Tell Me Who I Am

by Julia Navarro

  Garin made a sign to my father to stop talking, but it was too late. Iris grew very tense. She turned pale and then her face grew red, a sign of the rage she was trying to hold back.

  “My father was a conservative, he never liked Hitler, but then again he never stood up to him. But who did? We lived well until the war began. My parents died in a bombardment, and they killed my brother in Stalingrad. He didn’t want to go to war, he didn’t want to fight for the Reich, but they took him. It was only my little sister and I who survived. I remember that my father said that if we ever got rid of Hitler then we would have to deal with the Russians, and he regretted that the British didn’t realize that the true enemies were the Soviets. But that is not why I work for the Americans. I had a fiancé, he was Russian, his parents were exiles in Germany after the October Revolution. He grew up in Berlin. In spite of his parents’ opinions, he gravitated toward the Communists during his years at the university; he sympathized with them and said that we would go to visit Mother Russia one day. A little while before the war broke out he disappeared. I went crazy looking for him, no one knew where he was, not his parents, not his friends... nobody. I suspected that he had decided to go back to Russia, and had told no one, neither me nor his parents, because he didn’t want them to try to stop him. When my parents died I took charge of my sister, we had only each other. She was so terrified every time we heard the bombs over Berlin that she had convulsions. When the Russians entered the city... some people received them as liberators, but they were our torturers. The day they arrived there was a great deal of confusion, no one knew what to do, whether they should hide or not. We were in the street looking for food when we saw the first tanks and groups of Russian soldiers approaching. We ran to hide in the rubble of a bombed-out building. Some soldiers saw us and ran after us, laughing. One of them grabbed hold of my sister and threw her to the floor. He raped her right there, and then came another one, and another. I... well, the same thing happened to me, I don’t know if it was two or three soldiers who raped me, because I shut my eyes, I didn’t want to see what was happening to me, I didn’t want to see my little sister thrashing around and begging for mercy. They laughed the entire time. Suddenly an officer arrived. He told them to stop and called them beasts, monsters. He tried to help my sister to stand up, but she was so scared that she started to shout, and then he came to me and I could see the shame in his eyes that his men had done this, but he didn’t ask for forgiveness, he just turned away and left. The soldiers said that they were just doing to us what the Germans had done to their mothers and their sisters, and that we were lucky they had let us live. My sister was stretched out in a pool of blood, her own blood. She was only twelve years old. I held her tight to calm her down, but she didn’t seem to hear me, she cried and looked into the void. When I tried to get her to stand up she couldn’t move. We sat on the ground for a long time until I managed to get her to stand up and made her walk. We tried to get home, but there were tanks and soldiers everywhere and my sister trembled with fear. Suddenly some soldiers saw us and came toward us. My sister shrieked in terror. I don’t know where she got the strength from, but she ran away without looking at anything in front of her. She slipped and... fell in front of a tank, which ran her over. She shrieked, she shrieked like a wild animal. The soldiers ran toward her, but it was useless, the tank had destroyed her, she was just a bloody scrap of meat. The soldiers seemed shocked, but my sister was dead. Does anyone know how many German women were raped? I was lucky because I survived. And now I have a little boy. His father is one of the soldiers who raped me. When I look at my son and see features that are not my own, then I know that they come from his father. The dark hair, the grey eyes, the wide forehead, the fleshy mouth... When I found out I was pregnant I wanted to die. I didn’t want to have the child, I hated him. But he was born, and now... now I love him with all my soul, he’s all I’ve got. He’s two years old and his name is Walter.”

  We were all silent. I was very young, but I understood the drama of the moment. Amelia had not been able to stop herself from crying, Garin looked at the floor, and my father felt guilty for having provoked Iris into this confession.

  “I didn’t know you had suffered so much,” Amelia murmured, taking hold of Iris’s hand.

  “Well, I don’t normally tell anyone about it. I don’t want Walter to grow up with the shame of not knowing who his father is.”

  “And what will you tell him when he grows up?” Amelia wanted to know.

  “That his father was a good man who died in the war.”

  “Will you tell him... Will you tell him he was Russian?”

  “No, why? Russian or German, he doesn’t have a father, so it’s better for him to grow up without asking questions for which there is no answer.”

  From that night on, Garin and Iris were welcome at our house. Amelia always insisted that Iris bring Walter with her, and although he was much younger than I was, we would play in my room while the grown-ups talked.

  Albert asked Garin to join the Party, in the end, due to Soviet pressure, the Socialist Party had merged with the Communist Party. As Garin still had some Communist friends from university, he found supporters for his new activism without arousing any suspicion. He was a foot soldier, an unimportant party member, but Albert knew that Garin could win the confidence of the party hierarchy.

  Once I heard Albert talking with Amelia about Garin.

  “What do you think of him?” he asked.

  “He’s brave and clever, he’s got authority in the group and we all listen to him and follow his lead in a very natural way.”

  “You know, sometimes I wonder why he’s with us.”

