Anna never liked to show her knees in public. She said they were ugly. Many decades after it happened, she still grew uncomfortable talking about it. She tried to cover her knees with her hands even though she was wearing pants. She never wore a dress or shorts — nothing that would reveal the black stain.
With a distant look in her eyes, on a day many years ago, she told me the story of her childhood.
That story changed my life.
Anna Münnich was my host mother. When I was 16 years old and a junior in high school, I packed my bags and said goodbye to my family and home. I spent one year as a foreign exchange student in Germany with a new family, the Münnichs. I lived in Stade, just outside Hamburg in northern Germany. I went to school, learned German, rode a bicycle everywhere and experienced the world.
It was the most exciting time of my life and a tumultuous time for Germans. In 1989, a year before I left for my temporary home in Germany, the Berlin Wall had come down. It was built in 1961 by the Soviet Union to divide the city and stop East Germans from fleeing to the West.
The wall tore families and neighbors apart, and people caught climbing or getting near the barrier were shot and killed. Life for Germans after World War II was difficult. The county paid war reparations while Germans attempted the impossible task of asking forgiveness for Nazism and Hitler’s genocidal Third Reich.
Living under the weight of the impossible, many Germans found hope in the lessons learned. I understood the history and background of the country, and it helped me visualize Anna’s story as she spoke.
Anna was just a little girl in 1946 — the year after the war’s end — small and quick with the heart of a lion.
She remembered that food, coal, and anything else people needed was shipped to the west and the east in massive trains as part of war reparations. Everything imaginable going in every direction but leaving almost everyone in Germany without supplies and staples.
Families would send boys to the ditches to fish for anything they could catch. If by some miracle they caught even a minnow, they would bring it home. Dinner, sadly, usually involved running your bread over the fish to get just the essence of its flavor. A hint of protein on rationed bread.
As for warmth, Anna explained to me, the smallest and stealthiest were recruited to provide for their families. Whenever a train loaded with coal and bound for some other place so much as slowed down, little German girls were heaved up and thrown on top.
They would throw down as much coal as their little hands could grab. For a split second, but what felt like an eternity, Anna said, you flailed and pushed and shoved as much coal as you could to the people down below. You knew you only had seconds before getting caught, or worse, that the train would roll on before you had a chance to jump off, she said.
So you moved as quickly as you could and your knees bled, Anna said. The coal made its way into your skin, and it stayed there forever. The coal is what turned Anna’s knees black, like an unwanted tattoo. Perhaps it would be more romantic to say a lady never reveals her knees. But the reality is, she said, her knees were ugly from the pain and misery of war.
In October 1990, Anna paid for my bus ticket to Berlin. There was going to be a reunification celebration in the capital city. For almost 30 years, Germans had been divided symbolically and physically by the wall. The physical devision would now end.
Anna wanted me to witness history. She wanted me to remember that freedom is fought for and, above all, that freedom is gained when we give freedom to others.
On the third of October, I took a small hammer to the Berlin Wall and chipped away a piece of cement.
Anna shared more of her story, reminding me of the young lady, Magda, I’d met the previous week. Anna said Magda wasn’t just her friend. She was an asylum seeker from Poland, then still part of the Soviet Union’s Communist Bloc.
Magda, the woman’s name, wanted to escape Poland and seek political asylum, Anna said. Anna, her family and I had helped Magda however we could.
I realized as I heard these stories that Anna had spent much of her time and energy helping to bring freedom to as many people as she could. And she was still doing it, working to give opportunities to others. Perhaps it was a way to fix the unfixable.
When Anna rose form her seat the day she told me these stories, she did so with noticeable difficulty.
Let this change your life, Anna said. Look around you and observe. Wherever you or someone or else feels lacking in freedom, you do not worry about the risk of helping. You just do it. The risk is greater when you don’t act.
Javier Sánchez is the former mayor of the City of Española, NM, and the co-owner of La Cocina New Mexican Restaurant