Lehrter Station jr-5

by David Downing

  Turning off Konigin-Luise-Strasse, they could see Thomas waiting by his gate. He hurried to meet them, engulfing first Effi, then Russell, in ferocious hugs. They had last been together in May, when Russell had bought their releases from the Soviet zone with the atomic documents that he and Varennikov had buried in Thomas’s garden. But Thomas had soon set off for the country home of his parents-in-law, where his wife Hanna and daughter Lotte had been living for almost eighteen months. Since that day Russell had only received one letter, confirming that all were alive and well.

  The house looked much the same as in April — in sore need of attention. Thomas looked fit enough, but Russell couldn’t help noticing how much the war — and the death of an only son — had aged his friend.

  ‘When did you arrive?’ Thomas asked, leading them in through the front door.

  ‘Late last night,’ Russell said. ‘We arrived at Anhalter Station in the middle of a gun battle.’

  Thomas was not surprised. ‘That’s a place to avoid after dark. The occupiers don’t have the men to police the city, and they won’t arm Germans. So…’ He shrugged and continued on into the kitchen-dining room. ‘This is the only communal room,’ he told them, pulling out chairs from under the table. ‘You’ll sleep in my bedroom,’ he added; ‘I can use the camp bed in my study.’

  ‘We can’t turn you out of your bed,’ Russell protested, knowing full well that his ex-brother-in-law would insist. The Americans might offer better accommodation, but Thomas’s company seemed infinitely preferable.

  ‘Thank you,’ Effi said.

  ‘You’re welcome. It’s so good to see you both. How is everyone?’

  They gave him the news from London — Paul’s possible romance, Rosa’s excellent reports, Zarah’s flirtation with the man downstairs. ‘It seemed wiser to leave them there,’ Russell said, ‘at least until we knew what was happening here.’

  ‘That was probably the right thing to do. Hanna wants to come back, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I want them back, but I can’t help feeling they’re better off where they are. And I wouldn’t have any time to spend with them if they were here — if the Soviets aren’t demanding my presence, then the Americans are.’

  ‘Your printing works are in the Soviet zone,’ Russell guessed.

  ‘One street away from the boundary line,’ Thomas said bitterly.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Ouch indeed.’

  ‘So who else is living here?’ Effi asked.

  Thomas grunted and shook his head. ‘In the living room,’ he began, ticking off one finger, ‘an old couple named Fermaier. They’re decent enough, but in shock — they’ve survived and their family hasn’t. Their son was killed in the Dresden bombing, their daughter by a Russian shell in Schmargendorf. Two grandsons died in Russia. There’s only a granddaughter left, but she’s joined the communist party, and they can’t decide whether to disown her. I tried to reassure them — I told them that my sister was in the Party once — and they gave me sympathetic looks, as if I’d just admitted a family history of mental illness.

  ‘In Lotte’s room,’ he continued, ticking off a second finger, ‘there’s a younger couple named Schrumpf — about your age. How he survived the war is unknown — a civil servant of some sort I’d guess, and there’s that tell-tale fading of his jacket lapel where the swastika used to be. They don’t go out much, which might be because he doesn’t want anyone to recognise him. Or he just can’t bear seeing what happened to the thousand — year Reich. She wanders round in her dressing-gown at night, like someone auditioning for Hamlet’s ghost.

  ‘But it’s the couple in Joachim’s old room who give me the most trouble. A mother and her grown-up daughter. They’re not very nice, though perhaps they have cause. They both seem incredibly angry, and I’d guess that the daughter at least was abused by the Russians. But God knows it’s hard to feel any sympathy. They are so…’

  Voices were audible in the hall.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ Thomas half-whispered.

  Two women came into the kitchen, one around fifty with pinched features and hair in a tight bun, the other in her twenties with blonde hair cut short and the sort of face a smile might transform.

  ‘Frau Niebel. Fraulein…’ Thomas said, getting to his feet. ‘How are you this morning?’

