“But we still have the Dürer. Shouldn’t we be so happy about that?” I said, not without sarcasm. Her answer was merely a disgusted look, which let me know she was not about to give up, and that my comment was out of place.
The next day, again hopeful, she went off to the Berlin Symphony Hall to reclaim our grand piano. Mutti, who had already experienced one terrible war in her life, had shrewdly acquired permission to store our piano in the basement of the symphony hall, where all the pianos for the Berlin Philharmonic were packed away for safekeeping. Perhaps she received permission because she was an officer’s wife. I no longer remember the details.
Dieter and Margarete at the piano in Swinemünde, about ages five and six.
She told us she arrived at the symphony hall, and yes, all of Berlin’s precious instruments had been carefully wrapped and hidden in the basement, the Russian admissions guard assured her. Mutti was prepared for anything—to hand over her identity papers, anything. She was determined to be successful this time and told the woman behind the desk, politely but firmly, she was there to reclaim a piano that had been stored away for six years.
“But which piano is it?” the woman wanted to know, as she handed back Mutti’s identity papers, barely having glanced at them. It was clear she was not in the least interested in helping.
“I know my piano! I’ve been playing it since I was twelve. I know every scratch. I probably put each one of them there myself. I would even recognize the patina on the pedals,” Mutti said.
“All right, then. I’ll show you into the basement. There are only a few pianos left; I suppose you’ll know if yours is one of them,” the woman said, and they walked together down the hall.
“Right away I recognized it! Right away!” Mutti told me over our tea that night. “It was there. The wing lay on top of the piano, somewhat skewed, but I thought, What could I expect after all those bombs?
“Now, this is how the rest of our conversation went: ‘Yes, Madam. It’s true. That may be your piano, but the legs are missing.’ Well, of course the legs were missing; all the legs of all the pianos were missing. I suppose it’s what they did with everything, the Russians. They unscrewed them or sawed them off and sent them all back to Russia, just as they did with all the radios and bicycles we saw piled up at the train stations.
“So I said, ‘It’s quite all right. I’ll take it as it is. It’s my piano and I can play it without legs just as easily as with. I’ll just set it onto chairs, four of them, and it will play just fine.’
“Do you know what she answered? ‘Oh, but no, Madam. You can’t take a piano without its legs. Without its legs, it’s no longer your piano!’ That’s what she said!”
This is the story Mutti told, half laughing, half crying over her cup of tea because, again, she returned empty-handed.
Germany was still under severe rations imposed by the Allies, and we were given only four potatoes per day per person—not enough to get well on. Later this became better, but it seemed they wanted to starve us out, the entire country. That’s what it felt like. Don’t misunderstand me—things did improve, but not right away. While we were on these meager rations, the only thing we could do to help ourselves was barter on the black market. That’s how we sometimes had extra bread, and that’s how Frau Schulz had come by those cans of mustard herrings.
My cough got worse, the diarrhea never let up, and Mutti often felt terribly weak. Both of us were weak. We tried so hard to make our lives work, but we were undernourished, and, with the poor rations, it seemed every scratch and bug bite turned into a pus-filled infection. We were physically depleted, but even worse, we were finished. Nothing was left. Dieter was dead, Papa Spaeth was somewhere else, and all we wanted now was to leave Germany. For good.
Mutti came upon the idea of staying with our relatives in Neu Ölsburg, a small town near Hannover. She found out from the British Red Cross that we could quite easily obtain travel documents for the British-occupied sector of Germany. They would only be temporary passes, but we could travel if we showed a need. “Surely our poor health would speak in our favor, wouldn’t you think?” Mutti asked one evening. Our relatives had a home still, a house that had not been bombed and some land where they could grow food. The prospect made me feel better—to be somewhere where people actually might care who we were, and care about Dieter and my broken heart and Mutti’s sorrow. Somewhere to rest.
