Silesian Station (2008) jr-2

by David Downing

  'Joachim's already gone,' Paul said.

  'When?'

  'A few days ago.'

  'Where?'

  'They won't tell the families that,' Paul said, sounding surprised at his father's stupidity.

  'No, no, of course not.' He wondered how Thomas and Hanna were coping with their son's call-up. He should have phoned them.

  They were on the Speedway now, and Russell was surprised by the volume of traffic. Cars full of families heading out for a day in the sunshine, anywhere beyond the reach of their radios and the city's loudspeakers. If they didn't get the dreadful news until evening, then that was one more day of peace they'd grabbed from their government.

  'Do you think England will really go to war for Danzig?' Paul wanted to know.

  'I think they'll stand by Poland.'

  'But why? Danzig is German. And it's not England's fight.'

  'Maybe not. But the English can't break their word again. And it's not about Danzig. Not really.' He expected Paul to ask what it really was about, but he didn't. He already knew.

  'We've been doing a project on the victory in Spain,' Paul said, 'and how important the Luftwaffe was. They'll bomb London, won't they?'

  'I expect so.'

  'And the English air force will bomb us.'

  'Yes.'

  Paul was silent for more than a minute, looking out of the window and, Russell guessed, picturing a sky full of English bombers. 'It will be terrible, won't it?' Paul said eventually, as if he'd suddenly realized what a war could do.

  Russell didn't know whether to be glad or sad.

  'You never talk about your war,' Paul said almost accusingly. 'I used to think it was because you fought for England and you didn't want to upset people here, but it's not that, is it?'

  'No, it's not.' He wondered what he should say, what he could say to a twelve-year-old boy and have him understand it. The truth, he supposed. 'It's because, in a war, you see what damage people can do to each other.' He paused for breath, like a man about to walk through fire. 'Exploding bodies,' he said deliberately, 'limbs torn off, more blood than you can imagine. The look in a man's eyes when he knows he's about to die. The smell of rotting human flesh. People without a scratch whose minds will never be the same again. The constant fear that it'll happen to you. The terrible knowledge that you'd rather it happened to anyone else.' He breathed in again. 'These are not things you want to remember, let alone share.' He glanced sideways to check Paul's reaction, and saw, for the first time, pity in his son's eyes.

  What have I done? Russell asked himself, but over the next couple of hours, as the two of them walked and talked their way along the wooded paths of the Brauhausberg, Paul seemed more his usual self, as if some sort of burden had been lifted. Or perhaps it was just the sunshine though the leaves, the birdsong and the leaping squirrels, the mere insistence of life. There was no way the boy could have any real notion of the enormity of what was coming, and perhaps that was a blessing. Sometimes knowledge set you free, as one old comrade used to say, but sometimes it locked you up.

  During the hours with his son Russell hardly spared a thought for Miriam Rosenfeld or 403 Eisenacher Strasse. Effi , he discovered on reaching home, had not been so fortunate. She had set aside the afternoon for evaluating a film script - an ensemble piece about soldier's wives in Berlin during the Great War - but had found the necessary concentration hard to come by. 'I can't stop thinking about her,' she said angrily. 'It's driving me crazy. I'm sure there are people being beaten to death in the concentration camps all the time, but they don't haunt me. Maybe they should, but they don't. Nor do all the children starving in Africa. But I can't stop thinking about one girl in a Schoneberg brothel. I can't get her out of my mind.'

  Russell poured the two of them a drink.

  'And you know what else I realized,' she continued. 'They're Jews. The girls will all be Jews. Jews for the SS to fuck.'

  'Maybe.'

  'No, definitely. Don't you see? Blonde is good. Blonde is worthy. Blonde is about pure love and motherhood and child-breeding. There's no place for pleasure in any of that, no sensuality. It's all about duty. Dark, on the other hand, is bad and dirty and unworthy. Dark is all about pleasure. I see the way most of these creeps look at me, as if I must be able to give them something they can't get at home. And Jewish girls are the darkest of the dark, the ultimate forbidden fruit. Who would the SS want more?'

  'You're probably right,' Russell said, 'but what can we do?'

