by Thynne, Jane
‘May I ask what your business is?’
Honigsbaum offered a smile around to his audience – What kind of question is that? – but the audience did not respond.
‘I live there.’
‘So I see. Rykestrasse, 131. Do you have luggage with you?’
‘Certainly.’ The young man inclined his head towards the luggage rack.
‘Open it.’
Clara remembered Steffi Schaeffer’s comments about Jews being searched on trains, right down to their tubes of toothpaste. It pays to be very careful if you’re going to conceal something.
Honigsbaum hauled his leather case down from the rack with shaking hands and made several attempts to undo the clasps before he succeeded. The guard bent over and rifled through the contents with a rough hand. A bottle of pomade. Underwear. A wrinkled shirt. He extracted a novel – stared at it, then held it by the spine and shook vigorously, as if notes might be concealed. Then he seized on a pair of worn brown shoes, tapped the heel and, reaching inside, peeled back the insole.
‘Is there anything I can help you with, officer?’ ventured the young man, unwisely. His voice was reedy and educated in comparison with the guard’s thick Bavarian accent.
The request only spurred the guard to further efforts. He opened the bottle of pomade and shook it, so drops splattered on the floor, then turned a pair of gloves inside out. The young man stood immobile, but his face was running with sweat. He would not dare to protest against this invasion of his dignity by disparaging the guard; even to query the search might suggest some criticism of the authorities, so he said nothing. But there was a terrible eloquence in his silence, and an ominous tension amongst everyone in the carriage. The fat neck of the guard was blocking her vision but suddenly Clara saw him withdraw a pocket knife from his tunic and with a swift, practised movement, run it through the blue satin lining of the case, cramming his sausage fingers inside and withdrawing something that looked like a deck of greasy cards but on closer sight proved to be a wad of notes.
A look of cruel satisfaction broke across the guard’s face at this trophy.
‘What’s this?’
‘My savings. Where am I supposed to keep it, with this new ruling about bank accounts? I’m not breaking any law.’
‘That’s for us to say.’
The guard slammed the case lid shut, and stood at the door.
‘Come with me.’
‘Why is that?’ asked the young man, his show of indignation entirely failing to mask his fear. He offered an imploring smile round to the rest of the carriage. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘That is what we need to establish,’ said the guard, keeping hold of the suitcase. ‘Come quickly. We don’t want to keep these people waiting.’
He slid open the door and took the young man’s elbow.
‘Heil Hitler!’
Everyone responded.
The guard proceeded to escort the young man down the train and Clara watched him being marched along the platform, his white face mouthing protest, his hands gesticulating as other guards came forward to meet them. Then there was a piercing whistle as the train moved slowly off again, and as they passed, the young man glanced directly at Clara, with an expression of imploring anguish on his face.
Brandt did not even look up. His eyes remained trained on his boots as the scent of the spilled pomade rose accusingly from the floor. The elderly woman alongside Clara observed her distress and reached a comforting hand to her arm.
‘Er Jude war,’ she said, consolingly. He was a Jew. It explained everything.
As the train swayed on, Clara recalled what Steffi Schaeffer had said about the men who were arrested at dawn and taken away. Loaded onto trains, but not like this one, more like trucks, and transported to camps all around the country. What happened to them there? She had no idea. She knew no one who had been in a camp, at least no one who had returned from one.
The lift was out of order again at Winterfeldtstrasse and the bulb was out on the stairwell so she walked up the seventy-two steps – she knew exactly how many steps to the fifth floor – in semi-darkness, listening to the sounds emerging from the closed doors as she went. There was a blast of dance music from the schoolteacher on the ground floor and the sound of raised voices from the young couple on the first floor. Excitable squabbling from the children in apartment four. But when she reached the top of the stairs next to her own door, an unfamiliar figure loomed in the dim light.
‘May I introduce myself? I’m Franz Engel, your new neighbour.’
He was a slender man – in his forties perhaps – with a precise, professional demeanour and a gaunt clean-shaven face that was at once humourless and forgettable. It was the kind of face you could see anywhere, behind a desk or a bank counter, in a school or an office, but never be able to recall. A face that was always going to stick to the rules.
‘I just wanted to say hello.’
Surprise made Clara abrupt.
‘What’s happened to Herr Kaufmann? Is he OK?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. The lease of this apartment has been assigned to me.’
Through his opened door she caught a glimpse of the apartment behind him. Drab grey paint, cheap, practical wooden furniture, no distinctive features.
Herr Engel gave a bureaucratic smile and although instinct told Clara she should engage him in conversation and enquire after his job, perhaps, where he had last lived, or at the very least comment on the weather, for once her Englishness failed her and she remained silent. Her lack of response seemed to forestall any further pleasantries, so in his clipped voice Engel said,
‘Anyhow, I just wanted to let you know I had moved in.’
He vanished quickly into his apartment and shut the door.
