Sektion 20

by Paul Dowswell

  Part of the problem, Alex understood, was how little they had in common. Conversations here mystified him, with their references to characters like Asterix and Tintin. They had all read a book called Lord of the Rings. He had never heard of it. Nobody knew about his childhood TV heroes, apart from Sandman, and their eyes glazed over when he tried to tell his new acquaintances about them.

  Alex and Geli both felt embarrassed about the clothes they had been given when they arrived or hurriedly bought with their refugee grant. Geli, especially, was conscious of the fact that her outfits looked cheap and gaudy compared to the West Berlin girls she was meeting. ‘Everything you wear tells the world how chic or dowdy you are, how rich or poor,’ she complained. In the East everyone wore five-Mark sneakers – they were all the same. Here you had a bewildering array of footwear. She looked at her hair and make-up and knew instinctively she wasn’t getting it right.

  And it took a while to get used to people’s manners. In the East you always said ‘Guten Morgen’ and shook hands. Here, people barely looked at you, said ‘Hi’, and gave a little wave. They seemed informal to the point of rudeness. And people seemed so much more forceful. If you were in a restaurant in the East and there were four chairs around a table, then four people sat at that table. In the West, if a fifth person arrived, they would take a chair from another table and squeeze in. Sometimes they would not even ask the waiter if they minded. No one would do such a thing in the East. Behaviour like that would be considered brash and outlandish.

  As they grew more confident with their new surroundings, Geli and Alex ventured further afield. In maps back in Treptower, West Berlin had been a white blank. It was fascinating to discover the city on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, underground and overground. All the trains here were electric or diesel – unlike the chugging steam trains of the east. Everything was so modern.

  Some of the U-Bahn trains they took ran part of their journey under East Berlin and through the ghost stations. Alex wondered, as they trundled under Alexanderplatz, when they would pass the exact spot where he and Sophie had sat to eat their sausages and feed the sparrows.

  Every day there was something new to get excited about. They enjoyed daydreaming as they ogled the windows of travel agents. Pictures of Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, and the skyscrapers of New York, filled them with a restless desire to travel. ‘We’ll get part-time jobs and in no time we’ll have enough money to get to London,’ Geli assured Alex. ‘Then next year, maybe we can all go to New York!’

  All these things were possible now, if you had the money. There was no Stasi, or school political officer, or concrete and barbed wire Wall, to prevent you from going.

  Geli took a waitressing job. She came home and told them how she had been scolded by the boss for being distant with the customers. ‘They don’t have to come here,’ he told her, ‘so smile and make them feel welcome.’ Geli laughed about this.

  ‘Why should I smile?’ she told her family. ‘I’ve never met these people in my life.’

  Alex found a job in the supermarket close to where they lived, stacking shelves. And he helped out at a music shop at weekends. Frank warned him that he would have to pack in one of those jobs when he went back to school in the autumn. But Alex was earning money. If he kept going at this rate, he would soon have enough for a trip to London, or even a Les Paul copy – a cheap Japanese guitar that looked exactly like the one Jimmy Page played. There was one in the shop where he worked. His boss had already told him he would give him a good discount.

  One day in the third week of July, Grandma Ostermann came to visit. It had been quite a performance discovering where they lived. Once she had realised they had left, on her next visit to the West she had gone to a police station and explained she was looking for her son. They asked her to return in a few days. By then the Ostermanns had been contacted by the police and arranged to meet her at Sonnenallee.

  She was impressed with their apartment and began to wonder if she should move to the West too. Grandma said she would think about it. She still had plenty of friends in Treptower and the government looked after her well enough.

  She had brought newspaper reports about the breach in the Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier and the death of two human traffickers, Albert Metzger and Heinz Amsel, who were both pictured. They had been ‘shot whilst trying to escape’. There were no photographs of the Ostermanns, though, and no mention of their name, which Alex thought was a bit odd.

  Alex asked whether she had seen Sophie. Grandma looked surprised at his question.

  ‘I thought she might have been round by now, to see if we were all right,’ he said.

  ‘No. No sign of her,’ said Grandma and swiftly asked Gretchen if she had remembered to get some fruit for her to take back East.

  They loaded Grandma’s bag with oranges, bananas and chocolate and Gretchen and Frank took the U-Bahn and travelled with her down to Sonnenallee where they had so recently escaped. Alex and Geli refused to go with them – that night still haunted them both.

  Frank found West Berlin more difficult than the rest of them. He hated the long hair on the boys and the tiny little mini skirts on the girls, and the way the youth chewed gum. Even the way they walked annoyed him. And he was disturbed by the hollow-eyed girls and boys he had seen around Zoo Station, selling their bodies to middle-aged men. He assumed they were drug addicts and worried that his own children might end up like that.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Gretchen to Alex and Geli, after Frank had delivered a particularly vehement tirade about paper tissues and how wasteful they were compared to handkerchiefs. ‘He will get used to it. As soon as he finds a job he will settle and then we can all start enjoying our new life. Alex take Vati out for a walk. Take him window-shopping down Prinzenallee. Remind him what he can buy when he starts earning some money.’

