Letters from Berlin

by Tania Blanchard

  ‘I know you two lovebirds want some privacy,’ Tomas continued, ‘but I haven’t seen you both in so long.’

  ‘Just one drink,’ said Julius, grinning at me.

  ‘Herr Siebenborn,’ said the man across the table. He wore a Nazi armband. ‘Otto Haffner.’

  ‘Otto works for Kreisleiter Mueller,’ said Tomas genially. I sat with a brittle smile at the sound of his name. I still worried that one day I’d come face to face with him again.

  ‘A pleasure to meet you,’ said Julius graciously without missing a beat.

  The champagne was poured and Tomas clinked glasses with me, sharing a cheeky wink.

  ‘I hear you’re a rising star within the transport ministry,’ said Otto without preamble.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Julius evenly. ‘I just do my job well. I’m there to serve the minister and the government.’

  ‘As do we all,’ said Tomas. ‘Can you believe that Italy’s declared war on us when we still hold Rome? Preposterous!’

  I smiled. Tomas was an expert at navigating conversation away from difficult waters.

  ‘We’ll force the Allies out before they ever come in range of Rome,’ said Otto confidently. The Allies had invaded Sicily and were fighting the Wehrmacht in southern Italy. It was a reminder that the war was no longer moving away from us, but advancing ominously towards our homeland on two fronts, the south and the east. ‘The Italians will thank us for keeping the Allied wolf from their door.’

  ‘Tell me, beautiful Susanna, how’s university life?’ asked Tomas, turning the subject again like a masterful conductor.

  ‘I’m taking a break and nursing at Beelitz at the moment.’

  ‘Because of the evacuations causing such chaos?’

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I want to do something practical to help the war effort.’

  ‘She’s a wonderful example of patriotism and sacrifice for the Fatherland,’ said Julius, smiling with approval.

  ‘An admirable act, my dear Susanna, a shining light to the rest of us,’ said Tomas, patting my hand.

  ‘You’d think that with all those leaving the city, we’d be rid of the last of the Jews, fleeing from danger like the cowards they are, but we’re not Jew-free yet, despite the public declarations,’ stated Otto in a flat voice. ‘It’s time for us to finally rid this city of them all.’ I glanced at Julius in alarm; his expression was stony. ‘At least you haven’t been brainwashed by them at the university,’ Otto said to me as if it was the most natural comment in the world.

  ‘I’m caring for our military men now, Herr Haffner, those injured in battle fighting for our Fatherland.’

  ‘Of course. Your caring nature is the very essence of womanhood. We need more women like you, willing to roll up their sleeves and look after our soldiers.’

  I nodded stiffly, my fingers digging into the plush upholstery. Comments such as these were commonplace and I couldn’t react to them, no matter how furious they made me. What was more difficult to ignore were the comments about taking further action against the Jewish people. At least now that Julius and I were viewed as a couple, it kept my family safe to some degree.

  ‘Ah,’ said Tomas loudly, clapping his hands. ‘The seafood has arrived.’

  7

  It was early October before I made it home to Gut Birkenhof.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ Tante Elya said, hugging me tight as we waved goodbye to her few remaining friends who had come to visit from the village.

  We’d had a lovely time, drinking tea with women who remained steadfast in their friendship to our family, despite our troubles. In fact, it had felt like old times and Tante Elya’s dry humour and vivacity had returned along with the colour in her cheeks. The rhythmic crunch of our feet on the driveway as we walked back to the house reminded me of childhood visits to the village where there was laughter, good food and wonderful company. And yet, although the visit had gone well and we still had stalwart allies, the overall mood in the village was more hostile. I wondered if it could ever be like it had been.

  ‘It’s good to be home,’ I replied, comforted by her words and warm embrace. I looked out across the river, the afternoon sun casting a golden glow across the forest and green farmland on the opposite bank and making the water sparkle. Gut Birkenhof was the only place I could really be myself.

  ‘I know why you stay away but it’s not the same when you’re not here.’ With Onkel Georg and Leo busier than ever on the estate with fewer workers, the isolation had hit her hard.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ I asked as we walked arm in arm.

