Luis H. Zayas
A Soldier’s Son in Munich, 1960-1963
Every morning and afternoon for three years, the school bus carried us through the heart of Munich, its grey cobblestones still slick with dawn or glowing faintly in winter’s afternoon light. I watched people walking to work, cyclists weaving through traffic, trolleys filled with people, the city moving with a quiet, earnest rhythm. Time has softened memories of those years, but to an impressionable eleven‑year‑old son of an American soldier in 1960, Munich felt like the entrance to another world where fairytale castles hid in the nearby Black Forest of Bavaria. And it was the place where I was reminded of war every day. I didn’t know it then, but years later I came to realize how that place and time had left lasting memories that would define who I became.
My father was an American infantry sergeant stationed in Warner Kaserne (barracks), an imposing U.S. Army base in Munich whose grand, stone structures had once housed Hitler’s SS troops. With the imagination of a soldier’s son, I could hear Nazi boots striking the parade field, voices drifting across the cobblestone walkways. In one corner of Warner Kaserne was a theater where we could catch a movie with cartoons and newsreels for only pennies. One Saturday afternoon, I went to see Elvis Presley in GI Blues with just enough money for the movie and some popcorn and candy. Sitting in one of the front rows with my buddies, we were part of a noisy, frenetic scrum of Army brats and young soldiers barely older than our teenage sisters. We watched Elvis with the giddiness of knowing that just a year or so earlier he had been stationed in nearby Augsburg. As Elvis is dogged in the movie by a tough drill sergeant, a young soldier directly behind me said, “Hey, that’s just like Sgt. Zayas.” His GI chums laughed in agreement. Of all the seats in the theater, this hapless GI had chosen the one behind us. I turned to him and, in faux seriousness to keep the same light humor of his expression, said “Hey, that’s my dad you’re talking about!” Surprised, he said in a feigned conspiratorial tone, “Sorry, kid. Don’t tell your dad.” We all had a good laugh.
My laugh, I knew, was not genuine, even if it fooled them. I knew what Elvis and the GI were going through. At home, I had gotten some of the drill-sergeant toughness, and it scared me. In those moments, I wondered why he treated me like that. I just didn’t know. When I would see him marching in parades with his soldiers or running with them in cadence, my father singing the first line and the soldiers answering, keeping their speed and moving at the same pace, I felt proud. But the same discipline that I admired in him could quickly turn at me at home. It never felt justified. Like most kids, I felt like I hadn’t done anything wrong, though my parents would have disagreed with me. I didn’t fear that he would hit or mistreatment me physically, that was not in his nature. His strong, stern voice carried the authoritativeness he needed to train his men, to prepare them for combat. But he was applying it to the oldest of two sons. Throughout my childhood, the Army had taken him from me for prolonged periods of time, for maneuvers and other combat training. I didn’t resent his absences because I didn’t know or have a name for that emotion. That came much later in my life. What I felt was loneliness for a father who wouldn’t be away for long spells. I wanted more of his time. Yet, when he was present, his blunt military manner scared me, and I hated him in those moments. My mother was my protector. She quickly reminded him that our home was not his barracks, and that his son was not his soldier. I knew I could always count on her, but it didn’t take away the dread that it would happen again.
For the children of soldiers, life in Munich was framed by school, homework, and Little League baseball. It was nights at the American Youth Activities club with “Sherry” by the Four Seasons playing endlessly. It was Thanksgiving dinners with other military families, fathers in formal uniforms, mothers in stockings, and kids in their Sunday best. It was the warmth of serving midnight Mass at Christmas in my cassock and starched surplice, my father and family in the pews, the smell of frankincense filling the church, and the feel of the crisp air of Bavarian winters on my nostrils. Buried somewhere among those years was my first kiss with an older blonde German girl, a maid in an officer’s home nearby. Her kiss tasted of cigarettes—an unexpected moment that made me feel grown up. Wherever military families gathered, the men talked sports. In those years, it was about the Yankees’ march to two consecutive World Series titles and the Pirates’ awful debacle after taking the series from the Yankees in ’60. We boys gathered at their feet to listen. The men’s conversations always turned to shop talk, the military and war.
