by Celia Rees
“Frau Schmidt.”
“And a smaller one. Older. Pink nose. Beady little eyes.”
“Frau Kaufmann,” Edith supplied. “Friend of Frau Schmidt.”
“They seemed pretty skittish, so I made myself scarce, but I stayed close enough to overhear. You should have seen how they treated her. She could have been Frau Himmler. Afterward, I got a little bonus. The contact list brought by the Schwestern. People and places from here to Switzerland and beyond.”
“How did you get it?”
“Picking pockets is a particular talent. Done in minutes while I was helping with the cooking.” She mimed using the Minox. “And back in the apron pocket.” She held up a tiny roll of film. “I thought we might pop this in the mail to your friend Bill Adams. It’s about time you gave him something. It’ll keep him busy and distracted. I’ll post it for you. I need to wire Drummond.”
Edith wrote a quick note to Adams. She dashed off a card to Louisa, included the Rote Grütze recipe and a casual mention that she might be going for a bit of a holiday. To Italy. Then another card to Harry. No time to agonize. Keep it simple. Keep it short.
I’m taking that holiday to Northern Italy. I can be contacted poste restante at Vipiteno Sterzing, Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, South Tyrol. I miss you. If the offer is still open, I accept with all my heart!
Much love, Edith
She sealed the envelope and addressed it to him at BAOR Quarters, Bad Oeynhausen, hoping that it might get to him, that he hadn’t left yet. It was an act of faith, a bottle thrown into the sea. She delivered her post to Dori’s waiting hand. To her annoyance, Edith found herself blushing like a schoolgirl.
“I don’t suppose he’ll get it,” she said, trying to sound as if it didn’t matter.
“You never know.” Dori smiled. “There’s ways and means.”
After that, Edith was busy packing. A small suitcase and a rucksack, Dori instructed, no more than you can comfortably carry for a reasonable distance. Spare skirt, couple of blouses, two frocks, one a bit dressier, underwear, nighties, toiletry bag. Her Mason Pearson hairbrush had disappeared, her best lipstick too. A damned nuisance, but no point in going on looking. She would have to make do with Rimmel and the comb in her handbag. Time was tight. They were getting the midday train to Hamburg.
Italy
1946
37
American military train
10th May 1946
Buffet Menu
Crème Tomate
Crevette au Mayonnaise Russe
Poulet Roti
Pommes Chateau
Asperges au Hollandaise
Filet Mignon
Shortcake au Fraises
Welsh Rarebit
Café
The menu in French, but the food American: tomato soup or shrimps in a kind of pink mayonnaise, chicken or steak with roast potatoes and asparagus. Strawberry shortcake. Welsh Rarebit as savory. American rations far more generous than the British equivalent.
Edith hadn’t been back to Hamburg station since her arrival in the depths of winter. Now, people milled about the great concourse in frocks and shirt sleeves. The place smelled of soot and smoke laced with lilac from untended gardens, the sourness of broken drains, and a sweetish undernote of decay. Eau de Hamburg. The noon sun shone down through the great arches, the strong light split into golden shafts filled with swirling motes of dust. The squeal of iron on steel, the urgent snorts and long exhalations of arriving and departing engines sent roosting pigeons whirling up into the blueness past glinting shards of glass still gripped into the twisted ribs of the roof.
The military train stood at Platform 4. A young Rail Transport officer stood checking papers at the barrier. Dori swept up to him, Elisabeth in tow. She was in her WAAF officer’s uniform, which suited her tall slenderness and dark good looks. She managed to be both austere and alluring at the same time. The papers she had obtained for herself and Elisabeth would get them through as far as the Austria-Italy border, but she was not one to leave things to chance, even here. Her combination of haughtiness and charm left him reeling. He hardly glanced at Edith’s papers, just nodded her through, while staring after Dori’s legs in seamed stockings with awestruck lust.