  The woman sighed. ‘That woman kept us awake with her sobbing for half of the night,’ she said. ‘Again. She may be a “Victim of Fascism”’ — a heavy hint of sarcasm here — ‘but we ordinary Germans need our sleep. I’ve been to the Re-housing Office, and they have no record of her, so I assume she’s your personal guest…’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Well, can you talk to her?’

  ‘I can indeed. But her husband is very ill, so she does have something to cry about.’ He gestured towards Russell and Effi. ‘These are old friends, who’ll also be staying for a while, Herr Russell and Fraulein Koenen.’

  Russell and Effi got up to shake hands.

  ‘Have we met before?’ Frau Niebel asked Effi.

  ‘You’re the actress, aren’t you?’ the daughter said.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Oh,’ her mother said, bewilderment in her eyes. Effi guessed that Frau Niebel was remembering the newspaper pictures from December 1941, and the story that she’d been kidnapped by her English spy of a boyfriend. The woman’s involuntary glance at Russell seemed to confirm as much.

  But the woman quickly recovered. ‘We all have our crosses to bear,’ she said, turning back to Thomas. ‘I lost a husband myself, and not that long ago. But some of us bear those crosses in silence.’

  Thomas merely nodded, but it proved enough.

  ‘What a dreadful woman,’ Effi murmured once the door had closed behind her.

  ‘Indeed,’ Thomas agreed. ‘But you’ll never guess who she was complaining about.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Esther Rosenfeld.’

  ‘Miriam’s mother?’ Russell was astonished.

  ‘No!’ Effi added disbelievingly.

  ‘The same,’ Thomas told them.

  Six years earlier, in the last summer of peace, two Jewish Silesian farmers named Leon and Esther Rosenfeld had put their seventeen year-old daughter Miriam on a train to Berlin, where a job was waiting for her at Thomas’s printing works. Abducted on arrival, the girl had been in terrible emotional and physical shape by the time Russell and Effi tracked her down. A Jewish family in Berlin had offered care and a bed while she recovered, but when Russell travelled back to Silesia with the news of her survival, he had found the farm in ruins, both parents gone. He had, until this moment, assumed they were dead.

  Their survival was wonderful news.

  ‘What’s Esther doing here?’ he wanted to know. ‘Where have she and Leon been all this time?’

  ‘A long story. That summer, they were threatened, and they decided to flee. They walked across the mountains, which must have been hard, even in August. Leon had an old friend in Pilsen, a Jew, and he had a Czech friend who was willing to shelter them all. They spent the whole war on a farm in Moravia, and when it was over they decided to go back home.’

  ‘But by then their home was in Poland,’ Russell guessed.

  ‘Yes. And as we know, an awful lot of Poles share the Nazis’ fondness for the Jews. The family that had taken their land refused point-blank to give it back, and when Leon tried to get official help he was beaten up. Badly as it turned out, though according to Esther they both thought he was well on the way to recovery. They set out for Berlin, partly to look for Miriam, partly because they had nowhere else to go, but by the time they got here Leon was having trouble breathing. The two of them turned up at the works — it was the only address they had in Berlin — and I got him admitted to hospital.’ He smiled wryly. ‘As Frau Niebel pointed out, Victims of Fascism get special treatment these days.’

  He gave them a troubled look. ‘I also told them everything I know about Miriam, which was probably a mistake. I wanted
them to know that she was alive in September 1939, but of course that entailed explaining why she hadn’t contacted them. Leon took it all very much to heart — quite literally, I’m afraid — and Esther is convinced he won’t recover until he knows what’s happened to her. So I’ve promised to start looking again. Some of the Jewish survivors must know what happened to her.’

  Russell sighed. ‘I was going to say “she must be dead,” but that’s what I thought about her parents. Maybe she is alive somewhere. Where would you start to look? We’ve got Rosa’s father to look for.’

  ‘We can look for Miriam while we look for him,’ Effi interjected. ‘We’ll be looking in the same places, won’t we?’