On a Saturday afternoon in December, about a month after the movie, my mother answered a call from my father, and I could hear alarm in her voice. After hanging up, she told me that a plane had gone down in the center of the city, and my father’s company had been sent to the crash site. A U.S. Air Force plane had hit the steeple of St. Paul’s Church in downtown Munich just after take-off, killing twenty soldiers on board and thirty-two people in a streetcar near the Oktoberfest site where our family had enjoyed its first German festival a couple months earlier. I don’t recall what time my father returned home that night, but I heard him tell my mother in a whispered tone about the scattered wreckage, bodies and body parts strewn over a large area, and the sight of a dead sergeant, an American of the same rank as my father, with part of his torso missing. Was that sergeant a reminder of himself? Why did that detail stick with me more than others? Could that sergeant have been my father? A military plane crash with soldiers aboard added to my sense that in Munich, war was never far away. The daily bus ride to school, and our family trips to the PX or commissary, or on sightseeing jaunts, had already taught me that much.
Munich was the birthplace of the Nazi party, I learned, and was the target of dozens of air raids by Allied forces, destroying half the city. We saw the remnants of war every morning as our bus passed bombed‑out buildings surrounded by chain‑link fences and signs that read Lebensgefahr! (danger to life) and Betreten verboten! (entry forbidden). One building that caught my fascination on the school route was little more than a hollowed‑out carcass, its walls crumbled, its windows holding only slivers of glass, a victim of those Allied raids. I would lean close to the bus window, squinting to see the pockmarks and gouges left by bullets and shrapnel. That building, unlike any other, stood frozen in time and in my mind. It was a constant reminder of what happens in war.
Our school was a converted warehouse of three or four stories of brick and thick concrete. The word Lagerhaus was carved in stone above its entrance, followed by a number I can no longer remember. Classrooms were interrupted by massive support columns that forced us to shift our desks to see the blackboard and follow the teacher’s lectures. There was no cafeteria, so we ate lunch in our classrooms. We clustered together naturally by gender—boys with boys, girls with girls. We exchanged true stories of German and American kids finding grenades, pistols, and other weapons in tunnels or hollows left behind by the Nazis. The stories included episodes of children picking up the old munitions, losing limbs and sometimes their lives. Whether those parts of the stories were true hardly mattered. In a place where war’s destruction stood in plain sight, the embellishments felt entirely possible.
Among our mix of white, Black, Filipino, and Hispanic Army kids were two German brothers, blonde and larger than most of us, whose father worked for Radio Free Europe, a credential that gave them entry into the American schools. They dressed like Germans, in unfashionably baggy, wool pants, shirts buttoned to their necks, and heavy shoes—very different from the stylish fashions American kids wore. The brothers spoke flawless English, and kept mostly to themselves, always attentive to the teacher. During free time, they sketched cartoons. The rest of us looked over their shoulders as they drew characters of precociously superior quality, like those we saw in Li’l Abner. The facial expressions and the motion of the characters running or jumping came to life on the pages.
For weeks, we gathered around the German brothers, studying their hands as they worked, trying to imitate the effortlessness of their drawings. The brothers generously showed us how to draw. We probably all improved our drawing skills, but not to their level. No matter how hard we tried, we could not match their talents, but we kept drawing anyway. Our drawings, however, took a different direction from the German brothers’ cartoons. We drew war.