The train wasn’t crowded. An attendant met them at the door and saw to their luggage. They had the four-berth sleeper compartment to themselves.
“So far, so good.” Dori got out her compact and applied a fresh coat of lipstick, a dab of powder. “I’m going to the buffet car. Anyone coming with me?”
“I think I should stay here,” Elisabeth replied. “Not attract attention.”
“Hmm.” Dori snapped shut her compact. “Probably a good idea. Edith?”
“I’ll keep Elisabeth company.”
“Need to get the lay of the land.” Dori stared out of the window, studying the people dotting the platform. “Have a scout about. See who else is on board.”
Edith had taken a seat by the window. Elisabeth sat opposite, her attention caught by something outside. Edith had her back to the engine and had to peer to see what Elisabeth was looking at so fixedly.
The farthest platform had no train standing there. None leaving, none arriving. It was distant from the other platforms, foreshortened, as if it was not really part of the vast station. It stood like an island. Beyond it lay sidings full of rusting engines, smashed wagons, twisted rails. A dumping ground for the detritus of war. The platform itself looked like a scarecrow encampment, black with people and their piled-up belongings under ragged awnings, rigged to keep out the hot May sun. People sat huddled, arms round their knees, staring out at the busy station, the trains leaving and arriving, studying the passengers who were boarding and alighting—coming from somewhere, going to somewhere—while they were going nowhere. Others lay sprawled while the makeshift awnings flapped above them like black, tattered flags. Children ran about between them or leaned listlessly against their mothers, or each other. Occasionally someone would stand up and find a place to relieve themselves, quite openly.
“Ostfolk,” Elisabeth said quietly. “People from the east.”
They had washed up here from East Prussia, Pomerania, Poland, and even farther east: Ukraine, Belarus. Some might have come from the south. Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia and where else? Who knows? Moving west, always west. Moved on from one place to another because no one wanted them. Lawyers, doctors, farmers, dentists, musicians, their wives and children, forced to take this trek by road and rail, the old, the very young, the weak abandoned by the wayside, buried there, or left to rot. On, ever on. But this was the last stop. There was nowhere else to go. So they sat here, waiting for someone to rescue them.
“Someone will come and pick them up,” Edith said without a great deal of conviction. “Red Cross, UNRRA, the British. They are building Nissen huts in the streets.”
“For Hamburg people. Not these.”
Edith did not disagree. The residents of Hamburg were still living in the bunkers and cellars of their bombed-out city.
“Schleswig-Holstein has already been declared a black area. It’s full, so is Hamburg.”
“But nobody has told these people this, so still they come.”
It was overwhelming, and the truth of it was, no one knew what to do.
The last door slammed, a whistle blew. A deep hoot announced that they were about to depart, and the engine began its long, labored chuffing as it drew them away from the station.
“Where’s Dori?” Edith asked. She had not come back yet.
“I’ll go and see, shall I?” Elisabeth volunteered.
After a little while, it was clear that she’d lost her, too, but Edith didn’t mind. She liked being on trains, and she liked traveling alone. She got her book out of her bag: Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear. Leo boasted an acquaintance with Graham Greene, albeit slight, so she felt a personal connection. She’d got it out of the NAAFI Library. She’d have to mail it back.
Yet the book lay on her l
ap, unread. The devastated city gave way to less scarred suburbs, then countryside: a farmer driving cattle to milking, a boy walking down long rows of potatoes. The fields became barren heathland, clotted with flaring gorse, dotted with twisted pines. Here and there, the rusting remains of war: a burned-out tank, a field gun tipped on its side, the skeletal remains of a truck. Then a tract of forest, great scaly trunks reared as the train plunged into cuttings; thick, twisted roots clinging to red, sandy soil. Every so often, they would steam through a station: a small village strung along the railway; a town of thin copper-clad spires, red roofs, and turrets. Gone before Edith had time to wonder about who lived there. On through Lower Saxony, glimpses of distant castles on gothic crags; isolated farmhouses with logs piled up against the oncoming winter, even though it was barely summer, the wood stacked under steeply pitched roofs reaching almost to the ground. The shape and the design of these Saxon dwellings hadn’t changed much since the Iron Age. We are a deeply conservative people, that seemed to say. Our history goes back a very long way.
