But now that I was here, I knew I couldn't do that. Papa wanted me to find this building, and he wanted me to dig here. I wasn't sure why he had chosen this place, but it was important enough to let me take the risk of standing here. It had to be good, an entire chest full of money or better yet, fake passports that would allow us an easy slide across the border. Or something better than I could dream of. Something he believed was worth the risk to my life.
A crumbling stone stairway led to the main floor above me. I poked my head up there, and printed in old paint on the wall was a faded sign that simply said, Willkommen. In that moment, I named this place in my mind, the Welcome Building.
The main floor was empty except for piles of old brick. The same brick filled every window and door opening facing onto the Death Strip. There was enough brick so they could've sealed up all the back openings too -- maybe they'd given up before they finished. Another stairway went to an upper level, an attic maybe. But nothing would ever get me up there where I was even more exposed. I crept back downstairs on the hunt for Papa's treasure.
After choosing my starting place, I raised the shovel, stuck the tip of the blade into the dirt, and crunched my foot down on the blade's shoulder. But in the hard earth, it didn't even go down a full centimeter. I tried again, pushing harder, and even jumped up on it, using all my weight to force the blade into the ground. But nothing I did made any difference. It was like digging through concrete with a spoon.
I moved the shovel to a different spot and tried again, but still with no success. The same thing happened in another corner. It was quickly becoming obvious that my father hadn't buried a single thing in this basement, not unless he had done it thirty years ago, because I was convinced this hard ground hadn't been disturbed for at least that long.
I tried in still another place, right in the center of the room. This time my blade struck something metal. It rattled enough that I quickly fell to my knees to quiet the echoing vibrations. I dropped the shovel and ran my fingers along the ground, feeling for the edges of the metal. Whatever it was, it lay nearly at the surface with only a thick layer of dust to cover it.
If my father was going to bury something to be kept secret from the Stasi, he could've done better than putting it right at the surface. Anyone might find it this way. Then my heart dropped as I realized another possibility. Maybe his treasure had already been discovered, and only the empty container remained.
I had found the edges now, some sort of metal plank wide enough to stand on. When I brushed off the dirt, I saw grooves cut into one side and hinges on the other. This wasn't a plank. It was a door, buried in the earth.
Curiosity was mounting inside my chest, so much that I almost couldn't stand it. I pried the door up with the shovel and then pulled it the rest of the way open. The door was heavier than I had imagined, but I was certain that something inside it would make all the risk and effort worth it.
With some effort, I got the door open. I peered down, but it led to a hole too deep to see the bottom, with a rusty metal ladder on the side that I didn't entirely trust to hold my weight. Nor did I have any interest in diving into some unknown darkness without knowing whether I could get back up again, and with nobody in the world aware of where I was. I wished I had a flashlight.
I walked around it to try to get a better sense of what was down there, then happened to notice dim writing stamped onto the underneath side of the door: Luftschutzraum. An air-raid shelter.
There were hundreds of them all over Berlin, places built underground during the Second World War when the Allies began bombing the city. There was nothing special about them -- we had one under my own apartment building in fact, and so did Anna. So there was no reason, none at all, why my father would go to the trouble of putting anything special inside this one, so far from home.
I closed up the door and even scattered dirt across it again, then did my best to erase any evidence that I had been here. Obviously, I had misunderstood my father's instructions. Whatever his meaning was with the silly dances and the picture, I couldn't understand it.
Maybe there was no meaning. Maybe his dance was only a dance, and this picture was only a picture. It might not even be from him at all! If I was reading secret messages into it, that was only a sign of my boredom and desire to find some lost connection to my father.
I climbed out of the basement, pulled the boards that had blocked the window back into place, and stashed the shovel beneath some rubble in the alleyway so I wouldn't have to answer any questions about it on the way home.
I hadn't lost hope, no, that wasn't the right word for it. It wasn't lost because I didn't intend to try finding it again. As I walked home that morning, I simply accepted the reality that it was wrong for me to ever have had hope in the first place.
Who shows courage, encourages others. -- Adolph Kolping, German priest and social reformer
The following Wednesday, two letters came to our door. The first was from Oma Gertrude -- my mother's mother and the woman for whom I'd been named. For as far back as I could remember, Oma Gertrude had always been old, but over the last year she had also begun to have some health problems.
The state was usually very cooperative about giving my mother time off from work to take care of Oma's needs, but Mama seemed worried this time. "She's fallen and broken her leg," Mama said. "I'll have to stay with her for a while. Perhaps the state will give me work near her home."
"What about us?" I asked. Our family was separated enough, I didn't want Mama leaving too.
"We can take care of ourselves," Fritz offered. "School is almost out for the summer, and I've got to stay here in Berlin and work. Gerta can take care of things around the house."
"I'll come home as soon as I can." Then Mama frowned, second-guessing herself. "You should both come with me."
"No!" Fritz and I were in agreement about that. Aside from whatever work he could find, Fritz had a girlfriend here now. And I didn't want to stay with Oma. Her house smelled like fish and there was nothing to do.