  'We have to get Miriam out. And the others.'

  'But how? We can't storm the place. We can't knock on the door and tell them we don't approve. We can't go to the police.'

  'How about going over their heads?' Effi suggested. 'Write to Himmler. I could probably get a meeting with Goebbels after the way he drooled all over me at the Universum.'

  Russell shook his head. 'I think they'd decide it was easier to shut us up than shut the brothel down.'

  'All right. You told me you know the people who produce the anti-Nazi leaflets. Could we persuade them to publicise the place? Let the whole of Berlin know what their aryan knights are up to. Shame the bastards.'

  Russell grunted. 'They have no shame.'

  'They must want to protect their reputation,' Effi protested.

  'Maybe. But if the girls are Jews then they'll have broken the law by having sex with non-Jews.'

  'Not by choice!'

  'Of course not, but what Nazi court would find them innocent? They might convict a couple of SS officers for form's sake, but their punishment would be a slap on the wrist. The girls would go to Ravensbruck. It sounds a terrible thing to say, but they'd be better off staying where they are.'

  'Oh John.'

  'I know, but... Look, I'll tell Thomas the whole story tomorrow. Maybe he'll have an idea.'

  They went out to eat on the Ku'damm, then drove across town to the dance hall they'd found a few weeks earlier, but it wasn't the same. Effi insisted on their driving down Eisenacher Strasse one more time, but there was nothing new to see. 'What can we do?' she murmured to herself several times, putting different emphases on the four words, but neither she nor he could think of an answer. It was after one in the morning when Russell had the first glimmering of an idea. One good enough to wake her.

  Effi was excited by his plan in the dead of night, but more subdued than usual when morning came. It seemed to Russell that there were two new Effis he had to get used to: the one who seemed to take their new situation far too lightly, as if it were a game with no real consequences, and the one sitting beside him now in the sunlit Tiergarten, who took it all far more seriously than he had ever imagined. Both Effis, he realized, had been there all the time, but the latter in particular still needed getting used to.

  It was, he admitted, hard to sustain an acute sense of peril when house-maids wheeled their prams through hopping squirrels, and hard to take the world seriously when the front page of the Beobachter was almost all headline: 'Whole of Poland in War Fever! 1,500,000 men mobilized! Uninterrupted troop transport towards the frontier! Chaos in Upper Silesia!' Skimming through the editorial Russell noted an escalation of demands - not just Dan-zig and the Corridor but all the territories that Germany had lost in 1918.

  Around eleven o'clock Effi set off for Wilmersdorf and a long-arranged family lunch. Russell had also intended to go, but work and the matter of Miriam's rescue seemed a lot more pressing. He arrived at the Adlon Bar to find it buzzing with an unconfirmed rumour that some German units had actually advanced into Poland on the previous Friday morning. An invasion had apparently been scheduled, and news of its cancellation had not reached the units in question. More significantly, as the journalists discovered at an Economics Ministry press briefing that morning, food rationing was starting the following day. The cards had been sent out a couple of weeks earlier, but Russell suspected that their activation would still come as a salutary shock to most Germans.

  Frau Heidegger hadn't heard the news when he reached Neue
nburger Strasse, and he wasn't about to spoil her morning. He did accept her offer of coffee with more inner enthusiasm than usual, because he was keen to confirm that her set of apartment keys was still hanging in its usual place by the door. She only had one item of mail for him - a formal letter from the US Embassy advising all Americans whose presence was not absolutely necessary to leave Germany. He wasn't expecting anything from the SD or NKVD, and he assumed Sarah Grostein would make contact when she had something for him.

  On the way up to his room he knocked on Beiersdorfer's door, and told the block warden he didn't yet know whether he'd be home for the ARP exercise on Thursday. He would let him know on Tuesday. Beiersdorfer sighed, and reminded Russell that the weekly Party meeting was on Tuesday evenings, causing him to be out between seven and nine.

  He had phoned Thomas from the Adlon and been invited to lunch. The family mood, as expected, was coloured by Joachim's absence - Thomas looked drained, his wife Hanna seemed withdrawn, and their fifteen-year-old daughter Lotte was trying to rather too hard to cheer them up. They ate in the sunny garden, but it felt all too different from the last such gathering, on the eve of Russell's trip to Prague. The first member of their extended family was gone. How many others would follow?

