The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

  “Am I at home?”

  “Of course. In your own bed.”

  “And are you next to me?”

  “Ja.” She caught sight of his identity disc. “Shhh, Peter.”

  He frowned, with a moment of piercing lucidity, and ricocheted up in bed.

  “We can’t stay here. It’s dangerous! The Tommies are coming again. We need to take shelter! We’ll go to the bunker in Friedrichstrasse!”

  “Hush, Peter. We’re quite safe here.”

  “What about Kurt? And little Helmut?”

  “They’re already in the shelter. Everyone’s fine.”

  “But what will happen to you, Mutti? Will you be safe?”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  He fell back against the pillow and his eyelids drooped, but his lips were still moving with a string of broken words.

  She clenched her teeth to stop the tears forming and put a hand on his brow. “Rest now, Liebling. Go to sleep.”

  * * *

  —

  ONE MORNING, SHORTLY AFTER her arrival, she was fetching a tray of syringes for theater when she was stopped by a hand on her arm. It was a stooped, elderly woman in a white cap. A yellow star was sewn on the front of her apron.

  “You haven’t changed.”

  Irene was speechless. No one looked the same in wartime. The glowing complexion that people used to remark on was still there, but threads of gray now ran through the blond and rationing had seen nearly twenty pounds slip from her frame. Weight loss, not to mention the sleepless nights from constant air raids, had only honed the lineaments and made her distinctive, dark-lashed eyes more luminous.

  Yet when she focused on the weathered figure in front of her, the recognition was mutual.

  “Schwester Beckmann!”

  The elderly nurse who had taken such risks years ago to provide her with contraception. Nurse Beckmann’s face was more lined and gaunt than Irene remembered, the skin papery from lack of vitamins and the hair sparse, yet the older woman’s eyes retained their piercing, intelligent light.

  “You’re surprised to see me, aren’t you? I’m a survivor.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nursing, of course. In the Jewish wards.”

  “The Jewish wards?”

  The old lady took Irene’s elbow and steered her into the entrance of a storage room. Irene bent closer and whispered, “Are you telling me there are still Jews here?”

  How could that be, after the roundups and the deportations and Joseph Goebbels’s declaration that Berlin was Jew-free?

  “Several hundred. In the basement of the west wing.”

  “How have they escaped?” Irene was bewildered.

  “By the sound application of National Socialist logic. The Nazis want Jews to be healthy before they take them away to kill them.” She sniffed. “There’s a prison facility and a Sammellager, a holding camp, for people who are to be deported.”

  “And the medical staff? Are they Jewish too?”

  “Yes. Not so many, though. Increasingly few. The fine gentlemen of the Jewish Affairs Department pay occasional visits when they need to make up numbers on one of their deportations. They arrive unannounced and pick on anyone infringing the rules. Doesn’t matter what—wearing lipstick or nail varnish. Having a star improperly sewn. Crimes, you see. Enough to be sent to a camp.”

  “And Lili Blum? Is she still here?”

  The old woman’s face turned soft and vague. “I haven’t seen her.” She shrugged. “But that doesn’t mean she’s not.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST CHANCE SHE had the following day, Irene created an errand for herself—a trip to the storeroom for bandages—and headed for the dingy corridors housing the non-Aryan precinct of the hospital.

  Most of the patients in this section were admitted only because they were married to Aryans, or had one non-Jewish parent. Tending them were around sixty doctors, nurses, and support staff. As Irene moved from ward to ward asking after Lili, her question was met only by blank stares and disinterested shrugs. Irene got the impression that even if anyone had known of Lili’s whereabouts, they were not about to confide them to her. Her fledgling hopes were fading as she came to the last ward on the corridor. The door was marked with a skull and crossbones and the words HIGHLY INFECTIOUS: DO NOT ENTER. That was entirely unnecessary—such was the general horror of infectious disease no Nazi official would dream of entering—so Irene guessed it would be safe to slip inside.

