“I’m sorry. I’m not laughing because it’s funny. It’s the nerves. I didn’t expect it to be so good… to let it all out.”
Next to her, Erich moved his parcel under his arm. “It was good. Liberating. We need to talk about it more. I never understood why Amis make us… Now, I do. We need to talk. We need to shout about it but one thing we can’t do. We can’t be silent. Otherwise, it was all in vain.”
Tadek was terrified once again. Terrified and not even sure why. He knew he had to say something, explain himself to the couple in front of him but his tongue was suddenly heavy as lead.
“You should have told them,” Gerlinde said softly. “You were there. You saw it all…”
She hadn’t even finished yet but Tadek was already shaking his head and backing away from her, his hands held in front of him. “No, I can’t. Can’t talk to anyone about it.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because I’m not like them… not like the rest of the survivors.” The words barely found their way out, strangled, disjointed.
Gerlinde blinked at him. Erich scowled, confused.
“I’m not like… I helped the SS. I did their dirty work for them. In some sense, I collaborated with them.”
“Just what rot are you saying?” She was upon him again, eyes gleaming, cheeks – flushed with pink. “You had no choice! They would have killed you had you refused to do what they told you! Just like Erich! He had to fight in the war he hated because deserters met the same end as you lot. You both are victims, not perpetrators!”
“Why do I feel guilty then?” Tadek sobbed out. Wherever the tears came from and why, he had not the faintest idea but one thing she was right about, Gerlinde, it was good to talk about it. It was good to let it all out.
“I don’t know. Why do I? I haven’t done a damnedest thing to anyone,” she shrugged.
“I feel guilty too, if that eases things for you.” Erich’s hand was on top of his shoulder that was shaking with sobs.
“You know what?” Gerlinde removed her gloves and began wiping Tadek’s face with a handkerchief – a typical nurse, always there to help, he grinned through the tears. “Maybe it’s good that we all feel guilty. Maybe, it’ll help us become better people.”
“The trouble is, the truly guilty ones never think themselves to be the guilty party,” Erich said, with a touch of painful finality in his voice.
“No, they don’t. That’s why the world is such a vile place to live in.” Gerlinde’s eyes were staring at the ruins around them.
“Do you think your father feels guilty for what he did?” Tadek didn’t know what possessed him to say it.
It came out rude and unexpected but strangely enough, Gerlinde took no offense. “No. I don’t think he feels guilty at all.”
16
Spring dawns replaced the gloom of winter. Along with the blooming, hope came once again. In place of former flower gardens, neat rows of vegetables lined the sun-warmed earth; they were all over Berlin – around surviving houses and bare skeletons of tenement buildings. In front of Neumann’s estate, as well. Frau Hanke turned Frau Neumann’s entire garden to that very purpose. Who knew when the Amis would pull out and leave them to starve, along with the “Soviet” Berliners?
Perched on the bicycle’s handlebars, Gerlinde thought back to last spring, last April, when the Oder front was still holding; when the optimistic Berliners were learning English and pessimistic ones – Russian; when she, along with other young nurses from the Red Cross, painted slogans “We believe in victory” and “We will never surrender” on countless walls after the end of their shift; when the Führer was still alive, and when Alfred was still her fiancé. Now, as far as the eye could see, ruins lay around them and yet never before had Gerlinde felt so relieved, so at peace with herself and the entire world. Perhaps, she needed to lose everything she knew to find herself, she thought to herself.
The warm wind caressed the short strands of her hair. She’d cut her long braids a few days ago, without asking for anyone’s opinion or permission and was delighted to see a young woman, not a girl anymore, staring at her in awe from the other side of the mirror. The exams were approaching. She would ace them; she knew she would. And later, with her wartime experience, it would be utterly moronic of them not to accept her to the coveted medical faculty. Gerlinde Neumann, a surgeon! Last April, some stranger walked around bearing her name. It was never her and she saw that clearly now. An imposter only and Gerlinde couldn’t be happier to be rid of her at long last.
“You think it’s changed?”
The wind almost carried Tadek’s words away. Gerlinde carefully turned her body sideways to hear him better. “What? The Tiergarten?”
“Yes. Last time we were there, it was…”
“Last summer.”
“Yes. Almost a year ago.”
“I imagine they cleaned it up a bit. I don’t care for the sights, though. I’m hoping for that book I mentioned.”
“Yes, yes, the illustrated, anatomical… something.”
Gerlinde’s laughter even sounded different from last April’s Gerlinde’s. Careless, free.
“Why don’t you try and enter the Uni together with us? Wouldn’t it be grand, to study together just like we are now?”
“Erich will get jealous.”
Gerlinde tried to play-swat him and nearly lost her balance. Laughing, Tadek moved his head out of her hand’s path and almost rode into a patch of freshly turned ground. Someone was following Frau Hanke’s example here as well.
“I’m serious, Tadek.”
“Medical profession wouldn’t suit me.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve seen too many corpses and far too many sick people. Can’t bring myself to see any more of them willingly,” he admitted with honesty.
Gerlinde understood and nodded and turned to face the street again. The Tiergarten was coming into view and along with it, the carcass of the Reichstag.
