Oranges for Christmas

by Margarita Morris

  “Run ahead,” I say to Brigitta, “and ask for Andreas to come and help us.”

  Brigitta disappears down the tunnel, her small frame making it easier for her to move quickly in the confined space. Werner and I stagger on with our load.

  A few minutes later Andreas appears.

  “Give her to me,” he says. He takes over from me and I watch as he and Werner continue down the tunnel. It’s only then I realise that Sabine and Claudia haven’t appeared. Where the hell are they? I stagger back down the tunnel towards East Berlin.

  Sabine

  The light dazzles me and I am caught like a frightened animal. I’m vaguely aware of Claudia pulling me by the hand but then a voice I recognise calls my name.

  “Sabine.”

  “Astrid? Is that really you?”

  Astrid lowers the torchlight and I see then her tall figure and unmistakable blond hair. She is standing at the top of the cellar steps. She puts a hand on the wooden banister and starts to make her way down the stairs. I let go of Claudia’s hand and run towards her.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  She pauses on the second step from the bottom. She is distracted. “I…I…followed you here tonight. I was hiding in a doorway in Schönholzer Strasse. I…” Her voice trails away.

  “Do you want to come to West Berlin?” I ask. “Is that why you’re here?” I never thought for one minute that she would want to leave her family and go to the West, so I’m both surprised and excited to see her. I make a move to take hold of her hand but she jerks it away from me.

  “No!” she says. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “But why…”

  She cuts me off. “Sabine, I didn’t think you’d still be here.” There’s anxiety in her voice. She glances nervously up the stairs towards the cellar door. She looks at her watch. “Sabine, you should go, before…”

  “Before what?”

  She drops her voice and speaks in an urgent whisper. “Before someone comes.”

  Suddenly it’s as if I’m seeing her for the first time and I don’t recognise her as my friend. Fear is written all over her face, but I think it’s not fear for me, it’s fear of me, and the truth starts to dawn in my mind.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  I fix her with a stare and she doesn’t dare look away. “You knew Matthias and Joachim had defaced the portraits because you saw them come out of the classroom whilst you were waiting for me. You reported them to the Stasi. That’s why they’re now in prison.”

  “But, Sabine, the Stasi released you when they knew it was Matthias and Joachim. I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “Pleased? That my friend would shop her own classmates to the Stasi? And what was your reward for informing on Matthias and Joachim? Tickets to the opening night of Mutter Courage?”

  She stares at me wide-eyed. “How did you know?”

  “I was there,” I say. “I saw you, sitting in the best seats in the theatre. You and your family. But you never even mentioned it.”

  “Sabine, how could I? We were only there because my father’s boss invited us. What would you have thought of me if you knew my father was a Stasi official? You don’t know what it’s like trying to live a double life.”

  “What do you mean, a double life? What has your father’s job got to do with this? We’re talking about you.”

  She clenches her hand into a fist and hits the banister. “You don’t understand!” she cries. “It was so hard! I needed to be one person at school and another one at home. I tried to fit in at school by making fun of Herr Schmidt and all that, but at home I was expected to report on what was going on in the school.”

  “You mean you worked as an… informer?” I spit the word out in contempt, making her blink. I can’t believe this. Twice I refused to become an informer for the Stasi, even when to do so would have given me back my freedom. Astrid seems to have done it just to make her parents happy. But there’s one last thing I have to know.

  “Astrid, tell me the truth. What did you tell the Stasi about me?”

  “Nothing, I mean…”

  “Why was I arrested a second time? You told them about the tunnel didn’t you?”

  She nods. “I’m sorry. But Sabine, you have to believe me,” she grabs hold of my shoulders, “I don’t want you to get hurt. You have to go now. I’m giving you this chance. They will be here any minute.”

  I stare at her in disbelief. She has betrayed the tunnel, but still wants me to be safe.

  “Come on,” says Claudia, pulling me by the arm. She starts to drag me towards the tunnel.

  Suddenly there are pounding feet up above. The cellar door bursts open and a border guard appears at the top of the steps followed by two men in beige overcoats. One of them is Astrid’s father. The other is Herr Stein. The Stasi men stand at the top of the steps whilst the border guard runs half way down, his rifle aimed squarely at me and Claudia.

  “Scheisse!” mutters Astrid under her breath.

  “Stay where you are!” shouts the guard from his vantage point half way up the steps.

  Claudia and I freeze.

  The guard descends a couple more steps.

  At that moment, Dieter pokes his head up out of the tunnel entrance. “Sabine, where are…what the hell?”

  The guard fires into the air, shattering the single bulb that hangs from the cellar ceiling. Crystals of glass shower down over Claudia and me. Astrid screams.

  Herr Stein shines a torchlight into the cellar. Dieter pulls himself out of the tunnel and picks up the rifle which he had abandoned. He aims it at the guard.

  “Nein!” I scream at him.

  Claudia pushes me towards the hole.

  The guard shouts a second warning. “Stay where you are or I shoot!”

