Peter returned to Greiz only once, in 1990 with his family, 44 years after he escaped from the Soviet zone with his stepmother and brothers. On this visit to the home of his childhood memories, the Berlin wall had just fallen but the German reunification was yet to come. East Germany – the German Democratic Republic – had existed as a nation since 1949, having transitioned from being a Soviet-occupied zone to statehood, but of course remaining under heavy Soviet influence. Peter’s visit was to an East Germany that was gradually being disbanded. It was still a communist nation, but citizens of the German Democratic Republic could now travel abroad. Through the centralized East German government, Peter had arranged modest accommodations in the old - town area of Greiz, where no direct bookings or modern hotels existed at that time.

I took part in that trip with my husband, mother and young son. On arrival to East Germany, we passed through border patrol with our travel papers in order. But the East German border guards looked disinterested and did not check passports. These were two separate countries, but everyone knew that would not last much longer. The villages of East Germany stood in striking contrast to the villages in the neighboring West. There were buildings in ruins, and modest little dark and old cars. The “Eastern-style” drab apartment buildings, largely concrete, seemed to have been erected with speed and without consideration for architectural style. However, the old town of Greiz was still picturesque and had largely avoided being destroyed during the war. As we walked through the old town, we were charmed. Charmed until we passed a small square and Peter grimly pointed to it as the spot where, in the final years of the war, young army deserters had been publicly hanged as an example. We moved on.

The old family house, where Peter’s family had rented an apartment, was in a hillside neighborhood that overlooked the town, with rolling hills and open fields nearby. Peter’s mood had picked up and the memories – bits and snippets – were flowing. The garage, which had been bombed, had been replaced with something new, cement and practical, but the house otherwise looked just like he remembered. Peter thought it might be possible to get a peek inside. We were met with suspicion and a distinctly unfriendly greeting from a woman who lived there. Peter explained that this had been his childhood home, and asked if he could just show it to his wife, daughter and grandson. Further soured, she refused our entry.

Upon arrival to our rooming house, we were greeted by a gruff older woman who spoke with the rough local accent and was not eager to help. She said: “I have no record of a booking.” Peter responded, auf Deutsch (in German): “We booked it officially through the East German government.” There was “no record.” Peter and the woman went back and forth for multiple minutes, Peter ending with: “We will not leave until you have found us a place to stay.” There were no other nearby options, Peter’s two-year-old grandson was tired and getting fussy and Peter’s Germanic confidence was strong because he had followed proper procedures and had paperwork showing booked rooms for his family. After an extended debate, they found a room of sorts. The laundry room was temporarily equipped with four portable beds and a crib. Interestingly, the younger employees were curious and eager to help, and cheerfully provided information about the few dining options in Greiz. Under further curious gazes from local residents, we enjoyed a perfectly acceptable meal.

The next day we took the ancient, wooden-benched but still functioning narrow-gauge train to Neumühle, through the forests near Greiz (Figure 21.1). Peter was particularly eager to take his grandson on the old trains of his childhood – the same train cars that had been in operation decades before. We hiked in the woods near Neumühle, where, as a child, he had pushed a wheelbarrow in search of food and provisions for his family. The return visit to Greiz was brief, but it was during this visit Peter spoke freely for the first time about his some of his memories from the war. Memories that had long been suppressed.

Figure 21.1 Peter with his grandson and Janellen in the woods in Neumühle, near Greiz, in 1990. Peter had roamed these woods, as a child, looking for food during the war.

He did not tell all of the painful stories about Greiz during that visit. It is unclear if some of these were suppressed memories or if he did not want to talk about them. In the last year of his life, on that afternoon in Michigan, Peter first shared his memories of a particularly distressing experience in Greiz. With a look of terror in his eyes Peter said:

Other family members later verified the bombing, although it was the first time Peter had spoken to any of his children about it.

It is hard to comprehend how a young child witnesses such devastation and moves forward. There is substantial recent research on the inhibitory networks in the brain that suppress these unwanted memories [Reference Anderson and Hanslmayr1]. Apparently, forgetting is an active process that is mediated by inhibitory control mechanisms in the brain that stop painful memories. It is referred to as motivated forgetting. The inhibitory control mechanisms are in the frontal lobe of the brain. Evidence suggests that the neurotransmitter dopamine can affect these inhibitory networks in the prefrontal cortex to promote adaptive forgetting [Reference Wimber, Schott and Wendler2]. Dopamine is deficient in patients with Parkinson’s disease. It is intriguing to speculate that this may have contributed to what happened with Peter in his final year of life, with the night screams and resurfacing of painful memories. Researchers are making strides in understanding how unwanted memories are suppressed, although the area is still in its infancy. Do Parkinson’s patients have re-emergence of these thoughts due to the loss of dopamine activity in these inhibitory networks? Or is it possible that these inhibitory networks and synapses are pruned aberrantly in Parkinson’s disease and this contributes to the unleashing of repressed memories later in the disease?

The Final Months

In the final months of Peter’s life, in the lucid moments, he spoke more often about his childhood in Germany. But at other times he spoke only in German. It was often difficult to understand. English and German were mixed together. We would often sing German songs with him – we would sing the classic Brahms lullaby “Guten Abend, Gute Nacht” (good evening, goodnight) – he sang it perfectly, and looked subdued, even happy.

During one of the visits in his final months he kept trying to stand, but he was not allowed to stand because he had been falling. He was strong and stubborn. I would say “Sitzen” (Sit down) and he would look at me with childlike mischief and say “Warum?” (Why?). Unfortunately, shortly after this visit, he fell and broke his hip. I spoke with his nurse on the phone, and she told me he was in severe pain. I visited to check on him. With any movement he would cry out in agonizing pain, but the physician in the care center had no plans to fix his hip. This unshaven and “demented” old man, who had been fluent in English, was now speaking in German and people could not understand him. It was assumed that he was too far gone to worry about his pain. I was horrified that the care facility would leave him with a fractured hip. I called the local orthopedic surgeon and persuaded them to pin his hip. The local University of Chicago hospital was very nice about his care and allowed me to accompany him into the operating room and keep him calm as he was put to sleep. He did well during the procedure and spent the final six months of his life without hip pain. To this day I wonder if, without a strong advocate – a physician daughter – he would have been left with an untreated hip fracture and excruciating pain. It certainly did not matter that he had previously been a distinguished scientist and physician.

A few months later I wrote in my journal about another day’s visit to Peter with my cousin, Dieter’s daughter Gail:

On August 16, 2013, I wrote:

At Peter’s memorial service, Unitarian minister and good friend Donald Wheat ended the sermon by saying that Peter was lucky to have lived such a rich life, even though it had been bracketed by difficult years at the beginning and end. I pondered this. His life had been rich with experience and partnership and, most importantly, rich because of how he had lived it. It made me think about the words of the nineteenth-century American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life.”