  Alex took his father out into the sunshine. As they walked along they began to talk about the Reykjavik Chess Tournament between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer. Every day it was making the news. Spassky, the world champion and a Soviet citizen, had been suffering no end of ill manners and bizarre behaviour from Fischer, his American challenger. Frank had watched, appalled, when he had seen him on television.

  ‘That man represents everything vain, egotistical and selfish about the West,’ he spat.

  ‘I agree,’ said Alex. ‘But the funny thing is, if Fischer hadn’t been behaving so badly, then no one would care. Now even pop stations like Radio Luxembourg are relaying every move as it happens.’

  It was true. Before the controversy, chess was played by serious boys and men with unfashionable haircuts. Now everyone was interested.

  They walked past a hippie couple clad head to toe in denim. The boy was wearing a ‘STOP THE WAR’ badge and a T-shirt with a Peace sign in the colours of the American flag.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s odd,’ Frank said to Alex, ‘how the West German youth claim to hate the Americans, especially over the Vietnam War, but they love their culture? Chewing gum, cowboy boots, blue jeans, rock music, Hollywood. They lap it up.’

  Alex thought about that. ‘America means money, glamour . . . all the things the Soviet Union never brought to our country,’ he said. ‘That’s why we never felt like dressing up as Soviet peasants or playing a balalaika.’

  Frank didn’t reply, but he nodded. Alex was delighted. He had managed to say a couple of things his father had actually agreed with. After a second or two, he realised he was walking on his own. Frank had stopped to gawp in astonishment at a plumber’s supply shop. There was a window display full of taps, sinks, shower fittings . . . You had to wait six months for stuff like that in the East. Here, you could go into a shop and buy it in sixty seconds.

  Frank found a job quicker than they expected, in the telecommunications division of Siemens, the electronics giant. East German electrical engineers were valued. Their exemplary training and education more than made up for their unfamiliarity with the latest Western technology.


  He was paid a generous salary – the rest of the family scoffed at how he had always said workers were exploited by the capitalists. Now he was working they were doing really well, especially as Gretchen had also found a job – teaching German in a local school. Their rent was reasonable. Soon they would be able to afford a BMW or a Mercedes.

  But Frank was as bad-tempered as ever. In fact, he was more than that. He seemed sick in the soul. When they were alone one evening, Gretchen asked him quietly if he needed to see a doctor, even a psychiatrist, but he angrily rejected her suggestion.

  Chapter 28

  ‘Now we are settling in, we need to think about schools for the end of summer,’ announced Gretchen one August morning. She took Alex and Geli to see several schools and colleges and they both found it strange walking into them and not being confronted with a picture of Honecker on every classroom wall.

  Geli assembled an impressive portfolio of her best photographs. Within a week she had been offered a place at the Berlin State School of Fine Arts. The tutor who interviewed her said he had a friend who worked for the news magazine Der Spiegel. He was sure they would love to do a photo article about life in the East from a resident who had just escaped. Geli arrived home bursting with excitement but Frank was absolutely against the idea. ‘We must not draw attention to ourselves.’ Geli never sent the prints.

  Alex was accepted at the local Gymnasium. He had to sit several exams and the rest of the family were surprised he’d got into such an academic school. ‘You must have been paying some attention, after all,’ said Frank. Alex was thrilled. It was unbelievable that he could be given a place in a school where his exam results, rather than his politics and appearance, would determine whether he went to university.

  Frank Ostermann arrived on the first day of his job at Siemens feeling like the new boy at school who didn’t know anybody. All his life he’d been told that capitalist businesses treated their workers with contempt and that backstabbing was the norm in the Western workplace.

  So he was especially taken back when his department head – Herr Busch – greeted him with a handshake and told him that they were pleased to have someone of his calibre working on the team. He took him to meet the other department heads and made it plain that he should come to him at once if there were any problems.

  ‘We know the value of experienced people. We know they can always get a job elsewhere.’

  That was totally alien to Frank – touting your skills around and settling for the best offer. That was not what the ‘socialist personality’ did.

  Busch told him he would find some of the Western technology more advanced, but he’d soon catch up. Too many of his workers, explained Busch, just expected things to work without really understanding them. Frank, he was sure, was a traditionalist. And he would be able to improvise when he needed to.

  Frank noticed other differences. They didn’t clock off at 1.00 on the dot for lunch – sometimes they even worked through their lunch hour. Sometimes they stayed late. It was a far cry from his job in East Berlin where the whole workshop downed tools as soon as the lunch whistle went and then all put on their coats the second the working day came to an end.

  A week later his new colleagues all chipped in to buy him a birthday present and even bought him a cake. That evening, Busch and a couple of the others insisted Frank join them in Café Amsel, a nearby bar, for a couple of beers. The whole thing brought a lump to his throat.

  On the way home, Frank stopped off to buy Der Spiegel. He noticed how everyone in the office made a habit of keeping up with the news and he did not want to feel left out.

