Peter volunteered to be a messenger. If phone lines between gun batteries or fire-observation stations broke down, then it would be his job to get on his bicycle and deliver instructions. This appealed to him. It might be dangerous but he liked the idea of doing something to protect people from the bombers. Anna was impressed.
‘They’ve got jobs for us too, in the BDM,’ she told him. ‘We’re to be employed in the Katastropheneinsatz – disaster action. We’re supposed to give out food and other assistance to the people who have been bombed out of their homes. They’re really expecting the worst, aren’t they?’
Then she said, ‘I’m glad that they’re using us to do something worthwhile. We spend so much time collecting money or materials for the war or listening to nonsense lectures about being better National Socialists. Now we’ll be doing something useful.’
Anna said she’d heard that thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets had been handed out in Munich. Peter got very excited about this. ‘Wouldn’t that be a brilliant thing to do!’
He spent half the night wondering about it. All those times when he wanted to speak his mind but had had to hold his tongue. He was bursting to do something like that. To tell the world what he was really thinking. His messenger job gave him the perfect opportunity – when he was out on his bike during air raids, he could leave leaflets in apartment hallways. Everyone would be hiding in their shelters and basements. Who would see him? Anna would be impressed.
When he told her the next day, she was wary. ‘But what about the paper shortages we’re having? Every scrap has to be accounted for. Have you thought of that?’
Peter shook his head. ‘But we’ve got to do something!’
She paused and made a little bridge with her slender hands.
‘Those sort of leaflets, they’re only telling people what they know already,’ she said.
‘They’re not.’ Peter felt exasperated. ‘They’re telling people that we’re not all Sieg-Heiling robots. They’re offering them a glimmer of hope. I think we should do it.’
‘We can’t do it on our own,’ said Anna dismissively. ‘Who would we ask to help us? Segur? He’s not been the same since that beating. Look, we’d need spare paper and a printer.’
‘We’ll find something. My school has these things. We could break in after dark.’
‘Peter, you’re being silly.’ Now she was cross. ‘It’s just too dangerous. Don’t you remember the posters back in the autumn? That boy, Helmuth Hübener, he was sixteen, and they executed him because he did exactly the thing you are suggesting.’
Anna started to speak in a deliberately calm voice, but there was a hint of scorn in what she was saying. ‘If you get caught with a hundred leaflets saying “Down with Hitler. Surrender Now”, what are you going to say? You found them in the street and you were just going to put them in the bin? You’d be in Plötzensee Prison before your feet touched the ground and you’d be facing the guillotine within a fortnight.’
She was right. It was a stupid idea, though he was too sheepish to admit it. They parted without their usual kiss.
.
A few days later they met again at the library. She gave him a big smile – one that said ‘all is forgiven’.
‘Coffee and cakes on me?’ she said, and they walked arm in arm to a local café.
It was a rainy winter afternoon. The café was almost deserted. A radio played dance music loudly, as if to make up for the noise of absent customers. They huddled on a table as far from the counter as possible.
Anna began to speak cautiously. ‘If you really want to do something . . . something to get at the Nazis . . .’ she was watching his face all the time, searching for reassurance, ‘then you can help me.’
Peter leaned closer. For some time now, he had thought Anna was up to something. Was she finally going to tell him?
‘I know some people,’ she said in a whisper, ‘people who help the Jews who are hiding here.’
Peter felt a shiver right down to his soul – the sort of shiver you read about in ghost stories when someone thinks a spirit has passed through them. This was no longer playing at rebelling against the Nazis. This was the real thing.
He wanted to ask if they were people he knew. Then he thought, if she wants to she’ll tell me. Besides, he was almost certain she meant her mother and father.
‘They’re really struggling, especially since the Goebbels proclamation.’
Peter had heard the announcement too. Who hadn’t? Goebbels had used the chilling phrase judenrein – clean of Jews – as if they were an infestation of lice or a bacterial infection. They would all be gone, he had said, by Hitler’s birthday in April. At the time Peter had thought little of it. Surely by now, all the Jews in Berlin had been relocated to the east?
‘There are still some left,’ said Anna. ‘Ones with special skills – like engineers, machine builders. They’re helping the Nazis, to save their lives. But it’s been a poor bargain and now their luck has run out. And then there are hundreds, maybe thousands, who have just gone underground. You know, the U-boats the policeman mentioned. Well I help them. I bring them food. But there’s so many now, it’s difficult to keep up. I thought you might be able to help me?’
Peter was stunned. He didn’t know what to think. All the bravado he felt evaporated. What was left was fear.
They sat there in silence. After what seemed like an age, Anna said, ‘Let me buy you another coffee,’ and got up to go to the counter.
‘Lovers’ tiff?’ said the matronly lady behind the counter, and smiled sympathetically.
‘We’ll get over it,’ said Anna in a tone that invited no more conversation. She’d been watching them, she thought. We need to be more careful.
