When I was a kid, I used to think Germany was a magical place. All the problems that we heard about daily back in the States didn't seem to exist there. That all changed on March 26, 1996.
This last month in Germany was nice, but to be honest I was glad to be coming back home. Nothing seems to be the same anymore. I wish I could go back to my childhood, but I guess that is one of the curses of growing older, knowledge.
I wrote this about 3 years ago. I never thought I would share it with anyone. I just typed it to get it out of my head. But here it goes ... Just as a forewarning; it is 6 pages in Word.
I can remember that day as though it was yesterday; maybe because it was only six years ago or maybe because I have replayed it in my head over and over again. It was around four in the morning when the phone ring and a couple minutes later, I heard my mother cry.
Now there are different kinds of cries. You can hear someone cry out of joy or sorrow. But there is one cry that doesn’t sound like anything else. My neighbor (a former paramedic who is now a police officer) and I talked about it once and she said that when someone dies, you couldn’t mistake that cry for anything, the cry that comes from the family members when they hear the news. I shook my head like I understood, but I really didn’t have a clue.
Well that was the cry that I heard from my mom and I knew. I assumed that since she was speaking German that my grandmother had died. For as long as I can remember, my grandmother in Germany was sick. Let me rewind a little.
My mom was born and raised in Germany. She was the oldest of eight children. Then about twenty years later my father enrolled in the army about the time that everyone was being drafted for Vietnam. But since he enrolled, he had a better chance of picking where he wanted to go. So after basic training my father was stationed in Germany. My family seems to have luck this way because during World War II when everyone was being sent to Germany, my dad’s dad (a.k.a. my grandfather) was sent to Hawaii. So I guess its good karma or something.
So anyway, my dad was stationed in Germany and he met my mom. They were going out for about two years and then my dad had finished his time with the army and was going back to the States but he said that he would come back to get my mom. I’m not sure if he had already proposed and that whole story but since I’m writing this, you already know that she made it over here and they got married.
I never really fully understood my mom’s courage or stupidity. She didn’t speak a work of English and my dad’s German wasn’t so good but in the name of love, she packed up her things and left the country on her first plane ride over the ocean.
Her entire family still lives in Germany. We try and visit every four or five years but it is still hard. Now that we have gotten older, many members of my mom’s family have come to visit so we tend to see each other more often now.
But when we were younger, I can always remember everyone asking my mom about her mom (a.k.a. my Oma). I guess my Oma was always sick. When my mom was younger, my Oma was diagnosed with Leukemia. She had her good days and her bad days but for many years she was in remission. But then the chain smoking caused her to develop emphysema. It was sad and I can’t believe my mom would say this to us but my Oma was normally one of the last people that we would see before we would come back home and my mom would always tell us to give our Oma a kiss goodbye because we might not ever see her again. Why you would tell a child this, I don’t know but it was all together true.
So, when I heard my mom crying on the phone, I assumed that my Oma had died. I was the first one down the stairs and then my dad and brother came and I can just remember hugging my mom and crying too. Then she got off the phone and said that my Tante Gabi was killed. I couldn’t believe it, what do you mean Tante Gabi was dead. I thought it was just a bad dream. I thought the next couple of weeks were nothing more than a bad dream that I would wake up from. How could my thirty-three year old aunt be dead? My mom then told us that she was murdered. The details of the story, I didn’t learn until we got to Germany but I’ll share them with you now.
My Tante Gabi got married at a pretty young age. I think she was seventeen or eighteen and pregnant with my cousin. I know it sounds cliché but several years down the line, my aunt found out her husband was cheating on her. So they got a divorce. Then they got back together again and remarried and then she found out he was cheating again. So this time, she found comfort in another man. I’m not saying she was right but I can understand where she was coming from.
Around the time that my aunt and uncle got married for the second time, they decided to buy a sports bar. It was the clubhouse for a local soccer team. So they ran the kitchen and bar and when there was a soccer game, the team pretty much brought in the crowd. But around the time that my aunt found out that her husband was cheating on her, she sought comfort in one of the soccer players. At first it was just innocent, she would talk to him and he would listen. More importantly, he made her feel good. Well it didn’t take too long before she thought she would give her husband a piece of his own medicine and she starting seeing the young soccer player. I’m not too sure about the time frame but I know that my aunt and uncle were separated and my aunt ended up getting an apartment not too far from her house (so the kids could come over whenever they wanted) and she moved in with the soccer player. At first everything was honky dory.
Then he started to become controlling. I found out after the fact that my mom had talked to some of her siblings and they were warning her to break it off with this guy. They wanted my mom (the oldest) to talk to her but she never got the chance.
We found out the reasoning after the fact. I still can’t remember the guy’s name. I think I might have mentally blocked it out. I can remember asking a couple of times when we were at the funeral but I could never remember his name. Maybe it is for the best. But he was from Yugoslavia.
