He reached down into his half brother’s pocket. The key was still nestled there. He left it.
The security box would be his half brother’s first port of call.
Johann straightened his uniform, picked up the briefcase, and walked into the corridor. As he fled from the building, a lone security guard saluted him.
SS units were gathered around Stadtmitte station—where an SS panzer division was said to have set up its headquarters—and along Friedrichstraße. Johann thought that they must have received the orders to erect a second ring of defenses beyond the one on the outskirts of Berlin. Clearly they were preparing to defend the citadel—the government buildings in the middle of the city—on the assumption that the outer defenses would be breached. Johann could hear the flak towers firing at enemy aircraft above. There were distant explosions of ordnance.
He was almost too excited to imagine that—finally—he would encounter Anja and Nadine. Had Dieter been lying when he revealed that this was where they had gone? He cast a glance back at the edgy SS soldiers farther down the street and gripped the briefcase tightly. He had to get them out of the U-Bahn quickly before the Nero Decree was enacted. He might only have minutes.
Johann reached the U-Bahn and pushed his way down into a scene of human misery that, even after years on the eastern front, he found hard to imagine—filthy women, children, and elderly people cowered in the darkness, exhausted and haunted. They no longer looked like living human beings but like the damned. They were waiting for the end to come. Johann felt a sense of dread: If this was his family’s best option, the others must be unimaginable.
He searched the desolate faces, some impassive, some staring at him in terror. Others saw the SS uniform and glared at him with unconcealed disdain; the pretense was over, and those who had once feared to confront the agents of dread now felt that they had—literally—nothing left to lose. The sick and injured lay alongside families sharing their meager rations. The blue light flickered on and off. There must have been a generator somewhere, as the electricity had failed elsewhere in Mitte. He thrust his way through the crowds, examining faces, each time telling himself that his loved ones would be among the next group.
One of the wounded soldiers on a train parked in the station gave out a curdled groan. Johann glanced aboard and witnessed a scene familiar to him: a filthy space full of wounded men with little chance of recovery. A few fatigued nurses bustled about, but there was no sign of a doctor. With some guilt, Johann continued along the platform, stopping to adjust his eyes wherever the gloom deepened.
And there they were.
At first he hadn’t recognized them; their hair was unkempt, their faces smeared with soot. Their worn clothes looked like they were the property of some other, larger person. But he had no doubt about their identity. It was his Anja, his Nadine.
“Anja,” he said, keeping his voice quiet. He couldn’t be sure he could trust those nearby. His wife had her eyes closed. There were still explosions going on overhead, but she appeared to be deep in sleep. Johann crouched down next to her.
“Anja,” he said, more intensely this time. He took her hand and squeezed it. His wife awoke, tumbling into consciousness, falling forward as if in a hurry.
“Wha…?” she said, momentarily alarmed. Then, more slowly than Johann could imagine possible, a smile of recognition spread across her face.
“Anja,” Johann repeated, leaning into her and holding her close. “Anja.”
“We knew you would come,” she whispered into his ear. How light she was. Her shoulders felt scrawny, her body almost weightless.
“I’m here now, I’m here now,” he said, examining her from behind his tears.
“Come on now,” she laughed, “no time for crying.”
She held his face and kissed him, her lips encountering stubble and chapped lips. He stroked her hair. It was full of cinders and grime.
“Onkel Johann!”
Nadine was hugging him now. He took the girl in his arms. She was so much bigger than he remembered her only a few months before, but she too was perilously slight.
“I knew you’d come,” she said, holding him to her. “I knew you’d come.”
She pushed him back to get a better look at him.
“I can hardly believe my eyes,” Nadine said. “Are you sure that you’re not an illusion?”
“No, no…” Johann smiled. “I’m here. We’re together now.”
He noticed them examining his uniform. “Ignore this,” he said. “I’ll explain another time.”
He reached his left arm around Anja and brought Nadine closer with his right. He held them both to him, feeling the warmth of their bodies, their redeeming presence. They were together again, and he would not allow them to be separated. They would break out of Berlin together. They would survive.
“They say that there are trains still leaving from Lehrter station,” Anja said to him. “There are still people trying to get west. Maybe we—”
“We need to get out of here now,” Johann said urgently, interrupting her.
“Of course,” Anja replied, although she didn’t move.
“No,” said Johann. “Right now. We are in terrible danger.”
Anja looked at him as if he were insane. Did he think she wasn’t aware of their predicament?
Johann bent down and lowered his voice. “They are going to destroy the U-Bahn.”
Anja’s expression shifted from confusion to pure terror.
“Let’s go,” Johann said. They began moving through the crowd quickly. He put his arm around Nadine, ushering her through the mass of people, most of whom were sitting miserably on the platform. Suddenly Johann heard shouting ahead of him—many of the voices were women, and some of the male voices were old. These were not military voices, but civilian ones. There was a scrum of people on the stairs up to the exit.
“They locked the gates,” said one woman.
“Who has?” another asked.
“The SS,” the first woman said.
