“And Fritz?” I asked. “You took him in with you?”
“I had to. Some of the gang are pretty tough, and he’s tough too.”
“And the coat is part of the proceeds?”
“No. Joe gave me the coat;” she paused, then said bitterly: “What does it matter who it is after the Russians?”
I had heard about her experiences in the sack of Berlin. Frau Altmann had hidden both the girls on the ruined roof under the girders. Ursula hadn’t stayed there. She had been raped five times.
“Why should I go to church?” she asked bitterly. “What has religion ever done for me? Mother will tell you that it was my own fault that I was raped—that it was the hand of God which saved Lilli. It was too hot and uncomfortable up on that roof—I couldn’t stick it. It’s all right for Lilli—she’s trained to stay in uncomfortable poses. Lilli,” she finished with a wry smile, “is probably the only virgin of her age in Berlin!”
“Ursula,” I begged, “don’t let’s talk any more of these things. It’s my fault for asking you—tonight’s Christmas Eve. Your mother is such a good woman—she’s determined to think only the best of you.”
“Mutti’s a saint,” she agreed. “But she doesn’t belong to these times any more than Pappi does. They simply can’t adjust themselves to new values or to present-day life in Berlin.”
I said that Fritz was reading Karl Marx and asked if he was really interested.
She thought that he was. He had several Communist friends, she said. Quite a number of the former Hitlerjugend were joining the new Soviet Youth movement. Fritz was looking for something better than the life he was now living. At the same time he was no longer satisfied with the small deals they were doing on the Black Market and wanted to try something really big and then quit it altogether.
“Do you think he will then join the Communists?” I asked.
She laughed—and her laugh was horrible.
“What does it matter?” she said. “Nazi, Communist or Democrat, aren’t they all the same? We all want something which will give us work and fill our bellies—what does it matter if it is a Russian, British, Frenchman or American from whom I get the cigarettes? They are all men—and the British and American cigarettes are worth more—so what? Here’s Joe. And he’ll want his money’s worth even if it is Christmas Eve!”
Before I could recover from this outburst a young man in the uniform of the USAF came in with her. Tall and fair, he was so loosely jointed that he seemed to be strung together with elastic. His bland young face with its short upper lip closing over perfect teeth was never still as his jaws worked chewing the eternal gum. He spoke out of the side of his mouth to avoid moving it. He was not quite sober. Ursula introduced him as “Joe” and I left them together. His arm was round her and the hot hand he had given me was already on her breast before I had left the room.
Outside the house the driver of a U.S. jeep was talking to Stampie.
“Make it snappy in there, Joe!” he called out as I came out. “It’s no kind of place for a guy out here on Christmas Eve!”
He was not sober either. He lurched over to me.
“Would you care,” he said coaxingly, “to do a little kissing?”
Stampie was on him like a knife.
“Would you care,” he growled, “to do a little boxing? Keep a decent tongue in your head or I’ll be doing something, and it won’t be kissing either!”
“All right, pal—no offence meant,” said the American hastily.
“He’s taken a load. It’d freeze the marrow out of your bones tonight,” said Stampie, who was muffled up in a kind of Balaclava helmet such as John wore.
The driver of the jeep, not at all put out, saluted me while swaying slightly. “A happy Christmas to you, Ma’am,” he called.
“If it hadn’t been Christmas Eve I’d have given him a happy one all right,” growled Stampie.
We stopped to pick up our old Hausmeister who was trudging in the snow carrying a sack.
“Ach, it’s cold!” he exclaimed as he climbed in. “And it’s going to be colder, and there’s no fuel in the cellars.” He was delighted with some potatoes he had found and showed me a wretched little fish.
“For my cat,” he said happily; “she’s expecting kittens any day now, and gets a bit choosy. I’d like to give your little son one of her kittens if you will allow it.”
We picked John up from his party, and his two little Scottish friends, Peter and another John, piled in with us. The lighted Christmas tree was beckoning us from our window. The snow was still falling fast, and the car made no sound on its thick carpet.