Suddenly an interzone pass felt like the greatest gift on earth. With the passes and the few items we might need—sweaters, a coat, some aspirin—we took a train to Neu Ölsburg to stay with my Tante Erna and my Onkel Axel, Mutti’s brother. I cannot recall how we knew where the home was or even how we knew it was still standing, or that they would receive us when we arrived. All I remember is we arrived on their doorstep, jittery with hunger. We simply stood at the door for a long moment, staring at the knocker, our suitcases at our feet, and we both took a deep breath.
Tante Erna answered the door immediately when we knocked. She was thin, and her dress hung loosely from her bony shoulders. Her young son, my cousin Axel, who could not have been older than seven, ran to the door and promptly hid himself behind her legs. His large brown eyes peered around her skirt, and suddenly he let out a loud scream. Then he ran, shouting through the house, “There are ghosts at the door! There are ghosts at the door!” I suppose it was our clothes, the rags we wore, or it was our faces, or our sunken eyes, with our swollen legs, bruised and scabbed, I cannot tell you, but what else could a child have thought?
Tante Erna kindly welcomed these two “ghosts” into her home.
“Aber Helga! Margarete! Where, oh where, have you come from? We all thought you were dead! No one knew a thing about you. My God, come in!” Tante Erna shed tears of delight while she held the two of us in her thin arms. “Come, come, I’ll take your things,” and we were warmly shown into the parlor to sit. “My, but you look terrible! How thin your faces. Your eyes! And your fingers look like chicken feet! Oh my. What’s become of you?”
We told her our story; she told us hers. We had been in the Gulag in Russia since the summer of 1945. She housed refugees from the east. And now we were fatigued and hungry, and yet so happy to be somewhere where we could rest. We discovered that we were not the first relatives to have come to this idea. Tante Erna and Onkel Axel were our only relatives still living fairly well, and the many other relatives who had to flee the east at the end of the war had come here, too, to take refuge. And then there was the mandatory housing of strangers that they needed to comply with. There were, in all, thirty-four others! “But don’t worry. Somehow we’ll manage,” Tante Erna said. “We are some of the lucky ones. We still have a garden. We have fruit trees, potatoes, and a few cabbage plants. We manage.”
They were “some of the lucky ones,” too, in that they also had a small plot of land on the outskirts of town, the way it was in Germany, where they grew oats and more potatoes. The children were sent out each day to watch over this plot to make sure no one stole what was there, Tante Erna explained. With the oats and the peelings from the potatoes, the chickens and the rabbits were fed, and from time to time there were even eggs to eat.
At first there were only four potatoes per person per day, but later we were also rationed forty grams of meat per person, although only once a week. You may think this is something, but you must realize, forty grams is about as much meat as only one bite of a sausage. This we received once a week. Yes, we were still very hungry.
Mutti and I could not get well. I coughed, her joints hurt. What I recall most about that time is this: both of us lying for hours each day, sunning ourselves in the garden in the back of the house, and sleeping. We were given comfortable chairs, long ones—lounge chairs—and we wrapped ourselves inside several blankets and slept. For many hours, we slept.
Our interzone pass was to expire soon, and we needed to return to Berlin. It was time for me to piece my life together, and I began to dream about finis
hing my university studies, but I never gave up my dream of leaving Germany. I was quite finished with all of it, and I still had the sliver of hope that I might one day reach Sweden.
On a blustery winter day, Mutti and I made our way back to Berlin. Again we moved into our “washroom.” Mutti took the pearl necklace she had hidden among the silver she had carried through Russia and brought it to the black market. It was all she had left. There she traded it for a large sack of potatoes. We were ecstatic to have them. When she returned home, she put the sack into the washbasin in our new little Wohnung. We would cook them the next day and make a soup out of them, we decided.
I remember that day so well. I awoke, excited to begin to cook. In the night—there was no heat in our home—the potatoes had frozen solid, and when they thawed they were nothing but glassy, watery mush. Where our knives cut, it was soft and turned black immediately. It was a familiar look I saw in Mutti’s eyes. Terror. Panic. The shortage of everything. Our hunger.