There was little sign of the war here. Only the cities showed real scars. The empty, sentinel steeples of Hanover looked like Hamburg or Berlin.
Time to go and find the others. Edith had gazed on enough destruction in her time here.
Dori and Elisabeth were in the dining car, entertaining two American officers who stood up like schoolboys when Edith joined them. They seemed young for the marks of rank they carried, but when she came closer she saw a bullet crease disappearing into a blond hairline; eyes that were no longer young. There was a weariness there, as if they’d seen plenty of things they’d like to forget, creases at the corners from staring down gun sights and into the sun.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” Edith said as she sat down.
“Would you like a drink, ma’am? I’m Lew, by the way.” He was older than the other. A colonel. He smiled, his pale-blue eyes crinkling. He ran a hand over his dark-auburn hair.
“Yes, please.” Edith smiled back. “Whisky.”
“No ice, I’m afraid.”
“No ice is fine with me.”
Edith sat back and sipped her drink. Dori was being especially winning, looking up from under her long lashes, fixing the younger of the two with her large dark eyes as he lit her cigarette. She was keeping up a stream of flirtatious banter threaded through with casual-seeming questions. Where were they stationed? Where were they heading? What did they do?
Lew grinned as the younger man sought to monopolize her. “Your friend is quite a girl.”
Edith smiled. She knew how Dori worked. Befriending American officers would minimize problems when crossing into the American Zone; and maybe there was something more to it than that . . .
The talk moved on to swapping war accounts, as most people did at first encounter. Elisabeth won the pot.
“By January we knew we had to leave . . .”
Elisabeth began the story of her dramatic escape on horseback before the Russian advance. The searing cold, the impossible distances, the rocket whine and artillery fire of clashing armies; the endless columns of refugees, whole provinces on the move. The Americans listened with rapt attention, nodding now and then, to encourage her to go on or because she was confirming what they thought already. They were predisposed not to like the Russians, the new enemy, and this eyewitness account of rape and slaughter was exactly what they wanted to hear.
Everyone had war stories, embroidered to add texture and color, to make vivid the plain linen ground of day-to-day wartime life. People would, no doubt, continue to do so until the bright myth became the memory, but this was of a different order. Edith sat back in her seat, listening. Elisabeth hadn’t made this up. She was sure of that. The telling contained too many tiny details: the warning of crows in the trees near the villages they had to avoid, the infants encased in the frozen carapaces of their nappies. Such observations took her story out of the realm of invention. That’s where the power of it lay. Edith watched the expressions shift and change on the faces around her: horror, disgust, sympathy, admiration—all the emotions she’d felt on that first hearing. Elisabeth couldn’t play her in that way now. The deep sympathy she had first evoked had long gone.
They ate together. The talk turned to lighter matters. At Kessel, the train halted. American border police went along the carriages, inspecting papers. The presence of a colonel meant that theirs got little more than a cursory glance. There was a call for those leaving to leave now.
“We’re changing trains here.” Colonel Lew picked up his cap. “Come see us if you’re ever in Frankfurt.”
They all smiled with that combination of regret and relief that comes from knowing that you will never see that person again.
“Tom’s men,” Dori said as the doors slammed. “Keeping an eye while keeping us entertained. Two more have taken over.” She nodded toward the two officers settling themselves at a table. “Time to turn in, I think.”
The train stopped at Nuremberg while they were breakfasting. The two Americans from the night before had been replaced by another pair a few rows down and across the aisle.
“He really doesn’t trust us, does he?” Dori breathed, smiling in their direction. They quickly looked out of the window, instantly absorbed by the passing scene. “Not them I’m worried about, though. It’s those two.” She took out her mirror as though checking her makeup. “Third table, right-hand side.”
