It was much as Russell expected. The city’s encirclement had been completed on the previous evening, and Soviet forces were pushing steadily in toward the centre from all directions. That morning a battle was raging along the Teltowkanal, only four kilometres away.
‘Tomorrow they should be here,’ Leissner said with barely suppressed excitement. ‘The following day at the latest.’
He departed, leaving Ströhm with them.
‘It’s really good to see you,’ Russell said. ‘I must admit, I assumed you were dead.’
‘Not yet,’ Ströhm said wryly, walking over to embrace him. ‘It’s good to see you too. A welcome surprise. I won’t ask how you got here – or why – I gather it’s not a subject for discussion…’
‘According to Comrade Leissner?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to upset him. But I would like to know how you escaped the Gestapo in 1941. We were told in Stettin that the whole Berlin network had been arrested.’
‘Most, but not all. A few were saved. Like myself.’
‘How?’
‘In the usual way. The Gestapo got careless – in one case they applied too much pressure and the comrade died, in another they gave the comrade a chance to take his own life. And those two deaths cut the only links to several cells, mine included.’
Ströhm’s recitation of tragedy was as matter-of-fact as ever. He had initiated their relationship in 1941, in the hope that Russell, as an American journalist, could somehow get news of the accelerating Holocaust to the outside world. Together they had witnessed the first steps of the process, the trains loading up under cover of darkness, at several different Berlin yards. Ströhm’s passionate concern for the Jews was personal – his Jewish girlfriend had been murdered by stormtroopers – but Russell had always known that the man was a communist, and when he and Effi needed to flee Berlin, Ströhm was the man he had turned to. Ströhm had taken the matter to his comrades, and they had arranged the first leg of his eventually successful escape.
Russell sighed. ‘And now it’s almost over,’ he said, as much to himself as to Ströhm. ‘How are the Russians behaving in the suburbs?’
Now it was Ströhm’s turn to sigh. ‘Not well. There have been many rapes in Weissensee and Lichtenberg. Even comrades have been raped.’
‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Russell said. ‘The Soviet papers have been almost inviting the troops to take their revenge,’ he went on. ‘They’ve changed their tune over the last few weeks, but I think the damage has already been done. ’
‘You’re probably right, but I hope not. And not just because the women of Berlin deserve better. If the Red Army behaves badly, it’ll make things so much more difficult for the Party. The people already lean towards the English and Americans, and we need the Red Army to behave better than their allies, not worse.’
Fat chance, Russell thought. ‘Indiscriminate shelling is not going to win the Soviets many post-war friends in Berlin.’
‘No, probably not. But at least there’s some military point to that – the Nazis are still resisting. But raping hundreds of women… there’s no excuse for that.’
‘None,’ Russell agreed, thinking about Effi. ‘Look, I owe you a great deal…’
‘You owe me nothing.’
‘Well, I think I owe you something, but it’s not going to stop me asking another favour.’ He told Ströhm about Effi, how she’d come back to Berlin, and probably become involved with a resistance group. ‘She suddenly disappeared a few weeks ago, and her sister is convinced that she’s been arrested. Is there any way you could check if that’s true, and if it is, find out where she was taken? She’s using the name Erna von Freiwald.’
Ströhm looked up. ‘I’ve heard that name in connection with one of the Jewish escape committees. But I never dreamt it was Effi Koenen. I thought she escaped to Sweden with you.’
Russell explained why Effi had chosen to stay behind.
‘We have men in the police, but I have no idea if any of them are still at work. The area around the Alex is being turned into a strongpoint.’
‘I know,’ Russell said wryly. He told Ströhm about his attempted visit, and the day of hard labour that had resulted.
‘Ah. Well, I will see what I can find out, but don’t get your hopes up – it may well be nothing. But before I go, tell me, the work we were doing in 1941 – did you get the story out?’
‘I did,’ Russell told him. ‘But not in the way we wanted. The big story I had – the gas that Degesch produced for the SS without the usual warning odour – that must have gone into a dozen papers. But no editor was willing to headline it, to put it all together, and tell the whole story for what it was – the attempted murder of an entire people.’
