Let Me Whisper You My Story (9 page)

‘Heinrich, Friedrich, you weren’t in the cellar. Are you okay? And Gertrude too. Is she sick?’

I ran into the bedroom and hid under Freddy’s bed.

Freddy laughed as he told me later. ‘Opa opened the door a crack. It was that nosy woman from upstairs. He said, “Can I help it if my Freddy gets diarrhoea? We couldn’t get downstairs in time.”’

I laughed a silent laugh with him.

The next day, Freddy discovered that his school had been bombed. He ran home then took his grandparents to see the burnt-out remains of the school. No-one had been killed. He told me of the layers of broken desks, of
books turned to sawdust. How the portrait of Hitler had been split in two. He talked about the rubble in the streets, and how most of the windows in buildings had been blown out and there was glass everywhere.

I listened, without a lot of interest. I thought, so what if your school has burnt down? So what if you can’t go to Hitler Youth meetings anymore? So what if there’s broken glass on the streets? Now ordinary Germans are feeling the chill of winter. Now they know how it feels to really be at war.

My ears did prick up when he mentioned that the portrait of Hitler had been split in two. That was very good news and if I’d had a voice I would have cheered.

Friedrich tickled me. ‘Hey, Rachel, you must start talking. I need someone to talk to. I’m going mad.’

I held on to Mama’s scarf and smiled.

Hitler’s portrait was split in two. Ha ha. About time.

Freddy thought the smile was for him. He smiled back.

T
HROUGHOUT
1944, I watched the seasons change as buds formed slowly on a tree outside the window and birds nested in its branches. I saw fledglings grow and fly away. Freddy, having no-one else around, turned to me for company.

Gertrude cut down some of her own clothing to make me dresses. I wore Freddy’s socks. I was now eleven. I envied Freddy when he walked outside the building although he never went far. The streets of Leipzig were bomb targets and no-one felt safe.

It rained a lot in the summer and autumn and wind whipped up the dust of shattered bricks in the streets, the result of all the bombing. How cold was that winter. I wore layer upon layer of clothing and was still freezing. There was no coal for heating available anywhere. Were my parents all right? And Miri, and my aunt and cousins? Had they been reunited with Uncle Ernst? Were they all alive? When you see the images of people so clearly in your mind, they have to be alive, don’t they?

When his grandparents were asleep one night, Freddy woke me. He shook me gently by my shoulders. ‘Come, Rachel. Come outside. Be very quiet.’

I awoke confused, at first thinking it was another air-raid. The light was on, though flickering. There would probably be a blackout any time. Freddy already had his dressing gown on and tied up at the waist.

Was Freddy mad, I wondered. Outside? I didn’t know what it was like to go outside anymore. How long had it been? I clambered excitedly up from my bed on the floor and took a coat from the wardrobe to put on top of my long nightgown. Was it possible, after all this time, that I’d be outside the apartment?

Freddy opened the apartment door quietly and we crept down the wooden staircase, past the family living downstairs. Freddy occasionally turned to me, his finger held vertically over his lips.
Be quiet.
He seemed to have forgotten that I didn’t have a voice.

The building’s heavy front door groaned as he opened it. Outside the air smelt smoky. Across the street we could see the ruined skeletons of buildings. We sat on the narrow steps leading from the entrance to our building down to the street.

After being hidden for so long, I’d become used to being in a kind of tomb. The cold air bit me, heavy smoky air, but it was still outside air. Above me was a real sky, not viewed through a window.

People were about. A man in a horse-drawn open cart came by. The trotting of the horse’s hooves reminded me of my old fantasy of open fields. The cart was filled with something. A boot fell off the back and landed on
the road. I saw what looked like a bare foot sticking out from a covering as the cart went by.

Freddy put a thin arm around me. ‘The war must end soon. This cannot go on. Food rationing is getting worse. Oma cannot buy potatoes anymore, and there’s less bread. Even Hitler can’t keep us fed properly now.’ He did not say that I was eating their food.

Where are all the people going?
I gestured with my hands.