During the war, we had somehow learned to soak frozen potatoes in vinegar water to revive them. But we had no vinegar, so we just stood there at the sink, the two of us, and stared at those shriveled, brown, glassy globules of mush, and said nothing. And that is what came of Mutti’s last bargaining chip, the pearl necklace my Papa Werner had given her.
25
HOW I CAME TO KIEL
1948
Kiel, in the very north of Germany, near the Danish border, has a university long known for its medical studies. It is one of Germany’s oldest universities, built in the early seventeenth century. I was going to pursue my dream again and believed, with my Red Cross training and my experience as a medical assistant during the war, I would be accepted to study medicine without much difficulty.
There was a problem, though. I did not have papers to stay in West Germany, and Kiel is in the West. I had papers only for Berlin, and only once did I receive papers for a short travel abroad—the one we took to Neu Ölsburg.36
One day, while speaking with an old school friend, a crazy idea began to blossom in my brain. He was the boy I used to swim with at the Reichsportfeld. He gave me red roses once for my birthday. I didn’t thank him. I was arrogant and young, and I was thinking of other things …
Karl had found me after sending notes and making telephone calls and leaving messages with Frau Schulz every few months all that time I was in the Gulag. When we first saw each other, it was as though not a day had passed, but of course so many had! He had fought in Africa, he told me, and had been badly wounded and lost his left eye. He too had been in a prison camp, but a French one. It was a terrible existence, he said. “The French were not nice. They thought it was funny to laugh at us and watch us grovel for the bits of food they would sometimes throw over the fence. But I escaped.” I asked no more. I did not want to hear about suffering. We had all suffered, and now those of us who survived must try to make the best of what life had left to give us.
Karl Sommerfeld. “He stood proud when he talked, always flashing a bright smile.”
Karl was once a tall, handsome man. He stood proud when he talked, always flashing a bright smile. He did not smile like that now, and he looked beaten down. He was a man I could have been attracted to once, but not anymore.
I told him of my desire to go to Kiel. “I want to study again. I want to make a life for myself and become a doctor,” I told him. I suddenly felt very proud of myself and also very adult. I had never quite uttered that declaration, just that clearly, before. We were sitting at his small table in a kitchen he shared with a man and his wife, his “co-occupants.” They were very nice and very, very quiet. They left us to ourselves when I came to visit. They probably thought we had been lovers once, though we never were.
“I know how to get you to Kiel,” Karl whispered, not wanting his “neighbors” to hear. “Let’s go out for a walk. I’ll tell you more about it there.” We managed to duck out the door without being noticed. “It’s dangerous, but I’ve done it a few times already,” Karl said as soon as we were out on the street. He told me he too wanted to leave for the West. “You, with your Gulag history, I think the Americans, or the British, will have sympathy for you. They may even give you amnesty, and with amnesty you’ll be able to move around anywhere you like, dear Grete.” He turned to me then and held my shoulders in both his hands. “It will be dangerous, but you can do it.”
I didn’t really mind this word “dangerous.” Had I not already experienced dangerous? Many, many times before? How bad could it be? “Well, tell me, then, Karl. How do we do it?”
“We have to travel through Thüringen. We can go by train. Thüringen, as you know, is Russian. We stay on the train all the way through Thüringen. As soon as the train hits Niedersachsen, we jump off. It is British. From there, for about fifty meters, there is a wide strip of land known as No-Man’s-Land. That’s when we run. I’ve done it before.”
“Karl! What if we get caught? I’ve heard terrible things happen if the Russians catch you running across their borders. I’ve heard women get raped, people get shot, or even worse, they are sent to the Gulag! I’ll never go back to the Gulag!”
“Yes, yes. Grete. You must not think of these things. You must think of what you want to have and then work to get it. It’s not easy, but I’ve done it now a number of times. I go to Hamburg, or to Köln, buy merchandise I believe people will want, and then I return to Berlin, and I sell it here for five times what I paid for it on the black market. Here where American cigarettes are worth more than our own currency. This traveling and black marketeering is how I’m saving to make my final escape one day too.”
