While her husband departed from his doorstep to his duty, German soldiers, looking "thin and gaunt," arrived from their duty to his doorstep. "They rang the doorbell and said, 'Take us, we need a hideout.' My mother said, 'No, I cannot.' Certainly, some of them were very frightened people who'd gone through terrible things and really hadn't wanted to. It was a hard decision to say no. But. For political reasons, one had to hold firm, to show one was against the war and against the soldiers, even if you felt sorry for the individuals.
"And a cousin of mine came, the black sheep in the family. He was an SS man. A completely dear human being, a completely faithful relative still. Who certainly never did anything bad, but was enthusiastic about this war. He had some gold medal, and was an SS officer. He came to us as he was fleeing. As a human being we liked him very much—helpful and loving and attentive and faithful and we let him stay here one night. Then my mother said, 'As hard as it is, you have to move on. We can't keep you here.' He had to go."
A "completely dear human being"? Without an investigation, neither of us would know how "completely dear" her cousin was.
The war ended.
"We sat there in the cellar of our house. For the first time, there were no more bombs and planes, but artillery. The shooting sounded very close. Then it suddenly stopped. And one heard that the Americans were marching in. Then we heard them. They weren't loud like our Germans, who had hobnailed shoes. The Americans, I think, had rubber soles. But when hundreds marched at once, one heard it. We'd have liked most to run up to them with flowers or something, but we were too scared and didn't do it. You weren't sure of the situation or if you might get shot."
Asked her first impression of the American soldiers, she sighed. "They looked very healthy. Well nourished and healthy and red-cheeked. Well dressed, the uniforms still in one piece and new. From our point of view, they looked fantastic. Ach, to us they looked like gods.
"We were crazy with happiness when the Americans came," she said. "Certainly not everyone was happy. We were, although afterward there was a big disappointment about how they treated us and absolutely did not want to know if one had been for or against. What the Americans did here was quite a disappointment that hit our family pretty hard. Many, many Nazis got away with no problem at all, but us they threw out of our house."
She said that between 1945 and 1957, she and her children and her mother had to move twenty-one times.
The American troops threw not only her family out of the house, but also their possessions, she said. In addition to the antique beer steins, the family china, among other things, landed smashed on the sidewalk, too.
You were the enemy, I said.
"Ja. They broke everything, and threw it all outside. Later, we found only piles of rubbish. There wasn't much left."
But to Frau Beyme, there were two distinct "they"s among the American troops: the fighters and the occupiers. "Those who came in the first few days were fighting troops and they had seen something of the war. But those who came later, from the USA, hadn't seen anything at all. And many of these very young soldiers wanted to experience something, like repeat a little of the war, nicht? Have some adventure. One could understand it, but when you're part of it, it's not so nice. An old man was walking down the street. They kicked him and threw him over a garden fence. And such things.
"We had original watercolors and so forth on the walls, which weren't framed, and they wrote all over them. In the cellar we had bottles of apple juice. When we wanted to get some later, after the Americans had left, they'd drunk it all up and filled the bottles with urine. Or, in our cooking pots was toilet paper, used toilet paper. And such, such dumb things."
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