“Chocolate to Drink?” — German Women POWs Tasted American Hot Chocolate for the First Time D
The cup was warm before she tasted it. That was the first thing. She had wrapped both hands around it and the heat had come through the metal immediately. The particular heat of something that had been made recently and was still fully itself. She held it and looked at the dark liquid inside. Steam rose in a slow column and dispersed.
She had not drunk from it yet. She was trying to establish what it was before she committed to it. In the winters of the war, hot drinks had been thin and functional. Ersatz coffee made from chicory and grain, thin broth that was hot in the technical sense of being above room temperature. The cup was always tin and always too hot to hold it first and always too cold by the time you reach the bottom.
Warmth from a cup was a transaction. It had a purpose to raise the body temperature enough to continue. It did not have a character beyond that purpose. The camp in November was cold in the way that wooden barracks are cold when the season has changed faster than the building can adjust.
The walls held the temperature of outside more than the temperature of inside. You dressed had which was not always enough and you moved through the days inside the cold as if inside a second garment you could not remove. Hot food at meals was important. The warmth of it was part of what the meal was. It was not a meal time.
That was the first unusual thing. The mess hall had opened and the women had been directed inside and an American mess worker had moved along the tables with a large metal urn placing cups of something dark and steaming in front of them without explanation. Not water, not broth, something dark.
Something that smelled of a category of warmth she had not encountered in a long time. She looked at the cup. The cup looked back. The liquid was dark and dense looking. Not the pale transparency of broth. Not the gray translucency of Ersatz coffee. This was opaque. It held the light differently.
Absorbed it rather than let it through. The steam coming off it had a smell that was reaching something below the level of conscious identification. Something the nose knew before the mind had processed it. She brought the cup slightly closer. The smell arrived more fully, warm, sweet, dark, something from a long way back. Her body knew it before she did.
This is how certain smells work. They arrive in a register below language, below the timeline of the current situation, and they pull something up from further back than the present moment can account for. She felt the pull before she identified what was pulling. She stayed with the cup between her hands and let the smell continue to arrive and waited for the part of her that knew what this was to surface.
It came from a kitchen, a specific kitchen, her mother’s kitchen, she thought, or her grandmother’s, the two of them merged in memory into a single place. A pot on a stove, a small cup, a winter morning before school or a Sunday afternoon or some other moment that had not required marking because it was not yet clear that it would need to be remembered.
Hot chocolate, the smell of it was the smell of that kitchen. The two things were the same thing. She was in the mess hall and she was in the kitchen simultaneously. This is what certain smells do. They do not remind you of the past, they place you inside it briefly, the present thinning around the edges while something older becomes briefly more solid.
She was in the mess hall, the cup was in her hands, the American soldier at the next table was talking about something. The kitchen was also present, both of these things were true at the same time. She drank from it, not a sip, she tipped the cup and let a proper mouthful arrive. The heat came first, filling the mouth, then the sweetness, and underneath the sweetness something deeper and darker, the flavor of roasted cacao that she had last encountered in a kitchen that no longer existed in the form she remembered it.
She held the mouthful for a moment, then she swallowed. She kept her eyes closed for several seconds after. She sat with her eyes closed for longer than was strictly necessary. The mess hall continued around her. Chairs scraped, someone laughed. The sounds of an ordinary afternoon in an American military dining facility proceeded without reference to the fact that one of the women at the tables had her eyes closed and was doing something that had nothing to do with the room she was in.
Nobody commented. Nobody noticed. She was not in the mess hall for those seconds. She was somewhere else entirely. At the nearby tables, American soldiers were drinking from their own cups. They were drinking and talking simultaneously. The cup lifted and returned without interrupting the conversation.
For them, it was the afternoon hot chocolate. The kitchen had prepared it because it was cold and because the kitchen prepared hot chocolate on cold afternoons. It did not require comment. It did not require their eyes to close. It was simply what was available and they were availing themselves of it and it was background.
A soldier at the next table pushed his cup to the side still half full. He needed the table space for something. The cup sat at the edge of the table with hot chocolate still in it cooling slowly not going to be finished. She watched this for a moment. She looked at her own cup.
She looked at the space between his relationship to his cup and her relationship to hers. The distance between those two relationships was the distance between two entirely different kinds of life. The woman beside her said something quietly. She said it with the particular tone of someone saying a thing they had not planned to say.
She said, “My mother made this on Sunday afternoons in winter.” She did not look up from her cup when she said it. The foreground woman did not answer immediately. She looked at her own cup. She said, “Yes.” One word. The conversation did not continue from there. They sat with their cups in the Sunday afternoons they were both thinking about and did not need to name.
She drank more. The second drink was different from the first. The first had been about identification, locating the thing, running it against memory, establishing what it was. The second was simply drinking. The heat moved down through the chest. The sweetness was still present but less surprising now.
Underneath it, the darker flavor, the roasted depth that was the thing that made hot chocolate hot chocolate and not merely a hot sweet drink. She wrapped her hands around the cup again as she lowered it. The metal was still warm. Around the room, the other women were in similar states.
The cups had produced a particular quality of stillness, not the tense stillness of people managing cold, but the settled stillness of people who are warm from the inside rather than just the outside. The mess hall was quieter than usual. The hot chocolate had done something to the room that the room did not usually contain on an ordinary afternoon.
It had introduced comfort that had no function beyond itself. The cup was nearly empty. She was aware of it getting lighter. She was holding it slightly longer than the drinking required, not consciously, but the hands did not want to release the warmth before it was gone. This was not the same as the hunger adjacent holding of food.
