In reply, Katya turned and spoke in a language made graceful by her lilting voice. Herr Diehl seemed genuinely pleased by the question and replied at length.
“Some stories are easier to end than to begin,” he said. “I know that the ending arrives when I have opened the eyes of my heart and known the presence of the Lord. The beginning is somewhat more difficult, as it resides in the confusion that was everyone’s life at the end of the war.”
Jeffrey shook his head. “I love the way he talks.”
“You should hear it in the original,” Katya said.
“The crippling of my beloved Berlin began about two years before the Russians arrived,” Herr Diehl told them. “I was two years old, and the year was 1943. Our home at that time was a large apartment building with an inner courtyard in the city center. Still today I remember the British and American bombing raids so well, so vividly. Still I can see the planes overhead, great, booming sheets of hundreds and hundreds of metal birds.
“Every night they came. It was all automatic after a few months of the bombing, our reactions. The sirens would start. I would rub the sleep from my eyes, and wait for my mother to come and take me from my crib. I had a little wooden toy car, green and gold, and I made it my responsibility to carry the car downstairs. My mother and my father had their packed suitcases and their little carry-sack of provisions. I had my little toy car.
“In the cellar we were twenty, maybe twenty-five. We heard the planes, we heard the piping sounds the bombs made as they fell, we heard the explosions come close, then closer, then shake us violently, then move away. We heard the tak-tak-tak of the antiaircraft guns. Then it grew quieter, and then the sirens called that it was over, and we went back upstairs to sleep. Sometimes it was already light when we came up, and we would go outside, and it was a different world! The windows were gone. The building next door had vanished. The street had great, gaping holes. Fires. Running, shouting people. Great engines with different sirens trying to race around the holes and the rubble in the streets.
“A neighbor would come stand beside us and say that we had no electricity and no gas and no water. It was not so frightening for me, though. Either my father or my mother was always beside me, holding my little hand.
“The end of the war came at different times to the German people,” Herr Diehl explained. “Like waves from several different storms crashing upon our little island. The American troops moved fastest across our defeated nation, and we in Berlin kept hoping they would arrive first and rescue us from the dreaded Soviets. But they stopped just outside the city and waited for the Soviets to catch up.
“Refugees from the East brought horrible stories of what we could expect from the Soviets. I will speak about these refugees again in just a moment. Their true plight did not become clear until after the war ended, as the stream of homeless people struggling westward became a flood. At the time of the Soviets’ approach to Berlin, they remained few enough for their faces to be seen as individuals, for their voices to be heard.
“I was four years old in 1945. I was what they called an autumn child; my father was fifty-five and my mother forty-nine. To say the least, my parents were not expecting me. When the Soviets arrived, we were living in South Berlin, a section perhaps a half-hour tram ride from the center city. Our home in the heart of Berlin had been totally destroyed in the bombing raids. It was our great fortune that the day our house was bombed, my mother and I were with my father in South Berlin where he worked on a company project. Everyone else in our apartment house died when the bomb took the front walls and the cellar away. Completely away. I will never forget going back and seeing our apartment. The back of the house stood, the front was gone. No rubble, no stone, nothing! Our home was dust. And yet the back rooms were still so complete I could see the pictures hanging in what had been my parents’ bedroom. It made such an impression on my young mind, how the house had been split with a giant’s knife.
“So we moved to this less-destroyed section, into a house owned by the company where my father worked, just as word came that the Russians were advancing. Our first night in this strange new home, we began to hear their guns booming in the distance. It sounded like thunder, and the light they made on the horizon looked like the first, faint colors of a false dawn.
“As a child, I thought the Russians were evil ghosts. I had never seen a foreigner, you see. Then one day my father, who had been too old to be a soldier, was gathered up and taken away with all the other old men who still had two arms and two legs. He was given bits and pieces of several uniforms, I remember the right sleeve had been sewn from a different jacket and was four or five inches shorter than the left, and there was a dark stain over the jacket’s middle and a hole that had been sewn up in jagged haste. He was given only one weapon, a hand grenade.
“Four weeks later, he came back, dug a hole in the garden, stripped off his uniform, and buried it. Thirty minutes after that, the first Soviet soldier walked in. He stepped up to my father, who by then was dressed in his best suit and trying not to appear nervous, and asked what time it was. My father opened his pocket watch and answered, almost one o’clock. The soldier said, good, and took the watch. That was my first experience with a foreigner.
“South Berlin was a very dirty place. Filthy. Before the war, it had been the center for eastern Germany’s coal-processing and steel works. My father had been born there and had sworn never to return. Now he was back, had been conscripted and sent off to fight in a losing war, then had returned only to greet the Russians and hear that they were to make our house the Soviet army’s district headquarters. He was back, and living in the tiny, damp cellar while Soviet army boots clumped and thudded over our heads. But we did not complain overmuch. At least we had a roof.
“There was a park and a garden across the street. This became very important for us, because we raised vegetables there. It kept us alive, that park, us and our neighbors. We swiftly learned that our chances of survival were better if we could learn to live as an extended family.