“I’m surprised they let it stand,” she noted, more to herself. “One would think the Ivans would want to demolish it.”
“It’s much too easy.”
“How come?”
“Much too easy to erase the memory of something altogether instead of facing it, coming to terms with it, and reforming it into something contrary to what it had once represented. Now it is something that would make the entire next generation – or generations even – remember the past the way it ought to be remembered.”
Gerlinde stared straight ahead, at the pockmarked steps and chipped-off columns, at the soot-covered walls and the broken windows, and silently agreed with him. They came to a halt before a makeshift market – still there, still very much functioning – and Gerlinde thought to ask Tadek about the camp, whether he thought it was a shame for the SS to demolish the physical evidence the way they did but bit her tongue at the last moment and silently called herself a chicken. An elderly woman with a black kerchief around her head was already pushing a tiny dress into Gerlinde’s hands and the subject was hopelessly lost.
“No, no, I don’t need it.”
“For your child!”
“I don’t have any children—”
“For your little sister?”
“I don’t have any. I’m sorry. It’s just me.”
Gerlinde tore herself out of the misty-eyed woman’s grip. No one sold new children’s clothes for profit unless the children were dead and that was something Gerlinde couldn’t bring herself to deal with that day. The sun was too warm on her cheeks. Her coat was open and her backpack was full of her father’s books. If she were lucky, she’d trade some of the first editions that collected dust in her vast library for not only the anatomical atlas but the medical kit itself, if someone was selling one that day. She couldn’t bear looking at this woman in her black kerchief now. Gerlinde bandaged far too many injured children during that bombed-out spring to listen about the ones who had died after the surrender had been signed and the hunger replaced the ar
tillery fire.
“That man over there, I think he has books.” Tadek was pointing at the respectable-looking gentleman in a gray coat. The brim of his hat lowered over his face; he was pacing, two steps forward, two steps back, in front of several boxes lined up neatly in front of the curb, looking pained and out of place yet just as gaunt and hungry as the rest of them all.
However, it wasn’t him who Gerlinde was staring at, wide-eyed and breathless. Hands clasped behind his back, head tilted slightly to one side, mild half-a-smile and an American felt Fedora – there couldn’t be a mistake. Still, her mind went in circles, why here? Out of all places, why at the market? Perhaps, not him after all… a Doppelgänger, deceiving and alien against the sun.
“You go ask him,” she told Tadek in a voice that suddenly sounded hollow and unrecognizable, “and I’ll go ask that gentleman over there. He looks like he knows where to get these things.”
Tadek’s back to her, at last. Tadek’s hands on the bars of the bicycle. Tadek deep in conversation with the Gray Coat, animated and unexpectedly amicable. They were both digging in the boxes now and Gerlinde was walking briskly away. Away and toward the man in the felt hat, who had purchased the flowers and was hurrying along the sidewalk, across the street, toward the bus stop.
Gerlinde was running now. More than anything she wanted to scream after the man, shout for him to stop but only charged faster across the street, started when a staff car with several severe-looking Russians nearly ran her over and gasped in horror when the man clambered inside a bus that was ready to set off.
“Stop! Stop!!!”
Arms waving in front of her, she nearly threw herself in front of the bus, breathed out in relief when it stopped and even welcomed the cursing of the driver with a smile on her face. The man was making his way to the end of the bus. Gerlinde pushed her way after him, not hearing the discontented grumbling around her, not seeing anything besides that hat, those shoulders, that back.
He stopped before the window and was gazing out of it now onto the street that was losing itself in the sunshine. Beside him, Gerlinde couldn’t get her breath. With a trembling hand, she reached for his sleeve and barely brushed it to get his attention.
“Vati?”
The man turned around and regarded her in surprise. “I’m sorry, Miss?”
English. English language; wrong face. Wrong everything around her. Wrong street, a wrong bus that she should have never taken.
“No. Nothing. Nothing at all.”
She was backing away slowly from his politely uninterested expression; from the trap she’d brought herself to. New April, old Gerlinde. Not gone anywhere, still very much alive.
She dragged herself back to the market, found Tadek without any difficulty – where have you been? I thought the Ivans had kidnapped you! – and threw herself into his arms and wept, with her face smothered against his shoulder.
“I ran after him, Tadek. I thought it was all in the past and yet I ran… ran, like a madwoman. I thought it was him and I ran.”
17
October 1946
Argentina was kind to Otto Neumann. From its sunlit squares, he brought with himself a golden tan and a new passport, along with a set of horn-rimmed glasses and a beard which he fiercely despised, yet which saw him through the customs without any questions asked. If anything, it was sympathy the customs officers expressed. A victim of the regime, returning to his obliterated Fatherland to mourn it in taste. His papers were excellent in this respect and he had read enough of Marx, while in exile, to answer all the possible questions concerning his political affiliations.
The questions didn’t follow. The papers held out, just as von Rombach had promised they would and the few rare Amis he’d met in the streets hardly gave him a passing glance. His apartment, provided through the same reliable circle, was big and airy and the landlady wished to know as little as possible about her new tenant and took care to disappear at once whenever he accidentally encountered her ghostly figure in the foyer.
