She’d been dreading seeing him off. Not because she was sorry he was going. If anything, she was relieved. The newsreel of his boot connecting with the man’s head while he counted off family dead was still playing in her mind. It got uglier each time. She wanted to stop seeing it. She wanted to stop seeing him. That was the problem. She was afraid her eagerness to say goodbye would wound him. She was even more afraid saying goodbye in the Anhalter Bahnhof would undo her.
She’d managed to avoid the station since she’d returned to Berlin. It hadn’t been difficult. The building was in ruins, much of it still flooded, and no trains had been running until recently. Now, as she and Theo made their way through the exposed girders of what used to be an impressive public building, a cold drizzle fell on the rubble. She’d steeled herself for the tattoo of her heels on the marble floor, the echo of her mother’s years ago. Her footsteps made no sound in the dirt. She’d girded herself against the ghosts of the crowd rushing beneath the soaring roof, but there was neither roof nor crowd beneath, only a handful of travelers and several beggars, some of them missing arms or legs. That part was unchanged. There had been beggars then too, maimed and wounded in a different war.
She and Theo stood on the platform, uneasy in each other’s presence and their own skins. He’d sensed the change in her. But neither of them could admit it. They promised to write. They made vague plans to meet. They tried to hide their discomfort at the long goodbye and their eagerness for it to be over.
Then suddenly it was. She turned and started back down the platform, moving at a brisk clip. She refused to be intimidated. She stepped through the charred remains of what used to be the door to the interior of the station. Her breath caught in her throat. She stopped, inhaled, exhaled, a second time, a third. That was better. She began walking again. That was when she noticed the people, first only a handful, then a crowd, then an onslaught bearing down on her. She stopped, leaned against a girder, and closed her eyes. She must be imagining things. Fifteen minutes earlier the station had been almost empty. She opened her eyes. The crowds were still coming. Men were pushing, and women were rushing, and children were struggling to keep up. She was trying to dodge them, but each time she moved one way to avoid collision, she managed to crash into someone else. She was running now, the charred ruins swirling around her, the broken floor shifting beneath her feet. Suddenly the ground came up to meet her, and her head shuddered with the blow.
* * *
An air of hysteria hung over the waiting room, shrill and ugly as the black swastikas on red and white buntings that snapped in the wind whipping through the station. People raced for trains, trailed by porters laden with luggage. Others hurried in the opposite direction toward the throbbing city that beckoned beyond the exits. Men in fedoras and homburgs marched to the beat of a new Germany, scrubbed clean by Hitler and his henchmen of the shame of defeat. Women in calf-grazing skirts and slouch-brimmed hats hurried toward shops and cafés and assignations. Soldiers strutted in their uniforms, demilitarization a bad joke they could laugh at now. Boys in short-panted imitations of the uniforms danced in their wake. There were beggars, there are always beggars, war-wounded veterans dragging maimed bodies and hopping on crutches and propelling themselves on wagons, every one of them with an old field cap held out for contributions. Announcements of arrivals and departures boosted the noise to cacophony.
“Schnell,” her father called above the noise. “Hurry,” he added in the language he was rushing toward. He was careful to avert his eyes from the soldiers who strode by, though the Iron Cross was heavy in his breast pocket. They had no need for porters. Each of them carried a single suitcase, or rather three of them did. Her father clutched two, his own and Sarah’s. They held their own passports too, each stamped with a large J for Juden and the words Gut nur für Auswanderung. This dividing up of things was unprecedented. On family holidays, their father always carried everything, passports, money, even maps. He’d never trusted anyone else with them.
They made their way, fought their way really, through the crowd, her father leading the way with the two suitcases, her mother holding Sarah’s hand, Meike and David keeping close behind them. Every now and then, her mother turned to make sure they were there. Once when two soldiers came between her parents and Sarah in front and David and her behind and their mother lost sight of them, she stopped dead. “Schnell,” her father barked, and Meike and David snaked around the soldiers and caught up with them.
The long wooden benches in the waiting room were crowded with travelers. Her father found space at one end for her mother and Sarah. After a few minutes, another train was announced and the man sitting beside her mother stood, picked up his suitcase, and headed toward the platform. Their father gestured to Meike to take the seat. She shook her head. She could see the mustache of perspiration on her father’s face, despite the cold air blowing through the entrances to the station.
“You take it, Papa. David and I are fine here.”
They went on standing against the wall, their suitcases at their feet. A few minutes later, another train was announced. The man beside her father remained where he was, but the couple on the other side of the man stood and moved off. Some people would have noticed they were a family and slid down to let them sit together, but this man didn’t seem to. He was too engrossed in his newspaper. It was the Völkischer Beobachter.
“Should I ask him to move?” David whispered.
“Don’t look for trouble,” Meike said, and they took the two seats at one remove from Mama and Papa and Sarah.