‘They don’t know where to go. Nobody knows where to go. There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere at all. We are trapped by ourselves.’

Trapped by ourselves.

I guessed he meant there was nowhere for Germans to go, in the same way that Jews had been trapped. I moved closer to him and sheltered in the crook of his arm.

We sat there breathing in the smoky air, watching people move around, the darkness broken by eerie light coming from fires in nearby streets. Later we crept upstairs and when I awoke in the morning, I could not be sure if it had been real or a dream.

Freddy was already up. ‘Don’t tell,’ he whispered to me as I sat at the kitchen table. I smiled. We had a secret, Freddy and I.

O
NE NIGHT THERE
was a knock on the door. It wasn’t the thumping of Gestapo boots but a timid knock. Gertrude pushed me quickly into the bedroom. I peeked through a crack in the door and listened.

The lady from upstairs was there. She was a small woman with short blonde hair. She was dressed in black, as if going to a funeral. Her sharp eyes darted around the apartment.

‘Could you spare some food for my mother? She is sick.’

‘We have no extra food,’ grumbled Heinrich. ‘We can hardly manage ourselves. Look at my grandson. Skin and bone.’

‘My mother is sick,’ the woman repeated. She lowered her voice. ‘Sometimes I hear you, Gertrude, talking about the war in a bad way. Don’t you know you can get into trouble for that? Be sent away? It makes me wonder about you. Are you listening to the British broadcasts? You know that’s illegal. And why is it that you don’t come to the cellar when the sirens go? What keeps you in your apartment instead of sheltering from the bombs?’

‘In this dreadful war, my arthritis plays up,’ Gertrude said quickly. ‘I cannot get down so many stairs and Heinrich and Freddy won’t leave me alone. Madam, you have some cheek, accusing me of not being patriotic. It makes me wonder about what you might have to hide.’

The woman held herself as tall as she could and said firmly, ‘I have lost my husband and son in this war. I accept it. So don’t talk to me about patriotism. Did I mention that my mother is sick?’

‘I have a little pea soup,’ Gertrude said slowly. ‘Mind you, I am doing this for your mother.’

There was a clanging of a saucepan lid in the kitchen then a pause in the conversation, and a stiffening of the
atmosphere within the room. Heinrich didn’t say a word. He stood with Freddy in front of him, quietly kneading Freddy’s thin shoulders, and stared at the woman.

The woman didn’t look at Heinrich. She took the bowl of pea soup and mumbled her thanks. The door was closed and Heinrich said quietly, but loud enough for me to hear, ‘Rachel doesn’t talk. You don’t rave on about Hitler. I think the old bag is bluffing. Everyone is turning everyone in to the Gestapo for an extra slice of bread. Tell me again, Gertrude, why do we save this child?’

‘For the day when we shall stand up and be counted. For the day when this is over and we shall know we stayed human throughout this time of horror.’

‘Human? Gertrude, there are things going on in this war that defy humanity.’

‘We can’t stop the war outside, Heinrich. But here, inside this apartment there is no war, and we shall stay human.’

Heinrich opened the door to the bedroom. His eyes twinkled. ‘You, Rachel, our special little troublemaker. You can come out now.’

I ran straight into his open arms.

A few nights later there was the thud of heavy boots storming up the stairs. There was shouting. Somewhere in the building a door was kicked in. I could hear the terrifying sound of guns. Rat-a-tat-tat. People screamed. I couldn’t stand it. I put my hands over my ears.

I hid in the wardrobe behind layers of clothing. I sniffed the smell coming from Freddy’s clothing and my own. I remembered my parents’ wardrobe and the joy of
being hidden there; the soft velvet darkness and the smell of their clothing, which was a security blanket for me. I’d lost track of time but it had to be nearly two years ago.

Freddy told me later, with a broad smile on his face, how, when there was a bang on our door, he had opened it despite his grandparents reaching out to stop him. A soldier had stood there, his gun raised.

‘You have a traitor living upstairs. He was hiding his Jewish girlfriend. What about this apartment? Is there anything unpatriotic going on here?’