With the snow falling outside we held our tree ceremony for the staff. They had received all kinds of touching little gifts for us from some of the people we were helping. There was a little cross-stitched mat worked for me by Krista, a little girl who had been in a Russian concentration camp, and whom I was feeding, and all kinds of little parcels for John. The gift I liked best was from an old Baron who was working now at shovelling coal from the road into the Allied cellars, and whose wife was bed-ridden. He had heard I was a painter and had sent me a canvas stretcher, a mahlstick, and an instrument for removing drawing pins which had all been his own. The Altmanns’ gift was a silver bonbonnière which I saw at a glance was valuable, and would have to be tactfully returned. It was an exquisite piece of work. The note accompanying it was signed by Maria, Oskar, Ursula and Lilli, but not by Fritz.
From him there was an envelope which contained one of the postcards now being sold all over Berlin—depicting well-known buildings, the upper portion of the card showed Berlin as it had been in 1933 at the beginning of the Third Reich, and the lower portion as it was now—a heap of ruins. Across the centre of the card in gaily coloured letters was printed, in English, “1933, Best Wishes from Berlin, 1946.”
The card he had sent me was one depicting the Chancellery. On the back he had written in English,
Happy Christmas in our ruins!!!!
Fritz.
I looked at the card. Similar ones had been offered for sale by young men in the streets and they were on show in the little stationer’s on Rosenecke. Were they a symbol of a race who could so advertise their maimed and shattered capital to make a little money?
What if the card were a reproduction of a water-colour made by an artist that he might eat? Could we have done the same with similar reproductions of our famous London buildings, the Temple Church for instance, destroyed by German bombs? What if they were currying favour with the Occupation by advertising thus their acknowledgment of the infamous end of that Third Reich?
I felt a certain sympathy with young Fritz, who had seen the irony and bitterness behind the gay words “Best Wishes from Berlin.”
X
CHRISTMAS was over, and a terrible depression was noticeable. Everyone had done their best to ignore the growing horror of want and hunger during the festival days. Now all those small tit-bits of extra food for which people had saved for so long were all eaten, and the yellow candles had burned down to their sockets. What was there to look forward to? The bitter cold was increasing daily, there was no fuel, and the Berliners had little heart for the celebration of Silvesterabend or New Year’s Eve.
The most one could hope for was that things would not get worse; no one expected them to get better. When one asked “Wie geht es?” the answer was always, “Es muss gehen.”
There was a fresh spate of parties and receptions to bring in the New Year for the Occupation, given by each of the Four Powers.
Notices of deaths from hunger and cold appeared daily now in the Tageblatt, and on December 27th all Berlin was horrified at hearing of the arrival at the British zonal frontier of a train with 16 corpses, and 57 old people suffering so acutely from frost-bite that several more died later.
These unfortunate Germans were being forcibly sent back from Poland under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement, which stipulated however that “Germans remaining in Poland should be repatriate
d under humane and orderly conditions.”
The humanity was remarkable by its absence, although, as one German doctor remarked to me, the dead could scarcely be described as anything but orderly.
Displaced persons were returning every day in steady streams. One met them wandering aimlessly from station to station with their miserable bundles in their frost-bitten hands, their gaunt frames in rags and utter despair in their eyes. I grew to dread having to go near any of the stations because of the impossibility of helping them all.
Coming home from a cocktail party one evening we passed a British Mess where a party was being held. The curtains were not drawn, and one could see men and women members of the Control Commission playing with balloons, pulling crackers and dancing round a large Christmas tree. Watching them outside in the snow was a group of people. One family attracted my attention. A young woman with no stockings and old felt shoes, with a shawl pinned round her weary face, held a child up to look in at the scene; two little girls clung to her skirts and tried to peep in too. Clad in rags, either of these two little mites could have posed for Andersen’s little match girl. Oblivious of the bitter wind, of hunger and cold, they gazed entranced at the gaily lit scene.
