift: "We can do nothing to earn it." That, certainly, was true. No success in business or sports had freed her from the self-hatred that had blighted all her adult life.
"Is He real, this Savior?" she asked. Once before, she'd put her faith in a savior. "I have to know if He is real."
The speaker smiled. "Ask Him." And so she did, that night, alone in her room. "Jesus," she said, "I never again want to believe what is not true. If You are real, please show me."
She recognized Him at once. He was with her in the room, the Presence she had known so often on the mountaintop. So real that the rest of her life till that moment seemed only make-believe. So real she knew He would not let her go until He had made her whole.
Read Helene's Story, Part 2
Helene's Story by Elizabeth Sherrill is copyright 1990 by Guideposts, Carmel, New York 10512. All rights reserved.
If you would like to reproduce this story, contact Guideposts, ATTN: Rights & Permissions Department, 16 E. 34th St., 12th floor, New York, NY 10016, Permissions Editor@guideposts.org.
For more true stories of hope and inspiration, visit www.guideposts.org.