by Celia Rees
“What is it?”
“An old friend would like to see you. Tomorrow in the Tiergarten. In front of the Reichstag at four o’clock.”
32
Hotel am Zoo, Berlin
26th April 1946
Dinner--Hotel am Zoo
Schnitzel à la Holstein
Ideally a veal cutlet beaten very thin, coated in fresh breadcrumbs and fried until golden to browning. Holstein topped with a fried egg or two, crisscrossed with anchovies and finished with a dressing of browned butter, parsley, finely chopped capers, and the juice of a lemon.
Not in this case. Eggs overcooked, yolks hard, whites like crisped lace. Strips of fish could have been anchovy but were more likely salted herring. The few wizened capers resembled rabbit droppings. Meat flaccid, pallid, encased in something that had the texture and consistency of a sodden sock.
Edith had only visited Berlin once. She’d traveled there with Leo after their stay at Schloss Steinhof, just for a day or two while Leo “nosed about.” It was a city that yielded little on casual acquaintance, rather like its inhabitants. She didn’t remember it very clearly and had no affection for the place. Of that, she was glad. Fond memories would have been erased, obliterated by Allied bombing and Russian shells, replaced by the ruination she saw now. She’d seen this desolation before, of course. Horrible how one got used to it. The destruction wasn’t necessarily worse than Hamburg or any other city, it was just bigger, just as the city was bigger, more spread out, going on for mile after mile.
Jack dropped her in front of the Hotel am Zoo. She hadn’t expected him to drive her, but he had an excuse. A new toy. A cream-and-black BMW sedan had replaced the Humber. “Beautiful, ain’t she?” Jack had said, regarding the coachwork with something between respect and lust. “Needs a run. Put her through her paces.” Was he keeping an eye on her, or did he just fancy a trip to Berlin?
They made excellent time. Harry hadn’t arrived, neither had Dori. Which was good. Edith didn’t want to explain where she was going or what she was going to do; but there was at least an hour to kill before her meeting. Her room was small. Long cracks, like a road map, zigzagged across the walls and ceiling. A skin of paint in a different shade had been applied in an attempt at disguise but that just added to the feeling that the whole building might fall apart at any minute, fracturing along the fissures. It was stuffy in here and smelled faintly of rot and other people. She opened the window. From below came the steady chink, chink of a Trümmerfrau patiently chipping mortar from usable brick.
Edith couldn’t wait in here. The Zoological Gardens were opposite, the Tiergarten behind them. She would go out. Get the lay of the land.
From the ruins of the zoo, a distinct trumpeting suggested that at least one elephant had survived the general destruction. Goodness knows what had happened to the other creatures once kept there. There were stories of lions and tigers roaming the city immediately after the fall. Real beasts replacing their human equivalent. A Russian vet had apparently fought to save a hippopotamus, even sleeping next to it, tending its wounds, feeding it on vodka, while all around people were dying in their hundreds, if not thousands. What a strange world this was, she thought. What a strange species we are.
Beyond the zoo lay the no-man’s-land expanse of the Tiergarten, pocked with craters and shell holes filled with green-gilded stagnant water, dotted with broken and mutilated trees. Statues of kings and soldiers surveyed the devastation. Many pedestals were empty and broken. One huge plinth held just a foot. Look on my works, ye Mighty. The wide walks and promenades were churned and rutted, potholed by the treads of tanks and armored cars. Edith took the crisscrossing tracks made by the surviving Berliners in their search for firewood, the quickest way from one point to another. Edith used the soaring Victory Column at the center of the Tiergarten as a landmark. It was the only thing that appeared unscathed. The gold figure of winged Victory gleamed in the spring sunshine. Above her rippled a French tricolor.
There was beauty here, among the destruction. New growth was sprouting from the boles of the shattered treas. Lime leaves, vivid green and as soft and delicate as newly washed silk handkerchiefs. Women were digging the heavy clay soil, kneeling, hands in the mud, planting, watering seeds from battered enamel mugs, turning the churned mess of what had once been flowerbeds and manicured lawns into Schrebergärten, vegetable plots. Nearby stood a low cross, lashed-together branches of silver birch. A gray-green helmet, pitted with rust, dangled from one of the arms.