Perhaps it was wrong of me to have gone in and asked them to draw the curtains. They were entitled to their party, but it was somehow unbearable that those starving people should see it.
The revellers were very decent; some of them came out and filled the children’s hands with sandwiches and cakes. It was so cold that the food would quickly have frozen and the little ones stuffed the things into their clothes.
The New Year came in with the temperature dropping every day; it had not been so cold in the memory of even the very old people.
The ground was as slippery as glass. The Horch just turned round in circles on the Hohenzollerndamm, and Stampie was even paler than his nightly festivities warranted as he strove in vain to get some control on the steering wheel. We were obliged to abandon the car and get our old Hausmeister to bring buckets of ash before we could do anything. The little Volkswagens were the winners. They just sailed by, leaving all the large cars stranded.
Every day the sun melted the ice on the upper surface of the roads, and every afternoon they froze again. The snow seemed permanent under the glassy upper surface. When one went out of doors it seemed as if a thousand needles were pricking one’s face. We tied up our ears and envied the Russian sentries their Balaclava helmets with slits for eyes, nose and mouth.
Stampie had been looking worried and strained for some time, and I asked him if there was anything wrong. Nothing special, he said, but it was getting more and more difficult to obtain fuel and potatoes for some of his protégés. We had deliberately shut our eyes to those bits of coal and earth from potato sacks which one could not fail to observe in the car lately. When he saw that I had noticed it, he told me that he picked up the sacks from a contact near his car unit, but that it was becoming a great worry to him. He could not bear to let his protégés down.
The previous night we had been to the Altmanns’. Lilli was at home, she wasn’t well and had a hard dry cough. Frau Altmann was worried, and no wonder, for she looked terribly frail as she huddled over the stove which was so low that it was useless. The room was icy cold and the windows still unglazed. Fritz came in. He was thinner than ever, and he coughed too. They had no fuel, no one had any fuel, and the cold was becoming unbearable. Her husband felt it worse than any of them. His weak heart caused poor circulation. He was in bed, the only place where it was even moderately warm.
I asked after Ursula. She was very well, the cold seemed to suit her, said Frau Altmann drily.
“She gets plenty of food,” said Fritz resentfully, “and can bear it better.”
“She’s a good girl,” said her mother defensively, “and always brings something home for Pappi.”
After I had sat there a few minutes, I was frozen. Stampie fetched in some Steinhager, which was horrible but certainly warmed one. A glass was taken to Pappi in his bed. Lilli didn’t want to drink any, but Stampie coaxed her into swallowing some by telling her it would do her cough good. I didn’t like the look of her, nor did Stampie.
When we were driving home he said to me, “We’ll have to get some fuel for that family—or the old man and Lilli are for the high jump.”
I asked how he would get it, knowing how scarce it was.
“I’ll get it somehow—leave it to me,” he said simply.
I said that I should like to help pay for it. He promised that I should.
The car was so cold that it was an ordeal to go out in evening dress now. It seemed fantastic that one had to dress up every night in this freezing, starving city and attend dances and dinners, but when I said so, a very important lady rounded on me sternly. It was our duty, she said, to make friends with the other Occupying Powers, and it was my duty to accompany my husband to all these official and semi-official functions.
On such a night, with the temperature almost at its lowest point that winter, a huge Ball was held in the Allied Control Administration building. Given in the month when Russia was in the “Chair”, each Power taking it once in every four months, most of the honour for the arrangement of the ball fell to Russia.
