“She is married,” she said in a heart-broken voice. “There are no children left,” and now that the guests were gone she wept unashamedly.
V
ALTHOUGH the new currency had more or less settled down now, people were resentful at having lost their savings again, and without any kind of warning.
The shops no longer wanted cigarettes and coffee—they wanted money—the new money, and to get it they began releasing the stocks of goods which they had hoarded against just such a happening.
Great was the indignation of the housewives at some of the shopkeepers.
“Just look at all these buttons, fasteners and elastic which have suddenly appeared,” said one to me, “and the needles and pins. They are all old stock—the wretches must have been hoarding them up for years.”
Clothes appeared—all kinds of clothes and shoes—and household goods which had been missing from the market for years began to fill the shop windows. But now that their pockets were empty—for the miserable forty marks had not been all paid out at once—these women were in a veritable fury and loud in their contempt of the shopkeepers.
The Russians took full advantage of this, having launched their own currency, known as the East Deutsche mark, at the end of July, and the battle of the marks was now added to the battle to force the Allies to relinquish their rights and to give up the city.
Planes droned over day and night—Skymasters, B.E.A. liners, Dakotas, Lancasters, Tudors—and the air was noisy with their engines as they brought in more and more food and fuel to the blockaded city. Fear lent strength to the Berliners in their determination to resist the Russian campaign. They minded the new food shortage less because everyone was in the same boat—the Allies were as strictly rationed as they were, and with fuel too. One of the greatest grumbles in the previous winters had been the complete absence of fuel for the Germans and the abundance enjoyed by the Occupation. It was warm still, but the evenings were already getting chilly. The September days were golden and sunny, but there was no relaxation for the populace who, although still sunbathing and deepening the tan of their misleadingly healthy-looking skins, watched the planes in the sky anxiously, and worried about the safety of their life-line.
It was on one of these glorious September days that Stampie was driving me through the Charlottenburg Chaussée when we came upon an ugly crowd throwing stones at Soviet sentries who had arrived to take over the guard at the Red Army War Memorial. They were in our sector, but as their War Memorial was situated in the British sector they had a perfect right there. Why the crowd had decided to attack them was not clear, but it was probably the pent-up feelings of the Berliners coming to a head and finding release in an attack on these symbols of the Soviet.
Stampie, anxious for my safety, was trying to get a passage through this sudden mêlée, which appeared to have come from nowhere. They made way for the car, with no signs of animosity towards us, and renewed their stone-throwing and rude epithets.
A British officer who was on duty near the memorial was trying in vain to disperse the mob.
“Better get out while you can,” he shouted to me. “They may open fire at any minute.”
We were surprised at the Russians’ patience in face of these taunts, but at a renewed volley of stones they made ready to open fire on the crowd, and shouted a warning. Another British officer went up and persuaded them to hold their fire while the police dealt with the angry crowd.
We did not know who the British officer was, but he behaved with such tact and patience that not a shot was fired. We remembered this later when the Soviet radio was blaring forth complaints that the British Police and Military did nothing to help the sentries or to disperse the crowds.
It was an exciting but an unpleasant experience. I had never seen a Berlin crowd in such a mood. We were becoming so accustomed to seeing them docile and even servile that we had forgotten that they could fight. It was not so long since the Battle of Berlin and they had many old scores to settle without this added blockade. Strange, though, that I felt no fear in the mob, whereas when once caught in a similar French crowd in Paris, I had been terrified. These were far more like our own crowds at home.
That evening, which was September the 9th, Stampie was witness of a much uglier incident.
He and Max had gone to attend the big meeting of the Social Democrats and Liberal Democrats, which was being held by permission of the Allies in front of the ruined Reichstag in the Platz der Republik. The Meeting was being held as a protest against the Soviet blockade, and to demonstrate the determination of the Berliners to continue the fight for a free Berlin. There were over 250,000 people present, including thousands from the East sector who had come through the Tor for the meeting.
They were addressed by Professor Ernst Reuter, their Burgomaster, and by various Trade Union leaders, and the whole proceedings were perfectly orderly, declared Stampie and Max. Max was interested in the speakers, and had gone purposely to hear them. The enthusiasm of this huge crowd seems to have been so overwhelming that they did not disperse after the meeting was finished. It was, after all, the first large gathering held in Berlin since the Occupation had banned all such meetings.
Over the Brandenburger Tor flew, as always, the Red flag, marking the beginning of the Soviet sector. It had flown there unmolested during the meeting, but now a boy, excited, and egged on by the crowd, climbed the Tor, and tearing down the flag threw it over into the British side of the gateway, where an infuriated crowd tore it to shreds. Stampie, who from a distance on a pile of ruined cement blocks had been watching, missed Max from his side, and was stupefied at seeing him the centre of the mêlee fighting for a piece of the flag. His clothing was torn, his face cut and bruised, and his hair in a wild state, as he triumphantly held a piece aloft. His face was flushed and his eyes brilliant. He looked so elated and mad that Stampie was astounded. Here was a Max he had never seen before.