Our drawings began the same way: one or two Alpine mountains rising steeply on the page. We bisected them so you could peer inside, like looking into an ant farm between glass panes. Within these mountains, we drew tunnels, chambers, ramps, hidden rooms, and passageways, where Nazi vehicles hauled fierce weapons, moving closer to the surface of the mountains. The drawings became elaborate worlds of underground drawbridges, pulley-operated gates that opened onto winding mountain roads that led to combat. Nazi machine guns stuck out from pillboxes, fighting off the attacking American forces. American soldiers always won the battles in our drawings, though some of their tanks and trucks were destroyed. We didn’t draw dead Americans, only Germans. Army kids knew that soldiers died in war. Just not our dads.
*
Church and family outings to the surrounding towns of Munich were no less memorable to my young mind. Each trip seemed to open another door to the war’s lingering presence. On a trip of altar boys and priests to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, we heard that it had once been the headquarters of Hitler’s elite Mountain Troops. On a family visit to Berchtesgaden near Austria, we learned that Hitler’s mountain residence and Nazi Imperial Chancellery had once stood nearby. There was an especially memorable Sunday trip with our family to Dachau, the concentration camp, just twenty-two miles from our home. A survivor-organized exhibition had opened in the crematorium and the area known as the “Grave of Many Thousands Unknown.” We toured the crematorium and the barracks. The grainy black and white pictures of emaciated Jews—their eyes hollow, their bodies nearly transparent against the gray background—were displayed beside uniforms stained by blood, sweat, dirt, and urine, preserved behind glass. Fifteen years hadn’t cleared the smells of the uniforms, barracks, and crematoria. Or so it seemed to me. Whether I smelled anything or simply imagined it, I cannot say now. It hardly matters. For an eleven-year-old, Dachau felt less like history than a dread that still lingered in the air. It felt close and alive.
The lessons of war, Dachau, and Munich’s devastation were made more intimate, more human, by the woman we called a gypsy, a Romani woman who visited our second-floor apartment on Rockefeller Strasse to sell scarves and sweaters. My mother always welcomed her warmly. One afternoon, I sat with them as they bargained. I don’t recall how they communicated—her English was as limited as my Spanish-speaking mother’s—but they looked closely at the stitching and sizes, and somehow transacted business. That day, their conversation shifted. I watched the woman’s face tighten. She began speaking quickly, intensely, words my mother and I couldn’t fully understand, but whose meaning we felt immediately in her expression and her voice. She lifted her sleeve to reveal a tattoo on her arm, bluish-purple ink sagging with her skin, a number marking her as a concentration camp victim. My eyes took in the moment, the tattoo. I wanted to know about the number, about her family, about how close she came to extermination. Shy by nature, I stayed quiet, although I wanted to know everything about her experience. I did not ask. Besides, my mother would have shut it down instantly with a “stay out of adult conversations” glance. The Romani woman had stories richer than the stories the buildings of Munich or the smells of Dachau told.
*
Life in Munich was always marked by the war—by its ruins, its whispers, its ghosts. But in the autumn of 1962, war shifted from something shadowy to something distinct, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tension had been mounting. We heard it on the radio and saw it in our parents as they prepared for a possible war. It was a frantic swirl of activity that was hard to keep up with, especially since the adults were trying to shield us from the worst possibilities. When other soldiers and their wives met at our apartment, we were sent to our rooms. They spoke in hushed voices about the latest developments and the uncertain plans that were unfolding. Even as they tried to speak quietly, some of their words filtered down the hallway, words like evacuation, blockade, missiles, and fighting Russians at the Czechoslovakian border. At school, our civilian American teachers looked strained. They, too, would have to flee Germany at a moment’s notice. Kids were not supposed to know too much. But secrecy only sharpened our senses.
On at least one night, maybe more, my mother left after dinner to attend meetings on how to evacuate with her children if war erupted. Only years later did we learn what she had been told—that she was to drive us to a location outside Munich, a secluded airfield or a small-town train station. From there, we would be hustled out of Germany and back to the States. I knew there was planning, but I didn’t know the plan. I knew there was a crisis, but I didn’t know its magnitude. My parents didn’t hide it from us, and they calmed us with promises that we would stay together no matter what happened.