  That evening, Alex took Der Spiegel off to bed to read before he went to sleep. There was a major feature on the escapers from the East. It was a sorry catalogue of shootings and drownings. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed that his family were not featured. Many of the escapers, Alex noted with a mixture of shock and admiration, had tried to swim across the River Spree at night, and in the middle of winter. Most of them had been shot in the water. There were also stories of young children falling in to the river on the Western side and drowning because only the East German border guards were allowed to enter the water. It seemed particularly cruel and senseless.

  Then, as he turned to the final page of the piece, he saw something which sent a chill down his spine. A familiar face stared back at him. The photo was captioned ‘Holger Vogel, 16, shot dead whilst trying to escape, January 1972’. Alex read on with his heart in his mouth. Holger and an unknown girl had tried to cross over the Wall, said the article. They were spotted almost at once. She surrendered. He carried on running and they shot him. Poor Frau Vogel. He wondered if she was still waiting for the knock on the door to tell her he was all right. Alex had been certain he was dead, but seeing it there in black and white sickened his soul.

  It had not been wise bedtime reading. Alex spent the night dreaming about his own escape and the rattle of machine guns that had accompanied it. He came to the breakfast table sunken-eyed and pale.

  ‘Another bad night, mein Schatz?’ said Gretchen, as she ruffled his hair.

  Alex could bear it no longer. He had to find out if anyone else in the family had told anybody that they were going to escape.

  ‘I have a confession to make,’ he said. ‘I told Sophie we were going.’

  He heard his mother take a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he went on. ‘I should have kept my mouth shut.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence around the table.

  Gretchen took his hand. ‘Alex. She might have told the Stasi. That’s probably why the lorry was stopped.’

  ‘You stupid Arschloch, Alex. Do you know what you’ve done?’ shouted Geli.

  Alex dreaded his father’s reaction the most. In fact, he had half expected Frank to get up and knock him off his chair. They all looked at him, waiting to see what he would do.

  But Frank looked pained. He seemed neither angry nor surprised.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ he said. ‘If you want to be angry with anyone, blame me. I let you go out to see her. I should have told you ten minutes before we left. If I could have my time again, that is what I would do.’

  Geli was steaming. ‘Those two men, they might still be alive if he’d kept his mouth shut . . .’

  Frank turned his anger on her. ‘We have absolutely no proof whatsoever that Sophie betrayed us. Why would she? She was close to Alex . . . and even if she did tell, it was entirely the Stasi’s decision to murder those two men. They could have arrested us and them easily enough. I think they did it to discourage other escape assistants.’

  He thought for a while and then he said, ‘And if they did know about the escape, why then did they not stop the lorry and search for us?’

  Gretchen turned to Alex. ‘And what do you think?’ she asked.

  Alex was fighting back his tears. ‘I don’t know, Mutti,’ he said. ‘The Stasi, they get to you. They even asked me if I would inform for them a couple of weeks before we escaped. I told them I’d think about it. I’m sure they would have been back to pester me, if we hadn’t come here. They might even have threatened to arrest me again. Maybe they threatened Sophie to make her spy on me? Geli is right. I should have kept my mouth shut.’

  Geli snorted with scorn. ‘She should have kept her mouth shut too. The little snitch. No wonder she hasn’t been round to Grandma’s to ask how we were.’

  ‘We shall never know if she reported us,’ Gretchen said, ‘and we shall never know if it was our fault those two men were murdered. But we must stop blaming ourselves. Vati is right. It was the Stasi who pulled the trigger on the machine guns, not us.’

  Chapter 29

  As the summer drew to a close the whole country was galvanised by the forthcoming spectacle of the Munich Olympics. The Ostermanns were all looking forward to watching it on television. The stadium, the pool, and the other new buildings around the site, looked like something out of a science fiction stor
y. The whole event was a great showcase for West German architecture and technology.

  And the East Germans – so all the Western newspapers reported – were determined to show the world how their 15 million people were going to produce superior athletes to the 55 million who lived in West Germany. What was it Honecker had said? The Deutsche Demokratische Republik was ‘a victor of history’ and would soon prove to be a victor on the athletics field too.

  Alex could not get enough of the West German newspapers. There was a saying in the East: ‘Twenty-three newspapers, four radio stations, two television channels, one opinion.’ In the West you would have two articles in the same paper completely contradicting each other, or two different papers, both with opposing opinions. Alex loved the way he was allowed to make up his mind about what was going on, rather than being spoon-fed with an opinion he was not allowed to disagree with.

  He read a paper every morning as he ate his breakfast. One particular story nearly made him choke on his rye bread.

  ‘Hey, Geli,’ he shouted. ‘Come and have a look at this.’

  She came in from the bathroom, towel drying her hair.

  ‘Look. It says here that East German athletes are being given drugs to make them faster and stronger.’

  Geli was a little cynical. ‘That’s just sour grapes, isn’t it? They’re making excuses in case the Western athletes don’t do as well.’

  But as they both read on something in the story began to ring horribly true. It said that the drugs were called steroids and they had drastic side effects. They made athletes aggressive, bad-tempered and, with girls, they affected how the body developed, especially if they were taken by teenagers. Even worse, claimed the articles, the East German coaches did not even tell their charges they were being given steroids. They told them they were ‘vitamin supplements’.