The Reichstag, or what was left of it, was closer now. Edith slowed her pace. She looked at her watch. It was nearly four, but she was reluctant to go any nearer. All the way through the gardens, different dialogues and scripts had been playing in her head, but she still had no clear idea what she would say to Kurt, or what he would say to her. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to meet him at all. She could go back to Lübeck, to her work with the Control Commission. Be finished with the whole business. Just do the job that she was paid to do.
Then she saw him moving among the buyers and sellers gathered under the trees. British and American servicemen, even a few Russians, poking through the contents of bags and bundles held out for their inspection, cardboard suitcases open on the floor.
He seemed to be browsing at random. She lost track of him for a moment, then suddenly he was by her side.
“Edith! I’m so glad to see you. I was worried you would not come.”
Edith stepped away as he reached to embrace her, kiss her on both cheeks, as he had done at Heidelberg station. There was a fusty, unwashed smell about him. His gabardine raincoat was shiny on the lapels and ill fitting, the sleeves too short, an epaulette missing. His hat was battered, his shoes cracked across the toes. The smile had lost its dazzle. The charm as worn and shabby as his clothes.
“You will find changes in me,” he said, uncomfortable under her scrutiny. “I lack a woman’s care.”
He rubbed his jaw, in need of shaving. There was a scar on his cheek, recent by the look of it, pink and livid.
“How did you get that?” She couldn’t stop herself from staring. “You didn’t have that before the war.”
“Shrapnel.” He touched it as if it was still tender. “It became infected. Took a long time to heal.”
“Why did you want to see me?” she asked. Suddenly, she wanted to get away from him. As far and fast as possible. “How did you know about me anyway? That I would be in Berlin.”
He ignored her questions.
“Well, what do you want?” she demanded in the face of his silence, resisting the urge to run.
“How do you know I want something?” He gave his rictus smile.
Edith looked past him toward the trading, the buying and selling, the men following young flesh into the bushes, so sad and so utterly predictable.
“Everyone wants something.”
“I want—” he began but didn’t finish the sentence. He was looking at something, or someone, over her shoulder. “I thought you would come alone. I wish you a good evening.” He tipped his hat to her and turned abruptly on his heel.
Adeline was standing right behind her, camera in hand.
“Edith! I thought it was you. What are you doing here? Do you know that guy?” She stared after Kurt’s retreating figure. “What did he want?”
Edith shrugged. “Just a light.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“That’s what I told him.”
She turned away, ignoring Adeline, tracking Kurt weaving his way through the crowd milling in front of the ruined Reichstag. She would tell Adeline about him when she was ready, not before. The encounter had shaken her far more deeply than she could have anticipated. Adeline’s appearance was surely coincidence, but it had rescued her from an unexpected storm of emotions: revulsion, loathing, hatred, physical repulsion brought on by everything she now knew about him, everything he’d done. A few seconds more in his company and she’d have lost control, failing Dori, failing everyone.
“So, what are you doing here?” Edith forced her attention back to Adeline.
“Taking photographs. What do you think?” Adeline looked up. “Light’s going. That’s it for me.” She put her camera back in the musette bag slung over her shoulder. “Tom McHale’s in town, too. Got an apartment out by the Wannsee. Very fancy.”
“He hasn’t sent you home yet, then.”
“Not yet.” Adeline laughed. “I have my uses. He’s basing himself here now. Berlin’s the place to be. Things are heating up with the Soviets. Tensions rising. There’s been a referendum here on merging the Social Democratic Party with the Communist KPD. Soviets all for it, of course. The Western sectors not so thrilled. There’s been trouble. People being snatched off the streets. All kinds of dirty tricks. It’ll get worse with the fall elections. Berlin is turning into two cities. Front line in a new kind of war. West and East. Us and them. Tom wouldn’t want to miss out on that.”
Back at the hotel, they found Dori in the bar, still in her uniform.
“Drink?” she asked. “I’ve already started, as you can see.” She indicated to the barman. “Three more of these. Your last message.” She turned to Edith. “You have an address for von Stavenow.”
“Yes, it’s here.” Edith took the piece of notepaper from her bag.
Dori looked at the note, folded it carefully and put it into her bag. She looked tired. Her face was even paler than usual, with tiny lines of strain around eyes that had a glassiness to them, an unfocused quality, as if she’d had more than one martini.