Eighteen
The MPs on duty in the Anhalter Bahnhof took her to the 279th Station Hospital on the Unter den Eichen. A year ago the beds had been filled with the wounded heroes of the Thousand-Year Reich, the Waffen-SS. Now American doctors and nurses like her friend Mary Jo were treating American GIs and German civilians. She insisted she didn’t need medical care. She certainly didn’t need a hospital. She’d tripped over some rubble. The most serious wound was to a new pair of nylons. She showed the MPs the holes in her stockings. She was hoping her legs, not in a class with Betty Grable’s but passable all the same, would do the trick. The MPs took in her legs but were adamant. The doctor was too.
“I’m fine,” she told him after he’d examined her.
“Have you ever heard the word concussion?” he asked and told her he was sorry, but those were the rules. He couldn’t release her on her own. Someone had to come for her.
Her first thought was Anna, but the week before, she and Elke had moved into a small flat of their own, without Frau Kneff. They’d been lucky to get the apartment. A telephone was out of the question.
She called David’s office. The woman who answered the phone said he was at Schlachtensee.
“You see what I mean,” Millie told the nurse. “Schlachtensee is handling the arrival, medical examinations, and delousing of two hundred displaced persons a day,” she quoted David’s figures, “and you won’t let a woman with holes in her stockings leave on her own reconnaissance.”
“Those are the rules,” the nurse echoed the doctor.
“I have a friend, a nurse here, Mary Jo Johnson.”
“I know Mary Jo,” the nurse said. “She’s on duty in the wards now.”
Millie had the feeling the mention of being on duty in the wards was intended to shame her. It succeeded. She had no choice but to call her office. Fraulein Weber answered the phone. At least it wasn’t Schmidt. Sullenness was preferable to gloating. She asked to talk to Captain Kahn, Captain Craig, or even Captain Shirley. Fraulein Weber said they were all in interviews and managed to sound as if Millie had some nerve asking. She explained that she was calling from the 279th Station Hospital on the Unter den Eichen. Weber didn’t say anything to that.
“I need someone to sign me out,” Millie went on. “I’m really fine, but apparently that’s Army regulations.” Another silence from Fraulein Weber. “Please tell Captain Kahn or Captain Craig or Captain Shirley when they finish
their interviews.”
Harry Sutton turned up twenty minutes later.
“I’m sorry,” she said as soon as he walked through the door, “but the doctor wouldn’t release me on my own.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. That’s why all this is so silly. I tripped in the Anhalter Bahnhof.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m absolutely fine. The only casualty is a new pair of nylons.” This time she didn’t demonstrate the damage.
He raised his eyebrows. “I grant you the Occupation is a bureaucratic mess, but people don’t usually get taken to the hospital for a simple fall and torn stockings.” He turned to the nurse and held out his hand for the papers. “I’m the commanding officer.”
The nurse gave him the papers. He stood looking down at them, then lifted his eyes to her. “This says you fainted. There’s also something about a possible concussion.”
“I did not faint,” she insisted. “I tripped.”
“If that’s your story you stick to it.” He put the file down on the desk, bent over the release, and began to sign it. Suddenly his head snapped up. “Are you sure? No other symptoms?”
It took her a moment to catch on. She wished the floor would open up and swallow her. No, she wished it would swallow him. “Damn it, Harry, it’s been twelve days. Symptoms, as you so delicately call them, do not turn up in twelve days.” At least she didn’t think they did. She had no firsthand experience. But his insinuation infuriated her.
He went back to signing the release papers, but now he was smiling. “Nice to know you found the night so memorable that you’re measuring time by it,” he said under his breath.
He really was a bastard.
She didn’t look at him as they went down the steps of the hospital and past the bullet-pocked façade to the street where Private Meer was waiting in the jeep, but she could tell he was still smiling.
When they pulled up in front of the building on Riemeisterstrasse, he glanced at his watch, then told Meer not to wait.
“I’m fine,” Millie insisted.
“The order was to see you home. Besides, it’s too late to go back to the office.” He followed her up the stairs and into the apartment.
“I’m home now. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He walked past her into the parlor and sat on the sofa, staring at the breakfront. “That’s quite a piece.”
“Confiscated goods.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“My mother—” She stopped. “Look around you. The place reeks of kleinbürgerlich stolidity. Except for that. It stands out like a sore, or rather a gorgeous, thumb.”
“Maybe it’s a fake.”
“That’s what the woman tried to tell me when I requisitioned the place. It’s the real thing.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Bryn Mawr art history?”
“Something like that.”
He leaned back and looked from the breakfront to her. “Do you want to tell me what happened to make you faint in the station? I’m not asking for personal reasons. We’ve established that. But I’m supposed to be concerned about the physical and mental health of my staff.”
“I told you. I keep telling everyone. I stumbled on a piece of rubble. For all I know, some Trümmerfrau left it there intentionally to trip up an unsuspecting Jew.”
He went on staring at her for a moment. “The fall may not have hurt you, but you’ve contracted the disease.”
“What disease?”
“Hatred.”
She looked away, then back. “I’m sorry I can’t be as forgiving as you.”
“I’m not forgiving.”
“Then what do you call it?”
“Uncertain.”
