Last Train from Kummersdorf

by Leslie Wilson

  The next thing Effi could remember was all of them standing by a taxi in the rain, waiting to get in and catch the boat train from Victoria Station. Papa wasn’t coming. Papa and Mama were angry with each other. That was when Effi heard about Schulz for the first time, though she didn’t know why they were standing shouting about this man called Schulz when the taxi driver had got his meter going and it was ticking away, making the ride to Victoria more and more expensive by the minute. Papa didn’t want Effi to go to Germany, he wanted her to stay behind if Mama was set on going, but Effi wanted to stay in London with both of them.

  Papa shouted: ‘There’s going to be a war. Any day now. And you’re going off to Germany?’ He kissed Effi goodbye, he said: ‘Remember I love you.’ He gave Mama a quick kiss on the cheek, it was a nasty kiss, as if he hated her, and went back into the house. She remembered the door banging and she felt as if it had slammed on her finger. That was how much it hurt.

  She couldn’t remember the crossing, just how they got off the boat at Ostende in Belgium and walked down the platform. The porter was wheeling their luggage up the platform to the train, their bags were all wet and shiny. And they had a sleeper compartment and Mama pretended to sleep, but when Effi got up and went into the corridor to look out of the window, Mama jumped off her bed and came out, she grabbed Effi’s hand as if she was a kid herself, younger than Effi, and couldn’t bear to be left alone in the compartment.

  There was steam flying past the windows and it was dark outside, there were empty lit-up stations with weird names, they shone up out of the night and then were gone, and Effi was scared of Germany because Hitler was there, and one of the things she’d always known was how Hitler had killed Uncle Max in a camp and how he’d wanted to kill Papa too, that was why they’d cleared out of Germany, so why are we going back there? she asked herself, but she couldn’t ask Mama because Mama was upset enough already.

  When they got to the border they had to get out of the train and sit in front of a desk in a big shed and a man in uniform looked at Mama’s passport and then stared at Mama’s face. Mama’s hands clenched in her lap. Effi was such a kid still, she was scared that Hitler would come along himself and drag them off to a camp. But the man just stamped the passport and said: ‘Welcome back to Germany. Heil Hitler!’

  Grandmama lay coughing in her big bedroom in the villa in Wannsee, coughing and crying with joy to see Mama and Effi. And Schulz came round, he was a big man in a big suit who started on at Mama about working in Germany, but she said she had to go back to Papa.

  ‘Why?’ said Schulz. ‘You could get rid of him so easily.’

  ‘Get out,’ said Mama. So he apologized, but it showed Effi why Papa hated Schulz and she hated him too. And she wanted to go back, they’d seen Grandmama, hadn’t they? But Mama said Grandmama needed them to stay awhile.

  She learned all about Schulz later on. How he’d been a film producer, though not a very important one, but Mama had worked with him once and he’d always had a thing for her. How he’d got his big chance when all the Jews and anti-Nazis had left in 1933, and now he worked in the film section of Dr Goebbels’s Propaganda Department. Mama had been a really big name in the old days and it’d be a propaganda coup for the Nazis if Schulz managed to sign up Leni Valentin. There was more to it than that, though. He was in love with Mama.

  Mama kept telling Schulz she was only in Berlin to visit her mother.

  It was like a weird, gone-wrong summer holiday, beautiful weather, and the lake was just down the road from the villa, it had a sandier beach than the seaside in Brighton where they used to go for outings from London. Mama took Effi down there and they swam. But Effi couldn’t enjoy herself properly, she was longing to go back to London. And then the war started, just as Papa had said it would, and they were trapped.

  *

  The story was that the Poles had attacked the Germans at a place in the East called Gleiwitz. Most people swallowed that, though they were bricking themselves because of the war. Nobody wanted a war, so they kidded themselves Hitler couldn’t want one either. Maybe some of them guessed the truth, but they only ever whispered about it after they’d looked over their shoulder – that was ‘the German glance’, the quick once-over to make sure no one was listening who might shop them to the Gestapo. And Grandmama’s maid Anna said to Mama: ‘Why did the British declare war on us? Didn’t they realize we had to defend ourselves?’