“That’s in the Russian Sector,” she said, her expression bleak. “Makes sense.” She drained her glass. “I’ve just come from that Nacht und Nabel place I told you about in Alsace. Natzweiler. A secret camp,” she added for Adeline’s benefit. “Somewhere for people to disappear. Prisoners sent there didn’t come back. Civilian resisters mainly, spies, foreign commandos, worked to death in the granite quarries.” She frowned, picking a strand of tobacco from her tongue. “They had a facility there to deflesh corpses. The skeletons were sent to the Anatomy Institute at Strasbourg University for their collection. Four of our girls were taken there. Killed by lethal injection.”
“They didn’t do that . . . Surely not . . .” Edith stumbled for words to express her disgust at yet another unspeakable horror.
“No. That didn’t happen to our women. They were incinerated.” Dori’s laugh was dull, like cracked glass. “It comes to something, doesn’t it? When one hears that with something like relief. But they were taken there for a reason. This was a secret camp. No witnesses. A place where they thought that they could do as they liked. But they couldn’t, d’you see? There were witnesses. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, thousands, watching, taking notice. The prisoners were nothing to them, less than nothing, but putting them in jackets marked with a cross and N and N stenciled on them did not erase the human being within. They didn’t all die, and they saw what happened. They heard. And now they’re telling us.
“Women came to the camp. Four of them. Well dressed, young, attractive. This was a camp of men. How would they not notice?” She stubbed out her cigarette. “We’ve identified three of these women: Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, and Diana Rowden. The fourth may have been Noor Inayat Khan, but we’re not so certain. What we do know is that these four arrived in the afternoon and died that night. They were to be killed immediately. Orders from Berlin. This was unorthodox. There was a reluctance to take responsibility. This was not a moral or ethical dilemma; it was a matter of procedure. This was not how things were done. The executioner didn’t want to hang them; it would create too much drama. It was up to the doctors, but they weren’t sure that they had enough of the right kind of drugs to kill four healthy women.”
Dori spoke slowly, her focus inward, as she carefully pieced together the story from the witness statements she’d taken, the reports she’d read. Only the tension around her mouth betrayed her emotion, the way her hand trembled as she lit another cigarette.
“Anyway.” She let out a thin stream of smoke. “The women were locked in cells. They could have had no idea what was about to happen to them. Later that evening they were taken to the building that contained the crematorium. The other prisoners had been locked up early. They all knew what was about to happen. The camp doctors were nervous, jittery. At this point, it is hard to find out who did what. They all deny it now, of course. What we do know is that whoever administered the injections botched the job. The listening prisoners heard screaming, someone shouting “Vive la France.” There is evidence that at least one of the women was put into the oven alive.” She stopped long enough to control her voice and then cleared her throat. “Anyway, a witness, a Dutch doctor, places someone else there. Natzweiler was one of a select number of camps involved in various scientific and medical experiments involving poison gas, among other things. There was a doctor who came from Berlin to collect the results. He supplied the lethal drugs and assisted with the loading of the women into the oven. In the process, his face was scratched badly.” Dori touched her own cheek. “Deeply enough to leave a scar.”
“It’s there!” Edith nodded quickly. “Looks recent.” She couldn’t stop the words bursting out.
“You’ve seen him?”
“In the Tiergarten.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“You didn’t ask me.” And Edith hadn’t wanted to tell. But she did now. She had to.
“It was him. I knew it!” Dori’s dark eyes were on Edith. “Arrange another meeting. That’s why you’re so important. You’re Beziehungen.” She used the German word. Connected. “For Vera, it’s enough to find out what happened to our girls, to bring the perpetrators to justice, where that’s possible.”
“But it’s not for you,” Edith ventured.
“No, not for me. Vera was never in France. She never saw active duty. She just sent us there. Some of these girls were picked up straight from the landing grounds. That didn’t have anything to do with Vera, but she feels responsible. She has to discover what happened, bring prosecutions where possible, inform the relatives. When she’s done that, then she’s fulfiled her duty. It can all be filed somewhere, tidied away and forgotten. But these women were my comrades, my compatriots. They were picked up in France, sent to Germany to die horribly. It could have been me being loaded into that oven. I saw it, Edith. I saw the iron door, the metal loader, and there was a smell, faint but still there. Burnt offerings.” She shuddered. “Some things you can’t forget. Will never forget. I tell you, I’d want someone to avenge me, if it’d been my fate to die in that terrible place.”