“Why?” the woman asked, panic in her voice.
The other woman ignored her. Instead she joined the chorus of voices screaming up at the entrance. No one was able to see what was happening; alarm was rising.
There was no way out of the station.
“Coming through,” Johann said, raising his hand to guide his way through the crowd.
As people saw his uniform the mob parted. Angry, emaciated faces watched him, incensed.
“They left you behind, did they?” said one sneering face.
“Get them to open the gate, you bastard,” said another.
Johann was shoved; he felt blows on his back and head. The infuriated crowd wanted a scapegoat. He managed to make his way to the top, where he checked that Anja and Nadine had followed him.
“Keep close by,” he insisted.
There were people pressed up against the sliding metal gates calling up to the soldiers above, begging to be freed. Johann came close to the gate. Maybe he could use his uniform to order them to reverse their actions.
But then he realized that he was too late; the Demolitions on Reich Territories was more powerful than one officer. Johann looked for a soldier nearby with whom he might negotiate to at least allow the people trapped inside to leave. The soldiers had retreated to street level at the top of the stairs, perhaps to avoid the screams of those trapped below. He looked at the people around him: None of them knew what was to come. The rank air that each and every one of them was breathing would be the last they would inhale. Johann pushed his way back through the crowd, dragging Nadine, Anja, and the briefcase with him.
“What’s going on?” he was asked.
“Why don’t they open the gates?” demanded another petrified person.
“Let us out!” commanded someone else angrily, shoving Johann.
Johann kept moving, steering Anja and Nadine through the scrum. They arrived back where they had first met, toward the rear of the platform.
Joh
ann whispered to Anja, “We can’t have long now.”
“The tunnel,” she replied. “We can escape along the tunnel.”
There was more agitated shouting and screaming from above.
Johann nodded.
“There are no trains and no electricity,” Nadine added.
“Let’s go,” Anja said, heading toward the end of the platform. The three of them passed the end of the hospital train and clambered down onto the tracks.
“This direction will take us to Lehrter, right?” Nadine asked.
“Yes,” Johann said. “It shouldn’t be more than a twenty-minute walk, and we’ll be safe from the bombing.”
After about fifty meters the blue glow of the light in Friedrichstraße began to ebb. The three of them were in total darkness. Johann turned and looked back at the station. It existed now only as a receding and distant indigo blur. As remote as a star. There was nothing to guide the three of them forward. The next station would be Lehrter. It was either too far in the distance for them to see, or its generator had failed.
“What if there are no trains running?” Nadine asked, her feet clattering on the stones beneath their feet. Every so often one of them would trip over a railroad tie or an electrical installation.
“Unless it was hit today, the trains are still running,” Anja said. “That’s what people are saying.”
“But we don’t have travel documents,” Nadine said.
Johann heard Anja groan—but it wasn’t because of the question. She had tripped. He groped his way through the darkness and helped her to her feet. Nadine sensed what was going on.
“Are you all right, Tante?” she called. She was slightly ahead of Anja and her uncle now. Johann’s eyes were adjusting to the darkness a little, but it was still hard to see much other than the outline of objects.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Anja replied through the gloom. “Keep going, Nadine, keep going.…”
Her mind cast back to what Dieter had said about Johann. Now wasn’t the time to question her heart. Her husband’s return for them told her all she needed to know about who he was.
Johann helped his wife forward. He was expecting a blast at any moment, if Dieter was to be believed. They continued to trudge along the tunnel. Johann’s shoulders ached. For a moment the noise of their shoes on the gravel beneath the tracks made him think of a beach he had once visited on the Black Sea. For years afterward he’d imagined that all beaches had stones. It came as a great surprise to him to discover, while a student, that some were sandy.
His thoughts were interrupted by a noise. It wasn’t the usual flash of ordnance from above, the crack of a bomb exploding; this was something else: a rolling, deeper detonation, as if coming from the center of the earth itself.
“That was it,” he said to Nadine and Anja. “They blew it up.”
Numb with shock, the three of them tried to block thoughts of the poor wretches who had perished—they stumbled forward in the darkness, their eyes searching for a light that would mean deliverance.
They knew that very soon Berlin would become a battleground that would make the Allied bombing seem like a mere thunderstorm. Life meant continuing west along a subterranean tunnel.
Dieter had been right: The regime might be dying, but it would take everything else with it as it perished.
27
Johann had never seen rats like them. Not that they were clearly visible: The creatures were scurrying presences, specter-like and swift around their feet. As the city had fallen apart, the creatures had thrived, the ruined buildings providing a rodents’ paradise of niches and recesses for them to shelter and breed. The creatures were no longer frightened of human beings, and they moved around the city as if it were they, not the humans, who were in control.
Johann glanced behind him: Friedrichstraße was receding, its blue light glowing in the distance. There was a powerful smell of sewage now. Johann cupped his hand over his nose to try and reduce it, but the odor became stronger the deeper they went into the tunnel. There must be a damaged pipe somewhere, he thought.
“Hurry now,” Anja reminded them. Johann heard her stumble as she said it. “The trains will not continue for long.”
