My grandmother told us a story recently, and while I wasn't smart enough to turn on the voice recorder on my phone, I do want to write it down while it's still fresh in my mind. Some of the details might be misremembered by my grandmother, myself, or both, and some details have been filled in by a bit conjecture, but it is a true story. It is the story of the bunker.
Oma's Bunker
The Itjeshorst family lived on a small family farm outside of Dinslaken, Germany. They lived just next door to the Reinersmann's. These two families comprise my father's half of my family tree: my grandmother was born an Itjeshorst, my grandfather a Reinersmann.
During World War II, Allied pilots would occasionally drop their bombs on small farms outside of major cities, not because the farms were strategic targets of course, but because the extra weight of the bombs wouldn't allow them to reach their home bases. As one former pilot once told my father (not knowing that he had lived on such a farm), they would sometimes take target practice on the small farmhouses. While this practice was rare enough not to be a constant threat, such bombings did sometimes occur on a daily basis on the Itjeshorst and Reinersmann farms. Hence the need for the bunker.
It was a great undertaking. The walls were thick concrete (“Like that!” she says, holding her hands about a foot apart.) and the bunker itself was entirely underground, accessed by a hatch door. Oma remembers her father saying that while it might not have survived a direct hit by a large bomb, its structure was not disturbed by the smaller ones that fell around it.
While the size of the bunker is a matter of great internal debate to my grandmother (the memory is, after all, 66 years old), it was large enough to hold all that sought it. The entire neighborhood would come to the bunker when the air raid sirens sounded, just as they had all come to help in its construction. Oma jokes that if the bunker had collapsed, “the entire neighborhood would have gone down with it!” It was so large that it was even able to hold a British officer.
Captain Blackstock was an officer in the British armed forces, and a friend of Oma's father. She tells the story of a time when her father went to meet Captain Blackstock at his office (presumably in Dinslaken) for a hunting trip. My great-grandfather showed up to the office wearing his simple farmer's clothing, and received a rude and abrupt greeting from the British officer that answered the door, who was quite confused (and presumably embarrassed) by Captain Blackstock's warm “Itjeshorst!” a few moments later.
(This story was mirrored decades later when my father, Richard, wearing his electrician's work clothes, popped in on Mr. Smith of Smith-Barney, with whom he had been close as a child. The secretarial staff had a similar attitude, and similar surprising revelation, when Mr. Smith embraced my father.)
To preempt the question: no, I do not know what a British officer was doing in Western Germany in the early 1940s. I do know that he was warmly welcomed into the neighborhood bunker during air raids, and that my grandmother grew up with a picture of Captain Blackstock in the window above their kitchen sink, and probably heard his stories a hundred times in the years following the war. Captain Blackstock's story reminds me of the stupidity of war, and the greater power of human connection.
The last time Oma saw it, the bunker was about half full of water, an almost forgotten relic of an awful time. She and her second husband, Russ, went to see it during their trip to Germany in the early 1980s. The house is gone, sold to the city when the families emigrated to the United States, but that bunker will likely be there for a long, long time. For me, so will the memory of Oma telling its story.