“The Soviets were very bad, and most of the stories you hear of their atrocities are true. They took the last of our possessions—our clothes, furniture, carpets, jewelry, everything that had survived the war. But for me they often showed a different side, as many were kind to children, and sometimes they fed me from their kitchen. Even at that early age, I knew I was incredibly fortunate. I still had my mother and my father. There were few such complete families then. Very, very few.
“We survived those first two years with great difficulty. Those words do not describe the times, but no words would, so I will not try. My father had been an electrical engineer who worked for the coal and electrical combine. Before the war, all big German companies had their headquarters in Berlin. But now Berlin was no more. Destroyed. Leveled so completely that soldiers coming home from the fronts or the POW camps could not even find the streets where they had lived, much less their houses or their families.
“My father found work with a little coal company during the days, and at night he pedaled his bike to nearby villages and rewired the damaged electrical systems in cottages and farmhouses. He was paid in milk and vegetables and sometimes meat. He slept when he could. My mother sewed.
“Because my father worked for a coal company, we had heat. Others did not. Old people simply froze and died. The two winters after the war were extremely cold. The cities were hell, simply hell. People risked their lives to steal coal. There was no wood at all.
“Coal shipped by trains was sprayed with chalk over the top. When it arrived officials would look down on the train cars; a dark spot meant that some of the top coal had been stolen. The suppliers would then be penalized or sometimes jailed. So the suppliers hired very tough men to walk back and forth on these freezing trains and beat off people who raced up at crossings and tried to steal enough coal to keep their families from freezing.
“My father knew this for a fact, because sometimes he had to travel for the coal company and
talk to the officials at the other end. There was no gasoline, of course, unless you were with the occupying forces. It took days and days for him to obtain the permits to travel by train, and then he was forced to sit on the coal wagons, atop little runner stations. In the open. He would sit like that for hours, wrapped in blankets my mother gave him. Once he traveled with the really privileged, inside an unheated boxcar. He never spoke of what he saw when he rode on the coal cars. Yet I could see how haunted his eyes looked when he returned from his travels, and hear how his sleep was disturbed by nightmares.
“There was no infrastructure in those early days. No cars. No trams. No streets sometimes. No resources. No food. The land was empty and barren and blown up and scarred, a landscape from hell. And the government was horrible in the east of Germany. Simply beyond description.
“The Soviets sent back German Communists who had escaped from the Nazis by fleeing to Russia and fighting with the Red Army. They came back to take over the new Communist government. And they hated the German people. They were merciless. The old people, the weak ones, the young, they suffered. And then they died.
“To make matters worse, much worse, there were refugees. Millions of refugees. Germans from the former eastern provinces—now part of Lithuania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, lands that had been part of Germany for centuries—all who could, fled to what was left of Germany. But when they arrived, starving and battered and stripped of everything of value, they found nothing left for them. No homes, no shelter, no food, no medicine, no heat, no sympathy. They came, they starved. They, too, died.
“Some months into that second year, I contracted typhoid. That was both very good and very bad. The bad side was how sick I became—very high fever, so high I almost died. This sickness stalked the city, with panic walking on one side and death on the other. At night I thought I was hearing ghosts, as screams and wails drifted through our little cellar windows, but later my mother told me they were real, the cries of mothers powerless to hold their children to this battered earth.
“Within a few days, the authorities gathered all the sick children who were still alive and placed them in a cinema. All the hospitals had been destroyed by the bombing raids, and this cinema was one of the few large halls that remained. It was something straight from my worst nightmares. There was very little medicine. There were not enough doctors or nurses, so most of the time I was left alone with my pain. The air was fetid, full of the smells of sick and dying children, too full of smells to breathe. The lighting was a dim, yellow glow, and there were frequent blackouts when the power failed.
“Every night children died all around me, their cries and choking gasps reaching out, threading their way through my fever to clutch at my life and pull it from my body and carry me off with them. And I was alone. More alone than ever in my life, before or since. We were not allowed visitors. I had not seen my parents since I was placed on the stretcher and carted away. I lay there in the putrid gloom and felt myself being consumed by the flames of my fever. And I cried, and I called out to a God I knew only through a child’s prayers.”
Katya choked back a shaky breath and reached for her glass. Both Jeffrey and Herr Diehl were immediately solicitous. Quietly she calmed the gentleman, then said to Jeffrey, “I’m all right. Really.”
“We can stop now if you want.”
“No we can’t,” she said firmly. “I have to hear the end. If I stopped now I don’t know if I could ever go to sleep again. Just hold my hand, would you?”
He grasped it with both of his, tried to rub away the coldness in her fingers.
“As I lay there in my fear and my fever and my pain,” Herr Diehl continued, “I felt something come upon me. I had not prayed for a healing, because I did not know what prayer was, beyond the words we spoke on Sundays and before meals and the little rhymes that sent me to sleep. I had simply called, and my call had been heard. That much I knew then, even in the midst of my fever-dreams. There was never any question that I had been heard, or that my call had been answered. A peace descended upon me, a love and a comfort that left me quietened and able to rest through that night and all the nights to come. It was only later that I could place words to the feeling. I had formed a solemn friendship, you see. The rest of my life, I have simply tried to hold up my side of the friendship that was forged on that dark and glorious night.