“Come here, you bloody fool; you don’t want to get mixed up in this—you’ll lose your job in the Control Commission!” Stampie shouted above the roar of the mob as he forced his way into the fray and dragged Max out.
He remembered Fritz, and the trouble he had got into from just such a crowd as this one, and at exactly the same place. He was thinking of Frau Altmann and of how she idolized Max.
“Otherwise,” he told me, “I’d have left the silly fool to get knocked about and probably arrested. As it was, there wasn’t a breath left in my body when I got that bastard clear.”
Having recovered his breath, he had shaken Max as one does a dog, affectionately but firmly. Max had come to his senses, apologized sheepishly, and thanked Stampie. He seemed to be in a dream, said Stampie, and had no idea why he had done it.
“I don’t know what came over me,” he had explained, “but when I saw that flag coming down I just had to have a piece.”
“You’d better put it away quick,” Stampie had advised.
Shots were being fired and the Russians, infuriated at the insult to their flag, had opened fire in the Pariser Platz and were driving jeeps ruthlessly into the crowds, while at the same time others advanced at the ready with their tommy guns, down the Friedrich Ebertstrasse into the Charlottenburg Chaussée. A British Police Major had a tough job to persuade them to withdraw into their own sector, but eventually he did, and the mob was dispersed with difficulty by the British and German police. Thirty people were badly injured, and one boy died. Most of the injuries were from gunshots, although others were caused by trampling in the crowds.
“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” declared Stampie, after giving me a graphic description. “It was as good as a football match when that flag came fluttering down.”
Max had handed over the piece of flag to him, and he was going to have it framed with a brief account of the affair, he told me.
The unfortunate scapegoats chosen by the Russians for this incident were four youths all under twenty, and one man of forty. They were tried in camera by a Sovi
et court, and sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour. The savagery of these sentences caused a wave of violent indignation, and even the East Zone papers, the mouthpieces of the Soviet propaganda, criticized them. The fury of the people was so great that the sentences were later somewhat reduced. Matters were made worse by the letter of protest about this incident which General Kotikov sent to General Herbert, in which the Russian General described himself as “Military Commander of the City of Berlin” and addressed General Herbert as merely “Commander of the British Garrison.” The British thought this a piece of arrant impudence, but at the same time it amused them. The Germans could not understand how we could put up with such an affront, let alone be amused by it.
“You ought to demand an apology. It’s an insult to your General!” declared Max, waving a paper with a full account of it at me. He and his fellow-workers in the Control Commission had apparently been discussing it animatedly all day. He gave me some of their comments.
“How can you put up with it?” asked Karl. He was, after all, an ex-regular army officer and understood military etiquette. “It’s shocking.”
“I can see the funny side too,” agreed Dr von R. when he asked me what we thought about it. “But their impudence is staggering.” Now that Frau von R. was dead, he was living alone out at Gatow. He had got his de-nazification through, but now there were no jobs in Berlin because almost all the Control Commission was moving out into the Zone. I said that probably he would soon be able to practise again as a lawyer. He thought so too, especially now that the new currency meant that banking would start up again, and with it all kinds of legal problems. He looked tired and much older. It had taken all the reichsmarks he could raise to get his de-nazification through. I wondered what he was managing to live on—probably the potatoes which he grew in his large garden and the apples on his trees in the orchard. He showed me some tobacco plants he was growing.
The dog looked melancholy; Dr von R. said that he missed his mistress, by whose bedside he had always kept watch.
“She often talked about you,” Dr. von R. said, “and hated me getting my de-nazification through. She died loyal to the Party.”
I asked if she had thought it would revive.
“She was sure of it,” said Dr von R. “She said that there was plenty of spirit left in the people still, and that they would throw off their yoke and revive Nazism again.”
“And you?” I asked.
He shook his head smilingly. “I can’t tell what the future will bring,” he said, “but it has no attraction for me any more. I’m an old man now, and I want only peace.”
That was what all the Berliners wanted, I thought—peace. They were sick of being fought over and quarrelled over and wrangled over, but as Frau Altmann said quaintly to me, “even that one gets used to—as with everything.”
Stampie told me how furious the Germans were about the Kotikov-Herbert affair.
“It’s damn funny. Think of all those old blimps in the War Office reading that,” he chuckled.
I said that the Germans couldn’t understand how we could think it funny.
“They can’t understand how we thought William Joyce funny and named him Lord Haw-Haw,” laughed Stampie. “They’ve got a funny sense of humour themselves.”
“Don’t forget that we used to think Hitler funny,” I reminded him, “until he marched into countries just a little too near to Britain—and then it wasn’t so funny.”
“Too right,” agreed Stampie, who had a new Australian friend and was picking up some of his expressions.
The trials of the Field-Marshals were now on, and the names of Falkenhorst, Kesselring, List and Milch were being tossed about in violent discussions as to whether or not they were war criminals. The Germans to whom I spoke about it were definite that they were not war criminals, but merely good patriots, obeying the orders from the head of their country. They were indignant that after all this time these men should be brought to trial at all.