  Mama just spread her hands; she was so miserable she didn’t want to talk about it.

  Letters came from Papa via the Red Cross. Things were bad for him, he’d been locked away in a camp. Mama said: ‘If we’d stayed we’d have been locked up, too.’

  People got killed in camps; they were a Nazi thing, so why were the British setting them up? It didn’t make sense. The British were supposed to be OK. Mama said it was a different kind of camp, Papa had only been sent there because he was German and Britain was at war with Germany. That didn’t make sense either.

  ‘He’s not an enemy,’ Effi said. ‘He hates Hitler!’ She said it too loudly and Mama shushed her, even though she was speaking English. She understood, she’d learned quickly how careful they had to be. Everywhere. She was only a little kid, though, it was hard for her to remember all the time. Papa’s letters all got read by the German censor, but Mama always destroyed them anyway after she’d read them, and she kept his photograph hidden under her mattress.

  Papa had written ‘Raindrops Shining in Your Hair’ before they took him into the camp; he’d sent the sheet music to Mama, and Effi had to sing it under her breath, but when it became a big hit in America, the Nazis pretended they didn’t know who’d written it and it was allowed to be sung in German cafés here, just with German words. So Effi could hum it – she wouldn’t sing the German words, they were rubbish. The record made Papa’s name, so that later, after the English let him out of the internment camp, he got an offer from Hollywood to come and write music for the movies. He accepted because Germany wasn’t at war with America so if he went to Hollywood Effi and Mama could come and join him.

  The song was about how much he missed Mama, and how sorry he was that he’d been angry with her on the day they left. That was why Effi hummed it so often, bit by bit it did away with the hurt from when he’d slammed the door on them.

  *

  She hated the school she had to go to in Wannsee. It was all girls, they were all called by their surnames and the teachers shouted at them and hit them for stupid reasons. They made you do a lot of games and gymnastics – that wasn’t too bad, though the games teacher was a real bitch and she used to drive terrified girls right to the top of the climbing bars to toughen them up. Effi wasn’t afraid of climbing and she was good at gymnastics, but there was too much cookery and sewing. She wouldn’t sing at school because if it came out how good she was she’d have to sing in Nazi concerts. She pretended not to be able to sing in tune. Mama was teaching her music at home and she told Effi that what the teachers were getting the kids to do was rubbish, they had to sing too loudly, they’d wear their voices out. The songs were rubbish too, they were all about loving Hitler and invading Britain. People were pleased because France had fallen so quickly, they wanted London to be bombed so the British would surrender and then they thought the war would be over. A nice Europe that would have been, but anyway, Hitler had other ideas and he invaded Russia.

  Claudia Anders was a girl Effi really got on with – clever and good at art. She had some Jewish blood, something like a great-grandfather, it wasn’t enough to get her chucked out of the school, but some of the teachers were truly bad to her. They made her sweep the classroom and empty the bins, or clean out the kitchen after domestic science. It wasn’t easy for her to do those jobs because she had one leg shorter than the other and had to wear a special shoe. Once Effi found her crying and she put her arms round her while all the other girls walked past. They weren’t nasty exactly, just soggy. They didn’t want to stick their necks out. That was the only time C
laudia cried openly, anyway. She had guts, she didn’t want the teachers to see they’d upset her. Then one day Schulz came round and told Effi she shouldn’t be so pally with Claudia.

  It turned out that Schulz was protecting Effi, or else – with Papa a ‘filthy émigré’ (that was what the Nazis called people like him) – she’d have been made to do all those jobs too. He stood there in his sharp suit with those huge padded shoulders and laid down the law to her and Mama about it. The next day the games teacher told Claudia she had to clean the toilets out. Just to show Schulz, Effi stayed behind and started to help Claudia. They were halfway through when Frau Bitch-face came along to check up on Claudia. When she saw Effi there she stood still and her mouth tried to smile; it said, That’s what I like to see you doing, Mann. But then you could see her remember Schulz. She frowned and shook her head too fast – she looked like an idiot. Almost gabbling, she told them both to stop work, they’d done enough, she said, the caretaker could finish. That would have been a good memory – only a week later Claudia wasn’t in school any more.