  ‘I’ve been helping Onkel Georg as much as I can around the farm. There’s so much to do and he’s spread so thin, trying to keep everything going.’ She sighed. ‘I wish I could do more, but there are things I can’t help him with, you know, operating heavy machinery with the harvest, supervising the logging and reworking the planning schedules for the year and, of course, managing the finances.’ I’d noticed that Onkel Georg looked tired, worn down by the worry. When he wasn’t rushing about the estate, he was cooped up in his study, no doubt going over the figures yet again. ‘Sometimes both he and Leopold take the black market goods into Berlin and are away one or two days. Lately they’ve been spending more time away.’ She stared off into the distance and I followed her gaze. The garden had not been planted out over summer and the hedges were overgrown. It was the last thing on anyone’s mind, but at least there was still colour, as cheery white daisies and the autumn roses had appeared.

  ‘Finding more black market customers?’

  Tante Elya shook her head and took my hand. ‘I have nobody else I can tell and you should know, despite all their secrecy. They’ve joined the underground resistance.’

  ‘They’ve what?’ I stopped walking abruptly.

  ‘Leopold made the first contact through his black market connections. He couldn’t sit on his hands a minute longer. He didn’t tell his father straight away, but when he did, Georg quickly joined him. Leopold’s very involved now,’ she said calmly. ‘Georg’s more in the background at Leopold’s insistence. If anything happens to Georg, we’re lost.’ She shrugged helplessly.

  A warm glow of pride settled in my chest. It was just like Leo to think about how his father had to remain beyond reproach. ‘How does it work? What do they do?’ I whispered.

  ‘It’s only been a few months. All I know is that they meet in Berlin and are putting plans in place to help enemies of the Reich in any way they can. Although it’s forbidden, we listen to the BBC broadcasts on the radio at night when the staff have gone home, so we’re getting real news of the war and the Allied position, not Nazi lies and propaganda. Georg tells me that with the fall of Mussolini in Italy, there’s new hope that the Nazi regime can be toppled too.’

  ‘Onkel Georg told you?’ I felt a stab of pain that Leo hadn’t told me what they were doing.

  She nodded. ‘Leopold says nothing, but Georg and I have always told each other everything.’ She rubbed her diamond ring absently. ‘He didn’t want to worry me, but…’ She stood very tall, as if she was defying the world. ‘He’s doing all he can to protect this family, but each time he thinks he can relax a little, he finds that he’s really helpless to do anything to stop them coming after us.’

  ‘I know that feeling,’ I said softly.

  She nodded, tears in her eyes. ‘He has to do something and so does Leopold. And after what happened to Onkel Levi in Lemberg… we heard that the Nazis burned down the ghetto there recently. I don’t know what happened to his grandsons…’ She blinked away the tears. ‘If Leopold and Georg can’t protect their own, they’ll become broken, shells of men. I’ll never let that happen and so I’ll support them,’ she said.

  ‘It feels good to do something,’ I whispered, unable to tell her what I really wanted to.

  ‘We each have a way of surviving, a way of keeping our soul intact. We need hope to live.’ It was true of all of us and I turned my misty gaze to th
e neglected roses with their large pink blooms and fragrant scent. Hope could survive despite the greatest adversity and we would all do what we could to keep it alive. And I harboured the hope that, despite everything, Leo and I would one day be together.

  I nodded thoughtfully. ‘And that’s why I think we have to be involved with the resistance too.’ My nursing was no longer enough. I couldn’t stop thinking about Otto Haffner’s comments that more Jewish people needed to disappear. Onkel Tedi’s letters from Lodz and the violent end of the Warsaw ghetto had made it abundantly clear that the Nazis wouldn’t stop until all Jewish people were penned up like animals ready for the slaughter. Images of the damaged and broken soldiers I nursed – generations of our men destroyed by the Reich’s endless war – were burned into my mind too. I wasn’t going to sit on my hands. Doing nothing to resist was as bad as condoning their actions.

  A smile widened under Elya’s raised eyebrows. ‘I think you might be right.’