  Afterwards, in the cool of Thomas's study, he told his friend about 403 Eisenacher Strasse and his plan for freeing its inmates.

  Thomas was shocked, and surprised that he was. 'Are you sure you've got it right?' he asked.

  'One missing girl. A man who approached her and others at Silesian Station. People who can use the police to prevent any investigation. A house with every window lit and SS officers coming down the steps. The same house our man was taking Effi to. Can you think of another explanation that fits?'

  'No.'

  'And if by any chance we have got it wrong, and the place is full of SS manicurists and etiquette tutors, we'll just leave them on the pavement.'

  Thomas looked lost. 'I didn't mean...' he began.

  'You were right,' Russell told him. 'About saving one life.'

  Thomas grunted. 'How can I help?'

  'I need a small van and a lorry. With full tanks, and without Schade Printing Works emblazoned all over them.'

  'That shouldn't be a problem. But what...'

  'Don't ask. If it ever comes back to you, just say I asked for the loan of the vehicles.'

  'I feel I should be doing more.'

  'You're doing enough already. I sometimes think you're providing the Jews of Berlin with half their income.'

  After arranging to pick up the two vehicles on the following evening Russell drove north into Friedrichshain. The streets around Busching Platz looked even more run-down than he remembered, and Busching-Strasse was no exception. He drove slowly past the address Freya Isendahl had given him, looking out for any sign that the block was being watched, but the only humans in sight were two young children playing Heaven and Earth on the opposite pavement. He parked the car fifty metres further down, hoping that the mere presence of motorised transport would not be enough to provoke curiosity.

  The Isendahls, he discovered, shared a fourth floor flat with another couple. They were comrades, according to Wilhelm, but Russell was still pleased they were out. Wilhelm and Freya's room was large, low-ceilinged, with distant views of Friedrichshain park. Russell glanced around, and was relieved by the lack of seditious leaflets on display. The room was certainly crowded, but there was nothing to suggest it was anything other than the first home of a young couple struggling to make ends meet.

  Wilhelm offered him the single battered armchair, removing the copy of Rilke's Duino Elegies which was perched on one arm. Freya put a saucepan of water on the electric ring to make tea.

  'Has my article been printed?' Wilhelm asked, taking one of the two up-right chairs. Even in blue overalls he managed to look vaguely aristocratic.

  Russell admitted that it hadn't, that he was still looking for a safe way to get it out of Germany. He asked about the situation on the Siemens shopfloor, which kept Wilhelm talking until the tea was made.

  'I need your help with something else,' Russell said once Freya was seated. He told them the story of his search for Miriam Rosenfeld, from her original disappearance to her probable imprisonment in the house on Eisenacher Strasse. They both listened intently, Wilhelm's face growing grimmer as Freya's eyes brimmed with unshed tears.

  Russell explained his plan for getting the girls out, realizing as he did so that this was one of Sarah Grostein's life and death moments, when you opened yourself up to the possibility of betrayal. 'It's very simple,' he said in summary. 'On the day of the exercise - that's next Wednesday, the 30th - we turn up disguised as an ARP patrol, declare that the building has been hit by a bomb, and order everyone out. Even the SS have to obey ARP instructions, so we shouldn't have any trouble. We just separate the men from the girls, say we'll be back for the men, and drive away with the girls.'

  'What do you want us to do?' Wilhelm asked.

  'I need at least three more people to make it realistic. Can you drive?'

  'Of course.'

  'Then I'd like you to drive the ambulance.'

  'Where are you going to get one of those?'

  'I've been promised a vehicle, which I'll pick up tomorrow.'

  'Do they use ordinary vans as ambulances? I've never seen...'

  'They do. I was attached to a squad during the last rehearsal. They just paint the usual cross on them. And I'll be getting you some paint. Do you have anywhere we can keep the van? Out of sight, I mean.'

  'I can find somewhere.'

