In Living Memory: A Letter to the Stone in Berlin

In an increasingly complex world, travel abroad prepares college students for the challenges of the future by encouraging them to understand and empathize with individuals from diverse cultures. But travel to a foreign country can also be a deeply personal experience, a means of coming to terms with the past and memories that must not be forgotten.

In the following paragraphs Elizabeth Stone, a sophomore German Studies major, describes a visit she made to the Berlin Airlift Memorial during a trip to Germany as part of its Berlin Program. Submitted originally as a class paper, her story was described by her professor, Richard Schade, as “unusually moving.”

In Living Memory: A Letter to the Stone in Berlin
by Elizabeth Stone

You were a legend, of sorts, one could say. Your story unfolded from my grandfather’s lips like bitter wine, filling the air with spice and sorrow. As a child I stared at the fading black and white military photo as he spoke of you,

a perfectly wrapped tie nestled between two shiny brass buttons sewn onto the thick lapels of your army jacket. I was mesmerized by your young, chubby face and ruddy complexion. And your eyes. My father has your eyes. Papaw’s voice would stop occasionally, choking back the tears, choking back your absence. Then he would continue, slowly, with such pride and deliberation that I fell in love with your life over and over again.

“He was just a boy, you know? He was just an honest country boy from Lexington, Kentucky, who wanted to grasp a piece of the world he had never seen. And he did. He captured the world from ten thousand feet. But now, decades later, the world is holding him in their memories and in their hearts.”

The words I have heard since I can remember resound yet again in my mind. From this point he would look at the floor, or the wall, or lean on the corner of the doorway heavily and sigh. “I was in Tokyo the day my mother received his tattered army blanket and identification tags. One week later his body arrived. I tore my telegram to pieces and threw it to the winds. That was it. My baby brother was dead. What could be said?”

The truth is, there was a lot to be said about you. The problem was that no one could contact the right people. Your mother simply didn’t have the heart to prod or question the authorities, and your three brothers were all away at war. With the passing of years, your story stayed tucked away with your grey and blue blanket, kept in boxes on shelves and beneath beds, a mystery too disheartening to solve.

I repeated the story to myself as I looked out of the plane’s windows. Over fifty years had passed since your flight over this ocean. I thought about Papaw, your photo, the war, and the memorial I was to see. Papaw said that in order to understand your story better, I had to visit the place where your memory still lives. To be honest, I thought this a bit silly. A memorial, an inanimate thing, was supposed to explain your death? I could not understand how the memorial would be a solution to anything at all.

The red roofs beneath me burned with warmth, leaping like flames from the emerald green stretches of trees and patches of copper fields. The wings of the plane stretched over the lake-spotted land that sat snugly within the borders of Europe thousands of miles from my home. As the gradual rise of Berlin swallowed the rolling landscape, my heart shook with the rattling of the plane. Reality popped and whispered deep inside my ears. You are a foreigner. This is not your home.

You must have felt the same way. I tried to imagine your slim shoulders wrapped in that beautiful jacket, your eyes bright with excitement and fear. I fought to see your figure walking among the men of your company, perhaps jesting and joking, or maybe solemn with duty, sitting between brown packages of food and coal in the cargo hold of your plane. But the images were just so blurry that the thoughts faded with lack of information.

I found myself packed tightly into a cab, weaving and honking through the thin streets toward Kreuzberg. A rough but welcomed wind blasted against my skin, and an overwhelming sense of insecurity and uncertainty filled me as I stepped out of the cab and walked slowly through the door of the hostel where we would stay. Uncertainty still followed me later in that evening, lingering in my broken German and the shakiness of my hands. It brought restlessness to my sleep. There was something here I needed to discover. But what was it? How could I find something when I didn’t even know what it was?

The days and nights passed quickly in Berlin. Your image came and went with the changing scenery. I lounged on the grasses of kings and sat on the steps of great palaces. I walked through halls filled with some of the most famous paintings in the world, ate meals at small outside cafes, saw the sun dip and fall into the Spree River. I touched the walls that once divided the great city of Berlin in two. I stepped on ground that once would have caused me to be killed.

I traveled freely from East to West, from West to East. I biked over bridges and through streets of rumbling cars. I witnessed the resurrection of Dresden. I ordered pastries and coffee. I took a nap next to a sprawling lake and fed the geese. I drank the best beer in the world and laughed nights away with my fellow students. I gained irreplaceable friendships.