  Twenty iron-framed beds were crowded into the room, jammed right up next to one another and containing patients of every age and sex, all with a distinctive skin rash such as she had never seen. Livid red petechiae were scattered indiscriminately across every gaunt face and torso, accentuating the pallor of malnutrition and light deprivation.

  Overriding her instinct to avoid them, Irene approached the nearest bed. The occupant was a pretty woman in her twenties. Crimson pinpricks dotted her skin and ran from her chest up to the neck. More spots freckled her starved face. As Irene approached, the girl turned listlessly away, but Irene bent down and placed a hand on the pale brow. The girl flinched. Reaching for the water, Irene poured a glass and lifted it, but when she did a drop of water splashed onto the prone forearm. As she reached down to wipe it, a curious phenomenon became visible. The rash was bleeding and fragmenting as the water touched it, the color fading and leaching away. The girl snatched at the sheet to cover herself, her face contorted with panic, but Irene grasped her arm to examine it more closely.

  Paint. The rashes were made with paint.

  * * *

  —

  SHE WAS STILL LAUGHING as she closed the door behind her, yet almost immediately her smile faded. The corridor—which had been abandoned when she entered it earlier—was loud with the drumming of heels on linoleum and deep, confident voices. A phalanx of men in the gray and black livery of the SS was approaching, headed by a saturnine figure with a clipboard under his arm. Catching sight of Irene, he brought the group to a halt.

  “Let me see your papers.”

  He was lanky in his uniform, with a beaked nose and a wide mouth, tight as a trap. Cruelty came off him in waves. As he studied Irene’s pass, the death’s head on his cap winked in a shaft of sunlight.

  “So Krankenschwester Weissmuller.” His lips twisted. “I think you owe us an explanation.” He brought his face uncomfortably close to hers, and the air seemed to thin between them. “You’re aware that this is a non-Aryan ward?”

  “I am now.”

  “What was your business here?”

  “I’m new. I arrived only recently. I got lost.”

  “Aryan nurses are not permitted in this part of the hospital. I hope you were not attempting fraternization with Jews.”

  “No, Herr…” Her eyes flicked to his uniform to determine the rank. Four silver pips and a stripe, centered on the left collar. “Herr Obersturmbannführer.”

  “You must know that a contravention of this kind merits punishment.”

  “I’m sorry. I turned the wrong way. As I said, I’m new here. I simply made a mistake.”

  “You simply made a mistake,” he mocked.

  “Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” she replied evenly.

  He rocked back on his heels with the sadistic air of a teacher about to humiliate a student to encourage the others.

  “The Reich can do without nurses who simply make mistakes. Personally I wouldn’t like to be attended by one.”

  He glanced back at his uniformed posse. Some grinned at their superior’s joke, but the sneer had already died on his lips.

  “Perhaps, Krankenschwester, you’d like to show me that you are capable of working without mistakes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Follow me.”

  Irene
accompanied the SS group down the corridor. They turned the corner to a small foyer where a press of people, staff and patients together, were corralled. Most patients, judging by their dressing gowns, had just been helped out of bed and were standing only with the assistance of nurses. Some were not much more than skeletons, propped up in the final stages of terminal illness by stick limbs and wasted muscles. Others were doing their best to look healthy, with frail shoulders rigidly braced. All had instinctively shuffled into a parade ground parody of lines, three ranks of four, amid the trolleys and hospital equipment. The officer stalked along the rows, followed by a couple of his subordinates, then permitted a smirk to cross his features.

  “Attention.”

  The nurses, medical orderlies, and patients froze.

  “My name is Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann and I am here to select candidates for relocation to the East. Those chosen will be taken to Grosse Hamburger Strasse immediately and registered.”

  Eichmann thrust the clipboard at Irene. “Take down the names, ages, and addresses of the people I choose.”

  His eyes roved over the motley group and lit on a fat man in pajamas.

  “You.”