  “He doesn’t like the Soviets being here.”

  “Yes, but is that reason enough? He was a Socialist, he had Communist friends, he was a prisoner in a camp, and now, all of a sudden, he’s anti-Communist, is that it?”

  “You got hold of him for the network, if you didn’t trust him, then why did you do it?”

  “There’s something... something, but I don’t know what it is, it’s just that every now and then I don’t trust Garin.”

  “Do you think he’s working for the Soviets?”

  “Perhaps as a spy... You know, the Soviets prepare them for these activities.”

  “But he’s giving you all the information that comes through his hands.”

  “Well, there’s not been anything important until now, your group is not the most important one we’re running here.”

  “And why do you make me work with them?”

  “Because I want you to keep an eye on Garin.”

  “But if he works for the Soviets then you’re exposing Max and Friedrich to great danger... ,” Amelia complained.

  “If my suspicions are ever confirmed then I’ll get you out of here, you’ll come with me to the other side.”

  “If you were right about Garin, then they wouldn’t let us leave.”

  “We don’t need to ask permission from the Soviets. You know that people are always coming over to our side and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.”

  “And what about Otto and Konrad?” Amelia asked.

  “I trust those two absolutely. I won’t say why, but I know that they are loyal to us.”

  Otto was a translator for the Soviet military administration, and Konrad was a prestigious physics professor. They had both fought in the Spanish war. When it was over, Otto went to Paris, where he lived through the start of the next war. He didn’t want to go back to Germany, and fought with the Allies who were opposed to Hitler. Konrad had stood out at his university for his confrontations with Nazi teachers. If they did not arrest him it was because his experiments interested Hitler, who ordered that he work in a laboratory alongside other scientists, although his passive attitude had been the despair of his superiors from the moment he arrived; they could not get more than the most basic contributions from him throughout the whole length of the war. But for neither Otto nor Konrad was th
e fact of being anti-fascists enough for them to be happy to see their country in the hands of the Soviets, and so, with the same conviction that they had possessed fighting the Nazis, they now fought the invaders.

  Albert asked Otto, just as he had asked Garin, to join the Communist Party. No one suspected him, and he was made welcome.

  The members of the group took microfilms of everything that came through their hands, whether or not it was important. Then they brought the microfilms to Amelia, and she in her turn gave them to Albert.

  I still missed Cairo, although I never told my father so as not to annoy him. He wanted me to be a good German, even though it was the Communists who were responsible for my education.

  “They are Communists, yes, but before that they are Germans,” he said, “and they know what they have to teach you.”

  My father was wrong. The party members were Communists first and foremost, with everything else a distant second, including the fact of their being German, but he did not see it that way. He had made the idea of Germany into something sublime, and he thought it was important for me to be brought up as a good German.

  Life was rather monotonous for me and for my father, but not for Amelia. At night, after sending me to bed, she would sit with my father and talk about the day’s events. I listened to them talking, not because I was spying on them, but because I never managed to get to sleep before midnight, so I read until Amelia came in to turn out my light, and then I stayed awake thinking of fantastic stories.

  I think this was at the beginning of 1950. One afternoon Amelia came back from work, she seemed very upset, and she sent me to bed earlier than usual. As soon as she was alone with my father, she told him what was on her mind.

  “Iris will come round tonight, she called to tell me that we need to see each other. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “I hope they haven’t found her out,” Max said, worried.

  “If she thought that they might have then she wouldn’t come here. No, it’s not that, don’t worry.”

  Iris arrived sometime after eight o’clock. She had Walter in her arms. The baby was half asleep.

  “I wasn’t able to come before,” she apologized.

  “Don’t worry, have you eaten?” Amelia asked.

  “I’ve fed Walter, and I’m not hungry.”

  “Leave Walter in our room,” Amelia said, and went with her to get the child comfortable, so that he could sleep while we talked.

  “I think that the Soviets are going to sign an agreement with the Chinese,” Iris said.

  “Are you sure?” Amelia seemed worried.

  “Yes, I think so. One of the secretaries at the ministry was ill a few days ago, and they sent me along to give her a hand. This morning I heard the minister ask one of the girls in the typing pool to call our embassy in Moscow; he wanted information, and spoke about the ‘Chinese visit,’ and then said that the Soviets were behaving in a very mysterious way about the agreement they were going to sign with Mao Tse-tung. They don’t know me because it was my first day there, but he didn’t even look at me when he came out of his office to give the order. I carried on writing what I was being asked to write, and didn’t even raise my head, as if I hadn’t heard anything.”

  “I’ll get in touch with Albert. I’ll try to go to the American zone tomorrow.”

  “You have a pass, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem strange that the Soviets would come to an agreement with the Chinese, they’re all Communists,” Max said.

  “Yes, but what are they waiting for in Moscow? And if they sign a treaty, what will it say? It seems important to me, and I think we have to tell Albert in any case,” Iris said, looking at Amelia.

  On February 14 Stalin and Mao signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance in the case of aggression by any other power.

