America at 250, in the eyes of a prisoner and an immigrant

Later with my own family in Philadelphia, a country getaway could be out Skippack Pike and westward; or northerly, along the Delaware River, as far as time allowed. Or we might strike across that river into the belly of South Jersey and make a run for it, not stopping until the brute fact of the Atlantic Ocean, where we’d eat shellfish and pasta and glide home listening to yacht rock, into the sun as it set over America. For it is America we’re discovering.

All the way up Route 611

Once, with our then-only child, my wife Jackie and I pressed due north to an outdoor concert for which Jackie had been hired to sing with a German wind band on its US tour. They would play light classics and popular music, and Jackie would join them in hits from the world of operetta.

It was far, but easy to find. Start at the Delaware itself, at the beginning of Broad Street if you like, the Navy Yard. Take Route 611 (for such Broad Street is), and simply never leave it. Head to Elkins Park, stay the course past Willow Grove and Doylestown, through Plumsteadville and Riegelsville, past Allentown and fields and farms and on through Easton and up, still going until a mile or so before reacquiring the Delaware just below its Water Gap, at Mount Bethel. We parked on the grass, and walked to the stage in the pavilion.

The band played with warmth and good nature. Plastic cups and pitchers of beer stood ready on stage next to the chairs of not a few of the instrumentalists. Our five-year-old daughter spun and hopped to the music with a German lad. Jackie sang “Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiss” and “Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume” as the conductor beamed. (Our friend Nikolaus from Vienna had once told Jackie, wiping his eyes, “You sing like you were born in Austria.”)

In 1943

After the concert we stood in line for burgers and carried our trays to long tables. Across from a saxophonist and his wife, the bench was empty; they waved us in. His hair was brilliant, audaciously white, generous waves piled up in the mid-century German way of baritones and statesmen. Neither he nor his wife spoke English, so we engaged them in halting German. I asked if they had ever been to America before.

The man nodded. “Ja, das war ich.”

I asked when that was. He turned to his wife, as if to ask permission. She was now the one who nodded. He turned back to me, lowering his eyes straight to mine, and said quickly, “Neunzehnhundert drei und vierzig.”

A beat passed while the number registered and I considered whether I had mis-heard. I repeated slowly, “Drei und vierzig?”

He smiled broadly and chuckled. Yes, 1943. His first visit to the States was as a German prisoner of war.

From what knowledge of the war I lugged around, I asked in a lowered voice—drawing a blank on the word for “captured”—if it was North Africa.

“Ja, ja, stimmt, Nordafrika.” He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.

New Jersey against the Nazis

They were held at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he said. The Americans asked if any were musicians. He said yes; he had played clarinet in school. Could he play the saxophone? He lied and said yes. So they gave him one, a tenor. He learned it quickly, and found himself in a band playing for the USO club in Trenton—German prisoners playing American swing for US soldiers on leave.

Women brought them pies: homemade pies, peach and apple pies, he was specific about the pies. I’ve since read that government officials had at first discouraged civilian fraternization, but then relented when examining the letters the prisoners wrote home (yes, POWs were allowed to write letters). Goebbels lectured German civilians on how evil America was, but he hadn’t figured on Jersey women. Nazi propaganda was beaten back by American apple pie.

When the war ended, the saxophonist said, none of the prisoners wanted to go back. His wife nodded.

Escape from Berlin

Another excursion through the woods, not so far as Mount Bethel, takes me to another German visitor, but one who stayed. Fred was also a prisoner, of East Germany, escaping to America in 1952.

He was a boy during the war but saw enough of it from his home, a small farm in Saxony. A fighter plane came up while he was in the potato field; he dove into a ditch. The plane ignored him but his mother didn’t, scolding him for his carelessness. He saw a blackened, smoldering military car on a road, strafed, entombing two dead soldiers. He heard nearby Zwickau explode from bombs, and he saw the waves of planes that melted Dresden.

Fred escaped through Berlin when the Soviets began to seal the border in 1951. The subway still ran under the city but guards patrolled it. He bought a round-trip ticket (one-way tickets to the West were forbidden), stepped off the train in West Berlin, and kept walking. No one stopped him. He mailed a postcard to his aunt and uncle living in Philadelphia, walked to the American embassy, and declared himself. His relatives put his immigration in motion, and a year later he arrived in America.

“There is no country in the world like America”

He had studied horticulture in Germany but at his uncle’s business he swept floors. Then he started keeping the books, then he handled all the finances. He married, raised a family, retired, became a widower, and all that time expanded his gardens. He is 94 and still works them, digging and planting and weeding in his bare feet.

He visits his homeland every year. It took decades and money from the West, he says, money from America, to rebuild Dresden’s central square. “They numbered all the stones from the demolished buildings so that they could be assembled later,” he said. But in East Germany “later” never came. “The Platz was covered in numbered stones, lined up for years. But the Berlin Wall had to come down for Dresden to be rebuilt. Communists are good catalogers, but they are not good builders.”

East Germans couldn’t fix their houses because they couldn’t get paint. Or if there was paint there were no paint brushes, or lumber, or bricks, or cement, or nails. So on weekends, Fred’s brother, a truck driver, bribed shopkeepers and guards with booze and delivered building materials all over Saxony. The black market was the only way anything ever got done.

“Communists, socialists, fascists, they’re the same,” says Fred. “They tell you what crops to plant and when, tell you where you can’t go, tell you what you can’t say. Here, if you work hard, you can do anything you want. Americans don’t know how lucky they are. There is no country in the world like America.”

His biggest garden, visible from the street, is a quarter-acre of extravagance: canna lily, Solomon’s seal, and Sweet William; dahlia, zinnia, and chrysanthemum; types and heights and shapes and colors arrayed in rows and quadrants, hemmed with a begonia border, anchored at one corner by a stately magnolia.

In an American garden

A few years ago a car pulled up while he was in the garden. A man, a woman, and a younger woman got out. They’d been admiring his garden and had a question. Their daughter (the young woman) was getting married; could they take pictures in his garden after the wedding service? They had immigrated from South Korea, and in that country or this, his garden was the most beautiful they had ever seen.

Of course they could take pictures, he said. On the wedding day they arrived just as it began to drizzle.

On a country ramble past fields and through woods to Fred’s house one day, he showed us the pictures—the daughter, the husband, the wedding party, his flowers. In one photo Fred stands with them in his gardening attire of shorts and polo shirt. Everyone is smiling, the former South Koreans, the former East German, standing in an American garden in the soft rain.

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