  ‘I was actually compiling a list this morning,’ Thomas said. ‘DP camps, of course — there’s probably twenty or more in and around Berlin, some big, some small. Some of the Jews are in camps of their own, but not all of them. It seems the Americans believe they deserve special treatment, while the British think separating them out is too reminiscent of the Nazis. The old hospital on Iranische Strasse where you and Rosa were held is one of them, and there are a couple of others. And then there are the old Jewish neighbourhoods. There are messages pinned wherever you look, telling where people have gone, or asking for news of others. Almost everyone seems to be looking for someone.’

  ‘We’ll start tomorrow,’ Effi said, looking at Russell. ‘I’ll go to Schluterstrasse in the morning, and meet you both somewhere for lunch.’

  ‘Not me, I’m afraid,’ Thomas said. ‘I have another meeting with the Russians.’

  ‘How is business?’ Russell asked.

  ‘A nightmare,’ Thomas said cheerfully. ‘Living in the American zone, working in the Russian — it’s a recipe for trouble. The Russians brought me plenty of work right from the outset, but most of it was propaganda, which didn’t please the Americans. So they told the Russians that I had a suspect past, and that they’d be bringing me up before a Denazification tribunal. They haven’t yet, but they probably will.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ Effi said.

  ‘I wish I was. As you both know, I did cosy up to some pretty disgusting people during the war — it seemed the only way to protect our Jewish staff, not that it worked in the end. If it comes to it, I could probably find some Jewish survivors to testify on my behalf, but what a waste of time and energy that would be.’

  And embarrassing, Russell thought. Thomas was not someone who liked to publicise his good deeds.

  ‘Business has become politics, I’m afraid,’ Thomas concluded. ‘But then I suppose it always was.’

  ‘How did the Russians reply to the Americans?’ Russell asked.

  ‘Oh, they wouldn’t care if I turned out to be Hitler’s long-lost brother. They shot all the Nazis they came across in the first few months, and then drew a line under it. Now all they care about is how useful anyone might be. It’s almost refreshing, especially when you see the contortions the Americans are going through. But I shouldn’t complain,’ he added with a sudden smile, ‘most Berliners are having a much worse time than I am. You know what the basic ration card is called? The death card, because it doesn’t give you enough calories to live on. That’s the one everyone in this house has, save me and Esther. I get more for running a business, and Esther for being a ‘Victim’. But we both put what we get in the house kitty, not that you’d think so from Frau Niebel’s attitude.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have two more for the pot now,’ Effi said.

  ‘And yours will be the most welcome,’ Thomas told her. ‘Artists get the highest-grade card, thanks to the Russians. What a strange people they are. Their soldiers rape half the women in the city, and then they sponsor an artistic renaissance.’

  ‘Different Russians,’ Russell told him. ‘Think Beethoven and the storm troopers.’

  Thomas laughed. ‘I suppose so. Do you know much about your new film?’ he asked Effi.

  ‘Not a great deal. It seems well-meaning, which will make a change in itself. I’m hoping there’s a script waiting for me at Schluterstrasse.’

  ‘And you’re back as a journalist?’ he asked Russell.

  ‘Yes. Sort of.’

  ‘The Soviets have come back with the bill?’

  ‘Yes, but we can talk about that some other time. Esther Rosenfeld isn’t here, is she?’

  ‘No, she spends her days at the hospital. She usually comes back here to sleep, so you might see her tonight.’ He smiled at them both. ‘Now, how about some lunch? There’s a community canteen on Im Dol where the food’s just about passable. And then we can go for a walk in the Grunewald. Just like old times.’

  ‘That sounds good,’ Russell said, with rather more enthusiasm than he felt. He had last walked the Grunewald at night, in the company of three Russians. Two had died before dawn, the third a few days later. It would be nice to see the forest again, but ‘just like old times’ seemed a trifle optimistic.

  Through lunch and a long stroll through the winter trees, through dinner and drinks at a local restaurant half-full of American officers, the three of them talked and talked, catching each other up on four years spent apart. Their time together in April had been short, and Thomas had only scant knowledge of Effi’s years alone in Berlin and of Russell’s long exile in America and Britain. And they knew next to nothing of Thomas’s long losing battle to save his Jewish workers, or the months he had spent back in uniform.