  Somebody said she’d gone to hospital to have her tonsils out and she’d died of pneumonia. But a girl called Karin Koch told Effi: ‘You know, if a child goes to hospital and they’re, you know, undesirable, the wrong race, or from a delinquent family, or epileptic or deformed – well sometimes they give them something and then they die. Nobody ever worries about it.’ Karin Koch’s father was a doctor, so she knew. The girls never talked about Claudia again.

  *

  Grandmama died in September 1941. Papa wrote a kind letter to Mama; he said he was just leaving for America and once he was there he’d organize a visa for them. Only Germany declared war on America before Effi and Mama could leave. So they had to stay on at Wannsee. Grandmama had left them money to live on and the maid Anna did their housework. And Mama sat looking at the atlas, trying to work out routes she could take to get to America after all. They could go to Sweden, she said. Sweden was still neutral. Then get a boat from there to America.

  The doorbell would ring: Schulz had come visiting again. Anna was always pleased to see Schulz – a Party bigwig with a huge Merc and a badge and a chauffeur, she thought he was a real classy number.

  He was still on at Mama to go into the German movies. He said she could be bigger than Zarah Leander, and Mama, who was so slim, said, ‘I’d have to eat a lot to manage that.’

  Even Schulz had to laugh, because for all everyone in Germany was gooing over Zarah Leander and her schlocky films and songs, she was putting on so much weight all her costumes had to be specially designed to hide it and the publicity shots were airbrushed to hide the blubber.

  ‘No,’ Mama said then. ‘Anyway, I’m always so tired.’

  *

  At school the teachers started to say: ‘Children, if you hear your parents doubting that we will win, you must contradict them.’ There were fewer girls in the classroom anyway, kids were being sent away to the country because there’d been a few air-raids on Berlin, which Fat Man Reich Air Marshal Göring had said would never happen. Nothing compared to what was going to hit Berlin later, of course. Mama didn’t want to go away again, she’d even stopped looking at the atlas. All she wanted to do was rest, or go down to the beach and sit there while Effi swam. She was getting thinner, though she told Effi it was only the wartime rations. Then she started to cough. She had TB like Grandmama. And she died of it.

  Chapter Seven

  Effi remembered all that as they walked through the night, but it was bad, thinking how Mama had died. It’d make her cry if she didn’t put it out of her mind, and this wasn’t the time to cry. She said to herself: ‘I’ll cry when I’m with Papa. Not before.’

  They’d been going maybe an hour or two when they came to the edge of a pinewood. It stretched as far as they could see in either direction, so they had to go in between the trees.

  The moonlight didn’t reach in there and they had to feel their way: the pine-bark scraped at their hands and the unfriendly sharp broken branches reached out to jab at them. The boy swore.

  Effi laughed. ‘That’s the first bad word I’ve heard from you.’

  ‘Did you think I didn’t know any? It’s going to be grim going through here in the dark.’

  ‘We’ll have to go on till we find cover. I’m not just going to lie down in the woods – supposing the Ivans came in the morning?’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I did scouting in the Hitler Youth, they taught us about cover.’

  ‘Clever Hitler Youth.’

  She was tired and scared; she thought he’d get annoyed now, she half-wanted him to, but he didn’t.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, calming his voice down, ‘don’t let’s row. I guess we’ll find some cover, sooner or later.’

  So on they went. At least the forest floor was easy to walk on, needly and bouncy, and the night air smelt of wild mushrooms, though you wouldn’t get mushrooms in the spring. All at once they were walking into branches. A fallen tree maybe. Effi lit her lamp to see.

  It looked as if a bomb blast had thrown two trees down and they’d fallen across each other, roofing each other’s trunks. Effi crawled in and waited for Hanno to follow before she put the lamp out. She shuffled the bits of broken tree away, it’d be more comfortable to lie on the soft underlayer of decaying needles.

