The Berlin Girl

by Mandy Robotham

  Outside, he hailed a taxi with urgency. ‘Aron says there’s a search party in my neighbourhood, going house to house. It might just be routine, but I don’t think we can take any chances.’

  The taxi seemed to take an age, and they remained tight-lipped in the back, Max’s knee bouncing up and down, jittery with anxiety. Georgie pushed out a hand to quell his nerves, though she understood his disquiet – it was his apartment the Amsels would be discovered in. For the Nazis, a clear case of guilt by association.

  They spied the troops as the taxi drew up, not so much swarming, but stealthily working their way through the next apartment block like worker ants. There was no sign of Rubin or Sara, or a general unease that anyone had been hauled away, and the troops hadn’t yet reached Max’s block. A few dog walkers slowed up as they moved past, but no one dared to stop and stare for long.

  Max grabbed Georgie’s hand as he would a wife or girlfriend, and they headed towards the centre of his own building. The sun beat down on the courtyard, the flap of washing on a line breaking an eerie, deserted silence. Even those with nothing to hide had retreated indoors, windows firmly shut.

  Max took the stairs two at a time and Georgie ran behind. He checked the thread was still in place and put the key in the door – only he and Georgie had keys, and the Amsels wouldn’t have been alarmed by the sound. Frau Sommer’s door opposite was shut, although Georgie thought she might have seen the curtain twitch. Or was that her over-egged imagination?

  Rubin and Sara had already heard the search party – both suitcases were on the bed, ready to go.

  ‘Should we just leave, pretend we’re out for a walk?’ Rubin suggested. ‘Try and sneak back in later.’

  Max shook his head. ‘Too risky.’ His brain seemed to be calculating. ‘I’ll run to the pawnbroker’s and use the phone. Do you have the number of your garage – the one that supplies your cars?’

  Rubin nodded.

  ‘Good, then we’ll just have to move things forward. Georgie, you take a taxi and collect the car. Meantime, we’ll move to the basement, where the rubbish is kept. I’ve seen the troops do this before – they generally start at the top and move down. Hopefully, it will buy us some time.’

  It seemed the only thing to do. There was no telling how zealous the search would be; if the troops were targeting only known addresses, or crashing through random doors and grasping any deceit. The only certainty was that any enquiry would not be polite.

  Georgie moved as if in a dream, wanting to half run out onto the main street, where taxis trawled more regularly for business. But she was conscious of keeping a bounce to her step, at the same time naturally slowed by the heat of the day – just a woman out walking. She passed a trooper outside the next building standing sentry and he returned her smile. ‘Good day, Fraulein.’ He nodded, and she was struck that – if stripped of his uniform – he would resemble any young man across Europe. It was already a waste, whether war followed or not: a young German hunting down his own countrymen. So futile.

  Georgie flagged a taxi, praying the traffic was not too heavy. Twenty minutes later, she was driving away a car that promised to be returned later that day, silently absolving herself of the lie. It was necessary and, if needed, she and Max would find some way of repaying the garage owner. The drive was hot and sluggish, fumes pushing their way into the open windows, and she had to refrain from using the horn to avoid undue attention. ‘Go on, go on,’ she hissed at drivers in front. ‘Keep moving!’

  The troops had just arrived in Max’s block, scampering like ants in a line towards the courtyard. Georgie parked outside the adjacent block and waited for their uniforms to be absorbed by the building, unlocked the boot, and walked as confidently as she could towards the basement stairs at the side of the building. She hummed a tune as she neared, hopped down the few stairs to a closed door and rapped three times in quick succession. Amid the heat, gloom and unbearable stench of festering rubbish, Sara looked terrified, her eyes white and wide. Georgie reported only one sentry had been left outside, and the car was parked a little way down the street.

  ‘Max and I will walk out down the street with the cases,’ she said. ‘If we’re stopped, we have our press cards – it’s easy to say we’re going on a work trip.’

  ‘Once we reach the car, we’ll go, just Sara and I,’ Rubin said. His mind was set again – no more risks for his friends.

