‘Bystro!’ he said.
He took my elbow in his large calloused hand and barged a path down the stairs for me. At the bottom he pointed towards the large entrance where everyone was streaming out into the street, panic still stamped on their faces.
‘Bombit,’ he said.
I stared blankly. ‘A bomb?’
‘Da.’ He nodded.
‘The war is over. No more bombs.’
And then it hit me. An unexploded bomb. The lethal metal canisters lay scattered throughout the cities that had been targets during the war. Bombs that had been dropped from aircraft but failed to explode on impact. Lethal killers biding their time. Hiding in cellars, waiting to do their job.
In the basement of this building?
My new friend pointed at me and then at the corridor that led to the back of the building. He gave me a gentle push in that direction. I got the message. If I went out the front door I would be rounded up instantly and the interrogations would start all over again somewhere else.
‘Spasibo.’ My only word of Russian. ‘Thank you.’
I raced as fast as my wobbly legs would carry me to the rear of the building. It proved to be a maze of doors and narrow corridors. They were already deserted. I felt the wheels slow in my head, my thoughts stopped falling over each other.
Find the back entrance.
Think. Where? Where is it?
Look for the kitchens.
I threw open doors. One turned out to be an empty military-style canteen. Behind it lay a kitchen. I rushed in. And stopped dead.
Hanna was leaning over the sink, a trickle of blood dripping from her nose.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ Hanna dashed the blood away with a cloth, ran over from the sink and clasped her arms around me. ‘Oh Klara, you look a mess. But you’re still in one piece.’
The warmth of her body in its stupid scrap of white sheet, tight against mine, slipped something loose inside me. I had been holding everything back – the fear, the certainty I would never see my daughter or Davide again, the rage and throat-searing anger. The humiliation. The crippling sense of failure. The desire to scream. The closeness of death. The pain. The stubborn refusal to let go of my dreams.
It all came. A great tidal wave of it engulfed me and spilled into tears pouring down my cheeks. I tried to shake them away. Now was the wrong time. I wiped my wet sleeve across my nose and cheeks, but the tears wouldn’t stop.
‘Look at you, girl.’ Hanna squeezed the breath out of me. ‘Let’s get our backsides out of this hellhole before the bloody bomb blows our brains into confetti.’
We found the back door. It had been left wide open from when the kitchen staff made a run for it. Not a soul was in sight in the narrow street, just shadows ducking out of the wind. Everyone had fled. The building could disintegrate in a violent hail of bricks and glass at any moment. I was wet and sore and shaking like a dog in a storm, but I had the sense to snatch two brown coats from a row of them on hooks behind the back door.
It was that moment just before twilight. A sky of grey and ash with darkness fringing its edges. Nothing was stable, nothing stayed the same. Berlin lay before me and somewhere in it was one place I needed to find.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Graufeld Camp
DAVIDE BOUVIER
The man looked sick. Worse than sick. He looked as though he had already slipped one foot into the grave. He lay unmoving in the Graufeld hospital bed, eyes closed, skin grey as old bones, except where a livid rash marked his cheeks and chest. The only sign of life was his laboured breathing. Davide watched the rise and fall of the man’s ribcage and willed it to keep working.
If he died . . .
Merde. Klara!
Haven’t we all seen enough death? Time for it to stop. To finish. Let it go, Klara. Let it go.
The man in the bed groaned as if in pain. Davide took his hand. ‘It’s all right, mon ami, you aren’t alone. They are fine doctors here, they are taking good care of you.’
The hospital ward was busy, full of chatter, of comings and goings, of nurses offering professional smiles.
‘How is Helmut Gessler doing?’ he asked one bright young British nurse in a small starched cap who came to check the bed chart and take the patient’s pulse.
‘He is doing well,’ she said confidently. ‘Improving by the hour. He’s a fighter.’
Davide studied the man again. Improving was not a word he’d have used to describe the limp figure between the sheets. He kept vigil for an hour at the bedside. He asked himself how he would feel if it were Oskar Scholz lying here in the sickbed, Oskar Scholz’s hand looking as if it had lost its grip on life despite being a fighter.