‘Why?’ Ströhm asked, just as Kenyon had in Moscow.
Russell offered him the same guesses, and shrugged. ‘I tried. I made such a pest of myself that one editor actually hid in his cupboard rather than see me. I think that was when I realised I was onto a loser.’
‘That’s a terrible shame,’ Ströhm said quietly. ‘But perhaps we were foolish to expect more.’ His face was lined with sadness, and Russell found himself wondering how Ströhm would make out in a Soviet-dominated Germany. Here was a man who wanted to believe in a better world – who had no hesitation about putting his own life on the line in pursuit of it – but who found it harder and harder to muster the required suspension of disbelief. He had seen through the lie that was Western capitalism, seen through the lie that was fascism. And soon he would see through the lie that was communism. He was too honest for his own good.
They embraced again, and Ströhm disappeared down the staircase, calling out over his shoulder that he’d return with any news.
Varennikov, it seemed, had understood enough of the conversation to form his own judgement. ‘Your friend seems more of a German than a communist,’ he said casually.
‘Maybe,’ Russell said non-committally. Ströhm had actually been born in America, but he doubted whether Varennikov would find that reassuring.
‘It will take many years to rebuild our country,’ Varennikov said, with an air of someone addressing a hostile meeting.
It seemed like a non-sequitur, until Russell realised that his companion was using the German despoliation of western Russia to justify the Red Army’s behaviour in Germany. ‘I’m sure it will,’ he agreed diplomatically.
‘But America has not even been touched,’ the Russian went on, as if Russell had disagreed with him. ‘I know a few English cities have been bombed, but my country has been laid to waste. You must remember – until the Revolution we had no industry, no dams, everything was backward. People worked so hard to build a modern country, and now they must do it all again. And they will. In fifty years the Soviet Union will be the richest country on earth.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Of course, we must avoid another war. That is why the papers we found are so important – if we have an atomic bomb no one will dare to invade us, and all our socialist achievements will be safe from destruction.’ His earnest face suddenly broke into a grin, making him look about twenty. ‘Who knows? Perhaps we will both be made Heroes of the Soviet Union.’ The battle began badly. The machine-gun was destroyed by only the second shell of the opening barrage, killing two of them. The rest ran for the nearest exit, shells exploding around them like the lashes of a giant whip. Had they emerged at the back, they might have kept running till evening, but a wrongly chosen door led them out into enemy fire, and a choice between death and going to ground. Paul had a ten-metre crawl to reach the nearest communication trench, and it seemed a lot farther.
Once inside, he was little more than a spectator. A hail of shells whooshed over him, provoking a sporadic response from the surviving German machine-guns and artillery. The latter, he assumed, were conserving their ammunition.
Clouds of smoke and brick dust coalesced and spread, until the whole area seemed choked in a brown haze. Around ni
ne o’clock, lines of Soviet infantry came charging out of the fug, singing and shouting like there was no tomorrow. For most of them, there wasn’t – the first wave succumbed almost to a man. Some had been carrying small boats, but only a single soldier reached the edge of the canal, toppling into the oily water with blood pumping from his neck.
The Soviet artillery redoubled their efforts, slowly reducing the buildings around the harbour to their constituent bricks. Planes came swooping out of the smoke on low-level bombing runs, and stretches of the trench system on either side of Paul were plastered with human gore.
More infantry appeared, and this time some succeeded in launching their boats. None got safely across, but the bodies now floating in the water were like marks left by a rising tide. It was all so fucking predictable, Paul, thought. So many pushes, so many corpses, and sooner or later…
Soviet tanks were now firing across the canal, and drawing no response. The next wave would wash over them, Paul realised. And so, apparently, did Major Jesek. As more Soviet infantry loomed on the southern bank, the order was given to pull back.