  ‘No,’ Max said. In the darkness, his voice projected equal determination. ‘You two can travel in the back, out of sight, Georgie and I in the front. We’ll get you just beyond the city confines, and then we’ll say goodbye.’

  Shouts from above meant Rubin had no time to argue. Georgie and Max took a case each and, checking the way was clear, strode out into the sunshine, a show of laughter as they walked towards the car. Max started the engine, while Georgie returned to collect the Amsels, casually casting her eyes at the windows above, hoping any Nazi sympathisers were being kept busy. With the Amsels in tow, the distance was only a few hundred yards, but each step felt like wading through a sticky bog. The car in sight, she could see Max’s wide eyes willing them to keep a steady pace, and yet hurry at the same time. A sudden shout from above induced Georgie to almost stop and snap up her head, but she reeled the instinct back in, forced herself to plough on. Only Max’s image through the car window kept her moving.

  She opened the back door and the Amsels poured themselves in, shrinking onto their knees behind the front seat. Georgie covered them with a blanket, while they melted into the car’s dusty floor; she could only guess at the heat and humidity underneath, fear in the total blackness under the covering.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Georgie said through another faux smile.

  Max drove the route dictated by Rubin, his voice relayed via Georgie from under the blanket, streets he recalled were less likely to have checkpoints, bypassing government buildings with a military presence. Then, their worst nightmare – halted at an impromptu roadblock, an officer walking the line of traffic, scrutinising some papers and waving on others randomly.

  Despite the open windows, the stench of sweat trickled into Georgie’s nostrils; she could smell her own trepidation.

  The Wehrmacht officer approached. Georgie smiled automatically, though not convincingly enough, it seemed. He smiled back, lips together in that ominous Nazi style, eyes tacking their faces, his own nostrils twitching, sniffing out duplicity.

  ‘Heading out of town?’

  Georgie handed him her press papers. ‘Far too hot for us,’ she trilled. ‘Going for a swim in the lakes.’ Don’t look in the back, please don’t look in the back.

  51

  Blind Panic

  In the car’s rear, amid the blistering, blind hellhole of the musty blanket, Rubin and Sara suspended life and lungs. Muffled by the scratchy, dank fibres, they could pick out every other word of the officer’s gruff tone, but it was unequivocal. Heavy with underlying threat, his suspicion was rife. He was looking for his day’s prize of fugitives and intent on finding them.

  Both were crouched like rolled-up beetles, head to head, squeezed by the seats, flesh broiling, backs aching, muscles in rigor mortis. Somehow, Rubin unfurled a finger, crawled the filthy floor and silently found his wife’s single digit, also probing for touch – a pulse of terror, then hope traded between them. Instantly, it sent him years back, to the first time he’d set eyes on Ester, in Sara’s arms only minutes after the birth – her tiny newborn fingers pushing out like tendrils into the air, gauging her new world. Oh, and what a world it was now.

  Sara’s finger responded now as Ester’s had done then, curling around his for extra surety – that if they were discovered, the blanket pulled back, their deceit exposed, nothing would ever rob them of this intimacy – not a prison cell, or the Gestapo’s torture. Not even death.

  For a few seconds, Rubin’s resolve seemed unbreakable, but in the next moment he thought of no life, then worse – an existence without Sara, and his faith almost crumbled. It
took every effort – and the sudden shouts of Wehrmacht beyond the car’s thin casing – to keep his breath and sobs from escaping.

  52

  A Hard Parting

  The officer’s eyes flicked away, narrowed and crawled over the papers. Tick, tock, tick. Georgie felt her lungs squeeze, hot blood static – her congealed heart went out to Rubin and Sara in their back-seat sauna. Then, a shout from along the line: ‘Move it along! Quick!’

  The officer reacted sharply, waving them on, breath and sweat spores freed inside the car. Seconds later, a large, open-topped Nazi staff car swept by, Wehrmacht hands saluting the superior SS.

  Max turned his head and his look said it all: Oh, the irony – saved by the SS.

  Georgie’s laughter was driven more by hysterics than true humour: that was too, too close.

