A sudden movement from the doorway caught everyone’s eye. The crew staggered out carrying a limp, almost blackened woman, two firemen holding her sagging body by her arms and stockinged feet. Somehow, she had lost both of her shoes in the firestorm and amid the chaos, Georgie couldn’t help but focus on the small hole in the sole of one stocking; if she ever found out, the poor woman would be mortified, Georgie thought, and then checked herself for such whimsy in amongst the turmoil. Only she knew such a detail to be true.
The crew set the woman down on the pavement and Georgie rushed forward, Max just behind. She glanced briefly at the Stormtroopers to check their reaction – they looked on blankly, perhaps knowing they couldn’t stop it, not without a violent public backlash. Even so, the firefighters seemed reluctant to help further, perhaps fearful of overstepping their duties under the eye of the Reich. Georgie knew only the basics of first aid – what the hell should she do?
Instantly, Max pushed through, checking the woman’s pulse, and lowering his head to her mouth, pinching her singed cheeks between one hand and blowing into her mouth; from behind, Georgie saw his own ribs draw in air to feed another breath. After two or three of his bellows breaths, the woman’s body convulsed, Max pulled away and she coughed violently – her breath spewing like a sawdust of broiling charred wood, the odour of garden bonfires. The woman opened her eyes, wide with alarm, and kick-started her wheezing lungs, desperately gulping in the relatively cleaner air. Before anyone could speak, or take stock, they heard another commotion, shouts of ‘ambulance’, and within an instant, two men had pushed their way through the crowds, produced a stretcher and she was gone.
The pair stood in the midst of the continuing chaos, wondering what else to do, feel or say. Max wiped soot from his mouth and Georgie caught the eye of the fire chief, who winked in her direction, swiftly followed by a scowl and a nod towards the Stormtroopers, who were squinting at them through the smoke. The fireman’s message seemed clear: ‘Away you go, before they mark you out even more.’ He reiterated with a second, sharp gesture of his head.
‘We have to go,’ Georgie said, tugging on Max’s arm.
‘But … there are still …’
‘Now.’ And there was everything in the tone of her voice.
They threaded wordlessly around the debris and slipped into an empty alleyway, eerily quiet. Max flattened himself against the wall, head against the cool of the brickwork. He breathed deeply and coughed out the remainder of the woman’s singed lungs.
‘What on earth was that?’ Georgie panted. Trying to make sense of it caused her head to throb.
Max’s eyes were bright and wide with shock, shining out from the black smudges. ‘I’m not sure,’ he wheezed, ‘but it was one hell of a turning point. They’ve never been so blatant about the violence. There was no shame, no holding back.’
For a minute they were silent, absorbing the impact of Stormtroopers – Nazi-backed militia – openly vandalising, destroying and enjoying the power of their violence, without fear of punishment. With permission, clearly. The Wehrmacht and the SS were conspicuously absent. A horrible thought had dawned on Georgie over recent months, building progressively. Now, she felt certain of it: Hitler was unafraid. Of any one person, any race, army or country. Hadn’t he already stated, in front of the entire German parliament, that his country did not fear war? Here was the proof. When the realisation hit, an arrow of ice shot through her body and she was frightened to the core. Having just witnessed the debacle of a burning Berlin, the rest of Europe had to feel the same. Surely? The world needed to know about every spitting ember and splinter of hatred Hitler had worked to contrive. And it was their job to do it.
They persuaded a taxi driver to take them through the park as far the Brandenburg Gate, threading the streets on foot towards the Jewish quarter, noting scene upon scene of devastation.
Picking their way among the grit of glass and piles of belongings cast onto the pavements, they spotted Rod and Bill collected around a large hardware store, now a huge blaze: sad, resigned faces lit by the fire’s glow. Despite the fierce crackle of wood, livelihoods and history going up in smoke, it was strangely quiet, stunned families simply looking on. They might have been at a bonfire party on Guy Fawkes Night, Georgie thought, except for the expressions of loss staring into the flames.
