The Rest of the Story*

*with posthumous apologies to Paul Harvey

The story of the Assanovs in Hameln ended as it began, on a train.?

The City never did find a house suitable for them, so, it commenced to thoroughly renovate the Walkemühle.?The original DP residents soon withdrew into themselves and either died or disappeared into care in area nursing homes.?The most necessary improvements were made to the living quarters of the ‘refugees’ from a country most Germans in 1990 still associated with wonderful and cheap vacations on the Dalmatian Riviera.?Yugoslavia, which you will no longer find on a map of Europe, was a country apparently still at peace, because it had been part of the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’ under Marshall Josep Broz Tito and had never been part of the then as now crumbling and self-destroying Russian Empire of Soviet Socialist Republics and Slave States, Inc.? Yugoslavia was however seething with self-contempt and recrimination dating back to WWII, now ready to ?burst open in the flames of civil war as it did in just one more year.?The Assanovs had told us that things were so bad in Kosovo and on the streets of Pristina that they could not go out even to shop for food without being harassed by the Serbian police and paramilitaries.?The German Foreign Ministry knew more about the situation there than the typical German tourist, thus allowing them to seek asylum.

Six weeks after they had become guests of the Lutheran parsonage in the Heinrichstrasse, it was time for those guests to return to their prior residence, the Walkemühle.?The intervening weeks, including not only a tragedy but the month of Ramadan, had placed a strain on the American family not sufficiently appreciated even by its oblivious head, but others noticed and were concerned. Things happened and almost happened of which I was only informed years later by my daughter.?The guests, and particularly the older boys and even the father, became overly familiar with her when they thought no one was looking, but someone, thank God, always was, or was at least listening or making noise.?Some of our children’s toys and little knick-knacks were noticed missing as well, hardly an equivalent, but something the pastor's wife noticed.?Her response was to place cocked mouse traps in all of our coat pockets, but the only mouse she caught was the pastor.

I think that the Lutheran Superintendent reminded the City Manager in good Lutheran form that it was the State’s responsibility which the Church, in the person of one rather gullible young pastor from abroad and his family, had borne quite long enough, and that it was high time for the City to bear that civil responsibility again.?Case closed.?Bilingual Turkish- and German-speaking social workers explained to me what they were about to explain to the Assanovs, viz., that they would come to help them pack their things and to move them back to the Walkemühle in a couple of days.?During those couple of days, there was a puzzling running back and forth of the younger children as they disappeared into the city center and then came back with bags full of things.

I doubt that the Assanovs understood why they were having to leave.?Had the mothers not kept the entire house, except our bedrooms, immaculately clean??Had they not invited us to join them for every meal especially during Ramadan when they made a kind of fried bread, like delicious donuts, and always called me into the kitchen to ‘speak Qur’an’ over the dough before it was formed and placed in the hot oil??The only Qur’an’ I knew to speak for a blessing was to make the sign of the Cross, and that was fine with the mothers.?

This was to be a very different leave-taking from that of the uncles at Fari’s funeral. ‘Why were we casting them out from where we had all been so happy together?’ they must have thought. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and at the main door as they left.?No one made eye contact.?No one kissed my hand and held it to the heart, but eight-year old Nasli, their only daughter, the little princess, stuck her tongue out at me.?

We soon began hearing disturbing reports from the police.?My son’s bicycle, registered with the city, had been stolen, and the police had found it, along with several others, stripped of tires and tubes, bells and lights and reflectors, in the Hamel Creek, not far from the Walkemühle.?A detective from the KRIPO (Criminal Police), who was a great help to us during some unpleasant times connected with the First Gulf War, called one day and explained that the Assanovs were now on their way back to Yugoslavia with whatever they could carry, courtesy of the Federal Republic of Germany.?The father and mother of Fari had been arraigned on charges of multiple theft and corrupting minors, their own children, as accessories.?They were given the option to return to where they came from with all they could carry, no questions asked, or to face a prison sentence.?They chose the railway option.??Who knows where they got off?

And what became of the Walkemühle??After having been a mill of course, it served during WWI as a barracks for Allied POWs and during WWII as a barracks for mostly Polish forced laborers, and then, as you know, for German DPs from the East at War’s end.?The City of Hameln continued its renovation of this property, ironically allowing the Yugoslav Cultural Club to have space there after those other Yugoslavs cleared out. Upstairs was renovated during my time there for the express purpose of accommodating refugees (‘asylum-seekers’) as they tried to start a new life.?Chief among these in my experience were refugees from Romania following the fall of the Ceausescu regime on Christmas Day 1989 (Deo gratias!).?I had not yet met these people, but they had heard of me, that I was the parish priest thereabouts and a small delegation of them came round to the parsonage to give us a Christmas card and to invite me and my family to share Orthodox Christmas 1991 with them, asking that I come prepared to offer a sermon.?I brought with me a beautiful Italian ceramic of the Holy Family in Flight into Egypt that I had received as an ordination gift.?I started to speak in German, but they told me that English would be easier and that anyway, they had heard that we were Americans, weren’t we??So, I spoke in American about the Refugee Family that would save the world from itself. ?We sang ‘Silent Night’ in a few languages simultaneously, and they placed the image of the Holy Family in Flight at the foot of a small but luminously beautiful Christmas tree, thus turning it into a shrine which is the last place I saw it.?I have loved Romanians on general principal ever since. Their cookies were delicious.

My son returned to Hameln for a visit a couple of years later and of course to the Walkemühle of which he had pleasant memories, where he had once given baseball lessons instead of cramming for his tests in Realschule.??His return came during the full-blown Yugoslav Civil War.??He reported back to me that the Serbs were not letting anybody else use the club in those days.?Today, ‘Free Space Hameln, GmbH’ as acquired use of the property from the Town of the Pied Piper as a meeting place for ‘alternative culture,’ which I take to be a kind of small-town bourgeois equivalent of Berlin-Kreuzberg.?I wonder if any of the tattooed Goths and other denizens of that space now have any idea how ‘alternative’ a place the Walkemühle really is?

--gcc

?Guy Christopher Carter, 05/01/2023