Perhaps it was fatigue, or the alarming events of the past twenty-four hours, but the encounter shook Clara. Who was Franz Engel? To judge by appearances alone, he might have been a teacher or a civil servant or a clerk, some kind of professional anyway, yet he could be any of those and still be a Gestapo spy. That was the genius of the Gestapo – its strength lay almost entirely in its network of informers. They fanned out through Berlin like a giant spider’s web, connecting every strand of society, no matter how far from the centre. If, as Sabine said, the orders had gone out that Clara should be watched, what better method than to take the empty lease on the adjacent apartment and install a man within? Listening out for whether Clara tuned to foreign radio stations, watching who visited, how long they stayed, observing her daily routine and eavesdropping on her conversations through the wall. It couldn’t be easier if you were stationed right next door.
She went over to her window and looked out across the rooftops to the arched dome of Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn. She had always loved this place, ever since her friend Mary Harker was ordered to leave Germany and allowed her to take over the lease on the apartment. Nollendorfplatz had been the vibrant hub of the old Weimar Berlin, packed with nightclubs and cabarets at the time that the Nazis came to power, and even though they had closed down the clubs and replaced the Expressionist repertoire of the famous Metropol Theatre with operetta and light revues, it was still possible to feel the old racy pulse of the city running through these streets. The buildings with their scrollwork and plaster ornamentation bore witness to a lingering Weimar charm and the crash of bottles being collected from bars in the small hours suggested that some traditions hadn’t changed.
Winterfeldtstrasse was her home, but now, for the first time since she moved in, she realized she might have to leave.
Chapter Twenty-six
The second most important woman in Germany, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, was in a more than usually filthy mood. She was engaged in a battle over territory – not quite as frenetic as that over the Sudetenland – but just as heartfelt. The Führer, she had told Bormann, despite his fulsome tributes at the Nuremberg rally, was simply not sparing time to meet her. There had now been three hundred thousand applications from
women in the Sudetenland to join the organization, and that was on top of four hundred and seventy thousand from Austria. Yet she was still not getting the official recognition or encouragement that she deserved.
As the Führerin paused for breath, Rosa looked around her office – a place of utilitarian drabness that was a perfect outward expression of her boss’s personality. There was no mirror, there being no need for cosmetic adjustments, and the sole touch of luxury Gertrud Scholtz-Klink allowed herself was a row of leather-bound speeches of Adolf Hitler with lettering picked out in gilt. On the wall, by way of decoration, was a tapestry bearing a pronouncement from the Führer, stitched in elaborate Gothic letters in black thread:
Woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.
When eventually Gertrud Scholtz-Klink finished dictating the letter to Reichsführer Himmler and flounced out for a meeting with the Faith and Beauty League, Rosa moved swiftly. Her boss would not be back for a good hour, giving Rosa the chance to attend to the matter that was preoccupying her.
The light in the windowless library was dim and the air smelt musty and unused, reflecting how few visitors it received. This was not a place many people came to browse. The couple of shelves of books were outnumbered by rows of tall steel racks containing thousands of files, organized under sections including Family Policy, Marriage and Race Hygiene. Rosa gave a quick smile to the librarian, a mountainous woman whose job afforded very little exercise, and received a sour nod in return. Rosa’s position as secretary to the Führerin lent her a certain status, but the librarian was under-employed, and liked to flex what little authority she possessed to the full.
‘Can I help you, Fräulein Winter?’
‘I’m just looking in the files for something on racial science.’
The librarian inclined her head towards the shelves beside the chart explaining differences between the Nordic, Alpine and Baltic races and the inheritance of tainted blood through the generations. The chart was a baleful thing, illustrating the progress of the bad blood with red arrows pointing in various directions, like a diagram on a detective’s wall to follow the movements of a crime.
‘Anything particular you need?’
The woman was more like a guard than a librarian, as though, if not vigilantly protected, her files might be accessed by any passer-by in search of light reading.
‘It’s fine. I’ll just have a quick browse.’
Rosa needed to find what happened when children were reported to something called a Reich Health Board, but she had no idea where to start. She thumbed through the files at random, her fingers trembling, the contents blurring before her eyes. Tiny puffs of dust rose up as she browsed, suggesting that no one had felt the need to access any of this information since the day it was stored.
She withdrew a pamphlet entitled Mate Selection Guidelines with chapter headings like ‘You and the Question of Blood’ and ‘What is Race?’ She skimmed a little:
‘Since normal and sick hereditary factors are passed on equally to the offspring, the knowledge of hereditary factors and the duty to intervene – to restrict and to promote them for the formation of coming generations – are of enormous importance. At conception, the essence and worth of a person for his folk and his race are already determined. Hence the responsibility for the next generation lies with us.’
It concluded with the triumphant announcement,
‘Everything weak or inferior is annihilated.’
It read like gibberish. Rosa couldn’t see how any of this rhetoric could possibly apply to Hans-Otto, but she sensed the librarian peering suspiciously in her direction and guessed she would have to offer more information.
‘We just needed to clarify an item of law. About Reich Health Boards.’
‘Why didn’t you say then? It will be Hereditary Health you need.’
The librarian heaved herself to her feet and progressed along the length of another shelf, her fat fingers flicking expertly through the files.