One shared fact that made the rounds at school was that our families had to keep suitcases packed and ready for evacuation. Ours were placed in a closet by the front door, just steps from my bedroom. In that closet, beside our mismatched collection of suitcases were several boxes of C‑rations—drab-olive cans marked “Property of the U.S. Army.” C-rations were the food we would carry with us as we retreated from Germany. They were not a novel thing to us. We had tasted C-rations before, leftovers from the barracks. We had learned to open them with the small folding can openers that came with the ration boxes. Even though the cans’ contents were labeled, we anticipated what was inside. Would it taste good? Would we like it? The jackpot came if among the leftover c-rations we found a can labeled “chocolate” or we found something sweet. The rations lined up in our closet did not hold the same allure. The crisis we were living took away the anticipation. The dark olive cans matched the color of my father’s combat fatigues.
War was no longer a story, a tattoo, a museum, a ruin, or a drawing. It was real. It was an escape plan that only my mother knew. It was the boxes of rations stacked beside suitcases. For nearly two weeks, I fell asleep waiting for the moment my parents would wake me and tell me to dress quickly, grab a suitcase, and help load the rations into the car. I imagined us driving through the night, slipping through darkened German streets toward that secret airfield or train station the Army had chosen for us.
And in those quiet, fitful hours before sleep, I thought of my father, the soldier. I knew he would not be coming with us. My mother and their six kids would head toward safety. My father toward war. I was immensely proud of him, that he would fight the enemy as he had sworn to do. And I was equally frightened that I might lose him, that he might never come back. I had felt loneliness when he was called away to short deployments. This one was far scarier, since he might not return from it.
Those two weeks passed, and there was no war. Slowly, cautiously, life returned to its familiar rhythm. From the school bus window, I went back to seeing cyclists peddling to work, scanning the streets for pretty girls, watching merchants opening stores and cafes, and seeing German children going to school. The sounds of trolley bells and morning commuters were reassuring. The world seemed to have righted itself and the dread of war that I felt ebbed.
A few months later, my father received orders to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey. His orders were our orders. That was the contract of military life: fathers served and families followed, packing up our lives with the efficiency of soldiers accustomed to impermanence. We shipped out of Munich in the late summer of 1963. Looking back, I understand that the mountains we drew were a child’s attempt to make sense of a world that often seemed both beautiful and wounded. The ruins, drawings, Dachau, the tattooed number, packed suitcases and c-rations, and the possibility of war settled deep within me, though I didn’t fully understand what they meant.
Perhaps I still don’t know exactly how those years shaped the man I would become. What I know is that Munich taught me that history is never as distant as we imagine. Some experiences continue shaping us long after we leave them behind.
“I grew up the son of an Army sergeant and the military years influenced me deeply. Though I never served in the military myself, I learned of the sacrifices, adventures, attachments, and losses of soldiers and their children. I lived through them. As a developmental psychologist, I know that the pre-teen and early teen years include the awakening of so many thoughts and feelings. Coming of age memoirs reflect what this period in life does to us, and in this brief memoir, I write about my awakening while living in Munich from the age of 11 to 13. Memories from those years have always stayed with me and, I’m sure, shaped me to be who I am today. As I approach the remaining years of my life, I wanted to share these memories with others who may have had similar experiences and those interested in hearing what it was like in the decade following World War II.” —Luis H. Zayas
Luis H. Zayas grew up on military bases from the age of 5 to 16, from Puerto Rico to Virginia, Massachusetts, Germany, and New Jersey. He attended Manhattan College in New York City and went on to complete doctoral work at Columbia University. He was both a clinician and researcher in developmental psychology, always fascinated by how people grow and change across the lifespan. Zayas is a professor of social work, psychiatry, and psychology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Fordham University, Columbia University, and the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Austin, surrounded by his loving family.