  ‘It’s time for us to talk as a family,’ Tante Elya said that night. The staff had all left for the evening and Onkel Georg and Leo had joined us in the parlour after dinner. The thick black curtains were drawn, keeping the light hidden against the dark night and from the enemy aircraft that everyone was fearful of after the destruction of Hamburg. It felt like the place for secrets to be shared, silent plans to be made.

  Both men looked up warily, Onkel Georg from packing his pipe with tobacco and Leo from tuning the radio. Leo’s dark hair fell across his eyes and the urge to brush the hair from his face and trace my fingers down the curve of his cheek was as strong as ever. I had hoped that months of staying away from him would diminish my feelings but nothing had changed. When our eyes met I knew he felt the same. We were still drawn to each other. Elya’s sympathetic glances throughout the evening did nothing to help my agitation.

  ‘Susanna and I want to know about your involvement with the resistance in Berlin. You can’t keep it from us any longer,’ she said, staring down Onkel Georg and Leo. I leaned forward on the lounge expectantly.

  ‘I have to do something, Elya.’ Onkel Georg bristled immediately, banging the arm of his chair. ‘I can’t sit back and watch our lives being torn to shreds, helpless to do anything about the constant threat to your life.’

  ‘We can’t continue to allow thugs and murderers to define who we are and what we become,’ said Leo defiantly.

  ‘I can’t play their game any longer,’ Onkel Georg growled. ‘And nothing’s going to happen to either of us. I’ve learnt a thing or two from the last war and we won’t take unnecessary risks.’

  ‘We understand why you’re involved,’ said Tante Elya, flushed with pride. ‘But if you think we’re both going to sit back and let you do it all on your own while we wait helplessly, then you’re wrong.’

  ‘You don’t want us to stop?’ asked Onkel Georg.

  ‘No, milaya. I wouldn’t ask that of you,’ said Tante Elya.

  ‘It’s too dangerous to involve you both,’ said Leo belligerently, glowering at us as he returned to his armchair. Onkel Georg just stared as though deep in thought.

  Tante Elya shook her head. ‘This situation involves us all, whether you like it or not. Susanna and I can’t sit in the shadows waiting for something to happen to either of you.’ She grasped my hand and smiled. ‘We’ll both go crazy otherwise. We can help you if you tell us what you’re doing in more detail.’

  ‘We’re in this together,’ I said, squeezing her hand.

  ‘Your mother’s right,’ said Onkel Georg finally.

  ‘What if something goes wrong?’ demanded Leo, his eyes flashing with anger.

  ‘We’re all in a precarious position,’ said his mother calmly. ‘And what about the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who are worse off than us? Surely we have a responsibility to stand up for them?’

  ‘I have to do this,’ I said. ‘I can’t be a passive bystander anymore.’

  Leo and his father exchanged glances and Leo nodded slowly.

  ‘All right,’ said Onkel Georg after a moment. The creases of his face were set in stubborn determination and his blue eyes were bright with resolve. ‘We work together then.’

  ‘Tell us about the resistance,’ said Tante Elya, settling back to continue knitting the jumper she had started for one of the newly fatherless children in the village. The mother refused to take charity from a Jew, but Frau Kraus or Ida hoped to pass on the jumper when it was finished.

  ‘We’re with an organisation called Free Germany,’ said Onkel Georg, puffing away on his pipe. ‘It’s a national movement of all those who are opposed to the Nazi regime; people from all walks of life, all affiliations and beliefs.’

  ‘We’ve had news from resistance contacts in Sachsenhausen,’ said Leo, bowing to the inevitability of this discussion. ‘They remember Felix.’ I thought of Onkel Tedi’s son, with dark eyes like Tante Elya and Leo and his mischievous grin. I’d always wondered if he’d managed to survive Sachsenhausen after being sent there after Kristallnacht.

  Tante Elya pressed her hand to her mouth, tears in her eyes. ‘We’ll have to let Tedi know,’ she whispered. They still managed to correspond, using friends to smuggle letters in and out of the Lodz ghetto.

  ‘He acted as an interpreter for the Soviet officers and soldiers at the camp until he was transported out late last year,’ Leo continued. ‘We think he’s in Auschwitz now.’