‘Better let me help you. I don’t want anything getting out of alphabetical order.’
She pulled out a drawer and plucked a pamphlet entitled Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, 1933.
‘You’ll need to start with this.’
Rosa read it through. The law concerned anyone who suffered from any of nine conditions assumed to be hereditary: feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, Huntington’s chorea, genetic blindness, genetic deafness, severe physical deformity, chronic alcoholism and epilepsy.
Epilepsy.
The pamphlet was illustrated. Rosa gazed appalled at the grisly portraits of the mentally weak, easily identified by their slack, empty expressions and lolling tongues. They reminded her of a newsreel she had seen once, in the cinema – a documentary screened before the main feature which argued that some people led ‘a life unworthy of life’, and were doomed to rot in institutions. The Fatherland should be rid of such ‘burdens on the German worker’.
None of this, though, surely, had any connection to the note from Hans-Otto’s school. She felt sweat prickling under her blouse and sensed the librarian’s eyes boring into her, as though this was the most interesting thing that had happened all day. She was compelled to explain.
‘I’m just trying to remind myself of the details of the Hereditary Health Boards for children.’
‘Oh those. They’re new. You want to look under Proposals for Registration of Diseased Offspring.’
‘If you could show me.’
‘They’ve just come through. A letter’s been sent out to all the schools so I filed it under Education.’
The woman heaved her way across the room and extracted a piece of paper, stamped with the crest of the Reich Interior Ministry.
‘A decree has been enacted compelling all physicians, nurses and midwives and other professionals involved in the care of children to report infants and children who show signs of mental and physical disability. The prescribed registration form is designed with the intention of giving increased medical care. District doctors will send the completed form to a National Committee for observation.
The aim is to prevent the neglect of healthy children in a family through excessive care of the sick. Details of any child who might warrant registration under the scheme will be forwarded to the Health Board unless sufficient authority is given for such registration to be suspended.’
The letter finished with the touch that was the hallmark of all Nazi bureaucracy, a combination of promise and threat.
‘A reward of two Reichmarks will be given to the teacher or health administrator who furthers a name to the register. Failure to register any such infant will be subject to investigation.’
The final salutation, however, was unambiguous.
‘Heil Hitler!’
Rosa thanked the librarian and made her way back to her desk. She had a stack of typing to complete, but although her fingers flitted across the keys mechanically, her mind was full of the letter, with its ominous circumlocution and evasive terminology. Disability. Registration. Increased medical care. Excessive care of the sick.
Each one was a dagger of ice to the heart.
Rosa had a special reverence for words. She had always thought that words were instruments of enlightenment and that if you chose the correct words in the right order they would help you to see the world in a more beautiful and perfect light. That was why she had wanted to be a writer in the first place. It was why she worked away at her Observations in the privacy of her bedroom every night, trying to recapture the things she had seen that day in precisely the right language. Finding words that would make her experiences leap out from the page. But now she understood that words could be used to obscure, as much as elucidate. Abstract words and ugly official phrases grew up like a thicket of thorns around an idea. Walls of bland bureaucratic jargon could hide horror. Rosa saw that words were dangerous, and powerfu
l. If you used the right words, you could do anything.
Chapter Twenty-seven
For days now the city had been alive with politicians. Hurrying down the Wilhelmstrasse, burning the midnight oil in the embassies. Making so many foreign calls it was almost impossible for the wiretappers to keep up. At street level the bars and cafés buzzed with rumours and all night the dull rumble of convoys, lorries, tractors and tanks kept people awake in their beds. Police car sirens wailed through the streets. Chamberlain had met Hitler twice now, yet there was stalemate. Berlin felt like a city poised on the edge of something, uncertain whether the speeches of politicians represented the wind of change or mere bluster. History hung in the balance like a charge of cordite in the air.
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German Military Intelligence, five foot three with white hair, a ruddy complexion and bushy eyebrows, liked to project an air of professional inscrutability. In his Abwehr office he had statues of the iconic three monkeys fashioned to exemplify Canaris’ personal motto: see all, hear all, say nothing. He was a workaholic, perhaps on account of an unhappy home life, so he spent most of his time in his office on the Tirpitzufer, where he could be seen arriving at the crack of dawn and leaving late at night. Although the wily Canaris managed to camouflage his precise feelings about the Führer, his discontent with the direction of the Reich’s foreign policy was suspected and the gap between himself and Hitler was apparent to everyone in the know. Probably the only thing that Canaris did share with Hitler was his devotion to dogs. He could not be friends with anyone who disliked animals and took his two wire-haired dachshunds everywhere. He would book twin-bedded hotel rooms on his travels so that they could sleep beside him and when he was in Berlin he arrived at Army High Command carrying them tenderly under each arm in the black government Mercedes.
Sitting in the Casino Club opposite Canaris’ granite-faced headquarters, sipping a vodka and tonic, Rupert wondered yet again if the whispers he had heard were true. That a section of German generals, calling themselves the Black Orchestra, had launched a desperate mission to the heart of the English government and Canaris himself was aiding and abetting those who wanted to bring Hitler down.