How Opi Entered a Room

Childhood magic and the man who taught me to wonder

The final piece in my Ode to My Grandparents series. The quartet is now complete.
Soon we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Today belongs to Opi.

If my grandparents were characters in a film, Opi would never come in quietly. He’d enter with a swing in his step and a feather in his hat, as if life itself had personally invited him to the party. He was light on his feet and quick with repartee. Even now he looms larger than life, perhaps because he died so “young.” Cancer tried to diminish him but somehow only revealed how much there was to lose. Opi had life force in spades.

I recall a strange overlap in our lives when I was about 16. The chief of the hospital arranged for us sharing a private room—Opi for cancer, me for a severe case of mono. Two very different reasons for being there, but the same smell of disinfectant, the same view, the same quiet boredom. I don’t think either of us commented on it much. I just remember thinking there was something comforting about lying side by side under identical blankets.

But what do I really know about Opi that isn’t filtered through childhood nostalgia?

I know that he had to flee Berlin to escape the Nazis. He was politically active in the underground but, for a while, could get away with it because his stepbrother was Hitler’s personal secretary, handling travel itineraries and such things.

This special status protected Opi and also his younger sister, Toni. Tante Toni famously refused the Hitler salute in the office every morning. Her coworkers thought it was a test of loyalty and feared she might report them to the authorities. This charade got them off the hook—until it didn’t.

Berlin towards the end of the war

Omi — his wife and a great but unreliable storyteller — told an anecdote no one in my family could ever fully verify. Before their “escape” from Berlin, Opi was supposedly put on a train to be deported to a camp. When the train stopped in a remote rural area, Opi and a comrade simply got off and trekked and hitchhiked their way back to the city.

Opi loved the underdog story and all things “Indians,” as Native Americans used to be called. He taught me how to make a bow and arrow to shoot imaginary cowboys. We also murdered Smurfs with great enthusiasm and took long walks through the woods where every path felt like it was leading somewhere magical.

And he gave me books. Not children’s books. His choices were Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Last of the Mohicans, and Arabian Nights. We also read a lot of Karl May, a German writer known for novels set in the American Old West like Winnetou, the adventures of an Apache chief.

The story became a popular film series, starting a whole genre called the “German Western.” I loved those movies! Actor Pierre Brice, who played Winnetou, was French, was made up in skin-darkening, “racialized” makeup and a long black wig. Naturally I had a huge crush on him.

The Wild West as envisioned by Euros with imagination but zero fact-checking

I wanted to be a squaw and fight gunslingers. Opi would be my protector. I longed for magic lamps and flying carpets and desperately wished I had an exotic name like Scheherazade.

He was a masculine man in the most old-fashioned sense, yet one of our other favorite rituals was playing makeup. I’d pull out Omi’s toiletry bag, perfume bottles, and vintage hairpieces and transform Opi into a beautiful Fräulein.

He was bald and short but somehow occupied more space than taller men ever could. Everyone—and I mean everyone—in our tiny town knew Heinz Greil: bank director, city councilman, and chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group.

You could say he was a big fish in a small pond, but I suspect he would have been a big fish anywhere. He recited thinkers Cicero and Heraclitus by heart and dressed to impress, always immaculate in his Hugo Boss suit and calfskin gloves. Wie aus dem Ei gepellt.

One of many reminders that Opi belonged to more than our family.

He smelled of Irish Spring soap, shaving cream that looked like whipped cream, and Kölnisch Wasser. I can still evoke those scents. He frowned upon electric razors. He was a man with a sharp blade. He believed everyone—boys and girls alike—needed a pocketknife.

He always carried one, along with his father’s pocket watch. My dad inherited it, and it’s been collecting dust deep inside my mum’s secretary desk for decades.

Looking back, I think Opi spent his whole life entering rooms as if the trumpets of Jericho had announced him. Even now, after he’s gone, I still hear the echo.

Right after he died, I had a vivid dream where I met him outside a cemetery wall. We had a nice chat, then he said he had to leave. I cried: Take me with you! He shook his head and slowly walked back through the gates.

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Brought to you by nostalgia and questionable German storytelling.