A Woman of War

by Mandy Robotham

  I had nowhere to go, so I headed for the only place that was familiar, back home. In the western suburbs, our street looked almost as it did in the early years of the war, with added sandbags as an assault course for the children playing outside, but essentially untouched. The house, though, was anything but abandoned. Several pairs of tiny clogs were stacked at the front door as I made my way nervously up the path, my mother’s carefully planted hostas healthy survivors of the raids, pale green and standing to attention.

  The door was opened by a woman of about thirty in apron and headscarf, clutching a broom, and with a young, flushed face. When I explained, she welcomed me in, embarrassment evident at the mess her three children had created. But I wasn’t perturbed – it felt like the family home it had once been for us, sprinkled with dustings of love. As a specialist engineer, Helen’s husband had been excused military service and his family were settled in the ‘abandoned’ house. In return, he spent long hours keeping power supplies in Berlin flowing.

  She was one of the lucky ones, she said, hinting her relief that he was at neither end of a gun. There were no airs and graces to Helen and I liked her immediately. She offered me a room, the attic that had once been Franz’s little-boy bolthole. I refused, of course, but she insisted, and it didn’t feel like charity. Besides, I had nowhere else to go, and limited money to last me. She and her kindness reassured me that, despite this hideous onslaught, honest Germans were the still backbone of our country, and its bullyboys were the spineless few.

  And so I sat out the brief remainder of the war, picking up a little paid work here and there, in bars and restaurants, and volunteering at the medical stations to give respite where I could. In those early days, I never stopped hoping I would round a corner and he would be there, or that I would turn to serve a customer in the bar where I worked and he’d be looking back at me, asking for a drink with his engaging grin.

  In the end, we got our Berlin back for a time, limping and disabled. The fog of war was replaced by shame, first about defeat, and then, as the news about the camps spread out to the wider population, about the events of the war itself. There were those who hadn’t seen or known about the killing and the inhumanity, at the hands of that man, and of those who claimed they were doing it for Germany, the greater good. When we heard about Auschwitz, Dachau, Birkenau and more, I realised there were layers to hell, and that perhaps I had not sunk to that bottomless pit. Sad to say, many had.

  In those strange days of invasion, relief and renewed pain, I searched high and low for my family – in every Red Cross station, hospital, resettlement point, skimming my gaze over the women who still had flesh on their bones, plump faces and full heads of hair, to those who were wan, with thinning strands and empty eyes. I found them at last, my sister and my mother, clinging to each other in a community hall, and looking for hope. We hugged wordlessly for an age.

  We found Franz eventually, on a list of the missing at Auschwitz – a name scratched amid a long list, and we knew there was little hope of finding him, knowing his only remains were his fighting spirit in our hearts. Franz was lost, and I had to tell Mama about Papa, but with the sure knowledge that he didn’t die by the gas. I trusted Dieter to have told me the truth on that. I ghosted over other truths – the camp births, and my time at the Berghof. A small element of shame, yes, but also some things were hard to explain unless you were there.

  When I heard about the end for them both – the newly betrothed Herr and Frau Hitler – I wasn’t surprised or shocked. She would have followed him to the ends of the earth, and she did. I only wonder if Eva thought about her boy, in that moment when she bit down on the cyanide pill, whether he was lodged in her heart the moment it stopped beating. Magda, too, surrounded by her clutch of perfect babes. How can we ever know what she thought of as a mother, at that moment – beyond the lipstick, the gloss and her utter devotion to the Reich?

  It was the pictures of the mountain top that upset me most. I remember once chiding Dieter for investing so much emotion in mere bricks and mortar, for revering buildings over people. But seeing the Berghof reduced to rubble, bombed beyond recognition, muddy Allied boots stepping over places I had walked, it brought out feelings I didn’t want to surface. I shouldn’t have felt like that about the Hansel and Gretel house of evil. But I did, and that remains my own dirty secret.

  We rebuilt our lives, Mama, Ilse and I, in a sea of fellow nomads. My crimes against the Reich were erased, and I went back to being a midwife; my work was my saviour and my solace, helping healthy babies. And no, I didn’t think that for every one born robust and pink, every mother smiling and happy, that it made up for the ones we lost. I didn’t tick them off. You couldn’t think like that, or you would end up mad. Infected. But their faces, tiny and innocent, they remained a ghostly negative in a far corner of my memory for many years after.

  Then, the Wall. I fought to remain a Berliner, on the West side. I’d had enough of dictatorship for one lifetime. I met my husband, Otto, in a cafe, another vital encounter among the chink of cups and the headiness of beans. He had been a regular soldier on the Russian Front, and so our wars were very different. There were only a few times in our thirty-year marriage when we talked of our shadows; we agreed on having been different people then. War had moulded us, but could never define how we emerged, as humans.

  And, of course, it gave me my babies – a boy and girl. Finally, I could experience the agony and ecstasy of childbirth, of being at one with something outside of yourself, of that guttural and glorious push, the delicious wet head, the cry. The crazy, undying love. It was in that moment I thought of the Irenas, the Hannas, the Leahs, the Dinahs … and the Evas. I sobbed huge, rolling tears, for them and for my own relief and joy. For the lost ones, and the precious gift I held in my arms.