There was no holding off Rod’s hug when he saw them both; big arms engulfing her and, for a second or so, she felt safe. ‘Thank God you’re okay. I was worried,’ he whispered in her ear.
‘How long has this been going on?’ she said. ‘We were in the cinema.’
‘Several hours,’ he said. ‘We got word in the office – the diplomat in Paris died of his injuries. This is the result.’
‘But where are the police and the army – to restore order?’
Rod shrugged his wide shoulders. ‘You tell me. Look around – there are no fingerprints of the Nazi hierarchy on this, but it stinks of their work.’ His disgust was apparent, tears brimming. ‘It’s the worst I’ve seen. What is this world coming to?’
Max pulled at Georgie’s arm then, bent to shout in her ear as part of the building opposite succumbed to the flames and crashed to the ground. ‘I’m heading back to the office – I need to get something over to London. Shall we go together?’
‘I want to go to Rubin’s first,’ she replied. ‘Make sure they’re in one piece.’
Max shook his head. ‘Going on your own is insane,’ he shouted again. ‘Look, come back to the office with me – you can file your story via the telex, and then we’ll both go to Rubin’s.’
Keen though Georgie was to reach the Amsels, she could see Max was talking sense. They weaved around the backstreets, seeing less, but hearing brief snatches of triumphant chanting from groups of Stormtroopers rise and fall, drunk on power.
To his credit, Cliff Sutton had hauled himself into the Telegraph’s office – he looked pale and bloated, but it was clear that his profession came before Cliff’s love of the bottle on a night like this. Behind the desk, he and Max quickly organised themselves to writing different angles of the story, merging press releases and comments from the chancellery now ticking through on the wire.
Already, the Reich was bent on distancing itself from the Stormtroopers and their actions: the violent reaction was not a directive from the Führer, it insisted – simply a response to the shooting that the German Government could not contain. The people had spoken with their actions. How could they restrain such a swell of opinion? At best, it was a pathetic rebuttal that sounded suspiciously like school playground wars: ‘It wasn’t me, Miss. He started it.’ And the desecration wasn’t limited to Berlin either. Across Germany, synagogues and shops had been attacked and burned, Jews assaulted for nothing more than their birthright – all were held responsible for the shooting of one man, it seemed.
Georgie rang her London office and warned they would be receiving her copy via telex, then got to work. Her own rage spewed onto the page – once or twice Cliff looked sideways at her, and then at Max, whose own eyes were focused entirely on his work – and she found herself slicing words to pluck out her personal animosity towards the Reich. She missed Paul – not the man himself, since she barely knew him, but as a colleague, his knowledge, to bounce around ideas and work side by side. She envied Max in that moment.
By the time they fed through each piece, it was three a.m. Henry’s night editor sent through confirmation he’d received her piece and the Telegraph also signalled they had enough to process. Georgie’s eyes were sore from the smoke and boring into the white of the page. But she wasn’t tired, couldn’t have slept, and Max was equally wired.
Cliff had broken open a bottle of brandy as they finished and poured out three generous measures – they all needed it then. But Georgie was anxious to get on, since Rubin and Sara still played on her mind.
Outside on the street, it was evident the night’s events were calming. The cacophony had diminished to a hum, a ginger glow hovering
above the city. They learned later that fire crews had finally been allowed into action, where buildings housing German citizens were under threat. A lone taxi rolled slowly over the glass-glittered streets and Max thrust a wad of Reichsmarks at the driver in persuading him to take the fare, arriving at Rubin’s apartment just before four in the morning. They might have been in bed, asleep and largely unaffected by the night’s events, but somehow Georgie doubted it. The whole city had been kept awake.
Lights blazed in almost all the flats, but they could see no signs of fire or wanton destruction and Georgie breathed a sigh of relief. It was short-lived, however: when they began climbing the stairs to Rubin’s own apartment, open and splintered doors sparked fresh alarm. On reaching the third floor, Sara’s sobs could be heard through the hallway.