So against my mother's better judgment, it was decided that we would stay in Berlin while she went to the countryside to help Oma Gertrude. None of us seemed particularly happy about the idea, but we all agreed it was our best option.
The second letter was for Fritz. It was from the military, reminding him that he would turn eighteen in June. By the end of that month, he would be expected to enroll for a year and a half of service. Refusing to serve, the letter clearly stated, would have serious consequences. Well, of course it would. Everything had serious consequences.
Fritz's eyebrows pressed together as he read it, and I could tell that he was bothered. But even if he was, he clearly remembered -- as we always did now -- that the ears of the Stasi were hidden somewhere in our apartment, and so he couldn't say anything when he finished other than "This is a great opportunity. I can hardly wait."
Fritz wasn't as good a liar as I was, probably because he had a genuinely good heart, or a better heart than mine anyway. His attempt to sound positive came out sounding sarcastic and brittle. So I countered by saying, "I know you're excited. But we'll miss you." It sounded believable, though my sympathetic expression to him said otherwise.
He smiled a thanks in return. Mama didn't appear to have noticed any difference in him, or any particular strangeness in the tone of his words, but neither of us blamed her for that. She looked more tired every day, and now with the news of Oma needing care and the reminder of Fritz's military duty, I was sure Mama's mind was full of all the worries it could possibly hold.
She left early to go into work and speak with her supervisor. Fritz said because of that we had some extra time too and did I want him to walk me to school? I should've refused his offer -- after all, I was plenty old enough to get myself to school. But I missed walking with Anna and it would give us a chance to talk in private.
It was a busy morning, with the street full of Trabants, the bulky, inexpensive eastern cars that were about as reliable
as snow in July. The common joke said that the best feature of any Trabant was the heater in back, which would warm your hands as you pushed it home.
As we left the building, a white truck pulled up directly in front of our apartment. It looked like a delivery truck but had no markings on it at all. That alone was odd. Our building rarely received deliveries.
A door opened and a man was pushed out onto the street. He fell on his hands and knees, and the second I recognized our neighbor I darted over to help him up.
"Herr Krause?"
I glanced up only long enough to see Viktor -- Fritz's former friend -- standing in the doorway of the truck. He frowned at me and then eyed Fritz. Neither of them said a word, and Viktor's expression was so cold I thought maybe he had been turned to ice. Then he shut the door and the truck drove away.
Herr Krause had heavy bags under his eyes and his hands were shaking.
"Are you all right?" I asked him. "Can we send for a doctor?"
He put his hands on either side of my face and tears streamed down his cheeks. "I never should have printed those papers," he said. "Do you hear me? I was wrong."
By then, another woman in our apartment had seen Herr Krause. She darted forward and used her shoulders to prop him up.
Fritz held out a hand and said, "I can carry him in."
"No!" The woman pushed his hand away as if he had offered poison rather than help. "It's better for everyone if you go to school." Her eyes darted around the street. "Please just go."
"It's getting worse," Fritz said to me when we were alone. "People are more suspicious of us, and they keep their distance. Word is getting out that I was arrested."
"Anna barely looks at me anymore." Then I shrugged. "School is out at the end of this week, though, so at least during the summer I won't have to watch her ignore me all day."
Fritz stopped walking and shoved his hands in his pockets. "There's this girl I like."
"Claudia?"
He smiled at first, hearing her name, but it quickly faded away. "Yeah. We've known each other for a long time but just started dating a few weeks ago. I like her a lot, actually, and even asked if she'd wait for me until I got my release from the military. She said she would ... until last night. Her father doesn't want us dating anymore."
"Why not?"
Fritz kicked at the ground with his foot. "The Stasi showed him my file. They suggested it wouldn't be good for Claudia to continue dating me."
"I'm sorry, Fritz." My sympathy wouldn't make him feel any better, I knew that, but I felt his hurt and frustration like it was my own.
He only sucked in a whistle of air and then blew it out again. "Ever since I was arrested a couple of months ago, I've tried, Gerta. Honestly, I have. I've tried to say the right things and do the right things and be whatever it is they want of me. But the more I try to do what they want, the more I understand that my life has been put on this track to failure. From now on, wherever I go, they will stand in my way. I can't win against them."
"You can get Claudia back. I'm sure you can."
"Maybe, but that's not why I told you." He smiled, but it was so sad and hopeless I'd rather have seen him frown. "The same thing is coming for you too."
Even though he spoke quietly, his words echoed like thunder in my ears. Watching Fritz was like looking at pictures of my own life five years down the road. When I would be seventeen and hoping to get into a university, only to be rejected. Needing to get a good job, or any job for that matter, only to be turned down. Trying to find someone I could love, only to have him pulled away from me for reasons I would never fully understand. I knew it would happen to me, because it was already happening to Fritz.
"This all started when Father participated in that uprising twelve years ago," Fritz said, and now his tone grew bitter. "He thought because he wasn't arrested that he got away with it, but he didn't. And then he spent every year since then talking to people about ideas that are considered dangerous here. He thought he got away with that too because they were only ideas. But look at where we are now."
I started walking again and Fritz followed along at my side. "You and I have ideas too," I told him. "And I don't want to become like them." I stared up at him. "That's not me, Fritz, and I don't think it's you either."
