The Black Cat of Oberammergau

Photo by Jayalekshman SJ on Unsplash

    It was a July evening in the German village of Oberammergau. My mother and I were about halfway through our tour of Germany and we had just settled into our rooms at the Bed and Breakfast. Our tour group began to split up into groups, some staying in to relax, others going around to explore the sleepy town and get an idea of what shops they would like to go to when they opened the next day. 

    But Mom and I had a different idea: explore the old cemetery outside of Oberammergau's Catholic Church. So we set out, Mom equipped with the smaller of the two cameras she brought along to Germany. I had just walked out the door when I spotted him rolling around on the sidewalk. Because I'm an animal lover who has a special love for cats, I immediately went over to the black tom cat, hoping that he would let me pet him. 

    Luckily for me, I probably wasn't the first tourist who had begged the cat for pets, and he was happy to have a stranger give him belly scratches. Once Mom had noticed me halfway down the street baby-talking a random cat she joined me for a minute and then reminded me where we were going. So, with a heavy heart, we left the cat and walked over to the Catholic Church.

    The cemetery was beautiful. It was surrounded by wrought iron fencing, with a tall stone wall replacing the fence in the back of the cemetery. In the United States, cemeteries are like giant lawns with stone monuments standing in rows a few feet away from each other. This is not the case in Germany. The cemetery had a path around the graves made of crushed stone, and the graves themselves were unique. Some families had small flower gardens planted above their loved ones, others had statues and other mementos placed in the space above the grave.

    We hadn't been there long when I heard a meow. I turned around to find the same cat sitting on a tombstone, watching me. Once he was sure I was paying attention, he gracefully hopped down and went down the row, stopping every once in awhile to make sure I was still following him. There were some tombstones he took a special interest in, rubbing himself on them while purring.

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

    I called Mom over, who said, "It's almost like he's trying to give us a tour."

    So we followed him for a bit, stopping a little longer at the graves he paid special attention to. He seemed to be leading us towards the front of the cemetery. We had come in through a side gate close to the back, but because the cat had shown up we hadn't finished exploring the back of the cemetery. So, we decided to turn back.

    Our furry little tour guide followed us for a few rows and then stopped and sat, as if he was waiting for us to come back. A little while later we found an... interesting gravestone. It was simple, a dark stone with his birth and death date etched just below his name. But the name started with his military rank, Lieutenant, and the year of his death was 1942, only about 20 or so years after his birth. Those two facts would be enough to reveal what he did in his life, but to prevent misunderstanding there was a small laser engraved portrait of the man in his Nazi uniform just above his name.

    Mom pulled out her camera so that we could show my dad and brother the picture when we got home from Germany. She focused the small camera and clicked the button to take the picture. Instead, the screen went black. It appeared to have died on us, which was weird since it should have been fully charged, but it was a cheap camera that was already a few years old. But when Mom went to put it back in her pocket, she noticed that the lense of the camera was dented. 

    By the time we went back to where we left the cat, he was gone. We wandered around for a little while longer, but it was starting to get too dark to read the tombstones, so we went back for the night. Mom tried to charge the camera that night and many more times during the trip, even trying after we got home. It never turned on again, and all the pictures Mom had taken on that camera were gone, including the last picture of the Nazi's tombstone.

    This is one of my favorite memories of the two weeks Mom and I spent in Germany. We had many lovely tour guides throughout our stops in different German towns and cities, but that black tom cat is by far my favorite out of all of them. 

    Looking back, there is one particular thing I find especially eerie about the camera incident. I never saw the cat go near that grave, and he seemed to be leading us away from it too. Perhaps the cat was trying to protect us. Maybe we were lucky the only thing that broke was the camera.

Photo by Sašo Tušar on Unsplash