She said, after a while, that although she agreed their actions were understandable, "it seemed as if the local commander might have taken a little more trouble to differentiate. To disappoint old non-Nazis was hard."
Disappointed or not, she applied for and got a job as a secretary with the American forces. There she met "a very nice Jewish officer" who tried to intervene with his commander to let her family back into its house, but without success. The commander could well have his doubts; back on the streets of Marburg there was nary a Nazi. "It was extremely embarrassing. No one was part of it anymore. It happened very quickly. They suddenly were dressed differently, all uniforms were gone, no insignia at all, and they'd all been 'forced.' [. . .] The turnabout happened so fast, it was a joke. I never saw anything like it."
After several months of semihomelessness, the family was allowed back into its cellar, thanks to the intervention of "a very nice American" who was newly responsible for the house. He also later, secretly, allowed them to sleep in the attic, and finally to use the bathroom, rather than a pail.
Frau Beyme did not say whether the Americans' behavior was influenced in any way by whatever they knew or were learning about the newly freed concentration camp prisoners, or if they had asked her what she knew about the Holocaust.
But I certainly asked her what she knew. The subject came up in our first interview session and in several more over the years, years in which the Beymes offered friendship as well as hospitality. In fact, the friendship was one reason I felt obliged to press her more than I did other women. We were on a du basis, which she had extended; I could hardly let a du off the hook. Another reason for pressing her was that she seemed to have spent a good deal of effort in soul-searching and thinking about the Third Reich and her own place within it. Another reason was that I simply trusted her as at least trying to tell the truth.
That trust was confirmed when we experienced a bit of the aftermath of the Holocaust together. The Beymes had taken me to their vacation home, a two-hundred-fifty-year-old house in Herr Beyme's native village in the Eifel mountains. (At the puffy-cake kind of bakery run by a relative, he whispered, "Not a single ingredient has been ripped from nature.") One day, in typical German custom, we all, along with his cousin and wife, took a long walk in the nearby forest. Along the way, the cousin, a seemingly affable man, deliberately fell in step with Frau Beyme and me. He wanted to tell me about something that happened to him as a soldier in the Second World War, he said. It raised a question he thought an American could answer.
At the end of the war, in southern Germany, he began, American troops captured his unit. The American commander ordered the German soldiers to exhume an enormous pit of bodies, and lay the bodies side by side. (The Americans presumably wanted to count the bodies, try to identify them, and re-inter them.) While we continued to walk, the man continued to talk. Of standing thigh-deep within the pile of corpses. Of pulling at one body and the skin coming off. That was the trouble with moving them, he said. You'd pull on an arm and all you'd have in your hands was the skin. And boy, did it smell. When you went inside to sleep, you had to leave your clothes outside.
Throughout, he volunteered not a word about who the victims might have been, nor how they might have died. Nor did he mention the inhumanity that had led to this pit of horror, nor what it was like for him emotionally to undertake such a grisly task. Granted, I had no idea of his subconscious. But on the surface, he did not seem to be hiding anything. He seemed simply not to feel it. Then he got to his point. His friends laughed him off and didn't believe him when he told them about it, the skin slipping right off the arms like that. Could I find out which American troops had been in charge at the pit, to help him prove it was true?
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