Freddy, with his white-blond hair and cool blue eyes, raised his arm in a Nazi salute: ‘Heil Hitler.’

Time froze as Gertrude and Heinrich stood together in the middle of the room, Gertrude with a tea-towel in her hand, Heinrich with his head lowered, both barely breathing. The soldier hesitated for just a moment then leaned forward, ruffled Freddy’s white-blond hair, stared into his clear eyes, then stood to attention. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he saluted.

‘He looked for a moment,’ Freddy told me, ‘at my grandparents. His eyes ran over them, then back to me. How could he suspect my grandparents of anything? They are too old. He saluted me again, then turned and left.’

Freddy, why were you so brave after all you have said to me?

He guessed my unsaid question. ‘I took an awful chance,’ he said. ‘I could have been sent to one of those terrible places people whisper about if I’d been caught out. Lots of shocking things could have been done to
me if they’d found you. I thought about that, then I thought about them taking you away, you with that long silly scarf and your sister’s journal and no voice, being forced into a truck, and disappearing forever.’

He took a deep breath. ‘How could I let that happen? I need someone to boss around.’

F
REDDY TOLD ME
about himself. ‘My father is in Russia. He is a fighting man. My mother died when I was little. She’d been sick since she was a small girl. I don’t remember her, but I have a photograph. Here, look at this. You can see that she was beautiful and my father was good-looking too. It’s sad that I don’t remember her. Gertrude and Heinrich are her parents. They don’t like my father, maybe because my father believes in Hitler’s war. I miss my father sometimes, but war is war. Everyone has to make sacrifices.’ He turned away.

Sometimes Gertrude spoke in a low voice about the changing times. ‘Hitler cannot ignore this anymore. The war is lost. The bombs are coming from the Americans, the British, Russia and their friends. They will bomb Germany out of existence, but it will end the war. Meantime, we have to wait it out. There is nowhere to go.’

I thought about what Gertrude had said. Yes, bombs shattered lives, but the only way this war could end was with more bombs. It would take many Allied soldiers and bombs to stop Hitler’s evil.

Gertrude asked me many times to speak to her. Just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would do she said. I couldn’t. Papa would tell me when it was time to speak.

‘You are my small bird,’ Gertrude said. ‘One day you will be free and fly away somewhere, although I wonder where, for there seems to be no safe place for Jews.’

Freddy told Gertrude, ‘Rachel speaks to me in her way.’

There were grey hollows under his eyes and the bones on his cheeks stuck out now. He smiled at me. I knew that he had finally forgiven me for Jesus being Jewish.

O
NE DAY IN
1945 the bombs were never ending. We hid, hands linked, under the bed. Nobody knocked on our door anymore to ask us where we were when the bombs fell. It had reached the point where nobody worried about anyone other than their own family and themselves. The bombs were dropping without discrimination—a flash of light, a terrible noise, fire, smoke.

Then it happened. Our building was hit. The roof started caving in. We stumbled out from under the bed as the walls groaned and fell around us. There was dust and smoke everywhere. A heavy chair hit by a crumbling wall suddenly fell and pinned me to the floor.

Freddy called out, ‘Rachel, Rachel.’

He appeared through the smoke haze, coughing, and lifted the chair off me. Gertrude, limping and with a bloodied arm, found us. Coughing and crying, her face and hair bleached by white dust, she took our hands.

I couldn’t leave yet. I had to find Mama’s longest scarf in the world and Miri’s journal.

‘Come, Rachel. The building will collapse,’ Gertrude begged.

I looked around. I pushed away Freddy’s hand. Ah yes, there was the scarf, sticking out from under a section of caved-in ceiling, chalk coloured from broken plaster.

‘Let it go, Rachel,’ Freddy called out. ‘We’ll be killed.’

I couldn’t. I grabbed on to the scarf, pulling it out from the rubble. Miri’s journal? It was all I had of her. Wasn’t that it, poking out from a fallen beam? Freddy pushed me safely away as I picked it up just before the remaining ceiling groaned and fell around us and coated us in plaster.

Where was Heinrich? He must have gone on ahead of us.