Every morning I awoke to the bright sun shining warmly through two large open windows and the sound of small children playing in the garden. But there was a morning, your morning, that would be far different from the rest. That day, I was to visit the Airlift Memorial. I thought of others I had seen. They were unlike one another. They stood for different moments throughout time. I had been in their presence and yet failed to grasp their meaning. Would yours demand any more emotion?

This morning I could think of nothing else. My need to read the names encircling the memorial had suddenly grown greater than my desire. I stood, squinting into the sun, reading over and over again the large signboard at Checkpoint Charlie. Did he see this place? Did he pass over this border?

I couldn’t say if you had ever walked here. This small chunk of our family’s history was sewn together with minute pieces of information, mismatched and sketchy at best. We knew so little about you and the history of your death that this memorial was all we had. The holes were larger than the substance itself. The monument was simply the filler. How would reading your name solve anything? At least, I thought to myself, at least I’m pulling his blanket out of the closet.

I hung to the high bars in the train and swayed with the curves of the track. Departing from the group, I walked beside my friend and my teacher, drowning in thoughts of World War II, of this airlift sometimes referred to as Operation Vittles, of the men who died here. I thought of the seventeen years living behind your grey eyes.

We rounded a small bend of high bushes, and my breath caught in my throat. The memorial arched high into the crystalline sky, positioned before a small sweeping valley of rose bushes and vibrant flowers. Had he seen this field? Did he ever walk through this place? Simply overwhelmed with the massiveness of the stark white stone and the pure beauty in which it was set, my mind stumbled along with my feet as we stepped ever closer.

Suddenly I caught sight of it. Your name, with its curls and crosses, jumped from the aged bronze base. I didn’t even have to look for it. The name I was taught to write, the name that identified me. And here was this familiar name, on such unfamiliar ground. Tears burned at the corners of my eyes behind my large sunglasses. I bent and touched the extended typeface. Pfc. R. E. Stone. You were here.

Suddenly I stood up and looked around me. A young woman was lying in the grass reading a book. Two boys tied their bikes to a post and ran together down the hill. A father was teaching his son to fly a kite. Behind me I heard an older woman laughing on her cell phone. A young businessman walked hastily past me, off to the office, or lunch, or home. With the tingling of sensation at my fingertips, something clicked inside of me.

These people, Uncle Ronnie, these people were. They were. They were walking, they were laughing, they were running, they were reading. Just as I had skipped through gardens and danced in nightclubs and smiled at strangers passing on the road, they had too. Right here, in this city, these people were living their everyday lives, and I was living an adventurous one. Because of you.

I heard Papaw’s voice again. “It’s ironic, ain’t it, how these boys turn right around from being shot at and having their buddies killed, then bombing this country to feeding its children and fueling its fires? There’s something ’bout them. There’s just something grand ’bout them. And I ain’t saying that just ’cause he’s my brother and he died for something. I’m saying that ’cause they’re all our brothers, and they all died for someone.”

For the first time in my life I understood the building of this memorial and all the others I had seen. I understood the meaning behind their presence, the essentiality of their existence in the world. And for the first time since I set foot on foreign ground I felt connected by every fiber within myself to this place, connected to its history and its growth. To its life.

These people were laughing and living and loving because you gave your life. These people, with all their different faces and their own stories, were somehow connected to me and so many others from around the world. Touching your name in Berlin not only stood for my personal tie, but for a bond between people and this city that you helped to survive. It stood for the destruction and the death, for new alliances and hope. Above all, it stood for the memories, for the past that shaped the world and the future. Memories, I realized, as I stepped away from the memorial, memories must never be forgotten.

There, in that small valley, snuggled into the streets and houses of Berlin, I finally discovered what was missing. A German might have reflected upon the amazing weather, saying, “Wenn die Engel reisen.” When angels travel. But for a young American looking for a piece of her past, a literal translation seems more appropriate. This morning, an angel danced.

And all I can say is thank you. Your seventeen years of life helped to bring the beautiful gift of hope to a world desperate for something to warm its heart. Standing in this city, looking at its people, I rejoice in the voices and the stories and the faces because everywhere I go, your death breathes life.

I look at Papaw; he looks at me. We do not need to speak. He knows I understand now. You left a light behind, a light that shines within the Stone family and among the families of Berlin. They may not know your story and probably do not know your name, but you are a part of us all. I think of this as I touch the cotton knots of your blanket, folded with military precision over the end of my bed.