  Dusk was approaching and the heat receding a little when Max pulled into a lay-by north of the city, half a mile after passing a local train station. The Amsels had unfolded themselves gradually as the population fanned out the further north they drove, and they allowed themselves the relief of laughter at the close call. None of them wanted to calculate how many more Rubin and Sara might face before they crossed the border to any semblance of safety. If they got that far.

  Rubin dusted himself off at the roadside, Sara fiddling with the cases. All four were putting off the inevitable. Finally, Georgie could not endure the delay, the unavoidable hurt.

  ‘Come on, you need to go,’ she said, in a mother hen fashion. Rubin’s eyes were already brimming, Sara’s mouth pinched with sadness. Lord knows the conversation between husband and wife in persuading her to leave her brother, her country and – besides her children – her entire belongings in the world.

  Despite her grubbiness, Georgie threw herself at Rubin in a Rod-style hug. ‘We’ll see you in England,’ she said into his ear, willing herself to believe her conviction. ‘All of us will have some very warm English beer. I won’t let you escape that pleasure.’

  ‘I look forward to it – my Berlin girl,’ he said, and broke away before his tears turned to glue. Max dispensed with the formal handshakes – he embraced Rubin in a way he might never have done with his own father. Sara, too, held tight with every muscle, muttering her endless gratitude. Each was fending off the thought that this might be their last sight of each other, all together.

  Georgie couldn’t look back. She daren’t. It might have broken her. They heard the engine start and the car draw away, and Max – knowing her – tugged at her hand in the direction of the train station.

  ‘Come on, we have to get that train home. And if they don’t have a cold beer at the station bar, then I might just have a little boy tantrum.’

  The hole left by the Amsels was lessened by the thought they might have a chance. But the lack of news was agonising for Georgie; the mileage to the border was easily covered, but their route would be necessarily winding, and reports of their progress a long way off.

  Work, however, kept her occupied: the days were frantic and Henry’s demands increased to not one or two but three major stories per day. Help had not arrived in the Berlin office, diverted instead to Warsaw, where editors predicted the epicentre of war might initially be. Georgie and Max were both working long hours and there was no hope of investigating or exposing the link between Kasper, Doctor Graf and Sachsenhausen, and yet it seemed more urgent, with war just around the corner.

  Around the table at La Taverne, later and later into the evening, there was no longer any talk of ‘if’ there would be a war, merely how soon it would be. Days? Weeks? Hitler was steadfast in his claims on Poland as a right for the German people, the rest of Europe desperately trying to postpone the slide into conflict, as if teetering on the edge of a very steep and mud-filled gully, knowing a messy fall was imminent but treading carefully anyway.

  Berlin’s streets choked with fumes from the throaty exhausts of military vehicles, though – much like the creeping crimson of the flags – everyone seemed to adjust very quickly, sidestepping lines of troop carriers and getting on with their day. Once again, Georgie reflected on Hitler’s consummate skill in making the abnormal mould into everyday life. The British papers at home, by contrast, reported a frenzied preparation as only the British knew how, a mild panic whipped up by speculation.

  Georgie and Max managed little time to talk privately, only a veiled shaking of the head at La Taverne, meaning ‘no news yet’. Simone had made a reappearance after several weeks largely absent from the flat and was at Max’s side again, though Georgie sensed their body language was decidedly cooler. Elsewhere, Rubin’s garage owner was a sympathetic non-Jew but still had to be persuaded not to report the borrowed car as stolen. He was out of pocket to the tune of one vehicle, after all, and could have made life very difficult for them both, proving – thankfully – there were plenty of Berliners who had not swallowed Hitler’s hatred entirely. There is some hope for us, after all, Georgie mused.

  53

  A Visitor

  23rd August 1939

  Georgie was alone in the office, frantic to make her deadline but enjoying the solitude and the clatter of her typewriter drowning out the military din floating up from the street. Still, any knock on the door startled her and she spent precious seconds assessing if the bodies loomed large and grey. It was merely a slight lad bearing a telegram.

  4km north Saarbrucken, French border. Au Revoir. Merci.