She sighed and sat in brooding silence for a while. Edith and Adeline remained quiet, sensing she had more to tell. “We’re picking up traces of von Stavenow in other places.” She looked at Edith. “The girls from Ravensbrück, the women’s camp, had an interesting tale to tell. The women there were from different countries: France, Poland. Some Jewish, but mostly political prisoners, agents, Resistance often as not ended up in Ravensbrück. Among them comrades. Women I knew. Some came in pregnant. The other women would try to keep the births secret. Babies were taken away, you see. But it was impossible. It was impossible to keep anything secret, and the mothers were exhausted from the work they were made to do. They couldn’t feed their babies. Crying alerted the guards, and the child was taken. We interviewed a nurse, asked her, ‘What became of the babies?’” Dori stopped and took a deep breath. When she spoke again her voice was husky, with a slight shudder, her accent stronger. “They had orders, she said. The babies were not to be burned. They were to be preserved. Brains and organs removed and kept. For study. Orders from a Doctor von Stavenow in Berlin.”
Before she could shut off the image, Edith saw babies, coarse-stitched and blind, floating in jars of formaldehyde, the amniotic fluid of the dead.
“They’re not going to arrest him, we know that much,” Dori said. “It’ll be a tug-of-war with the Russians as to who can acquire his services.�
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“Don’t forget the Americans.” Adeline sipped her martini. “My turn now. I know why the Americans want him, and they want him bad.”
Edith dressed for the evening in the long-sleeved cocktail dress that Dori had chosen in Peter Jones. Strange to think the shop was still there, in Sloane Square, selling elegant clothes to elegant people. Impossible to imagine.
She checked at the desk as she went down to dinner. Telephone message from Harry. He’d been delayed. However much she ached to see him, that might be a good thing. One less complication.
Adeline was alone.
“Where’s Dori?”
“Gone to meet someone. We’re meeting her at the Kool Kat Klub. Let’s eat.”
The Soupe Julienne was a flavorless vegetable concoction, heavily favoring the potato. The Schnitzels Holstein were even worse.
“What is this?” Adeline speared a sliver of meat.
Edith cut off a tiny piece and chewed thoughtfully. “Should be veal but more likely pork.”
“Isn’t human flesh supposed to taste like pork?”
“So they say.”
“I seem to have entirely lost my appetite.” Adeline pushed her plate away. “There’s a story making the rounds here in Berlin. Heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy who works for the New Yorker, so it must be true. Anyway, this is how the story goes. There’s a guy walking down Kurfürstendamm, or it could be Knesebeckstrasse, depends on who’s doing the telling. The guy’s thin and kind of bent over, dressed in an old Wehrmacht jacket, broken boots, baggy trousers, an old soldier, you know the kind, you see ’em all the time. He’s blind, wearing dark glasses, has a white stick and one of those yellow armbands with the black dots on it that blind folks have here. He’s tapping along through the crowds when he stops this young fraulein, she’s a good-looking well-built kind of girl. He asks her for help. He has a letter to deliver. Is he on the right street? ‘Oh, no,’ the girl says, ‘you’re going the wrong way.’ They start to walk back together but it’s slow going and the address is quite a distance. ‘Tell you what,’ the Fraulein says, ‘why don’t I deliver it for you?’ ‘Would you?’ He’s very grateful. Not so nimble after Stalingrad and what with the blindness . . . ‘Certainly.’ She takes the envelope and off she goes. After a while she looks back, worried about how he’s doing. He’s doing pretty well, thank you. Just about to cross the road, looking right and left to see if there’s a tram coming. The glasses are gone, so’s the armband. She thinks, that’s strange. She’s suspicious, takes the letter to the nearest cop shop. They go straight to the address, thinking it’s maybe black market. It seems to be a shoe shop, but something rings phony, so they decide to search the place. In the cellar, they find spots of blood on the floor leading to a hidden door. Behind it they find a cold storage and a whole load of fresh meat. Definitely black market, but there’s something funny about the cuts. By the shape and the skin, it looks to be human. Up until that point, no one has thought to look inside the envelope. When they open it, they find a note. It says: This is the last one I shall be sending today.” Adeline sat back. “Good story, huh?”