  Iris’s character led the bureaucrats in the ministry to pay attention to her. She worked without ceasing, she was efficient, silent, and discreet, the kind of secretary that everyone would like to have. These qualities made her open for promotion and she was passed to the department that dealt with the “other” Germany.

  Otto had, in the meantime, started to work as an assistant to a member of the Politburo. The fact that he spoke Russian, as well as French and a little Spanish, had helped him to get a post.

  Every now and then he wrote reports on topics that were bothering the Politburo, the power struggles between its members and the arguments that had taken place in the Central Committee.

  As for Konrad, he was the indisputable leader of all the university malcontents.

  Garin had also prospered, and Amelia along with him. They now worked in the Department of Propaganda at the Ministry of Culture, where they seemed to be as happy as fish in water.

  Amelia kept a close eye on him, and would tell Albert that she could find nothing to concern her in Garin’s behavior. If there was one thing she could reproach him for, it was taking too many risks, and sometimes he stayed working until most of the civil servants had left, when he could take advantage of their absence to get into other offices and take microfilm pictures of everything he found.

  “He enjoys the risk. Sometimes I get angry with him and worry that we’ll be discovered. It was about to happen the other night. We had stayed working in the department, and when we thought that there was no one else there, we tried to force the director’s office door. We made so much noise that the night watchmen came. He told them that we had dropped a typewriter on the floor and that we were trying to repair it. They believed him, or at least I hope they did,” Amelia said.

  Although my father didn’t like them holding meetings in our house, sometimes he permitted it. For me it was a welcome break in the monotony of daily life when Amelia’s “friends,” as my father called them, came round.

  Garin was still my favorite, as neither Otto nor Konrad paid me much attention. I was just a little kid whom they preferred not to have around.

  “We are ‘planning culture.’ They’re crazy! As if it were possible to plan talent, or inspiration, or imagination,” Konrad complained.

  “Our department is trying to make sure that the whole of society soaks up ‘the truth,’ in order to achieve a new Socialist man. This is a truth that is to be found in Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin,” Garin said ironically.

  “The only thing they really want is control, of everything including our thoughts,” Konrad carried on.

  “The role of the press is terrible,” Otto added. “Isn’t there a single journalist who can criticize what is happening here?”

  “The ones who could have are already gone, and if anyone’s left, then the authorities makes him see the error of his ways. People who criticize the party or its leaders are delinquents who are trying to destroy the triumph of Socialism,” Amelia said, indignant.

  But what scared her most of all was seeing how the Social Democrats were treated as enemies of the people. They were being removed, step by step, from any public role; many of them decided on exile, and others, the ones who did not want to give in, ended up in prison, or in labor camps.

  “They want to impose one single variety of thought, one single ideology, so for them the Social Democrats are the most dangerous of all, because they dispute the Communist hegemony,” Konrad complained.

  “You have to be careful,” Amelia said, “or you’ll end up getting arrested.”

  “What I don’t know is how you managed to gain their trust,” Otto said to Garin. “You were a Social Democrat, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, but I have renounced my past. They accepted me in the SED, and now I’m a member of the party, I’m even going to the Third Congress in July,” Garin said.

  “I don’t know how you can do it without your flesh crawling,” Konrad insisted.

  “We have a job to do. It’s precisely because I don’t deny my own ideology that I do what I do. I am copying their own infiltration methods; it’s easier to
fight them from the inside than from the outside,” Garin said.

  “I think that our President Wilhelm Pieck isn’t like Walter Ulbricht or Otto Grotewohl,” Iris said.

  “You really think he’s different? No, don’t fool yourself, he’s as Communist as the rest of them, only with a friendlier face,” Amelia said.

  In 1950 the most efficient secret service of all those involved in the Cold War, that of the German Democratic Republic, came into being. If controls over the population had seemed up until that moment to be exhaustive, from now on it was impossible for anyone not to feel that they were being spied on by the Stasi. No one trusted anybody. From this moment on, now that they existed, we all lived in fear. The Stasi had informants everywhere, even within people’s families. They inaugurated a reign of terror that led people to inform on their own families and neighbors merely to shift suspicion away from themselves. Other people, of course, collaborated out of a sense of ideological conviction.

  Albert James wanted one of his agents to infiltrate the Stasi, which at that time was known as the Prime Intelligence Directorate, but it was useless to attempt such a thing: The selection process was extremely rigorous.

  In 1953 the protests against the new regime began. Obligatory “Socialization” crashed up against the desires of the majority of East Germans.

  One night, Iris came to our house. It was late, and you could see that she had come running because her face was red and she was panting.

  “They’ve arrested Konrad. His wife sent one of their sons over to my house to tell me. We have to do something.”

  Amelia tried to calm her. Then she told Max that she was going out with Iris to look for Garin. They had to do something to help Konrad.

  “The only thing that will happen is that they’ll arrest you too. What are you going to do? Turn up at the police station and ask for him to be set free?” Max asked, worried.