  Hanno said: ‘That was lucky.’

  Effi laughed. ‘Luck is my middle name, kid.’

  They both lay down to sleep, but it was cold in there. The boy’s teeth were chattering. He didn’t have a blanket, did he?

  ‘You’re keeping me awake,’ she said. ‘Roll over here.’

  They lay back to back and she put her blanket over both of them.

  ‘Just mind your hands,’ she whispered. ‘Any cheeky stuff and you’re out.’

  ‘I’m too tired.’ There was a laugh in his voice, though.

  ‘Good. Stay tired.’

  She started to hum Papa’s song under her breath. Hanno fell asleep, making little movements against her. She heard an owl call, its wavery voice tracking across the wood, then another answered. The warmth was building up between her body and the boy’s; it was good.

  *

  In the morning when she woke up, there was a lot of scuffling and chittering going on in the trees above them. She felt Hanno wake beside her.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered.

  ‘A bird, or a squirrel maybe. I think it’s a squirrel.’ He yawned and stretched his arms in front of him. ‘I dreamed about my best marble.’

  She’d hardly been with other kids the last few years, she’d forgotten what they were like. The boys at school in England used to have marbles.

  ‘What colour was it?’

  ‘It was a cat’s-eye, I found it in the garden when I was seven, it was sort of orangey-red and gold. Like two goldfish swimming together in a bowl. I always used to win with it. I dreamed I was back at my house, only it had been bombed and there was nothing but a heap of ash. I was digging through the ash trying to find the marble. Then I woke up and I remembered that it isn’t in Sternberg any more. I gave it to my sister when she and my mother went away. She’s got it in Frankfurt.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  His back felt hard, warm and alive. It shifted with his breathing. Her skin crawled pleasantly. She thought she’d like it if he turned round and put his arms round her.

  All at once there was someone out there, walking in boots, talking loudly, she wished it was the Amis, but this wasn’t even American English. This was Russian, she’d bet; strange, a language that was heavy and light at the same time. Papa once said every language had its own music, well, she thought, I couldn’t expect these voices to be music in my ears.

  They were laughing, one of them fired a gun off. She felt Hanno’s heart pounding, even through his spine she could feel it, but he didn’t move, neither did she. Further away there was more fighting going on than she’d heard yet, and it wasn’t a nice day. Not ordinarily cloudy. The air felt
dirty.

  There was another shot, and another, and this time the bullet came right into the hideout, whacked into the layer of needles, making a puff of dust. This was worse than a raid, it felt more personal. And she wanted to sneeze. Carefully, noiselessly, Effi took her hand away from the pouch and squashed her nostrils with two fingers.

  Don’t sneeze, Hanno lad, do what I’m doing.

  The Ivans weren’t shooting at them, they were taking a break from the battle, pot-shotting at squirrels maybe. Another shot tore her jacket and scorched her arm.

  *

  Hanno knew Effi was hurt because he felt her wince. He had no idea how badly, but he had to lie quiet with his back to her. If he moved or spoke he’d betray them both. He thought, she’s got to be OK. But he’d thought that about Wolfgang and Wolfgang was dead. He felt sick.

  The Russians laughed again. He could hear a faint tremble in Effi’s body, and the shots died off: he heard the boots and voices getting further away but he didn’t dare move yet or even whisper to her. Now he couldn’t decide which of them it was who was trembling, and he remembered the Jew in Sternberg, the old man in his shabby overcoat with the yellow star on it, shivering as the two of them were shivering now. It was a bad memory.

  Effi rolled over slowly and sat up. ‘They’re gone,’ she said.

  He sat up too, there was just enough head-space.

  ‘The swine winged my arm,’ she said. She pulled it out of the torn grey sleeve and rolled her shirt-sleeve up. The wound was just below her shoulder. She hunched round and licked at the blood but it kept coming.

  He said: ‘Let me tie it up for you.’

  ‘Have you got a bandage on you, kid?’

  ‘Have you still got Otto’s handkerchief?’