Johann stopped himself from declaring what he was thinking: That was assuming Lehrter Bahnhof still existed after the day’s air raids. He tried not to think too hard about what they would do when they reached the station. He didn’t doubt that the place would be in a state of chaos.
“We can do it,” Nadine said. “This time tomorrow we’ll be in the country. We can find a farm or a guesthouse somewhere safe.”
“We have no money for a guesthouse,” Anja said, not unkindly. To Johann it sounded like they were discussing plans for the weekend, not survival.
“I have a plan,” Nadine said. “We shall offer to work for them—I can sew and you can cook, and Uncle, well, I’m not sure what he’s good for, but maybe they can have him work in the fields or something.…”
“He can pull a plow,” added Anja, clearly trying to keep up the girl’s spirits.
Johann was thinking about the people back at the station. Was the explosion they’d heard what he thought it was? The implementation of the Nero Decree gnawed at him like a growing sickness. He wondered what other targets they were intending to destroy. Lehrter station could be next.
In the darkness he felt his wife’s hand—cold and frail—reach for his. There was a weightlessness to it that was unfamiliar. He had always thought of her hand as solid, tenable. What she offered now felt feeble. Her fingers tightened into a squeeze.
“I’m sure that we will see the light of Lehrter Bahnhof soon,” he said a little too loudly. His voice echoed off the slippery walls. He knew that he was using volume to block his thoughts. He didn’t want to think about the past any longer. He didn’t want to think what had happened to the people on the platform at Friedrichstraße. He wanted only to know how he would get Nadine and Anja out of this tunnel and onto a train.
“Is that it?” Anja asked. In the distance there was a blue light, similar to the one they had left behind at Friedrichstraße. Johann peered into the distance.
“I think that I see it too,” Nadine said.
Johann could perceive no light. He was exhausted, virtually seeing double with fatigue, so he closed his eyes to rest them for a moment. He opened them again and—what relief!—he saw what Nadine and Anja described. It was difficult to judge in the darkness, but he imagined that it was at least a half mile away. They had had a glimpse of what might be their salvation.
“Come on then,” Nadine said, stumbling ahead with renewed vigor.
Johann stepped forward, but as he placed his foot down he heard a splash of liquid. The thought of treading in sewage turned his stomach. He placed his other boot on the ground and the same thing happened. He told himself to put it out of his mind—the bombing had meant that there were pools of water and effluence all over the city.
But within a few steps, the three of them were wading—water was running past them further into the tunnel.
“It’s getting deeper,” Anja said.
Johann realized that it had risen above his boots. Every step he took meant getting soaked.
In the dark of the tunnel a moment of horror gripped him: He had been right—the noise farther back in the tunnel had been an explosion. The water was from the river that flowed on the other side of the tunnel wall.
Not satisfied with destroying Friedrichstraße station, the SS were attempting something even more terrible.
They were flooding the U-Bahn.
He tried to shut down his imagination. Conjuring the panic and desperation of the poor souls they had seen only minutes ago would not help him get Anja and Nadine to safety.
“It’s getting harder to walk,” Nadine said. “The water level is rising.” Johann said nothing. He couldn’t tell them what he thought was happening.
Within twenty feet the three of them were wading through water that was up to their kn
ees. Johann felt the water rushing against his calves and realized that this wasn’t a puddle that they were fighting through—the water was moving, as if a river had started to flow through the tunnel. And the water wasn’t just cold, it was freezing. Already his feet felt numb. Johann cast a look at the tunnel ahead. The blue light seemed impossibly distant now.
Johann moved so that he was closer to both Nadine and Anja. He could hear both of them thrashing through the deluge.
“Are you all right?” he called to them.
“Johann!” Anja shouted. The noise of the water was so loud now that they had to yell to be heard. “We should hold hands.”
Johann panicked—what to do with the briefcase? For a brief second he considered abandoning it; he must think of survival first. But no, leaving it was impossible—he had risked too much salvaging it. He undid his belt and stuffed the briefcase into the back of his trouser waistband, so that it was strapped to him once the belt was tightened again. Their fate would be one and the same.
Johann then moved so that Nadine was between him and Anja, and each grabbed the hand of the person next to them. The water was rising quickly; it was past Johann’s thighs and climbing. His legs began to tire. He thought about cramp. The power of the water was such that it was becoming hard to keep a footing. The three of them stumbled along the tracks, their legs—already fatigued—becoming heavier at every moment.
“Keep going,” Nadine called to her aunt and uncle, her hands clenching theirs tightly. It felt to Johann as though the girl was strong enough to drag both him and Anja to the next station. “Keep moving.”
The water level continued to rise. Within a few minutes it was at Johann’s waist. He realized that this meant it was more than halfway up both Anja’s and Nadine’s bodies. The going was tough now; each of them was using deep reserves of energy to remain upright. And the torrent rose higher and became more powerful. Despite the noise, the three of them could hear one another making involuntary sounds as they thrashed about.
The Nero Decree Page 30