If Oskar Scholz had threatened the life of his daughter, he’d have done the same.
As Davide left the hospital a small shadow tucked into place at his side. He glanced down. It was the slight, dark-haired boy with the disfigured face, the one that hung around Klara. The one that joined the poker game. What was his name? Izak, that was it.
Davide patted the boy’s shoulder. ‘You all right, Izak?’
The boy looked tense. Curled into himself. He didn’t answer, but kicked a stone and slowed his pace to Davide’s. ‘Is he going to die?’
‘Helmut Gessler?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, don’t worry. They say he is improving.’
The dark eyes shot a look at Davide. ‘I want him to die.’
‘He has done nothing to deserve it, Izak.’
‘He is German.’
Davide stopped walking and stood face-to-face with the boy. ‘The war is over,’ he said gently.
Izak put a hand to the terrible slippery burn scars that distorted one side of his face. ‘This isn’t over,’ he said.
‘There are people who can help you, Izak. Doctors. Surgeons who rebuild faces.’
The boy allowed a flash of hope to show, then smothered it. ‘Where have they taken her?’
‘To Berlin, I suspect. And Hanna too. How is her son?’
‘Rafal? He wants to kill Scholz. He says he’s the one who set the Soviets on them.’
‘We have no proof of that.’
‘We don’t need proof.’
‘If you say that, Izak, you are no better than the Nazis.’
The boy’s eyes filled with tears. His narrow chest heaved.
‘Izak, the hating has to stop somewhere. We can’t build a future on hate.’
Davide rested an arm on the boy’s shoulders, expecting him to pull away, but he didn’t. Together they walked on in silence until Izak kicked at another stone.
‘Berlin is far away,’ he muttered.
‘Yes. It’s in the Soviet Zone of Germany. In the east.’
‘How will she get back?’
It was Davide’s turn to kick at a stone. ‘She’ll find a way.’
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Berlin
Berlin was a city in ruins. The guts had been ripped out of it. As I moved, appalled, through the rubble I grieved for the starving city. It was not Berlin’s fault that it had fallen into the hands of a madman whose dream was to own the world.
Three hundred and sixty-three air raids. Think of it. Picture the skies black with bombs. I was told in Graufeld Camp that in one air raid last February 1,000 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers and nearly 600 P-51 Mustangs had decimated much of the city. Thousands killed. The injured screaming in the streets. Fires raging. Thousands more people homeless.
A city in tears.
Just as my beloved battered Warsaw lay in tears.
Hanna and I picked our way through the ruined streets. It was a ghost town, a Geisterstadt. Skeletons of buildings loomed around us and vast piles of masonry had changed the landscape of the city. It would be hard to navigate my way through it.
Before leaving Warsaw last spring I had studied Axel Fleischer’s map of Berlin, committed it to memory so that I would know my way to the district of Prenzlauer Berg. But now? Landmark
s were gone. Street names had crumbled in the dirt.
I was lost.
‘Hanna, what happened? How did you end up in the kitchen?’
‘I was doing the same as you, looking for a back way out of there. One of the bastard guards put a fist in my face.’ She touched her swollen nose with a fingertip.
She told me she was questioned. About me. About Oskar Scholz. About what I’d told her concerning my life in Warsaw. Had I ever mentioned Axel Fleischer?
‘They didn’t hurt me, if that’s what you want to know.’ She ruffled my short hair affectionately. ‘They were probably saving the thumbscrews for tomorrow.’
‘I’m sorry, Hanna.’
‘For what?’
‘That your friendship with me put you in danger.’
‘It’s not you who put me in danger, Klara. It’s the bastard Russians who did that. But when someone started running round yelling “unexploded bomb”, my shit-faced interrogator took to his heels like a whipped dog.’ She chuckled. ‘So I went looking for you and an escape route.’