Outside, a small orchard was shedding its golden attire. Across the street from it, an old fountain stood, waterless and green, on the pockmarked borders of which students often sat and smoked after their lectures were over. Von Rombach must have gone through great pains to find this particular apartment for his old comrade, Neumann. It was here that Otto had first seen Gerlinde in her white medical gown.
He had hardly recognized her that day, so much she had changed. Tall, slender, sharp, all angular and confident, debating something loudly with someone blond and obviously in love with her. The wind carried torn shreds of her phrases. Something to do with ethics and medical experiments. One of the students wasn’t taking her seriously and kept making jokes until she climbed on the edge of the fountain and began outright shouting something that had made the jokester cringe and that made Otto cringe even more and not just cringe but seek refuge in the curtain-draped safety of his bedroom. But even there, through an open window, the wind hurled accusations at him through its mouthpiece – hundreds of people tormented for nothing! Nothing scientific in it at all! Torture and mutilation for the sake of torture and mutilation!
Names of the camps.
Names of the people.
Otto slammed the window shut and sat for a very long time on the edge of his bed, clasping the covers with his sweating palms. His face was hot. His eyes stung with perspiration that dripped off his creased forehead. Before that day, before he had seen her, she was the same young girl from his picture that he, with the heaviest heart, had left on the bureau before setting off on this journey. Betske, an old comrade from the RSHA’s Amt IV, tried talking him out of it and insisted that sending someone for the girl would be much more practical and less risky – wise words that fell on deaf ears.
“She won’t go with anyone else. It has to be me.”
Betske surrendered but called him a right idiot. Now, sitting in this room which suddenly felt as though it was entirely devoid of air, Otto began entertaining the thought that perhaps Betske was right.
No. Nonsense. They wouldn’t have converted her so easily. She was his daughter, after all. Her loyalty was with him and him only.
Otto repeated those words like an old monk at prayer each morning and took care to keep the window shut so as not to hear anything else by accident.
Today was the day. Von Rombach had sent a message through one of his connections that Gerlinde had been spoken to, was in a bit of shock but delighted to get the news and was ready to go at Otto’s earliest convenience. The set of papers had been made for her in advance.
The “connection” was wonderfully nonchalant in delivering von Rombach’s words that weren’t included in the written message. The Amis had long stopped worrying about her affairs and all but dropped her case and even moved out of her house altogether. Just that Jew still lived there but he was an entirely different affair altogether. A harmless young sod and nothing to worry about. And that boyfriend of hers (spoken with great disdain), Erich Wirths, a veteran of the war (with even greater disdain). But no matter. Alfred would be following them soon after. He and Gerlinde would marry in Argentina immediately, as had been arranged a long time ago and together they’d produce as many children as possible to replace the fallen soldiers of the Reich. We may have lost the war but we haven’t lost ourselves. We’ll rise once again, give or take a few years.
The meeting was set for the evening. The train would be leaving at 19:15 hours. Otto paced the room of the hotel, almost attached to the station itself. It crawled with the military but von Rombach was right – the best way to hide was in plain sight and so, Otto took his lunch facing the company of the American MPs and thanked another bright-eyed Ami when he held the door of the elevator for him.
In his room, the clock was ticking on the wall. The closer the hands crept to the bottom of the circle, the hotter his cheeks grew.
At last, a knock on the door. Expecting it, yet startled by it, all the same, Otto discovered that he suddenly cou
ldn’t budge from the chair in which he was thoroughly pretending to read the newspaper to pass the time. His throat had dried up. His legs turned to concrete.
From the other side, a quiet and painfully-familiar, “Vati?”
And all at once Otto was on his feet, rushing across the room, throwing himself at the door, struggling with the lock with his shaking fingers… There she stood, smiling and pale, a suitcase in hand, his Gerlinde.
Before he knew it, Otto was pulling her into the tightest embrace, kissing both of her cheeks with great emotion, breathing in the alien smell of the musky perfume and faint remnants of some medication, and burying his wet face in the short locks of her hair.
“Maus! My little Maus!” Misty-eyed, he laughed and regarded his daughter as he held her in his outstretched arms. He didn’t seem to believe it himself, the fact that she had come after all.
“Yes, Vati. It’s me.”
He saw that her eyes had lost their childish bluish tint and turned steely-gray instead – steady, watchful, alert with intelligence. At least, she still called him Vati. Otto Neumann realized that he was desperately trying to reassure himself of something, on which he couldn’t quite put his finger, even with the best will in the world.
“Come. Come inside, don’t just stand there. Let me take your suitcase. My, it’s heavy!”
“I have my medical kit with me. I wanted to settle it once and for all between us that I’m not giving up on that.”
“No, no, you don’t have to.”
The promise of the marriage, Alfred, and promises to von Rombach had crawled into some dark corner of his mind. He’d sort them out later.
“Vati, the beard?” She smiled at him but the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” He touched it self-consciously.
“One might put it that way.”
He searched her face some more, afraid to breathe in her presence for some reason.
The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII Page 29