  Irene stepped forward to write down the man’s name. Barely audible, he whispered, “Solomon Cohen. Age forty-nine. Rosenthaler Strasse, 119.”

  Eichmann was moving rapidly, his finger jabbing like a pistol at the hollow-cheeked figures.

  “You, you, you.”

  Turning to the aide standing at his shoulder, he murmured, “Twelve, did you say?”

  “Jawohl.”

  Eichmann pointed to an elderly woman in a dressing gown, her pink scalp silvered with a few strands of hair.

  “You.”

  “But, Herr Obersturmbannführer…”

  Eichmann froze her with a look. Her whimper died on the air.

  “You.”

  Even though they were standing to attention, facing straight ahead, every quivering member of the group had worked it out. Eichmann was selecting the oldest and the sickest among them.

  “You.”

  A pungent smell of urine rose and caught Eichmann’s nostrils. His face whipped round to where an elderly, bearded man, with a blanket around his shoulders, had wet himself with terror.

  “You.”

  Irene followed in the Obersturmbannführer’s wake, taking down names. Often the patients had to repeat themselves because their voices were choked with fear.

  “You.”

  In the far back row Irene caught sight of a face she knew. The white hair was bundled beneath her nurse’s cap and her wan complexion had been given a touch of rouge, but Nurse Beckmann was still, quite plainly, one of the oldest people there. She was squeezed between two patients, next to a trolley of detergent and bleach, eyes fixed rigidly on the opposite wall. As Eichmann’s gaze roved across them, Irene saw her bend her knees and sink, very slightly, in the direction of the trolley, so that her face slipped behind the head of the man in front and dipped from sight.

  Eichmann passed her by.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS LATER, ON her journey home, Irene had reached the Zoo Bahnhof when a shriek sounded across the street.

  “Achtung! Achtung!”

  For months American bombers had been pounding the city by day, and at night British RAF Mosquitos took over. Whenever the sirens sounded, everyone rushed helter-skelter to the nearest subway shelter they could find. Bunkers and cellars were everywhere in Berlin’s subterranean world, and there, next to the zoo, one of the largest was situated, a concrete monstrosity whose entrance was decorated with a large sign: MEN BETWEEN 16 AND 70 BELONG AT THE FRONT, NOT IN A BUNKER!

  Wielding her shelter pass, Irene joined the crowd and squeezed through the thick wooden doors. The Zoo shelter was several floors deep, and its walls, made from massive blocks, were trickling with damp. The entire bunker was partitioned into spaces, like cells, so the effect was more like a prison than a place of safety, and it reeked of unwashed bodies and urine. The air was stale and exhausted, its oxygen infiltrated with sour milk, soiled clothes, mold, and chemical perfumes. The flickering light stained every face yellow.

  Squeezing her way past the ranks of baby carriages and wheelchairs, Irene was directed toward a space dominated by women and small children, huddling gratefully close in the January cold as the bombardment began. Each time a bomb landed, the entire structure shuddered with a reverberating shock, but the women chatted on regardless. By this time Berliners were almost used to the thrum and crash of bombing and the responding cannons from the giant Zoo flak tower that made the single bare bulbs above them swing like pendulums.

  Used to it, but still terrified of what they would discover when they emerged.

  Irene found a bench and sat with her Volksgasmask on her lap, staring at the wall opposite, where the by now familiar graffiti was scrawled. Three simple letters—the same tag you saw everywhere—LSR.

  LERN SCHNELL RUSSISCH. Learn Russian Quickly.

  The Russians were all anyone could talk about. The subject of everyone’s thoughts and fears. When the Ivans reached Berlin, one nightmare would be exchanged for another.

  For weeks Joseph Goebbels had been warning on the radio of what would come if the Soviet hordes were allowed to penetrate the Reich. The Russian onslaught must be smashed in a sea of blood! Goebbels’s nightly broadcasts were filled with graphic accounts of the savagery already being unleashed in the East. How anyone with a swastika on their house was slaughtered. How women’s tendons were slashed to stop them from running away. How raped girls were crucified on their own fences. Stalin had authorized a period of Plunderfreiheit—freedom to plunder—for troops who had endured so much bloody fighting.