Apparently when the war broke out, he ran for Germany. But when he was planning on leaving, his brother (who was in the military) threatened to tell on him so he killed his own brother and fled to Germany. He moved to Germany to escape the war and murder. Now I don’t understand how the German government didn’t know about this and granted the guy a visa but I guess Germany isn’t much different from the USA. So he was living in Germany and on what is equivalent to welfare. The Germans are pretty annoyed by this fact that you can be a foreigner and they will give you a place to live and food but if you are a citizen you have to work. I can understand their point.
Well apparently this guys was selling drugs and doing God knows what. When it was about the time for his visa to run out and he would have to go back to Yugoslavia. He didn’t want to go back to war and also to face murder charges for his brother’s death so he had to think of a way to stay in Germany. He probably wanted to marry my aunt so he could stay in the country but he knew that my aunt was on the verge of breaking up with him so he came up with the brilliant plan to murder my aunt and then he would have to stay in Germany and serve his time. He thought it would be better to stay in a German jail instead of going back to Yugoslavia to fight a war and face murder charges there. And people wonder why I am for the death penalty. Some people say it doesn’t deter, but I know in this case it would have.
When his controlling started to get out of hand, my aunt decided to leave him. Apparently, he got really mad and took a knife and cut her blouse and her necklace right off her. Now this really scared her and she left and stayed with her husband and kids that night. But the next day, she wanted to go back for her things. She wanted to get her clothes and jewelry and then be done with him. So she asked her sister to go with her. She told him that she was coming over for her things and he said fine. We found out later that he had already pawned all of her jewelry for drug money probably. So both my aunt’s went over to her apartment to get the rest of her things. He was there and asked my aunt if he could talk to her. She said okay and my other aunt went in the bedroom to start packing up some of her clothes.
A couple of minutes later, my aunt came running out of the bedroom when she heard her sister yelling for her help. My aunt ran out and thought that the guy was punching her in the stomach but when she got closer, she saw that he was stabbing her with a knife. When my aunt got close to him, he raised the knife towards her so she ran out of the apartment to get help. My pour aunt ran to a neighbor and called the police. An ambulance showed up a few minutes later but they had to wait for the police before they could go in. It took those useless chicken shits 20 minutes before they got to the apartment.
Now let me just explain the little town of Poking where most of my German relatives live. It is a small town with one police station. It would probably take you five minutes to drive from one end of town to the other. Since there hadn’t been a murder in twenty-five years in Poking, my personal opinion and that of my family is that they were too scared to hurry over to the apartment.
When the police finally did come and the paramedics made it up to the apartment, it was too late. The bastard had stabbed her thirty-three times. No one thinks it was a coincidence that my aunt was thirty-three years old and was stabbed the same number of times. Maybe it was some kind of sick joke for the bastard. Of course, he had everything planned perfectly so just before the paramedics came in the apartment he stabbed himself two or three times in the stomach saying that he couldn’t live without my aunt and he wanted to die. That was going to be his alibi. I didn’t plan this; it was an act of love. But like everyone in our family says, if you can’t live without someone, you kill yourself not that person. Plus he didn’t sustain any real damage; he didn’t hit any major organs. My aunt on the other hand didn’t have a chance. He stabbed everything from her hands to her feet. Sick bastard.
If things happen for a reason, I don’t understand what the reasoning is for this. I know they say what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger but try telling that to my then fifteen year old cousin and her ten year old brother.
That day, March 26, 1996, I didn’t go to school and I asked my mom if I could go to Germany with her. She called the school and they agreed to let me take the week before spring break off. So I had gone to school later that day to turn in some assignments before I left. It was the strangest thing. The weekend before I had gone on a snowball retreat. Snowball was a club in school that was organized to help kids who didn’t have the best home life. I wasn’t a member of the club but I decided to go on the weekend retreat because it sounded like fun and because my brother had gone and said he had a good time.
I went to this retreat and I felt like the luckiest girl on earth. I wasn’t abused as a child like a lot of these kids were. My parents were still married and for the most part I had a happy childhood. That weekend was good for me because I realized how lucky I really was. I met a lot of good people that I probably wouldn’t have associated with otherwise. Now that I look back, maybe it was something that I needed to do to know that I could go through what was about to happen to our family just two days later.