‘Thank you, Hanna.’ I felt choked with gratitude but knew she would not welcome a fuss. I rested my shoulder against the cushion of hers. ‘I’ll get you out of here, I promise.’
She looked at the mess around us. ‘Where the hell do you start?’
‘There.’
I pointed. Two hundred metres ahead of us a string of about thirty women were crawling over a bombsite, the way ants crawl over a crushed peach. Thin grey figures in headscarves. They were the Trümmerfrauen. The women who sift bricks from the rubble. Moving from bombed building to bombed building. Scrabbling, finding, scraping, cleaning. Reclaiming bricks to be used in the reconstruction of Berlin.
Sixty-thousand Trümmerfrauen were employed by the city at the pittance rate of twelve Reichsmarks for every thousand bricks cleared. When I approached one, she straightened her bent back with a groan and a smile, welcoming the respite from the task. They were clearly hurrying to finish before darkness claimed the streets.
‘Entschuldigung,’ I said, ‘could you help me, please? I’m trying to get to the Prenzlauer Berg district.’
The woman wiped her face on her sleeve. Both were covered in cement dust. She indicated back the way we had come and reeled off a list of directions involving crossroads, blockages, shortcuts and side roads. Her tired eyes inspected us with interest. I didn’t like to think what we looked like.
‘Be careful,’ she warned, lowering her voice. ‘You’re not from around here, are you? If a policeman stops you, he will demand to see your identification papers. Best to avoid them. If a Soviet soldier stops you, run like hell. He will demand far more from you ladies.’
Hanna gave a sharp laugh.
I thanked our guide. In the pocket of my stolen coat lay two hand-rolled cigarettes. I pulled one out and handed it over to the woman coated in her shroud of grey. She tucked it behind her ear.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for your help.’
She shrugged. ‘We all need a bit of help these days.’
There were pockets of Berlin’s streets still standing. Stretches of road still lamplit. The wide main thoroughfares had been cleared so that traffic and trams could move freely along them. But they were dangerous. Police patrolled them and armed Soviet soldiers stood on street corners looking for easy prey.
We moved fast, but warily. And we kept to the side streets. They were tough to navigate as darkness deepened and few had street lamps that worked. Twice we were challenged but each time we didn’t wait to argue. We ducked into the maze of broken buildings, which offered a million places to hide, and we didn’t move till our pursuer had abandoned the hunt.
‘Klara?’
‘Yes?’
‘How much further?’
‘Not long now.’
‘For us? Or the journey?’
I made an effort to laugh and drew her arm through mine to help take the weight off her feet. ‘At least we’re warm.’
The coats were good wool, but every swirl of the chill night wind threw rubble dust in our faces. Hanna peered at me, our noses almost touching, barely able to see each other in the blackness.
‘Klara, what are you doing?’
‘I’m looking for Oderberger Strasse. I’m trying to get us out.’
‘Is that so? It feels to me like you’re trying to get us in deeper.’
I smiled. ‘You know me too well, my friend.’
By some miracle Oderberger Strasse in the Prenzlauer Berg district was still standing, spared by the Allied bombs. The sight of it brought back memories of Warsaw, sharp as arrows, memories of Axel Fleischer’s lips trespassing on parts of my body that were not his. In his wallet a carefully folded photograph of his wife on horseback, her face a perfect sepia oval. Too small to make out her features clearly, however hard I looked. At the cinema his hand hot and possessive on the back of my neck.
Far worse. The smile on his face when he boasted of Hitler’s plans to exterminate Warsaw’s Jews and raze the city to the ground. To build a new Germanic one in its place. We did fight back hard. In the summer of 1944 the Warsaw Uprising was a titanic battle, sixty-three days of hand-to-hand street fighting to defeat our German occupiers, by the courageous Poles of Warsaw. But we lost and were made to pay the price. Sixty per cent of our population was slaughtered. Eighty per cent of our houses destroyed.
And one of our overlords, who was among those at the heart of this savage destruction, was lying in my bed. I should have stabbed him. A knife into his throat in the middle of the night. That’s what you’re thinking. You can’t imagine how close I came. Twice I touched the blade to his skin. Twice I drew back.