“When do we go?”
“Soon. It should be when there is significant activity going on. I’d say this coming Tuesday, if you’ll be ready. I know I can get you into British territory. From there, we will take a train to Hamburg. You’ll have to get to Kiel on your own, but that will be easy.”
Tuesday came. I prayed to Dieter and told him where I was going. I said goodbye to Mutti. It was quick; I didn’t want tears. I didn’t tell her my plans; she would have been frightened. I only told her I had found work, I would telephone her in a few weeks, and I was gone, out the door.
Karl and I took the train that traveled through Thüringen, taking us through the East Zone—all the land that surrounded Berlin and was now Russian. This was so strange. We traveled several hundred kilometers with nowhere to sit. The seats had all been given up, as was polite, to those with handicaps and to old people. Some passengers, young men, even climbed to sit up on top of the cars, as there really was no room inside.
Karl knew exactly what to do. “We need to run almost as soon as we arrive, Grete. This will be frightening. But don’t worry. We run at noon when the Russians are having their lunch up in their guard towers. They won’t be paying so much attention to anyone trying to run across the land. It’s much safer than running at night. Always, you read in the news, you hear it on the radio, another ‘escapee’ was shot. This won’t happen to us. The fools always try to run at night.”
I wore my Red Cross dress—I really had nothing else. I had my papers that said I was a citizen of the British sector of Berlin, a few Reichsmarks, and a scarf and gloves, both of which had been mended many times.
The train slowed to a stop in Niedersachsen. Karl poked his head out the window and said, “Look. Over there. Do you see the watchtowers? Those are the Russians. Now, as soon as the train stops again, and I squeeze your hand, we make our way carefully to the edge of the forest without being noticed. We must not look suspicious; we must look as though we have somewhere to go. Don’t draw attention to yourself. On the other side will be the No-Man’s-Land. I’ll squeeze your hand once again, and this time it will mean we run.”
No sooner had our feet hit the platform than Karl grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. My breath came short. I looked furtively around and I followed him quietly, staring straight ahead to get through the trees that stood ju
st up ahead. Branches crackling underfoot, my bag over my shoulder, quickly we crossed the forest to the land that was barren, and I felt his squeeze once more. This one was very hard. All I could think was Run! Run! Now! Fast as you can, run! Each minute was too long, each step not fast enough. I never looked back. I never even looked at the ground we were running on. I simply looked at Karl’s back, his broad shoulders, and I trusted God.
A bullet zinged past my head. Then another. Apparently at least one of the guards was not quite so busy eating his lunch. I didn’t even look up then. I didn’t want to see my enemy—I was afraid I’d lose hope or lose my focus, or both. I was afraid I’d stumble or he’d shoot me, this Russian with the gun. We ran and ran. Karl ran, and I was behind him.
The distance was probably only fifty meters, as he had said, but it could have been fifty kilometers. The moments took so long, it was as if they lasted all day. There was no barbed wire yet around No-Man’s-Land—that would come later. On this day it was just land, empty land, with watchtowers and Russians with guns.
When finally Karl stopped running, I knew we had crossed to the other side. We were in the West, and we were safe inside the British Zone. Such a frightening day, just when all that fright and all the danger was supposed to have been behind us. It was terrifying, but I was in West Germany, and I was going to Kiel.
After a heartfelt goodbye, Karl and I parted, each to move on to our futures. I left for Kiel, he for the black market.
My arrival in Kiel was very late at night, and, my God, it was cold! It was the middle of April and I had only a thin coat, a thin scarf, a thin pair of gloves, and no hat. I stayed in some refugee barracks I somehow found, and there was no heat. By four in the morning I could not take it any longer, so I got up and walked alone through the dark streets to the university. I thought I could just as easily freeze at the university as in the barracks.
Letters From Berlin: A Story of War, Survival, and the Redeeming Power of Love and Friendship Page 25