Paul joined the rush along the trench, clambering over the dead and still groaning, out into a rubble-strewn gap between ruins. Jesek was there, looking in his element, giving each soldier an encouraging smack on the shoulder until his head blossomed blood and his body pitched into the bricks.
Paul stumbled on, out of the industrial area and into residential streets. There were houses missing in all of them, and houses burning in most. Ahead of him, a soldier was frantically shaking his hands, as if he was trying to dry them – catching him up, Paul saw that the man’s mouth was hanging open in a silent scream.
The soldier suddenly sank to his knees.
Paul put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and the man violently shook it off. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he hissed.
Paul left him where he was. Looking back once, he saw the man still kneeling in the middle of the road, his former comrades passing by on either side, like a stream divided by a fallen rock.
A kilometre to the north, under the S-Bahn bridge by Tempelhof Station, the MPs were waiting for them. They joined the fifty or so men who had already been rounded up, and listened to the sound of the battles still raging while they waited for stragglers. When the road to the south was empty they were marched through the Tempelhof aerodrome gates and delivered to those in charge. There were lots of tanks dug in around the airport buildings, tanks they could have used that morning.
‘Guess why they’re here?’ the Volkssturm man beside him asked, as if he was reading Paul’s mind.
‘Tell me.’
‘Someone special might need a last-minute flight,’ the man replied. The thought seemed to amuse him.
It didn’t amuse Paul, and neither did the prospect of yet more digging. If he’d stayed in one place he’d be in China by now.
The emplacements, as it turned out, had already been dug, and all that remained was the wait for Ivan. It was actually a beautiful day, the sun shining out of a perfect blue sky until just before noon, when a horde of Soviet IL-4 bombers appeared out of nowhere and started blowing holes in the hangars and terminal buildings. They were careful not to damage the runway – mindful, presumably, of their own future needs.
Paul was assigned to one of the PaK41 emplacements in the aerodrome’s north-eastern corner, and had only a distant view of the afternoon’s battle, which raged between the S-Bahn defence line and the aerodrome’s southern perimeter. Every now and then a jeep full of Hitlerjugend armed with panzerfaust would careen away across the tarmac to take on the Soviet armour, and several familiar-sounding explosions would eventually follow. The gun commander claimed he could see several burning hulks through his binoculars, and Paul had no reason to doubt him. But none of the jeeps came back.
Darkness fell with the Soviets still held at arm’s length, but scattered engagements rumbled on by the light of the full moon, and as midnight approached the Russian infantry were still pushing forward. Paul’s own gun was down to eleven shells, which didn’t bode well for the dawn.
It had been a long and so far fruitless day, in which Varennikov had almost driven him mad with his non-stop ramblings. Sometimes Russell could hear the idealism of his own younger years, but mostly it was just the stupidity. There was nothing he really disliked about the young Russian, but Russell wished he would shut up. After a while he simply tuned him out, and focussed his ears on listening for sounds on the stairs.
It was well into evening before he heard them, and Ströhm’s head emerged from the stairwell. ‘You didn’t tell me she was Jewish,’ he said without preamble.
‘Effi? She isn’t.’
‘Well, she was arrested as one. On the 13th of April. She was taken to the detention centre for Jews on Schulstrasse – the old Jewish hospital – do you know it?’
Russell felt something grip his heart. ‘Yes, I went there once… but that’s out beyond the Ringbahn. It’ll be in the Soviet hands by now.’
‘It is. But Erna von Freiwald was released on the 21st. Last Saturday.
It’s in the records – all the remaining prisoners were released that day. I assume the people in charge were trying to earn themselves some credit for the future.’
‘Where did she go?’ Russell asked automatically.
‘I’m sorry, there’s no way of knowing.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Perhaps she went home,’ Ströhm suggested.
‘No, her sister went to the apartment only two days ago.’
‘Then she’s probably in one of the mass shelters – you know where they are: underneath the flak towers in the Tiergarten, under Pariserplatz. There’s one right next to Anhalter Station. They’re all incredibly overcrowded at the moment. Lots of women are hoping that there’s strength in numbers, that the Red Army will behave better in front of a thousand witnesses.’
