Description
Describes sending additional photographs from Parsberg, recounts an encounter with a young German boy who had been a member of the Hitler youth, discusses hopes for a telephone call home during a possible furlough to Switzerland, and continues the counting of “points” that would determine when he might finally be shipped home.
The transatlantic phone call he describes would have been complicated to arrange and extremely expensive. Dad instructed his parents that if the opportunity arose they should place the call using funds from his account. The cost, he noted, would be $14 for three minutes — roughly $250 in today’s dollars.
Only one photograph from this group appears to have survived. It shows a young boy standing in the fields outside Parsberg, with the town visible in the distance behind him. The original caption written on the back of the photograph was later heavily obscured, the handwriting scratched over until it became unreadable.
The photograph is almost certainly of the boy described in the letter: Josel Stanke, who had taken to following Dad wherever he went. Josel had spent four years in the Deutsches Jungvolk, the organization for younger boys, followed by two years in the Hitler Youth, the Nazi regime’s official youth movement. Dad described him as a “confirmed disciple of Nazi-ism,” firmly convinced that Hitler had been a god-like figure and predicting that “twenty years from now the Germans will be occupying America.”
Despite this background, the two formed a friendly bond. After the war Dad remained in contact with Josel and his family. Letters from Josel’s mother describe the hardships faced by many German families in the immediate postwar years. In a letter written in 1946 she wrote that they had lost their house and garden and:
“Former I have given charities and now I must beg and take them.”
She wrote seeking shoes for Josel, and if Dad's mom might have some old dresses she could send.
Nearly a decade later Josel himself wrote again, describing his life since the war. One of his sister's had married and migrated to Australia. The other married and was living in the Russian zone of Germany. Josel himself was working for the American Express Company in Germany and traveling through Europe, showing how much had changed in such a relatively short time since the end of the war.
I also remember Dad telling the story of how he first met Josel. One of the responsibilities of the Army of Occupation was de-Nazification, collecting and destroying Nazi flags, propaganda, and other material. In one town he vividly remembered from the spearhead across Germany, the streets had once been filled with Nazi banners hanging from the tops of buildings and posters everywhere. Yet when American forces arrived post-war, not a trace of them remained.
Frustrated by his inability to speak German, Dad wanted to ask what had happened to all the propaganda. Eventually he encountered a young boy who spoke English, having learned it before the war. The boy proudly led him to a warehouse where all of the Nazi material had been stored. As the boy explained, “We’re just waiting for you to leave.”
Dad later recalled asking the boy whether he believed in God and Jesus Christ. The boy replied simply:
“There is no other god. There is only Hitler.”
In that moment Dad realized that the boy’s certainty about Hitler had been formed in much the same way his own religious beliefs had been formed — through upbringing, teaching, and trust in authority. Each of them believed what they had been raised to believe.
The encounter raised a question that would stay with him for years afterward: how do we know that what we believe is true?
In the years after the war Dad immersed himself in the study of philosophy, history, literature, languages, and religion, at one point even considering entering the priesthood. Over time he came to see religious belief as belonging to a different category from other forms of knowledge — grounded not in proof or evidence, but in faith.