"No, it's not," he said. "In fact ... never mind."
"In fact, what?" Fritz was avoiding my eyes now, so I moved in front of him, forcing him to look at me. "Tell me!"
He opened his mouth, then clamped it shut and walked past me. A new worry sprouted in my chest as I hurried to catch up to him. Fritz had been keeping secrets from Mama for years, just to protect her. But something had changed. Now he had started keeping them from me as well.
Freedom lies in being bold. -- Robert Frost, American poet
After school, I returned to the Welcome Building. Every minute since the last time I was here had nagged at me. I'd left too quickly before. My father wanted me in that air-raid shelter, and today I intended to get down there. I didn't bring the shovel in from the alley, but I did have a flashlight that I had snuck into my bag and kept hidden throughout the day.
I stood in the alley and kept an eye on the guards in the nearest tower. The instant they turned their backs, I ran for the building, watching them the entire time. I didn't anticipate the irrigation ditch being as full of water as it was. I almost made the jump across, but still landed in mud, which slowed my run afterward. I must've made it to the building before they saw me, or else sirens would be headed my way already. But it was still too close, and even running so fast would've looked suspicious. If I was going to be on this property, I could never be stupid like that again. From now on, I would approach from the side, in the shadow of the wall.
After I reached the building, it wasn't hard to squeeze between the pried-up boards, drop onto the dirt floor, and then push the boards shut. There were fresh tire tracks from Grenzers on patrol, and more could be laid before nightfall. I needed to hurry.
I grabbed the flashlight from my bag, stuffed it into the waistband of my skirt, and pulled open the heavy metal door to the air-raid shelter. Then I lay on my stomach and angled the flashlight downward to get an idea of what might be inside. I didn't expect ghosts or monsters to leap out at me, but at the same time, I wasn't fully ruling out that possibility either.
The ladder was covered in spiderwebs and felt damp to the touch, but I gritted my teeth in some effort to feel more courageous, brushed off what I could reach, and then climbed down.
The room below was colder than I had expected, but then I realized that unlike some shelters, it wasn't surrounded in metal. This was really only a deep hole with a metal lid, and some crates at the bottom that probably had once held emergency supplies. There was a bench at the far end and a couple of pipes that seemed to carry in fresh air from somewhere outside.
The building above me was still standing ... mostly, so I wondered if this room had ever been used during a raid. Probably it had, even if the Allied bombs had never landed here. Papa had been around my age during the war, and described staying awake all night in the shelters, being too tired to stand but too nervous to sit. There he would wait with whatever group had gathered in the shelter, hearing the airplane engines coming and then the incredible explosions as the bombs found their targets.
Most of the bombings happened late in the war, and Germany's eventual defeat was certain by then. However, the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, wasn't ready to surrender, and seemed content to let Germany be entirely destroyed for his stubbornness. By that time, the Allies didn't seem to care where their bombs fell. They blanketed Germany, and particularly Berlin, with destruction. My schoolteacher said that by the end of the war, nearly all of East Berlin had been completely destroyed.
Mama said the reason East Berliners didn't fight the wall was because so many citizens considered it God's punishment for Germany's crimes in the Second World War. Maybe that was so, but God didn't seem to be punishing the west equally, and besides, the war was
the crime of my grandparents' generation. I didn't see why I should be forced to share in their penance. I was too busy with my own crime anyway, that of standing in this air-raid shelter.
It quickly became obvious that there was no treasure in this room. If anything had ever been here, it was stolen away long ago. But Papa should've expected that. He wouldn't have sent me here for something that could so easily be taken. Besides, whatever was here, he wanted me to dig for it.
The east side of the room was crowded with crates and the bench, and the dirt behind it was buffered with large rocks. So I wandered to the west side and pulled at the dirt, which crumbled in cakes in my hand. Maybe Papa had buried something inside the walls.
It made sense. If the ground above me was so hard, Papa couldn't have dug there to bury anything. But he could've put something down here, just buried behind a thin wall of dirt.
The wall.
The Berlin Wall had to be nearly over my head right now. And I realized that even if Papa had wanted me to find something buried in this dirt, it was far too dangerous for me to dig. Because every centimeter I clawed in there put me one step farther inside the Death Strip. If I went too far, I'd --
If I went too far, I'd end up in the west.
The truth crashed into me like I'd just tumbled through waves of the ocean.
I had been wrong before. There was no treasure buried in this air-raid shelter. No, the shelter itself was the treasure. Papa must've known about this shelter because maybe he had stood in this very room as a child. This was where Papa wanted me to start digging.
He wanted me to tunnel into the west. To freedom. To him.
Forge the iron while it is hot. -- German proverb
I dug a little deeper with my hands, but didn't get very far before I realized this wasn't a smart way to start a tunnel. At the least, I needed the shovel and more light than what came from this small flashlight. And I couldn't walk out of here with my entire body as filthy as my hands already were -- that would get me noticed by every Stasi officer in Berlin, not to mention the border guards, informants, and probably the great majority of nosy neighbors within a square kilometer of this place. Before I dug any farther, I had to have a plan.
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