‘Rubin? Sara? Are you all right?’ Georgie stepped over a door panel on the floor, broken like matchwood.
Rubin emerged into the hallway, his face a ghostly white, wringing his hands.
‘Rubin, what’s happened? Is it the children?’
He shook his head. ‘No, thank God.’ It was plainly not Sara – Georgie could detect her cries from inside.
‘It’s Elias,’ he said at last, the words choking in his throat. ‘They came and took Elias. I don’t where.’
It was Max who moved in then, to shoulder Rubin’s distress, man to man, while Georgie soaked up the tears from his wife. And they sat, and wondered – for the second time that night – what the world had come to.
28
Sweeping Up
10th November 1938
The SS had been busy that night, and again the next morning. But being the SS, they had the sense to work methodically and efficiently in their own crackdown against undesirables, more subtle than the marauding street offensive of the Stormtroopers. As the light rose on the Berlin of 10th November 1938, the extent of Nazi hatred against Jews became clear: skeletons of businesses and lives left smoking, and the sound everywhere of glass shards being herded by brooms, like shale on a beach.
Georgie headed back towards Frida’s flat around six, numbed by exhaustion and the night’s tragedies. She threaded her way around families trying to piece together their lives, foraging their own homes for anything of sentimental or cash value they could. What struck her was the distinct lack of outward distress or tears; each person moved with purpose, but not bent or broken. They had a job to do, in rebuilding, and they got on with it. Something told her they had either prepared, or they’d done this before.
She and Max had sat with the Amsels until dawn broke, Sara trying to calm the children’s distress while hiding her own.
‘We heard the commotion outside, saw the fires,’ Rubin told them, his voice flat. ‘I went out to see if I could help. The whole building was awake, and there were no troops around, so I thought the family was safe.’ His guilt at temporarily abandoning his family was acute. ‘Sara said they came and worked quickly through the building, bashing in all the doors, demanding to see everyone. But it was clear they had targets to find – they hauled Elias out of his bed without any questions, and immediately he was gone.’
‘Then you couldn’t have prevented it, even by being here,’ Georgie said, trying to soften his remorse. ‘It would have happened anyway.’
‘Yes, but Sara … she shouldn’t have had to … I should have been here.’ His eyes were grey and dead – the normally bright, positive Rubin, who sought to see the good side of everything, was a man defeated.
‘We’ll find him,’ Georgie found herself promising. Then to herself: How? How on earth would she find a needle in a Nazi haystack?
Rubin had smiled then, weakly, but with a glimmer of hope. She couldn’t let him down.
Max had left the Amsel apartment just before her to grab some sleep. Despite Cliff’s appearance, the most he could hope for was that the veteran reporter would hold the fort in the office while he covered the city, mostly on foot. Trams were running, but the roads were hit and miss, the sea of glass slowing the traffic.
In the watery light of a new day, Georgie rounded the main thoroughfare into Friedrichstrasse and came upon a new sight. Now, it was not only the remnants of windowpanes being swept away; a line, twenty or so long and two deep, of men – Jews – were being led by Wehrmacht soldiers, a makeshift Star of David hanging over one man’s neck. Those bystanders with brooms stopped and looked, almost paying their respects as the men passed by, their heads bowed. Their destination was almost certainly to jail, and then to Lord knows where. But for what crime?
This sad procession confirmed to Georgie that the night had not been simply an attack but a well-planned cull. Already, she could predict the Reich’s justification; these men would be marked out as agitators, sparking the riots. Jews would be the root cause, undoubtedly. The thought, coupled with a sudden, vacuous hunger, made her sick to her stomach. She was run through with fatigue, desperate to sink into her own bed, and yet her body sparked with agitation. She caught a tram that took her close to the Adlon, in the hope of finding friends equally in need of solace.
The sight of Rod at a table near the bar almost brought her to tears, and he drew her in with warmth as he always did. Bill read her mind and ordered a pot of English tea with a decent breakfast. ‘You look like you need it,’ he said.