  'Good. And if you can get hold of any stretchers, that would be a bonus. The more details we get right the more convincing we'll be.'

  'What will I do?' Freya asked.

  Russell hesitated, expecting Wilhelm to oppose her participation, but he looked every bit as interested in her prospective role as she did.

  'You could be a second nurse,' he suggested, hoping that Effi could get hold of two uniforms. It would be good to have two women, if only to inspire trust in the rescued girls. But another two men were needed, if only to intimidate the uncooperative.

  'I can get them,' Wilhelm said. 'I know half a dozen who'd be more than willing to join us.'

  'Jews?'

  'Yes.'

  'Then choose the ones who look least Jewish,' Russell said bluntly. 'We may have to order the SS around,' he added in explanation, 'and we can't afford the slightest doubt that we're who we say we are.'

  'Understood,' Wilhelm said, ignoring the outraged expression on his non-Jewish wife's face. He asked Russell how much he knew about ARP procedures, seemed relieved by the answer, and agreed to bring two volunteers to a meeting in Friedrichshain park the following evening.

  Russell drove back across the city feeling more confident than he'd expected - Wilhelm Isendahl was an impressive young man. He felt a little guilty at luring Freya into danger - this was hardly what her parents had had in mind when they asked him to make contact with their daughter. But she was no longer a child, and they were a long way away. He felt a surge of wholly unreasonable anger towards them, safe in their Brooklyn brownstone on the other side of an ocean.

  He arrived home to find Effi taping black paper across the windows ahead of Monday's trial black-out. 'It seemed like a bad week to get arrested,' she explained.

  The next few days were busy. Doing his job, and keeping abreast of all the rumours circulating Berlin's corridors of power and influence, left precious few hours for organizing what seemed, in his less optimistic moments, like a particularly bizarre method of committing suicide.

  On Monday afternoon he drove up to Hunder's garage in Wedding, bought a full tank of petrol for the Hanomag and hired a parking space for Thomas's lorry. Hunder raised one oil-streaked eyebrow at the latter request, but didn't ask any questions. Russell found himself wondering whether Hunder was a secret comrade like his cousin Zembski, and hoping, if he was, that it wouldn't prove relevant.

&nbs
p; He drove back across the city to Neukolln, beating the rush hour but leaving himself an hour to wait before the Schade Printing Works emptied out. Thomas showed him the vehicles and handed over the keys, refraining from expressing the anxieties all too obvious in his eyes. Russell drove the lorry north to Hunder's, slowly getting used to its size and controls. After leaving it in the designated spot he walked to Lehrter Station for the convoluted train journey back. It would have been easier to get Wilhelm to collect the van, but Russell didn't want anyone else knowing of Thomas's part in the operation.

  It was almost seven by the time he got back to the printing works, but it only took him fifteen minutes to reach the large hospital on Palisaden-Strasse in the van. He parked across from the emergency department entrance and drew a rough copy of the ambulance cross in his notebook. It was one of those symbols that everyone recognized, Effi had said, but that everyone found hard to replicate from memory.

  The Friedrichshain park was only a few minutes away. He left the van close to the gates and walked up to the agreed rendezvous point. Wilhelm was waiting with two young men, whom he introduced as Max and Erich. Neither looked particularly Jewish, and both had an undoubted physical presence. The four of them sat on a bench discussing meeting times, clothes and - something that Russell realized with a shock he had barely considered - what they would do with the rescued women. 'We can find Jewish families who will take them in for a few days,' Wilhelm announced. 'And after that we can see about getting them back to wherever they came from.'

  When they had finished and the new recruits had headed off towards a different gate, Russell handed Wilhelm the key of the van. 'There are cans of red and white paint in the back,' he said, handing over the sketch he had drawn. Wilhelm looked amused, but placed it in his pocket. Russell watched him drive off in the direction of the Central Stockyards, where an unnamed relation had promised him use of a garage.

  It was getting dark by the time he reached the West End, and the blacked-out Ku'damm looked like a vast railway tunnel. This time he found Effi stitching together pieces of cloth. 'I could only get one uniform,' she said. 'I couldn't think of a good reason for needing two' she added in explanation.