  It was my son, Erich, who helped me search for the answers, years later. It took thirty years for some truths to come out – details of the camps, survivors, the stark truth. Graunia emerged with an astute, lightning pen, although her honesty was too bitter for some to swallow. Rosa, sadly, didn’t make it out, but we tracked Christa to a town near her father’s old farm. Our reunion was swamped with tears and furious conversation – she had become what she was always destined to be, a midwife, and we talked birth and babies, practice and home life. Her flaxen hair was lighter with age, but those eyes were as bright as in the Berghof days, and she was dressed in style, her skills with a needle and thread still evident. She’d had her own babies by then, and we came together as mothers and midwives. We never once talked of the baby, that birth. There seemed no need.

  Erich was a keen historian, spending hours writing letters and peering at documents in the municipal halls, looking up articles about his grandfather, the revered professor of politics. He found little evidence of any attempted coup at the Berghof, the evidence perhaps burned in the rubble, and only a brief mention of a familiar name: Daniel Breuger, chauffeur to the Führer’s staff, shot for ‘actions against the Reich’ in June 1944, reason unknown. Details of attempts on Hitler’s life were well documented after a time, but there was no mention at all of the brief skirmish one May day in 1944, a tiny drop in an ocean of hatred, which might have proved to be a tidal wave in the enormity of war – it was buried, along with any evidence of its existence and the people engulfed in it.

  Erich found one other name for me: Dieter Stenz. Shot for desertion in late May 1944, two weeks to the day after Eva’s birth. The day I left the Berghof. There was little other detail. But Erich found an address: his elderly mother, still alive.

  I wrote to her – a short letter but which took me days to compose – simply saying that I had known her son in 1944, that despite the official reports he was a hero, a saviour, and not the coward the records painted him as. That he was kind and human, and everything the SS wasn’t. He was the son she would have wanted him to be. And in return, her spidery hand saying ‘Thank you,’ and a photograph of him without the uniform, next to his father, and in between
them an engine, no doubt being dismantled or put back together. You can’t see their hands, but I’m certain they are covered in engine oil. I have it in my drawer, alongside those of Otto, and my children. And the watch, its hands frozen in time.

  I didn’t tell her about the baby, the tiny, glowing element of Dieter nestled inside me that slipped out too soon, before I had much chance to welcome him or her into my body or my future, become part of my hope. Proof positive of our time together. The lovely Helen – she was with me as I bled grief and tissue, never asking awkward questions, but holding me as my mother would have. Dieter’s own mother – she didn’t need to know there could have been something of her son to adore, to hang on to. Too cruel to offer a hand, and then snatch it away. But it’s always part of me, one of those jewels wrapped safe in my heart. My Dieter. My war.

  As for the other baby, I have no knowledge. And I’m glad. I only know that he left my uncle’s farm three days after his arrival in the dead of night, driven away by a young man and his wife, who Uncle Dieter described as ‘kindly’. There are times when I look at my television set, at the evening news, and curiosity causes me to peer a little longer. I think I might see a politician with a likeness, and my eyes immediately search for the hand, for something not quite right. Because, of course, with medicine – prosthetics they call them – being so good these days, you might not know.

  But maybe he isn’t a politician – he could easily be a farmer, or a carpenter, an artist. Who knows? It’s good that he doesn’t. He need never carry the burden of shame, of the genes in his blood. He only needs to know that he was born out of a mother’s love, into an uncertain world, as one of thousands emerging under the awning of bombs, rubble or threat.

  A child of the time, a war baby, and not the Reich’s child.

  Acknowledgements

  So many people have contributed to this book’s appearance, not least my long-suffering family – Simon, Harry, Finn and Mum – who have allowed me precious space to write. I say a huge thanks to my readers: Micki, Kirsty, Hayley, Zoe, and Isobel, and to my colleagues at Stroud Maternity, who have borne my bleatings about ‘being a writer’ with true encouragement. A special thanks goes to fellow author Loraine Fergusson, without whom I wouldn’t have a publisher, or my sanity – her advice has been valued and constant. And to writer Katie Fforde – it was she who recognised the idea as more than a novella, and told me in no uncertain terms it was my first novel. How right she was! I also have to pay tribute to the wonderful crew at ‘Coffee 1’ in Stroud, who have kept me topped up with smiles and caffeine, and where a good portion of this book was written.

  Thank you to all who have supported and shaped – Molly Walker-Sharp and the lovely team at Avon who have guided a novice through the process without losing patience. I was also reliant for the camp setting on Sarah Helm’s excellent book, If This Is a Woman, chronicling the precise, human detail of women who survived with dignity under such conditions, and, for the first-hand accounts of survivors, the anonymous author of A Woman in Berlin, who illustrates that suffering is no respecter of culture or creed.

  As a lifelong bookworm, I am so delighted to finally make it to the ‘other side’, and I say thank you to any reader who wants to flip the pages and forge on.

  About the Author

  Mandy Robotham saw herself as an aspiring author since the age of nine, but was waylaid by journalism and later enticed by birth. She’s now a practising midwife, who writes about birth, death, love and anything else in between. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University, and recently acted as midwife consultant on a Katie Fforde romance, A Summer at Sea. This is her first novel.

  About the Publisher

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