  Georgie checked the origin of the telegram – a French mark. Could she believe it? Dare she? That it was from the Amsels – that they had made it across the border and were letting her know where they’d left the car? She checked her map of Germany. Yes, Saarbrucken was a town nudged on the border. It was everything she and Max had hoped for, and yet she couldn’t quite believe it to be true. She needed him to agree, to rubber stamp that feeling of joy.

  She pushed out the remaining words of her story in pure excitement and ran to Max’s office, where he would surely be filing his own copy. Like her, he read the same line again and again, turned the paper over several times in disbelief, and – finally, finally – endorsed her hopes.

  ‘I think they’ve done it,’ he whispered to avoid the ears of his German admin worker. Max gripped Georgie’s hand, his face bathed in delight. ‘I think they really might make it all the way.’

  ‘Celebrations tonight at La Taverne?’ she suggested.

  Max’s face fell. ‘Hmm, wouldn’t be so sure of the mood there. Bill’s been on the phone – he’s livid. Some radio commentators, Americans, were turned away from Tempelhof today, met by the Gestapo and hustled back on the plane. He thinks it’s just a taste of things to come. We might have to become very inventive.’

  It was a blow for the press, but nothing could dampen Georgie’s mood as she sauntered back to her own office. She swung the door open, humming ‘Greensleeves’ to herself – and stopped in her tracks. Stunned into silence.

  His back was to her, sitting in her office chair. He didn’t swing around immediately, giving her enough time to appreciate just what his presence meant. Here. Waiting for her.

  ‘Kasper?’ she said. Her surprise was genuine, the reaction pathetic, a croak of alarm rising in her throat. He swivelled, brow raised, those unnerving eyes bright with the joy of his coup, lips pressed together in a thin, half-smile. Lazily, he picked up an envelope addressed to her.

  ‘George Young, Chief Bureau Correspondent, News Chronicle,’ he read aloud. ‘You are a writer, then?’

  ‘I am.’ Her mouth was dry. Parched. She forced the next words out. ‘Truly. You made a presumption that many men have in the past, and I didn’t disabuse you.’ Her eyes crawled the office – no SS or Gestapo hiding in the walls that she could see.

  He rocked his head from side to side, humouring her. ‘Hmm, I’d call it creative with the truth. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘And would it have made a difference?’ she ventured. ‘Didn’t we have a nice time all the same?’ She was blathering, saying anything that came
to mind.

  Now, his eyes dimmed. Darkened. The green became muddy, the grey ashen. ‘You know it would have, Fraulein Young, hence your little white lie. That our liaison might not go down so well: Himmler’s boy – yes, that’s what I am, for now – in league with British press. I’m certain, too, that you’re aware I have a weakness for the company of English women, but don’t flatter yourself. You were never the only one.’

  The twist in her gut was not from vanity – Georgie only too pleased not to be in Kasper’s sights anymore – but his manner. Cold. Switched. She’d expected the Nazi in him to multiply. Here it was – he was – showing her the full transition.

  He pulled up, stood up swiftly, switched on his light again. ‘No matter, I’m not here about my wounded pride. I’m looking for someone – a man I know to be an employee of yours: Rubin Amsel. He appears to have left Berlin with his wife, inexplicably and quickly. Would you know anything about that?’

  He didn’t for a minute expect her help. It was his game now. Kasper was too senior even then to be a common Jew-catcher trolling the streets; the entire visit had been only to inform and bait her.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen Herr Amsel in a while. He was a messenger for me, that’s all, paid on a retainer by the paper. I haven’t needed his services for a few weeks.’

  He didn’t push her lie, only changed tack: ‘Do you want to know why we want to find him?’ Kasper stepped closer, cheek to cheek, the combination of cologne and sweat on his collar. She could hear his breath. This close, can he smell my dread?

  Fury overcame fear then. ‘I suspect because he’s Jewish,’ Georgie said calmly. ‘As I understand it, that’s a crime now.’

  He stopped, stared at her, exuding hatred for her mettle, as a woman and a non-Nazi. His look swapped to pitying, and Georgie read it plainly: You don’t know the half of it, he was thinking. I feel sorry for your kind. You non-believers.