It was, without exception, the most dazzling and brilliant spectacle we had ever witnessed—not excepting the most glamorous Viceregal balls in India. We danced in the huge halls of the former Kammergericht to British, Russian, French, American and German bands. The uniforms and decorations in the flag-filled and flower-scented rooms were magnificent, as were the dresses of the women. Cabaret artists flown from all over Europe performed at midnight, and the Scottish pipers thrilled everyone. People were quite frenzied in their thirst for enjoyment, their determination to have a good time at this magnificent party which had assumed the air of a real Victory Ball. I wondered what some of the German waitresses standing so demurely behind the mountains of food in their black and white uniforms and their white cotton gloves must be thinking. The cost of the flowers alone would have fed all of them. Flowers such as these indeed stood as a challenge to the right of the conqueror to luxuries—for they were all hot-house blooms grown with fuel which could have saved the lives of hundreds of old people dying daily from the cold.
As the night wore on and the small hours of the morning approached, the dancers became more and more wildly excited. Drink was in unending supply, as was food. The bands vied with each other for the popularity of their respective dance floors. At four o’clock I was fetched from the German waltz room by a wild party to hear the Four Commandants, Robertson, Clay, Koenig and Sokolowski singing the Volga Boat Song, stamping their feet in time to the music. But although a huge American friend hoisted me shoulder high the crush was so great that it was impossible to catch more than a glimpse.
Outside in the snow the sentries of the Four Powers marched smartly up and down, and the four flags fluttered in the icy air. In the deserted streets the snow gave an air of death to everything, as if the ball, still going on in the brilliantly lighted building, was a pavane for the dead of this ghost-haunted city.
An old man with a sack tied round his head was shuffling along in the gutter searching for the stubs of cigarettes which the guests might have thrown from their car windows. The driver of a cart, whose poor horse had bones almost sticking through its skin, got down and joined in the hunt. They found a stub at the same moment, and fought quite viciously in the gutter before the old man rolled over, and the driver of the cart went back to whip his poor beast. The old man sat up in the gutter and hurled filthy words at him.
At home John lay asleep. Across the bed, her arm protectively round him, lay Lotte, also asleep. Her fair hair was tangled on the pillow and she looked young and at peace. She woke up, explaining that she had got John to sleep with the greatest difficulty. He would never rest until I came home, thinking that only then was the house safe from falling down.
The following morning when I was walking
with the puppies in the Grunewald, they rushed ahead and began barking madly at something under a bush. I went to investigate, and found the frozen body of an old man. He was a queer dark bluish colour, and absolutely stiff. I went back to Rosenecke where there was usually a policeman on duty. He came back with me and said it was nothing unusual, there were such bodies found every day now.
“Don’t let your child out alone in Grunewald,” he warned me. “There are people who would murder him for a good pair of shoes.”
He knew John and me well, we passed him nearly every day on our walks.
Hunger was making many normally law-abiding citizens desperate—hunger and cold together were taking a terrible toll. At the Berlin Städtische Kinderklinik there had been a number of children brought in frozen to death. I saw these small corpses, also of a curious blue colour. Their parents had thought that the doctors could revive them. Dr. Gaupp and Dr. Annemarie and all the staff were working desperately to save children brought in in the last stages of hunger and exposure.
On January the 6th the temperature fell to minus four, or thirty-six degrees of frost. No one living in Berlin could remember such intense cold. There was no coal at all, transport was impossible on the iced roads, and we sat in our huge rooms wrapped in rugs and with hot water bottles to keep our hands from numbness. Even so, our block, having been heated until now, could not have been anything like as terrible as those permanently unheated, and Germans had neither rugs to wrap round them nor hot water bottles to help them, nor the hot cups of tea and cocoa which Lotte kept bringing us.
On this frightful morning Dr. Gaupp telephoned to know if I could obtain some penicillin to save a baby’s life. Gerhard was dead, he had died just after Christmas; now she told me that my other favourite child, little Lise, had died early this morning. Death, death, death! It was nothing else. I hated the snow. It carried for me the dirge of all that is gay, coloured and vital. It brought in its white shroud the winding sheet for thousands that winter. I wanted to go home—back to London—it was almost as cold there, but people were not dying of hunger. I found myself at the piano playing Ravel’s lovely Pavane pour une Infante Défunte, but my fingers were so numb that it was a failure.
The Dancing Bear Page 7