So, I went to school to drop some things off and then I went home and just slept. I woke up around three o’clock to go next door, like I did everyday, to baby-sit the kids until their mom got home. I tried to put on a happy face for the kids when they got home from school but it was hard. When their mom got home, I had to tell her that she needed to find someone to watch the kids next week because I wasn’t going to be able to. She asked why and I broke down. I told her that we got a call early that morning saying that my aunt had been murdered and that I was going with my mom to the funeral and I would be gone for two weeks. She comforted me and we sat and talked for a little while when the phone rang. My neighbor got off the phone and told me that I should go home, my Grandma had died. Just then I heard that same cry that I heard that morning coming from my mom. Only this time, it was coming from me. I couldn’t believe it. I was so mad. I thought that that bastard had murdered my aunt and my Oma’s heart just couldn’t take it and she had a heart attack. It was then that my neighbor told me no, it wasn’t my mom’s mom who had died, it was my dad’s mom. Just when I thought this day couldn’t get any worse, it just did. How could this happen? My grandma was seventy-five years old but she didn’t seem sick. Sure she smoked about a pack a day even after having open-heart surgery but she was feeling fine.
Apparently, my mom had been trying to call my grandma all day to let her know that her sister was murdered and that we were going to Germany. We thought it was odd that she wasn’t answering but we just thought she was running errands. But when it was evening and she didn’t answer, we got worried and called my dad’s aunt and uncle who didn’t live too far from my grandma. They had an extra key and when they went inside, they found my grandma dead in her bed.
Since my mom and I weren’t going to make it to my grandma’s wake and funeral, we all drove to my grandma’s house to see her for the last time. My grandma lived about an hour and a half away. So we all went there and I saw my grandma lying there. She looked so peaceful. We found out that she died around 11pm the night before on March 25th, 1996. She had a cigarette in one hand and a lighter in the other. The weirdest thing is that she had a book on angels lying at her side. My aunts later told me that I would be really freaked out if I knew what page it was on but they never told me. I guess you really do know when you are going. We think that her heart must have just gone out. She had had open-heart surgery about twelve years earlier and they said that the pig valve that they put in would only last for about ten years and I guess they just miscalculated. We were just glad that she hadn’t lit the cigarette yet and that the whole house didn’t burn down.
It was so weird to experience both variations of death. There is the death of an elderly person that went so peacefully and then that of a young vibrant woman who was stabbed to death and I can only imagine what was going through her head at the time. The next day my mom and I flew to Germany.
Of course the press was all over this story, the first murder in twenty-five years. I remember my mom and I flew to Germany the next day. When we got to Poking (about an hour drive from the Munich airport), my aunt asked us if we wanted to see the body. She didn’t think I should go and see if but I insisted. Since they don’t have wakes in Germany, this was going to be the last time I would see my aunt; I had to go. The entire eight hour flight to Germany, I thought it was some kind of a sick joke that when I finally got there, my aunt would be alive and well and that this was just a ploy to get us to come and visit. Although it was a sick joke, it was easier to understand than someone had murdered my aunt.
But seeing her body in the casket made it real for me. They opened it up and I can remember seeing the blood on her hairline. What the last twenty-four hours of her life must have been like. She was so scared after he cut her blouse and necklace off that she just wanted to go back and get her things and be done with him. She figured he would be going back to Yugoslavia soon and she would never have to see him again. My aunt went underneath the covers in the casket to hold her hand and that is when I saw that he stabbed her hands too. The only thing that they could show was her face; the rest of her was mutilated.
The next day was the day of the funeral. We started at the place where the body was stored. It was in a little room with a glass front where the casket was and all of our flowers. We were all gathering outside in front of the little room and I broke down. It all just hit me; I couldn’t stop crying. My mom then came up to me and said I had to pull myself together, my cousin was coming and we had to be strong for her. After all, it was her mom that was just murdered. We started out at a church where they said a few words and then the entire family walked behind the casket to the gravesite. I can remember the newspapers there taking pictures and the priest went up to them and asked them to leave the family alone. There were so many people there. It seemed like everyone in town showed up. Even those people who never knew her couldn’t believe that a woman with two small children had been murdered in their small town. They all showed up to the funeral.
I can still remember my poor Oma. She was so frail, we set up a chair next to the grave and put a blanket around her for the funeral service. Most of that day was a blur but I can still remember there being a man in a chair next to the grave singing, “The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer if blowing in the wind …” I still can’t listen to that song when it comes on the radio.
Those weeks were so hard from me. I can remember my tear ducts hurting from crying so much. After the funeral, the worst part came. We actually were expected to clean up the apartment since my aunt rented it. My uncle’s cleaned out the apartment a couple of days later but I had to see it. See the place where my aunt died. We walked in and I couldn’t believe how small it was. I couldn’t believe that my other aunt was only in the room next door and she still made it out alive. It looked like a movie to me, the chalk outlines on the floor of where my aunt’s body laid and where her murderer lay after he stabbed himself. Blood specks were circled on the walls and furniture. And then there was the carpet that was soaked in blood.
I couldn’t watch another horror movie for a couple years after that. Watching someone get stabbed was just too much for me.