Peter was watching Anna too. He thought of how much danger she was putting herself in, and felt a powerful urge to protect her. Yes, of course, he would help. The more he did the less she would have to, and the safer she would be. But he was terrified. Swing dancing might result in a beating or temporary imprisonment. The punishment for this was torture and execution.
When she came back with two coffees, he said, ‘Anna, how do you find the courage to do this?’ He had abandoned his leaflet idea the moment Anna had pointed out the consequences.
She held his hand. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘She thinks we’re having a lovers’ quarrel,’ she said. ‘But we’d better be careful what we say here. I’ll tell you on the way home.’
For now, they could think of nothing further to say. So she sat next to him and nestled her head on his shoulder. Peter loved the smell of her hair and how warm she felt. He wished they could stay there like this for ever.
.
By the time they left the café, the rain had stopped. They walked home, holding hands.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ said Peter.
She hugged his arm tighter. ‘Mutti and Vati made me promise not to. The more people who know, the more dangerous it is. They decided to tell me a few days after we came back from that dance. They said that anything that drew the attention of the Gestapo to our family was putting us all at risk. And the people they were helping.’
‘Aren’t you frightened?’ asked Peter again. He certainly was.
‘A few months ago, when I first started doing this,’ began Anna, ‘I was really frightened. So I thought about a photograph Stefan showed me that he had confiscated from one of the soldiers in his division. It’s the most awful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
‘It was blurred and tattered, but what was going on was clear enough. A group of women were huddled in their underwear with their backs to the edge of a wide trench. I don’t know where it was. Somewhere out in Ostland. And in the trench, there was a heap of dead bodies. Can you imagine that? Standing there waiting for a bullet?’
She stopped for a moment, trying to compose herself.
‘But what made that picture more terrible was . . . there was a little girl there, among the women. Maybe she was eight or nine. And she
was turning to look at the pile of bodies in the pit behind her. I couldn’t see exactly, but she looked like she was wringing her hands, clasping them tight to her chest. She must have been utterly terrified. That a child should see something so horrific, should have THAT done to her, it’s inconceivable . . .’
Then she said, ‘Mutti is sure they were all Jews. She hears terrible rumours of death camps out in the east, where they kill Jews in their thousands behind barbed wire, rather than out in the open. We had to do something to help.’
It was too horrible for words. Peter held her tight and swallowed hard. ‘What can I do to help?’ he said, sounding far braver than he felt.
.
CHAPTER 23
February 14, 1943
.
Ula Reiter played nervously with the telephone cable as she spoke. ‘And how is Onkel Klaus?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice calm.
Otto Reiter winced as he listened to the agitated response rattle from the earpiece. ‘Onkel Klaus’ was the code word they used when talking about the Jewish families they were helping. He could not quite work out what was being said, but it did not sound like good news.
‘And the rest of the family?’ said his wife. ‘Very well. We shall see what we can do.’
She placed the receiver on the handset with a heavy sigh and turned to Otto. ‘We need to make another collection of food stamps. Frau Niemann is at her wit’s end. The Abrahams are all ill and she’s convinced it’s from lack of food.’
‘A couple and five children . . .’ said Otto, holding up his arms in exasperation. ‘You’ll just have to tell them it’s not practical. They can stay together, have the people who’ve been helping them arrested and executed, and then all get packed off to Auschwitz, or they can see some sense and split up.’
He was always matter of fact about these things.
Ula went to the biscuit tin where she kept the spare coupons and made a quick inventory. ‘We have enough for a kilogram of meat, five hundred grams of margarine, three kilograms of bread, and two kilograms of canned goods. That’ll barely keep them alive for a week.’
Otto nodded. ‘We are having the Schafers over tonight. I am sure they will be able to contribute.’
Colonel Ernst Schafer was Otto’s friend at the Home Army headquarters. He and his wife, Magda, were always prepared to help.
Most of the Jews the Reiters and Schafers knew before the war had managed to get out. Like them, they were professional people. They had the kind of influence that helped them obtain exit visas. What a lottery that was. Some had gone to England or the United States. They were the lucky ones. Others had gone east to Poland or Czechoslovakia; they would be in worse trouble now, if they were still alive. Awful stories from the east continued to reach the Reiters. Stories, almost too horrible to believe, of mass extermination in special camps. The ones still living in cities were starving in ghettos that they were forbidden to leave.
Some of the Jews who had not managed to get out had gone underground, but people who were prepared to help them, like the Schafers and the Reiters, were few and far between. The ones with big houses hid them in their attics and basements. They moved from house to house, which was always a terrible risk, particularly for the ones who looked especially ‘Jewish’.
The Reiters, who lived in an apartment, only rarely had ‘guests’. It was too risky. So they helped as much as they could, with food and clothing stamps. A little bit from several people could just about feed a small family without depriving the donors of too much of their allotted rations.
Berlin’s remaining Jews were being picked off in small groups now. They couldn’t stay indoors all the time. When they went out, the Gestapo picked them up in the street. Bundled them into a black van. Sometimes there were shots. Cold-blooded murder, right there on the streets of Berlin.