Why?
Because of reprisals. Himmler would have ordered what was left of my city to bleed to death. Ten thousand inhabitants would have been shot in exchange for my one Oberführer. It was the way they did things in the Waffen-SS.
‘Are you okay?’ Hanna nudged me.
‘Yes.’
‘Sure? You look—’
‘I’m sure. Let’s get moving.’
Amber light from the lamps fell in pools on the cobbles at regular intervals along the street. We hurried through them, heads down, past the magnificent Oderberger public bathhouse. It seemed unfair for a bathhouse to exist, however beautiful, while people’s houses lay in the dust.
I halted in front of a black oak door with a tarnished knocker. There were five doorbells. I pressed the second. Nothing happened. I was nervous, though I had no reason to be. I had run through this moment a thousand times in my head.
Hanna lost patience and banged the knocker. After a minute it was opened by a youngish man with a neat ginger beard and crutches. He had lost a leg but still had a military bearing and a bar of medals on his jacket. He regarded us the way he must have regarded enemy snipers in the dark.
‘Guten Abend,’ I said politely. ‘I am looking for Frau Fleischer.’
‘She is no longer here.’
I had warned myself to expect this, but still my stomach crawled up to my throat.
‘Fräulein Huber lives in the apartment now,’ he added.
‘Magdalena Huber? She is here?’
‘She is.’
‘May I speak to her, please?’
‘Does she know you?’
‘No.’
‘Your name?’
‘Frau Janowska.’
He looked from me to Hanna and back again, doubt written over his face. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘In the hall.’
He swung off on his crutches and manoeuvred himself with impressive skill up the first flight of the wide staircase. We heard him knock on a door. A low murmur of voices, then his head reappeared over the handrail of the wrought-iron banister.
‘Come up, Frau Janowska.’
Hanna and I ran up the stairs.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Graufeld Camp
DAVIDE BOUVIER
‘I’ve been expecting you.’
Oskar Scholz was leaning agains
t the corner of his hut, smoking a cigarette. He was watchful. He had obviously been waiting for Davide to turn up, a scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face. His spectacles still cracked. The wind was sharp, chasing brown dust from the barren fields and throwing it about the camp. Clouds skidded across a dull white sky that stole all colour from Graufeld, leaving it stark and bloodless.
‘So she has gone,’ he said.
‘Thanks to you,’ Davide responded. He didn’t hide his anger.
‘I had nothing to do with it.’
‘It was what she feared. That you would report her to the authorities for what happened in Warsaw.’
‘I reported her to no one.’
‘You’re lying. Someone contacted the Soviets. You are the one who wanted her removed before she informed on you as a war criminal.’
‘Is that what you think? Is that what she told you?’
Davide was not a violent man. He used to be a scientist, a protector of life, not a taker of life, until forced to work on Wernher von Braun’s death rockets. But despite everything he had said to the boy Izak about letting go of hate, he now had a desire to take hold of this man. To beat him to the ground for what he had done to Klara. Already she could be lying dead in some Soviet mass grave. To beat him till he was begging for death.
Scholz studied Davide for a long moment. ‘You care for her too much,’ he said at last.
They walked the inside perimeter of the camp. Side by side, they talked. Not face-to-face. Face-to-face would have sparked too many clashes, too many challenges, emotions would have spilled too fast.
‘Walk with me,’ Oskar Scholz had said. ‘And I will tell you the truth about Warsaw, Davide Bouvier.’
‘I have heard the truth from Klara. I don’t need your filthy lies.’
‘What makes you think her version is the truth?’
‘Because I trust her.’
‘You are at fault there. She has given you no reason to trust her. You know what she is capable of. Look what she tried to do to me. Klara and I had a deal that both of us would remain silent, yet she tried to poison me. And she used a child to do it, so that her hands would remain clean. Tell me, Davide, is that a woman you can trust?’
The Survivors Page 21