“Of which Germans deserve clearance and which don’t?”
“Of myself. Of what I would have done under the circumstances.” He hesitated. “Of what I did under the circumstances.”
The statement surprised her. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. That’s the point. That’s what most of us, Jews as well as Germans, were guilty of. Turning away. Averting our eyes. And each time we did, the next time became easier. The other side of the coin of the Nazi laws. They persecuted in increments. First Jews couldn’t intermarry, then they couldn’t go to school, then they couldn’t own anything. And each time we said, oh, this isn’t so bad. We can live with this. We can wait it out. We’re accustomed to waiting it out. We’re Jews. Just be patient and mind your own business. For me it started in the schoolyard. My third year at the Gymnasium. That just happened to coincide with Hitler’s first year in power. One of the boys had got sick. Shades of the incident with you and the soap. The teacher on duty in the yard that day taught racial history. I can still see him stomping around in that bloody Nazi uniform as if he was on parade. There was one other Jewish boy in the class. A sad kid really. He’d had polio and wore a brace on one leg. I wasn’t particularly nice to him. It was hard enough being a Jew. I didn’t want to be the Jew who was the only friend of the crippled Jew. The Nazi told him to clean up the mess, though he’d had nothing to do with causing it. I drifted to the other side of the yard. I didn’t want to be anywhere near what I knew had to end badly. What was already ugly. But that didn’t stop me from keeping an eye on it. I can still see the boy, his bad leg dragging behind him, as the teacher hauled him to the spot. Another boy followed them. Unlike me, he had a spine. He started to help the crippled boy. The teacher was a big bruiser. The slap to the back of the boy’s head sent him sprawling into the vomit. Then he did the same to the boy with the brace. ‘I ordered the Jew to clean it up,’ he barked, ‘and the Jew will clean it up.’”
“None of that was your fault. You didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly my point. All that was necessary was not doing anything. That’s what a lot of the people we interrogate are guilty of.”
“What of the ones who did do something? The ones who committed crimes or at least offenses?”
“I have a feeling we’re not talking about the people we interrogate.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Come on, Millie. What did you do? Turn in Jews? Cavort with Nazis?”
She still didn’t answer.
“I don’t know what made you faint in the station this afternoon—”
“I keep telling you, I didn’t faint.”
He held up his right hand, palm toward her. “Okay, what you were running away from so fast that you fell, but I’ll put money on the fact that it was more than Nazi ghosts.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”
“Why are you really here, Millie? And don’t give me that song and dance about all those Fragebogen that need to be translated or how grateful you are to Uncle Sam for taking in you and your brother.”
She was silent again.
“I haven’t given you a copy of Der Weg in weeks, but I keep seeing it on your desk.”
“You can’t blame someone for hoping.”
“You’re right, you can’t. But I have a feeling it’s more than that.”
“Your feeling is wrong.” She stood. “But thanks for springing me from the hospital all the same.” She started for the door.
He stood and followed her. When they reached it, she turned and held out her hand. “I mean that. Really. I’m grateful.”
He took her hand. “The world hasn’t seen this much comity since Elbe Day.” He went on holding her hand. “Except if I remember correctly, in the photograph of the American captain and his Russian counterpart meeting beside the Elbe, the two soldiers had their arms around each other.”
“Everyone knows that picture was staged for the press. And the last thing we need is a replay of that night in your apartment.” She withdrew her hand. “All the same, I’m grateful.”
* * *
A few days later, Mary Jo stopped by Millie’s office and asked if she’d like to have lunch. Mary Jo didn’t
go on duty until that evening. They walked a few blocks to a large mess with a smaller lounge that was so thoroughly Americanized Millie felt as if she were stepping into Schrafft’s back in Philadelphia.
“I hear you fainted in the Anhalter Bahnhof.”
“What did the MPs do, send out an all-points alert? I didn’t faint. I tripped on some debris.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. But how did you find out about it?”
“You mentioned my name to the nurse.”
She’d forgotten that. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I wish I could have helped.”
“Thanks. But I’m fine now,” Millie repeated.
“Dr. Pinsky said he was concerned about a concussion.”
“Who’s Dr. Pinsky?”
“The doctor who examined you.”
“I know this is the Army, but is my medical record an open book?”
“After the nurse said you’d asked for me, I told him we were friends.”
“And that was all it took?”
Mary Jo’s smile gave her away. That and the deepening of the freckles on her nose and cheeks.
“Dr. Pinsky is the doctor you’ve been seeing?”
The freckles flared more brightly. “Did you like him?”
“I’m sure he’s very nice, though I suspect I didn’t see him at his best. Or maybe it was only that he didn’t see me at my best. Can I ask how serious this is?”
“He’s talking about marriage.”
“Wow. Dr. Pinsky is a fast worker.”
“Only I’m not sure.”
“Judging from that blush, you look pretty sure to me.”
“Oh, I’m sure of the way I feel. And I think I’m sure of the way he feels.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Millie asked, though she was beginning to have an inkling.
The Living and the Lost Page 20