This was something else. The warmth from the cup was warmth that had been made and placed in her hands without being asked for. It had no military rationale. It existed because someone had prepared it on a cold afternoon and put it in front of her. The mess worker came through again with the urn.
He stopped at her table and refilled her cup without being asked. The hot chocolate rose in the cup and the steam returned and he moved to the next table. He had refilled everyone’s cup on his route without distinguishing between them. He had refilled hers because it was in his path and it was low and refilling it was what you did when you had a large urn and the cups along your route were low.
She looked at the refilled cup. More. There was more. She looked at the refilled cup for a moment before picking it up again. The afternoon was continuing. The cold outside was the same cold. The camp was the same camp. The winter that had been arriving for several weeks was still arriving. None of that had changed, but she had a second cup of hot chocolate in front of her on a November afternoon and the man who had refilled it had done so because there was more and there being more was simply the condition of this place on this afternoon. When she left the mess hall, the cold outside arrived immediately. The November air was exactly what it had been when she entered, but she was warm from the inside in a way that the cold had to work against rather than simply meet. The warmth moved with her across the compound. It would not last indefinitely. The cold was patient, and eventually the warmth would dissipate, and she would be cold again in the ordinary way. For now, she was not. She walked across the compound carrying the inside warmth of a second cup of hot chocolate that had been placed in front of her on a cold afternoon for no reason
except that it was available. That evening, she wrote in the notebook. She wrote, “Sie gaben uns heiße Schokolade.” They gave us hot chocolate. She did not underline it. She did not need to. The sentence was already exactly what it was, a plain record of a plain fact that was also not plain at all. They gave us hot chocolate.
On a cold afternoon in November, they had prepared something that had no function except warmth and sweetness and had given it to her and refilled it when it was empty. She closed the notebook. Outside, the compound was cold and dark. She was not cold yet. The warmth was still there, smaller now, but still there.
In the barracks that evening, the conversation was quieter than usual, not because there was less to say, because what was available to say about the afternoon required a different kind of saying, slower, more careful, less certain of its conclusions. One woman said simply, “It was warm.” She did not mean the temperature of the liquid specifically.
She meant something that warmth was the approximate word for. Everyone in the barracks understood this. Her hands still held the shape of the cup. Not literally, the cup was in the mess hall, but the palms were slightly curved in the position of holding something warm, the muscle memory of the afternoon still present.
She looked at her own hands. She straightened them flat. They remembered the cup regardless. The warmth had been real enough to leave an impression in the body that persisted after the warmth was gone. The window showed frost at its edges. The November dark was complete outside. She looked at the frost and thought about the cup in the distance between the two.
The frost was what the world was doing. The cup had been what someone had decided to do about the world. The frost would continue regardless. The cup had required a decision to prepare it, to bring it, to refill it when it was empty. The decision had been made. The frost had not been consulted. In the kitchen, the mess workers were cleaning the urn.
The afternoon had ended for them in the practical way that afternoons end in kitchens. The vessel emptied, rinsed, set aside. The cups collected and washed. The tables cleared. The next meal already on the schedule behind it. The afternoon existed for the kitchen as something that had been prepared and served and finished.
It existed for her as something that had happened to her. The same afternoon kept differently. The camp was quiet at night. The mess hall was dark. The urn was clean and put away. Somewhere in the kitchen the schedule for the next day was already determined and hot chocolate was not on it or it was. She had no way of knowing.
She did not know when it would be available again. She knew that it had been available today. That was a different kind of knowledge from not knowing. She had the taste of it still faintly. The smell of it still fainter. The warmth of it faintest. All of it diminishing but none of it yet gone. The notebook entry sat on the page without underlining.
She had considered underlining it and decided against it. The other entries had been underlined because they were single words carrying compressed weight. Dienstag, Sonntag, Menschlichkeit. This was a complete sentence. It did not need underlining to be what it was. Sie gaben uns heiße Schokolade. The sentence was already its own emphasis.
They gave us hot chocolate. The giving and the us and the hot chocolate all present together in seven words. The following days she looked for the urn at the end of the counter. It was not there. The days were ordinary and the counter was ordinary and the meals were what they were. She looked for the urn the way you look for something that appeared once and you are not certain about the conditions of its reappearance.
Not with expectation, with attention. There is a difference. Expectation requires a promise. Attention only requires that you keep looking. Two weeks later the urn was back on the counter. She saw it from across the room. The recognition was different from the first time, quieter, more assured. She knew what it was.
She knew what would happen when she wrapped her hands around the cup. She knew the sequence, heat through the metal first, then the smell, then the first drink in the darkness of the flavor and the sweetness beneath it. She knew the kitchen she would be briefly in. She was ready for it this time. Being ready for it was its own kind of gift.
She picked up the cup and wrapped both hands around it without hesitation. The heat came through the metal immediately, the same as before. She held it and looked at the dark surface and let the smell arrive. The kitchen arrived with it, her mother’s kitchen or her grandmother’s, the merged place from before the war.
She held the cup and let the kitchen be present for its moment, then she drank, the heat, the sweetness, the depth underneath. All of it in the same sequence as the first time. All of it the same, all of it still extraordinary. She opened her notebook that evening and wrote below the first entry. Below “Sei gaben uns Heißschokolade” she wrote “Und sei gaben uns wieder” and they gave it to us again. Two sentences now.
The first, they gave it. The second, they gave it again. The again was the important word. Once could be an accident, an excess, a single miscalculation of supply and need. Again was a pattern. Again was a decision that had been made more than once. Again was the word that turned a gift into a practice.
She closed the notebook. The camp was cold. She was warm again.