“Why didn’t you shoot them in the first place?” they said. “They are Military, and have the right to be shot if they are sentenced.”
The horrors of the concentration camps at Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Ravensbruck and Mauthausen were being floodlit again with the trials of those responsible for the wholesale murder of the millions of wretched inmates there. On this subject the Germans were silent. They did not want to discuss it.
Berlin was especially proud of its cultural life. It could not have been pleasant to have to admit that the perpetrators of the revolting and horrifying crimes against humanity were—many of them—of the so-called “cultured” world. The doctors whom I knew at the various hospitals were following the trials of the prison camp medical attendants with growing incredulity and horror. They did not deny the facts. They had not known, they said. But what could they have done if they had known? One was powerless.
“They all knew,” insisted Frau Pfeiffer and Frau Altmann, who had reason to know themselves. “Everyone knew that these places existed because one was threatened with them, but just how appalling was the cruelty there many possibly did not know.”
The account of the notorious Frau Ilse Koch had a morbid attraction for Stampie. He couldn’t get over it as he pored over a photograph of her in a newspaper.
“She ought to be skinned alive and then made to look at lampshades made from her own skin; perhaps she’d enjoy that a bit less than she did those she had made from those poor devils in the camp. God! It makes one sick to think of it. And here we are, saving all these little German kids so that they’ll grow up and do the same.”
Stampie was indignant when he heard that Frau Ilse Koch was not to be skinned alive or even hanged. She was merely sentenced to penal servitude. Her husband had already been executed after his trial at Nuremburg.
VI
FRAU Altmann and Max were alone now in the ruined house. It was terribly quiet and strange without Ursula, Frau Altmann said. She missed her far more than she had thought she could. When Ursula was around there were always life and movement, arguments and often quarrels, but she was vitally alive, and it was this quality which was her great attraction. Her mother had resented it, because it drew attention to the girl, but she missed it now.
I learned a good deal more about Frau Altmann herself now that she was alone so much. She had told me very little about herself—she was not the sort of woman who cared to speak about her own personal life or experiences. She would talk of Kurt, of Fritz, of Oskar and of Ursula—anyone except herself.
I knew that she had learned her almost perfect English in England where she had taken a course at Oxford, and that she knew our country fairly well. It was with surprise that I learned from her that she had been engaged to a young undergraduate at Oxford, and that she had not married Oskar until ten years after her fiancé’s death.
One day when she had quoted some verses of Rupert Brooke to me and I had commented on her amazing knowledge of English poetry she had said:
“Edward used to read poetry to me when we were engaged—not Rupert Brooke, of course—Edward died long before the First World War—but Keats and Shelley and Browning. He loved them, and I have always loved your poetry. It was a great pleasure to me when I found that Kurt wanted to go to Oxford and take a course in English. Had it not been for the war he would have gone.” Kurt had gone to Russia instead—to that terrible Eastern Front from which millions of Germans had never returned. Almost every family we knew had a member missing in Russia.
“It was all so very long ago,” she went on, smiling, “when we were both at Oxford and my father was stationed in London in the Embassy. He and Edward used to go climbing in your lovely Lake District, and it was there that Edward lost his life in trying to save a child who had fallen in one of the lakes—he was drowned—a week before we were to have been married.”
From an album she took a fading photograph. “This was Edward,” she said.
There was nothing in the serious young face to indicate w
hat kind of young man Edward had been. He looked scared of the camera and stood in a slightly ridiculous pose before the entrance to a photographer’s arbour, tall and athletic in spite of the clothes of the period.
“He loved poetry,” sighed Frau Altmann. “And he loved his country as Rupert Brooke did.”
If that were so, at least she had been spared the horror of a marriage endangered by war between their two countries. I had seen so much suffering in this last war in families of mixed marriages torn asunder because of different nationality.
“It is years since I spoke of him,” she mused, putting the photograph carefully away, “but it seems only yesterday that we used to go climbing with Father.”
She must have been very much in love with Edward, for she had not married Oskar until ten years later, although he had wooed her for several years.
“But you were happy in your marriage?” I asked.
“Wonderfully happy,” she said. “Oskar was a good man and an unselfish one. We had many good years and many bad together—the bad ones were in the two terrible wars of course—and all the worries and joys of the children. And that is how it should be—everything shared—joy and sorrow alike.”
She shut the album, putting the little sprig of rosemary back with it.
“When one gets older it is lovely to look back into the past, and the strange thing is that the past becomes nearer than the future,” she said. “The children cannot understand that. Ursula and Lilli never thought that I could understand love. To them I was an old woman, and it is true that Fritz and Lilli were born when I was well over forty—Kurt is ten years older than Fritz, you know—but those days by the lakes in England seem nearer to me now than the years of the terrible bombing here.”
She asked me about London during the war and we compared some of our experiences.
I remembered how pleased Frau von R. had been when she had heard that our home had been completely destroyed by the Luftwaffe, and that we had been buried in it.
The Dancing Bear Page 19