  Then he lifts his rifle, and aims it at me. In the split second that it takes him to pull the trigger, Astrid launches herself in front of me and the bullet finds its target in her breast. Claudia pushes me into the hole. The last thing I see as gravity pulls me down is Astrid’s body flying through the air and landing with a thump on the cellar floor.

  Dieter

  The body of a young woman flies past me and lands in a tangled heap on the cellar floor.

  Rage surges up inside me. I point my rifle at the border guard and pull back hard on the trigger.

  Nothing happens.

  I try again. Still nothing.

  I don’t believe it. The rifle’s got no ammunition. Or it’s a dud. Harry never expected me to fire it. It was just for show. I throw it away in disgust.

  “ASTRID!” shouts a voice from the top of the cellar stairs.

  It’s only then that I become aware of the two men standing by the cellar door. One of them, with steel-grey hair, standing rigid, the other throwing his arms into the air and shouting Astrid’s name in a voice wild with despair. This second man runs down the stairs, past the border guard, and throws himself at the prone figure lying on the floor.

  “Meine Tochter …” he sobs, lifting her into his arms. My daughter. I realise it must be Sabine’s friend Astrid and her father. Sabine has talked about her.

  I would go and help them, but she’s already dead and the border guard still has me in his sights. If I move, he’ll shoot.

  “Stay where you are!” he says, walking down the steps towards me. “And you too!” he says to someone behind me.

  It’s only then that I realise Claudia is still in the cellar with me. I thought she had gone with Sabine.

  The guard continues his way down the steps, the thump of his boots making the wood creak.

  Suddenly, Astrid’s father jumps to his feet. His eyes are wide and staring. He looks like a man deranged.

  “No! You stay where you are,” he shouts at the guard. Then, slowly and deliberately, he puts his hand inside his coat, pulls out a pistol, aims it at the guard and fires, hitting him square in the forehead.

  The guard’s body
goes into a spasm, the rifle is ejected from his hands, then he falls forward and topples over the banister, landing with a sickening thud in front of my feet.

  I grab hold of Claudia’s hand and together we run for the tunnel. From the top of the cellar steps the grey-haired man shouts at us to stop. We ignore him and slide down the chute together.

  We scramble to our feet and move as fast as we can through the tunnel. We’ve gone about ten metres when there’s a thud behind us. I look over my shoulder and see the grey-haired man at the bottom of the slide.

  “Keep moving,” I say to Claudia. “Don’t look back.”

  The man shouts at us. “Stop! Or I shoot!”

  We keep going. I can hear the man’s footsteps behind us.

  We reach the white line painted on the shoring. At that point I turn and face our pursuer. He lifts his pistol to shoot. Claudia is crouched right behind me, breathing hard.

  “You can’t shoot us,” I say to him. “Look. This is the border between East and West Berlin. We are in West Berlin now.”

  He looks in confusion at the words scrawled on the white paint. Hier beginnt die Freiheit!

  “Go back to East Berlin,” I say.

  The hand holding the pistol falls to his side. He stares at us, speechless.

  Then I take hold of Claudia’s hand and together we walk into the West.

  Sabine

  As I cross the Tiergarten I notice that the first shoots of spring are starting to appear. It’s one month now since we made our escape through the tunnel and so much has changed.

  Mother has found a new job as a chamber maid at the Hotel Zoo and seems much more contented. Brigitta has started at a new school and is making friends. I will sit my Abitur in the summer and then I hope to go to university. Werner and Marion are going to be married in the summer and we are all invited to the wedding. Dieter and Claudia are very much in love. In fact, Harry has asked me out on a date. He’s a great guy, but I’m not sure he’s really my type.

  Rolf was released from his captivity in the bakery storeroom once Dieter and Claudia had made it safely through the tunnel. At first, he was in a furious state, shouting that he would denounce the whole lot of us. But when he heard that Astrid had been killed, he broke down and wept. It seems they knew each other from their camping trips with the Freie Deutsche Jugend. Maybe it was even Astrid who told him about the tunnel. I don’t know if Rolf returned to East Berlin. It would have been very difficult for him after the failure of his mission.

  I’ve been making enquiries at the refugee centre in Marienfelde, asking after Frau Fischer. I still have the photos of Hans and his father. The administrator at Marienfelde was reluctant to divulge any details at first, in case I was a Stasi spy, but when I explained my own escape through the tunnel and showed her the picture of Hans, she relented. It seems Hans has become something of a martyr to West Berliners. There is talk of erecting a memorial to him, on the West side of the Wall, near where he died. Frau Fischer is living in a quiet corner of Zehlendorf-Steglitz in south-west Berlin. I have set aside today to pay her a visit.

  I go into a flower shop and buy six red roses, each one a perfect specimen. Then I walk down to the River Spree which is part of the border between East and West Berlin. I can see the border guards on the other side. As I stand on the bank of the river I remember Herr Schiller, our friend who tried to save us; I remember Matthias and Joachim who took a stand and whose fate remains unknown; I remember Hans who was too impatient to get out; and I remember Astrid who gave her life to protect me. As I think about each one I toss a rose into the water and watch it float away on the current. I hope the border guards can see what I’m doing.