  It wasn’t all reminiscences, but Russell couldn’t help noticing that whenever the future cropped up, their conversation soon slipped backwards, as if the pull of the past was still too strong to escape. Later that night, lying, somewhat guiltily, in Thomas’ unusually comfortable bed, he tried to explain this thought to Effi.

  She was ahead of him. ‘In London it felt like people were only thinking of the future, that they wanted to put the war behind them. But it’s not like that here. The fighting’s over, but not the war. That poor girl in Joachim’s room — if she started weeping she’d never stop. The fight we saw at the station, Miriam’s father half-killed by Poles, not to mention the Russians’ plans for you. I know the Nazis are gone, but…’

  ‘The leaders, maybe. But the small fry are still out there, and from everything Thomas was saying, there’s no real acceptance of what happened here. Most ordinary Germans seem to think that the Allies’ concentration camp films were faked. Maybe a few thousand Jews were killed, but millions? And most of those who do accept it claim that there was no way of knowing, that only a few people were involved.’

  Effi sighed. ‘At least no one in our family helped them.’

  ‘Jens?’

  ‘Oh, Jens.’

  ‘We sat at his dinner table, we listened to him explain how hard it was condemning millions of Russians to starvation, and we said nothing because we didn’t want to upset Zarah.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘I spent Hitler’s early years writing stories about schnauzers, for God’s sake.’

  ‘But you did end up risking your life to expose them.’

  ‘Only when I had to.’

  ‘And I made movies for Goebbels,’ she said.

  ‘And you saved a lot of Jewish lives. We both have reasons for pride and shame, like most Germans. And I don’t blame us or them. When it’s your life or somebody else’s it takes a certain kind of bravery — or foolishness — to deliberately put yourself second. And I feel a lot easier praising those that do put themselves second than condemning those that can’t. I don’t envy the Allies’ judges. Those bastards on trial at Nuremberg may deserve all they get, but they’re special cases. And there are an awful lot of Germans — communists, Jews, homosexuals, victims and resisters of all descriptions — who deserve both praise and sympathy. And between those two extremes there are about sixty million Germans who deserve neither reward nor punishment.’

  ‘When we were at the restaurant,’ Effi said, ‘I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation at the next table. One man was ranting away about the hypocrisy of
the Americans and the British in not trying their own war criminals. I imagine a lot of Germans would agree with him.’

  ‘So do I,’ Russell admitted. ‘People should end up in the dock for Hiroshima and Dresden and a whole lot else. But they won’t. So we have to ask ourselves — hypocrisy or not, do we want Germany’s crimes to go unpunished? And I have to say, I don’t.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Effi agreed. ‘But the condemnation would feel more just if it seemed less partial.’

  ‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’

  ‘You know, it seems so strange. Yesterday, today, seeing foreign soldiers in control all over Berlin. They should be, of course they should, but it does feel strange. Imagine how you would feel if Germans were riding up and down Regent Street in their jeeps.’

  ‘With Italian generals running London’s opera. Yes, I know what you mean.’

  She raised herself on an elbow to look him in the face. ‘This is the end of Germany, isn’t it?’

  He was surprised. ‘Depends what you mean by Germany. The people won’t disappear. Or the towns or the farms. But the state will probably be divided.’

  ‘Divided!?’ She didn’t know why, but the thought had never occurred to her. Shrunken, yes, even broken into the old small pieces, but divided?

  ‘It’ll have to be. There’s no halfway house between free enterprise and the Soviet system — a society has to be one or the other. And since I can’t see either Washington or Moscow conceding the whole country to the other, there’ll have to be partition.’

  ‘And Berlin?’

  ‘That’s where it gets interesting. The Soviets will try and force the others out — the city is in the middle of their zone — and who knows how determined the Western allies will prove when the crunch comes.’

  ‘But they all seemed so chummy at Potsdam.’

  ‘If they really were, it won’t last.’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘Not the best place to raise a family, eh?’