The three of us stumbled to the broken door and then crawled down the cracked staircase. As we reached the bottom other people joined us—mothers and children, old men in singlets and pants. A child stopped to pick up a doll she’d dropped on the landing. She opened her mouth and stared at me.

‘Hurry, hurry,’ her mother said, and the child grabbed her doll and ran ahead.

I had a doll once too, but I had to leave her behind.

The woman from the upstairs apartment glanced at me with complete disinterest as we crushed against one another, everyone trying to get out of the building.

The smoke thickened. Gertrude said she hoped the rotting wood would hold as we stumbled to the front door. I was both terrified and fascinated by the sea of
people around me. I hadn’t been with others for so long, it seemed strange. Nobody cared about me. Someone tripped on a child’s shoe and cursed.

‘Mr Heinz,’ Gertrude said. ‘I would be obliged if you would stop shoving me. You only make things worse.’

‘We are going to die in here if you don’t move quickly,’ he replied. ‘Move, move, move. You children, you have young legs. Get out of here.
Move
.’

The front door was split open like a gaping wound.

We pushed our way through it, scrambling into a night which was made bright by fire. ‘Opa?’ said Freddy, pulling at Gertrude’s coat. ‘Where is he?’

‘I am going back for him,’ said Gertrude, her hand on her throat as she gasped for breath. ‘He was hurt. He told me to get you children out first. Here, hold this.’

She handed me a frying pan. Mama’s frying pan. It was covered with dust. Why had she taken it from the rubble?

Suddenly there was an almighty roar followed by the collapse of the building. Everyone scrambled onto the road, across the road, anywhere, everywhere. Walls, bricks, wood and tiles thundered and fell around us.

Gertrude stumbled back. As we all grouped, trembling, in rubble near the skeleton of a building opposite, Friedrich stared back at what had been his home—at the blazing fire and ruin. He wiped blood from his nose with the back of his hand.

‘Heinrich?’ Gertrude called into the smoke around her. ‘Heinrich?’ she asked the heavy fingers of fire burning where we had once lived.

Freddy coughed, then vomited his insides out. Poor Freddy.

I know what it feels like, I wanted to say to him, to have someone you love taken from you.

Cut off from everything but his own grief, Freddy buried his head in his hands and his shoulders heaved as he cried for the grandfather he wouldn’t see again.

All around us people limped, ran, hobbled and stumbled, although no-one seemed to know where to go. We, too, wandered aimlessly. Finally we took shelter in a building left standing, not just standing but with every room untouched by shells.

I am just like everyone else now, I thought. Nobody looks twice at me. I am just another child caught in war, looking for food and shelter. I am no longer hidden, yet it seems to me all of us here are hiding from some bigger monster.

And then they came—the men in tanks and jeeps rolled down the streets. The soldiers in them wore different uniforms, but they were still soldiers.

People gathered outside the broken buildings. A trickle of bewildered men and women seeped out of our building, and then more poured out when it seemed safe. There were no gunshots. Gertrude, Freddy and I stood beside the rubble and watched the soldiers.

‘Are they Americans or Russians?’ someone asked.

‘Americans,’ someone else answered, ‘but the Russians are close by too.’

Were they going to round us up and kill us? It was so long since I’d felt safe that I could only look at the soldiers suspiciously. I reminded myself that these soldiers
had come to fight Hitler, not to support him. Hitler’s enemy had to be our friends.

The soldiers stared at the people and the shattered buildings. The people stared back. One man waved his fist at them, but mostly people just stood there, wondering what was going to happen next. There was nothing to say. But my mind was racing. Was the war over? Could my family come home now? Where was home? All I could see were destroyed buildings and dust and the glass of broken windows.

The soldiers didn’t look unfriendly or even frightening. One child waved to them. A soldier in a jeep waved back, smiling. The mother of the child pulled him away, and they disappeared into the crowd.

Freddy looked uncertainly at these new soldiers in their jeeps and trucks, and put his arm around me. He was the man of the family now. I clutched Miri’s dusty journal and held on tightly to the world’s longest scarf.