There were raids on safe houses too. ‘If you ignore the knock on the door, they go away,’ Frau Niemann had said. But that was wishful thinking. The Reiters had heard accounts of these incidents. A car arrives – almost always after dark. Men jump out and run up the stairs. There is a lot of banging and shouting. The doorbell rings constantly. The phone inside rings. If there is no answer, the door is broken down. The poor souls inside are led off in handcuffs. Ula could well imagine those final moments.
Ula had always felt she would not survive the war. God would be her protector, up to a point. But there were too many other terrible things going on in the world, she realised, for Him to concern Himself with saving Ula Reiter. Her own life she was, by now, reconciled to losing. The grief she felt was like a mild toothache or headache. How her death would come she could not imagine.
Otto was different. The first time she met him he had told her he felt as though he was living on borrowed time. As a young officer in the Great War he had served in the trenches on the Western Front. Nothing, he sometimes said, could ever be worse than a week-long artillery bombardment. When the war ended and he found himself still alive he had treated every extra day of his life as a miracle. Ula knew Otto was tough and could look after himself, and although she loved him, she did not worry about him. But when she thought about Anna, and what the Gestapo might do to her, she felt sick with fear.
Recently Ula had heard about a young girl called Maria, not much older than Anna. She had been arrested for hiding army deserters. She wished Otto had not told her about it. Maria was sent to Plötzensee and guillotined within a week. Once the People’s Court passed a guilty verdict in cases like that the sentence was swiftly carried out.
Such thoughts often kept Ula awake at night.
Otto kept reminding her they would be all right as long as they were careful. As a senior officer in the Home Army, he reasoned, he was beyond suspicion. She was a trusted journalist. They just had to play the game. Say the right things to the right people.
There was a rattle at the door. It was Anna, home from the library.
‘You look troubled, Mutti,’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’
Ula explained about the Abrahams family being ill and needing extra rations. ‘It means more deliveries.’ She sighed.
‘We need some help, Mutti,’ said Anna.
Her mother shook her head. ‘It’s too difficult – you never know who to ask.’
It was a subtle, almost magical art, being able to tell who was safe and who was dangerous. You could never be sure. One slip could mean the whole network of friends and family would come tumbling down.
‘We should ask Peter,’ said Anna. ‘You know he is a safe one. He won’t betray us.’
‘It’s not right, Anna,’ she said. ‘It’s too dangerous. How would you feel if he was arrested and executed?’
‘I asked him already,’ she said. ‘He wants to help.’
Ula was too tired to feel angry. She knew she ought to be livid with Anna. Now there was another person who knew about what they did. Another person who might betray them to the Gestapo under torture. And although she liked Peter, she thought he was a hothead and too young and silly for such dangerous work. But she was so exhausted she almost felt detached from her body. ‘Very well,’ she said with a sigh.
Anna took her mother’s hand. ‘He’ll be careful. He can go about his deliveries in the air raids, when no one is out on the street.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Ula, venting some of her irritation. ‘He can’t turn up for duty with a bag of groceries to deliver.’ She regretted the words as soon as she said them. She felt dreadfully guilty about her daughter being involved in work like this. But right now, the network was barely coping and they needed all the help they could get.
.
Anna asked Peter to drop in at the apartment after school the next afternoon. There was food to be delivered to a flat in Salzburger Strasse. The Webers, old friends of Otto and Ula, had another Jewish family to hide. They were all starving on the rations they had to share.
When he got to the Reiters’ flat, Anna was out on a delivery herself and Ula sat him down and
made him a coffee. ‘You don’t have to do this, Peter,’ she said. ‘But there are many drops to be made so it is a great help to us all.’
Before he left she said, ‘Has Anna told you about our emergency plan?’
Peter shook his head.
‘If the Gestapo latch on to us, we have a safe house. So, if anything happens and we have to go into hiding, I want you to remember this number,’ she said. ‘Kreuzberg 1791.’
‘I’ll write it down,’ said Peter.
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ she scolded. ‘1791. That’s easy. It’s the year Mozart died. You ring that number and ask for Wulfie. Got that too? That’s Wulfie as in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Very important to remember that, Peter. In case anyone is listening in.’
As she handed him a small parcel of food, she gave him a kiss on the cheek, ‘For good luck’, and he set off to the address she had made him memorise. Being stopped was not a great terror. He could always say he was bringing provisions for his grandmother. The real risk was that the safe house would be under observation and the Gestapo would pounce when he arrived.
When he got there and knocked on the front door, his heart was beating so hard he imagined other people would actually hear it. The door was swiftly opened. He went in and handed over the provisions to a middle-aged woman. He was trembling so much he dropped them and broke an egg. After a muddled apology he was gone. Nobody was waiting to arrest him. It had all gone well.
As he walked home, Peter tried to remember the face of the woman who answered the door. She was so ordinary, so nondescript, he did not even think he would recognise her if he saw her again. He did remember the Nazi Party badge she wore on her cardigan and the thought of it made him smile. As he looked around at the other people on the street, he wondered how many were like her. It could only be a handful.
The Auslander Page 14