‘Okay, kiddo?’ Rod spread a hand on her shoulder. Georgie nodded, bit down on her lip, eyes brimming, and just about holding back on what might have been a cascade.
They sat over the table, quietly digesting the night. The full scope of the damage – both human and material – wouldn’t be known for several days, and even then they couldn’t rely on estimations from the Reich. It was tragic and it was evil, a fact that didn’t need stating, but each of them hoped the exposure on their respective pages would be the turning point for the world to wake up to Adolf Hitler’s true potential.
‘I would just love to be a fly on the wall in Herr Bauer’s office right now,’ Rod said, with his talent for lightening the moment. ‘He must be wetting himself with Adolf worship. And I can’t wait until he sees my paper’s headline.’
The imagined picture brought a smile to all three faces, a vision of Bauer hot-footing with his unctuous fawning, his tiny moustache bristling.
‘Does that mean you’re going home to pack a suitcase, my friend?’ Bill pitched, with a more serious edge. ‘Bauer would give his back teeth to have you thrown out of the country. Though I’d prefer it if you didn’t go quite yet. I feel we have a great deal more drinking to do.’
‘I’m not planning on going any time soon,’ Rod said. ‘I’ve got a bit more quiet agitation in me yet.’
Energised briefly by tea and eggs, Georgie revealed the loss in Rubin’s family, and they all recognised the personal cost then, of the unknown, desolate faces witnessed through the night, but also of people they knew, liked and had shared a brief past with. Their sorrow sat heavily across the table.
‘I feel like I want to write about the Amsels, put the world’s focus on them,’ Georgie said at last, though she knew it was naive to think it would do them any favours.
‘I’m afraid they would disappear into a puff of smoke – all of them,’ Rod said. ‘And very quickly.’
‘Then I’m just going to have to find out where Elias is myself,’ Georgie said, flooded with a sudden defiance. Inside she was still doubting herself: How? And where do I even start?
Finally, a wave of fatigue hit them all, and Rod – being her guardian angel and a wise old owl in one – packed her off in a taxi towards home. ‘Grab a few hours’ sleep, and we’ll see you at the press briefing at four,’ he said through the window. ‘First to spot Bauer’s nervous twitch gets a double scotch.’
He could always make her smile, yet the muscles of Georgie’s mouth felt odd in doing so. More than ever, she’d felt herself come of age in just one night; there was no pretence at being a fledging reporter now. This was serious. And she had little choice but to rise to the challenge.
Th
e apartment was deathly quiet as she let herself in – a quick peek in both bedrooms told Georgie that Simone and Frida were sleeping off whatever night they’d experienced. She left a message for Sam at the British Embassy – he was snowed under, his secretary said, inundated with requests for visas, lines of people queueing outside the building since dawn in a last bid to flee Berlin and Germany. But Sam was safe, at least.
Georgie crawled under the sheets and was asleep in seconds, a low, tinkling soundtrack to her dreams, pushing and ebbing as she woke and sank under several times. By three p.m., the flat was alive again; both Frida and Simone focused less on news and more on in-depth stories, and so their work was largely still to do in reporting on the aftermath. Frida would probably feed through to several worldwide magazines, might even have had a shot at a Time magazine piece. Georgie was still unsure where Simone published, yet she always seemed to be in work and have money to spend. The French popular press couldn’t help but be alerted now, being Germany’s immediate neighbour.
They were all present by four p.m., when Joseph Goebbels appeared on the lectern at the Ministry of Propaganda. Given his well-known hostility towards the foreign press, the atmosphere was electric before he’d uttered a word, pencils twitching alongside the irritated drumming of Joey’s fingers on the wood.
It was as expected: the shooting of Herr vom Rath in Paris had been the catalyst, but the Stormtroopers were only reacting to public opinion. How could they be blamed for defending their country against the fearsome aggression of the Jews? The Reich had not ordered it but was powerless to stop the initial acts of defence. It had moved, however, to halt further damage and lives lost. Jews were the aggressors, the Reich the saviour of its people. Again.
The Berlin Girl Page 17