After finishing her shift and eating, Effi could stand it no longer. She had to get some fresh air, had to convince herself that the moon and stars still shone. ‘Would you like to go outside, just for a minute?’ she asked Rosa.
The girl thought about it for a moment, then nodded.
‘Then let’s go,’ Effi said, taking her hand.
The rooms beyond the hospital seemed more crowded than ever, the smells of sweat, urine and excrement almost impossibly pungent. There were guards on the bunker entrance, but they had no objection to people taking the air – it was, as one of them said, ‘their funeral’. Perhaps it would be, Effi thought, but she was beyond caring. She stood for a few moments at the bottom of the steps, inhaling the smoke-laden breeze and listening for sounds of explosions close by. In the sky above, a few faint stars glimmered in the murk.
They went up into the Berlin night. The square was not silent, as Effi had expected, nor empty of movement. Several walkers were visible, all keeping close to those walls that remained. Far up Hermann Goering Strasse a lorry was driving away. Berlin still had a heartbeat, albeit a faint one.
They could see no fires, but the sky was a deep shade of orange, and several of the surrounding buildings were silhouetted against areas of bright yellow. Streamers of dark smoke hung in the air, like photographic negatives of the Milky Way. Far in the distance, she could hear the faint rattle of machine-gun fire..
The familiar keening turned into the familiar scream, and for one dreadful second Effi thought she’d managed to kill them both. But the shell hit a building on the far side of the square, starting an avalanche of masonry and igniting a furnace within.
What people had built, people destroyed, and would no doubt build again. She felt weighed down by the utter pointlessness of it all.
She knew they should go back down, but stubbornly put off the moment. One semi-delirious soldier had recognised her that afternoon, but the doctor had cheerfully put him right. Her acceptance as an Effi Koenen look-alike felt rather strange, but everyone knew that fugitive film stars avoided working in underground hospitals.
> Rosa snuggled up to her. ‘Is everyone going to die?’ she asked, matter-of-factly.
‘Not in this war,’ Effi told her. ‘Everyone does eventually, but I think you and I are going to have really long lives.’
‘How long is a long life?’
‘Well, according to the Bible, God thinks we should get at least three score years and ten – which is seventy. So let’s add another thirty for good luck, and live to be a hundred.’
Rosa digested that in silence for a few moments. ‘Is God hiding in a shelter until it’s over?’ she asked. ‘Like us?’
It was a long night. A storm raged in the early hours, adding thunder, lightning and pelting rain to the sporadic Soviet artillery fire, but it all passed over, and by five o’clock there was only smoke to blur the heavens, and a huge red moon seeking shelter behind the western horizon. Dawn brought the usual bombardment, but once again the Soviet artillery and air force seemed fixated on the city centre.
Paul was hunkered down in his unit’s emplacement on the north-eastern corner of the Tempelhof field, reading a copy of the Panzerbär newsletter that Goebbels had introduced in place of newspapers, and trying to ignore the bombers droning overhead. ‘We are holding on!’ the headline claimed, but, as an announcement further down the page made obvious, some believed otherwise. Those who hoisted white flags of surrender from their window would be dealt with as traitors, the propaganda minister promised, and so would all the other occupants of their building.
After exactly sixty minutes – the Soviets, sloppy in so many ways, were remarkably precise when it came to timing their bombardments – the artillery barrage abruptly died away. Another ten minutes and they could expect to see the armour creeping forward across the smoke-laden field, supported by the usual hordes of infantry. With only eleven shells remaining, it felt like the Seelow Heights all over again, only this time there seemed no point in destroying the gun – by the time the Soviets lifted it out of its emplacement the war would be over.
There was little point in firing it at all, in Paul’s estimation, but little point in saying so either. He scrambled to his feet just as an SS Hauptsturmführer with one arm in a bloodstained sling loomed over their trench asking for a volunteer. There was a job needed doing on the roof of the terminal building.
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