“That doesn’t mean my life has been made easy, or even good. A good life does not exist for a Christian in a Communist land, especially one who feels led to tell his brothers the Good News. But never again did I face my trials alone.” He paused and gave them both a gentle smile. “There was just one time when I did not share the miracles of my faith, at least not immediately. The day I returned home from the cinema-hospital, the Soviets moved out. My mother told me it was because they were frightened of infection.
“She was so happy to have both her son and her home back,” Herr Diehl explained. “I could see no reason to argue with her.”
CHAPTER 17
Kurt’s car crawled toward Weimar along roads made treacherous by rain-dampened cinders. As he drove he was struck by the thought that this was the first winter he could ever remember not seeing bent-over old ladies carrying coal buckets up from black piles dumped in front yards, alleys, and street corners. Perhaps there was something to this progress after all.
Home to Goethe and Schiller and Thomas Mann, and former capital of the German Republic, Weimar had suffered badly during the Communist years. Now, with the new influx of capitalism, the city was gradually becoming two. Within the ring-road that encircled the central city, the old town saw renovation progress at a hectic pace. Outside the loop, however, life ground on as slowly as ever. People struggled to survive, and Wessie promises to lift their lives had little meaning.
Since the region produced soft coal, the Communists had ordered all buildings—offices, apartments, hotels, hospitals, museums, factories—to employ that cheapest, most easily available source of heat. The city, hemmed in on three sides by high hills, therefore spent long winter months under a fog of soft-coal soot. Roads became slush-covered, buildings eroded as though dipped in acid baths, paint disappeared in a matter of months, cars were lost under thick black coatings. All the wealth and glory of Weimar had fallen victim to Communist homogenization, gradually fading beneath an ever-thickening layer of ashes and bureaucracy.
Approaching the ring-road at a snail’s pace, Kurt decided he could make faster progress on foot and pulled into a parking space between two plastic Trabants. He opened his door and felt his shoes grind through a centimeter of cinders.
He followed his contact’s instructions to what fifty years before had been the Gau Forum. It had been renamed Karl Marx Platz at war’s end, and was now one of many nameless streets and squares awaiting new signs.
In the early thirties, the Nazis had taken a minor plaza at the outskirts of the city center and had transformed it into a gathering point for the new power brokers. The expanded eleven-acre square had become the Gau Forum, where Nazi parades drew hundreds of thousands of fanatics, reinforcing Nazi visions of fulfilling the Weimar Republic’s lofty ambitions.
Buildings had been erected in stern Fascist style, with two long three-story arms extending down either side of the plaza from a central Nazi Party headquarters. Two balconies had been set at opposite midpoints; from these Hitler had often stood and incited the roaring mobs.
The Communists had converted the two arms into engineering and agricultural colleges and transformed the central building beyond all recognition. A modernistic glass-and-steel facade masked the original stone, and a fifteen-story office building loomed at its back. The clash of Fascist colonnaded stonework with Communist glass and steel, all surrounding a square of sooty-brown grass and stunted trees, gave the place a thoroughly grotesque appearance.
Kurt entered the main building’s glass-walled annex to find himself in a sort of everyman’s restaurant-cafe. Communist taste was stamped indelibly
on everything—the orange globe lights, the fake-marble floors, the plastic ceilings, the cavernous size. Three or four hundred metal-limbed tables stretched out into the distance. The long side walls sported murals sixty feet long and forty wide, depicting strong-limbed Communist workers marching into a dull-red future filled with nightmarish Picassoesque ovoids and triangular three-headed sphinxes. The place was virtually empty.
Kurt walked to the window table where his contact sat peering into the depths of his coffee. Kurt asked, “Why meet here?”
The young man raised his head and inspected Kurt with glittering eyes. “Brings back memories, does it?”
“I didn’t like such places before. I don’t now.”
“You should.” The man’s eyes were blue, yet shaded so dark as to be opaque. His hands were scarred black with oil and soot. “You built them. You and your kind.”
“I didn’t come for an argument. I need information.”
“Have some coffee first. Go on, it won’t break you. Costs only fifty pfennigs. One of the few bargains left these days.”
The single cafeteria line served brown glop that appeared to have been cooking since before the Wall came down. Seven bored attendants sat around talking in loud voices that bounced off distant walls. Kurt stood and waited long enough to know bitterness over a life and a world made myth overnight before one of them slouched to her feet and took his order.
While Kurt waited, he glanced back toward the table where his contact waited, hunched over his own cup. Kurt shook his head. One part of his former life that Kurt did not miss at all was having to deal daily with such freaks.
The prostitutes, for example. His duties had included shaking down whores who pandered to the low-class hotels. Not the big internationals, no, those hustlers were specially trained and monitored by the international section, the glamour boys, the department Kurt would have given his right arm to be a part of. No. His lot had been the third-rate inns catering to low-rent tourists from other Warsaw Pact lands. The prostitutes had known he wasn’t high up the power structure—otherwise he wouldn’t have wasted time on them. They had treated him like dirt.
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