  Then I take the sixth rose and make my way to Frau Fischer’s.

  ~~~~

  Postscript

  The Berlin Wall stood for just over 28 years, from 13 August 1961 to 9 November 1989. During that time at least 136 people lost their lives trying to escape from East to West Berlin.

  Initially it consisted of coils of barbed wire. Then it became a solid wall, topped with barbed wire. Its final reincarnation was as a 3.6 metre high concrete barrier with a cylindrical top, making it virtually impossible to scale. An “inner” wall was constructed on the east side and the ground between the two walls became known as the “death strip”, a 100 metre wide stretch of land incorporating watchtowers, anti-tank defences, signal fencing, dogs and trip wires. It was raked with sand to make it easy to spot the footprints of any would-be escapees. Houses that lay within the death strip were demolished, such as those on the east side of Bernauer Strasse.

  A large section of the Wall has been preserved at Bernauer Strasse. Part of the former death strip has been landscaped over and there is a memorial to those who died.

  The Church of Reconciliation on Bernauer Strasse was blown up by the East Germans in 1985 because it obscured the border guards’ view of the death strip. Today a new memorial church has been built in its place. You can still see the outline of the old church marked with metal strips on the ground. The bent iron cross of the old church also lies on the ground.

  The former Stasi headquarters at Normannenstrasse is now a museum with detailed displays about life in the German Democratic Republic and the Stasi’s spying methods. In the entrance hall is a prisoner transporter van, like the one Sabine is transported in. They were often disguised as delivery vans. The Stasi remand prison at Hohenschönhausen (where Sabine is taken, although she doesn’t know where it is or what it is called) is now a memorial site with very moving and informative tours about the Stasi and its interrogation methods.

  West Berliners were not allowed to visit East Berlin until Christmas 1963 when they were allowed to apply for a visa for a short visit. It was not until 1971 that West Berliners were allowed to apply for visas in the same way as West Germans. Permission for East Berliners to travel west was almost impossible to obtain and was only granted in a few circumstances, such as to the elderly, or to those participating in cultural and sporting activities.

  By 1989 political changes were taking place in many Eastern Bloc countries. In August 1989 Hungary removed its physical border with Austria. As a result, thousands of East Germans escaped to Austria via Hungary. The Hungarians tried to prevent any more East Germans from crossing the border, but many East Germans took refuge in the West German embassy in Budapest. Similar events occurred at the West German embassy in Prague. Peaceful, mass demonstrations broke out in East Germany, notably in Leipzig and Berlin.

  To ease the situation, the East German Politburo decided to remove travel restrictions to West Berlin and West Germany. The new regulations were to take effect on 10th November, but at a press conference on 9th November Günter Schabowski, the spokesman for the party, who had not been fully briefed, announced that, as far as he was aware, the new regulations would come into force immediately. The press conference was broadcast on television. Thousands of East Berliners began gathering at the checkpoints along the wall. The guards, who were not aware of the broadcast, were confused. Thankfully no one fired a shot. The guard in charge at Bornholmer Strasse took the decision to open the crossing and thousands of East Berliners swarmed into West Berlin. The Berlin Wall was over.

  ~~~~

  Thank you for Reading

  I hope you enjoyed this book. If you did, then I would be very grateful if you would please take a moment to leave a short review at the retailer where you purchased it. Thank you.

  Also by Margarita Morris

  The Sleeping Angel

  Scarborough Fair

  Scarborough Ball

  Find Margarita Online

  Website: http://margaritamorris.com

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/MargaritaMorris

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/margaritamorrisauthor?ref=hl

  Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/margaritamorris/

  About the Author

  Margarita Morris was born in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. She studied Modern Languages at Jesus College, Ox
ford and worked in computing for eleven years. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and two sons.

  Acknowledgements

  I first visited Berlin in 1987 on a travel grant from Jesus College, Oxford, and for that I am extremely grateful. I am also indebted to my friend, Kristin, who showed me around and took me to East Berlin.

  Here is a list of the most useful books I consulted during my research:

  The Wall – The People’s Story by Christopher Hilton (2001)

  Stasiland – Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder (2003)

  The Lost World of Communism – An Oral History of Daily Life Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Molloy (2009)

  1989 The Berlin Wall – My Part in its Downfall by Peter Millar (2009)

  Der Tunnel in die Freiheit – Berlin, Bernauer Strasse by Ellen Sesta (2001)

  East Berlin by Dr. Eckart D. Stratenschulte, translated by Shiel Ross (1988)

  The File – A Personal History by Timothy Garton Ash (1997)

  I would like to thank my children for having the patience and maturity to visit lots of Berlin Wall sites during their summer holiday. But most of all I would like to thank my husband, Steve, for his unwavering support, dedication as a first reader, insightful and constructive comments, help with technology and willingness to rough it in youth hostels.

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