Edith glanced down the train. Two men sitting opposite each other reading newspapers. As she got up to leave, one of them folded his paper carefully and followed her.
Edith went back to the compartment to find her place had been taken.
“Adeline!”
Edith hugged her fiercely, absurdly glad that she was here. Soon, Dori and Elisabeth would be leaving, and she hadn’t been looking forward to going on alone.
“Got on at Nuremberg.” Adeline resumed her seat. “Dori wired me which train you’d be on. She thought I might like to come along. Escaping Nazis will make a helluva good story. Also, I’ve got information of the sensitive kind.” She patted the musette bag by her side. “Where’s Dori? Elisabeth with her?”
Edith nodded. “They’re still at breakfast.”
“Good. I’ve got something you need to see.” Adeline took a file from her bag. “I looked up the guys she was with in the garden party photograph. Guess what I found in the Nazi photo archives?” Adeline set out photographs. “Elisabeth with Gehlen.” Elisabeth in a fur coat and hat walking next to the Nazi officer, going through a gate, barbed wire each side. “And here she is again, this time with Kapkow.” Elisabeth in an office somewhere, taken from the side. She tapped the file. “I got evidence that shows that Elisabeth worked for the both of them at different times.” She sat back. “Looks to me as though Elisabeth might be the draw here. Intelligence, British and US, would be interested in using Elisabeth as a bullshit detector on the stories these men are spinning to them and whatever else she knows.” She paused. “That’s not why Dori wants her, of course. These men sent her agents to the gas chambers.”
At Munich, they boarded the British military train to Vienna. No one seemed to follow them.
Munich’s ruins were replaced by bright meadows and dark forests. Adeline took photographs.
“Isn’t Berchtesgaden here someplace?” she asked.
“Farther east,” Elisabeth replied. “Even more remote.”
“Didn’t Hitler have plans for the Nazis to hold out there? The last redoubt? What did they call it?” Adeline frowned as she lined up another shot. “Alpen something?”
“Alpenfestung,” Elisabeth supplied. “I don’t think it was a serious plan.”
“Is that a fact?” Adeline turned the camera on her. “You don’t mind do you? It’s just I like snapping faces, and you are very photogenic.” Elisabeth blushed slightly. “Even better. No, don’t pose, like you are, looking out the window, that’s nice. So what was it about, then? This Alpenfestung? Sure fooled our guys.”
“It was a trick. They wanted the Allies to believe they could hold out in these mountains indefinitely.”
“But why?” Adeline carried on snapping.
“Who knows?” Elisabeth shrugged. “Maybe they wanted to believe it themselves.”
Edith watched the two of them. She’d seen Adeline do this before, question someone while taking photographs at the same time. It both disarmed and disconcerted. Adeline said it gave a more honest portrait.
“We’ll be at the border soon,” Dori remarked. “Just popping out for a smoke.”
“I’ll join you.” Adeline got up, taking her musette bag, leaving Edith and Elisabeth alone in the carriage.
“They can smoke in here.” Elisabeth looked inquiring.
“They know I don’t like it.”
“The border,” said Elisabeth, looking out of the window. “It will be all right?”
“Sure to be,” Edith replied, although she had no idea.
“Two British officers smoking out of the windows at either end of the carriage,” Dori said quietly as the train came to a slow halt.
They were entering the French Zone of Occupation. The border guards inspected papers with fastidious politeness. They touched their caps, everything in order, and went on to the next carriage.
“That went smoothly.” Dori tucked the papers back in her bag. “Our friends still out there?”
Edith looked out into the corridor and nodded.
“Time for a change of plan. We get off at the next station. You two stay on until Innsbruck. Take a stroll around the town, have coffee, cake, take some photos. Stay a day or two, then get a train to Vipiteno Sterzing. If our friends are still with you, go past the town and double back.”