大象传媒

This is a short story about meeting two old men who survived the war, former German soldiers.

When I was about 13 years old or so, I once went out to school in the morning. All of a sudden a stranger talked to me. He said wether I knew where east an west was. I said sure I know, if I use a compass, he said no, without a compass on a cloudy day. I said, no sir, I dunno. So he quickly told me about the story when he left his buddies in Russia in 43, because he knew where west was by looking on the tree-trunks, where the moss was, there was the weather side, so he went into this direction, the others decided to walk to another direction and never came back home.

When I heard what he had to say I thought he was nuts. Nowadays I think he was clever and lucky as well.

Same story, years later. I was working in Berlin a couple of years ago. On the street an old man stopped me, asked for a street name, I said, sorry, I'm not from here. He all of a sudden pulled up a part of his trousers to show me his left leg, or what had remained of it (it was a wooden prothesis). He said, the Tommy (the English) has showed us how it's done (hat uns zur Schnecke gemacht) in the Normandy. We hardly came out of the whole shit. I was attacked by fighter bombers during my journy back home, always bombs, bombs. He wished me a merry X- Mas and went off.

Again, nobody knows wether these guys were victims or also criminals, probably just poor lads with an average faith in these days...

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