  I put my arm around Tante Elya. ‘If he survived all that time in Sachsenhausen, he has a good chance of surviving in Auschwitz.’

  She nodded, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief.

  ‘From what we understand most of the Jewish people in the camp have been transported east,’ said Leo. ‘Thousands of captured Soviet soldiers were forced to march from the Eastern Front in the dead of winter early in the war. Now it’s primarily a camp for political prisoners, mainly the communists.’ I couldn’t imagine the conditions they’d endured across Russia and Poland to make it all the way to Sachsenhausen, so close to Berlin.

  ‘Franz Jacob, one of the founding members of the organisation, has spent time in Sachsenhausen and his contacts have confirmed Felix’s reports. It’s bad for the Soviet prisoners,’ said Onkel Georg, shaking his head. ‘Especially the officers. They’re considered the leaders of a subhuman communist threat and treated worse than animals.’

  ‘The Jewish and Russians,’ whispered Tante Elya, horrified. ‘They’re our people. If only we could do something to help them.’

  I nodded, not knowing what to say. We knew what the Nazi racial policy involved only too well. I felt ashamed to be German.

  ‘We can’t do anything to directly help the Jewish people now,’ said Onkel Georg. ‘We wanted to try, but it’s not possible with the resources the resistance has and their primary focus now is on disrupting the regime. The sooner the Third Reich falls, the sooner the Jewish people are freed.’

  ‘The resistance gets information from foreign newspapers and radio outside Germany and makes it available to ordinary people within the Reich,’ said Leo. ‘It’s hard to fathom, but reports about the murder of thousands of Jewish people rarely make the news across the world, not the newspapers or even the BBC. Nobody believes it.’

  ‘What hope do we have when nobody believes what’s happening?’ I said.

  ‘It’s a lot worse than we first thought,’ said Georg softly. ‘The SS conduct medical experiments on the men in Sachsenhausen which amounts to torture. Their barbarism falls to depths previously unknown.’ He shuddered in repulsion. ‘And they’ve been trying various methods of mass execution since the early days of the war, like gassing groups of prisoners in specially devised vans.’

  We stared at him in horror, all of us thinking the same thing – if that was happening in Germany, what was going on in the other camps further east? Torture and mass extermination of inmates suddenly seemed well within the realms of probability.

  ‘We have to do something,’ I whispered.

  ‘Surely we c
an do more,’ said Tante Elya, shaking her head in dismay.

  ‘We can help the Russians in Sachsenhausen,’ said Leo quietly.

  Tante Elya’s face lit up. ‘How?’

  ‘The Soviets will support us,’ said Onkel Georg.

  ‘The organisation has strong ties to Moscow. Many of the leading members are communists,’ said Leo. I nodded, thinking about the whispers of communist dissidents at university. ‘They promote the overthrow of the Nazi regime through the organisation’s pamphlets, magazines and radio broadcasts and they want to end this war as much as we do, but we want to do something more concrete.’ He was grinning from ear to ear now, like a small boy, itching to tell his secret.

  ‘With the help of the resistance, we’ve been actively recruiting people to our cause and we’re finally putting a network in place from Sachsenhausen to Berlin and beyond. We’re helping Russian prisoners of war escape.’ The look of pride on his face made my heart soar. This was the man I loved, a man of action who refused to be downtrodden. ‘We’ll hide them on the estate until they can be moved on.’

  ‘That’s where you both can help,’ said Onkel Georg.

  For a brief moment, I was overwhelmed with worry for them. They were as deeply involved as they could be. If they were caught, they’d be executed. But I also remembered the hopelessness I had felt before and I knew that none of us could go back now.

  Tante Elya and I looked at each other. The determined set of her face and the fire in her eyes mirrored my own feelings. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  ‘Of course we can,’ I said.

  * * *

  A little while later, Julius and I were stretched out on a blanket after our picnic in a hillside meadow near the Beelitz forest. It was a glorious sunny day and we had made the most of it before the icy reach of winter would descend upon us.

  ‘I received another report the other day regarding Elya,’ Julius said, flicking away an ant that had come too close to the remnants of our meal.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked, my stomach clenching with fear.