  To begin with, skeptics had called it Atrocity Propaganda. Yet now that Soviet tanks had penetrated the German border and trudging columns of refugees filed into the city, possessions piled on handcarts, that skepticism was confounded. The refugees’ stories bore out everyone’s worst fears. In Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia, the Soviets were exacting revenge for years of suffering at German hands. Footage of corpses who had been raped and murdered ran on the newsreels. Mothers were cutting their daughters’ hair short and dressing them in boys’ clothes to protect them. No woman, from eight to eighty, was safe.

  * * *

  —

  IRENE’S NEIGHBOR IN THE shelter, her girth swaddled in a dusty overcoat and hair concealed by a turban, was flicking through the Völkischer Beobachter, whose front page carried the headline NUN VIOLATED FOUR TIMES.

  On Irene’s other side, a pretty teenager with a lick of beetroot lipstick and kohl round her eyes, looking more like a shopgirl than a nurse or a factory worker, leaned over with a dismissive shrug. “Don’t know why you bother reading that. You get better news on a headstone.”

  Instantly general conversation broke out. There was nothing people wanted more than to air their fears about what lay ahead.

  “The Ivans will be here in weeks.”

  “Nonsense! There’s our secret weapon. That’ll turn the tide.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “They say it’s the biggest rocket ever invented.”

  “What secret weapon? There’s nothing. Or if there is, it’s made by Jews who produce duds.”

  “We have the Volkssturm to protect us.”

  “Those kids? Don’t make me laugh. Where’s the Führer? That’s what I want to know. How’s Hitler going to protect us when he’s holed up in his Wolf’s Lair?”

  “There are barricades.”

  “Barricades? They’ll take ten minutes for the Ivans to clear. Nine minutes for them to stop laughing and one minute to blast them into oblivion.”

  * * *

  —

  ONCE THE ALL CLEAR sounded, people shoved and pushed their way out, d
esperate for oxygen and light. Above, smoke cobwebbed the sky and fresh holes had appeared where the sidewalk had belched up a mess of pipes and cables. The soot and dust made the air almost unbreathable, and they could feel the grit against their teeth, but they pressed on regardless through the freezing afternoon, necks buried in scarves, until they were brought to a ragged halt by a passing motorcade.

  The crowd looked on with sullen expressions. Only a few made the German salute. Through the window of the Mercedes, Irene caught a pale blur and a smudge of dark mustache beneath a field gray cap. A familiar face staring out.

  So the Red Army had forced the Führer from his East Prussian lair. Hitler had returned to his capital for the final onslaught.

  Berlin was now Fortress City.

  * * *

  —

  AT WANNSEE S-BAHN IRENE picked up some Suppengrün, a bunch of vegetable stalks tied with string that was supposed to transform hot water into soup, and a couple of bread rolls, hard as fists. Her plan was to enjoy this meal close enough to bedtime to prevent the hunger pangs from interrupting her sleep, then to read. Perhaps, as a change from novels, she would look at the recipe books her mother-in-law had given her before the war and fantasize about the meals. Dreaming about food was everyone’s favorite pastime. Glistening golden schnitzel fried in butter, fish off the bone, sausage in spicy gravy, cakes oozing cream, red cabbage flavored with juniper berries. Chocolate of course, and even tea. An English, malty cup of tea.

  First she needed to light a fire.

  Entering the library, she ran her hand over a line of titles, selected An Introduction to Reich Labor Law; volume 1, and tossed it into the fireplace. The books didn’t last long and the ink in their spines made a toxic, greenish flame, but she had devised a method with book burning. One at a time, starting with tomes of legal cases, engineering, and metallurgy, then geography, botany, and history, before moving on to the classics. David Copperfield and Shakespeare last.