When the two brothers met, two opinions clashed that could not have been more different. During the war, my parents had helped prisoners of war and foreign workers to survive at the risk of their lives and had also helped German soldiers to desert.
My uncle, however, insisted that he had only done his soldierly duty on the Eastern Front, that the Russians had unjustly condemned him and stolen 15 years of his life. The brothers parted irreconcilably, with resentment in their hearts. My grandmother expelled her son, who had just returned home, because she could not bear his defiance and intransigence.
She died of grief over the loss of her sons less than a year after this unfortunate encounter. Uncle Otto left for western Germany with the entire family shortly before the inner-German border was closed. After that, all family contact broke off. But the last chapter of the family drama had not yet been written.
After an abundant year, we unexpectedly received mail from my cousin’s grandparents, asking for an early visit. This was unusual, because after Uncle Otto’s escape to the West, all contact had broken off. Father and I set out, for something important must have happened. Upon arrival, the old man tearfully told us that his beloved grandson had tragically taken his own life.
The reason was homesickness, the grandfather said. His grandson had fiercely resisted the move to western Germany and did not want to leave his grandparents’ house, school, and friends back home under any circumstances. But all resistance was in vain; in the end, Helmut had to bow to his parents’ will. As a former police officer with Easter experience, my uncle was immediately taken into police service in the FRG.
The family was doing very well, and Helmut had no material worries. Nevertheless, he complained of homesickness in all his letters to his grandparents. He desperately wanted to return to his grandpa and his friends, but this had denied him. Helmut dropped out of school and began an apprenticeship as a merchant.
On an errand, knowing full well that his father was on a business trip, he used a pretext to gain access to his father’s office at police headquarters. Since the officers knew their colleague’s son, they did not suspect anything. In his father’s office, he took his service pistol out of the cabinet and shot himself in the hallway of the headquarters.
Helmut died at the age of 17. His sister had married an American six months before her brother’s suicide and had moved to the States with her husband. We never heard anything about her whereabouts or the fate of her parents again.
In the energy workshop, work was in full swing. The aging power plant was only with difficulty able to meet the growing energy requirements of the constantly expanding plant. Since the boilers were almost always operated at full load at their capacity limit, one of the steam generators had to be taken out of service and given a general overhaul every two to three months.
Why the high-pressure steam generators were called boilers was inexplicable to me. The almost 40-meter-high square shafts made of fireclay and clinker bricks had not the slightest resemblance to a boiler. 𝓣𝓸 𝓑𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓾𝓮𝓭…
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