Potsdam Station (34 page)

He had chosen the Waisenbrücke as the least likely bridge to be guarded, but there was a checkpoint at the western end. It was manned by regular military police, and there seemed a good chance that the Reichsbahn uniform would limit any expression of official disapproval to simple refusal. He decided to risk it, and was amply rewarded – once he told them he was on his way to police headquarters they simply waved him across.

It took him only ten minutes to discover the reason for their benevo-lence. There were SS-manned checkpoints on all the exits from Alexanderplatz, and these were in the business of gathering volunteers. Spotted before he had the chance to gracefully withdraw, Russell reluctantly presented himself for inspection. His claim of urgent business with the police was answered with the gift of a spade and a finger pointing him down Neue König Strasse. An incipient protest died in his throat as he caught sight of the corpse a few metres away. There was a bullet hole in the forehead, and the Russians weren’t that close.

He got a glimpse of a battered but still-standing ‘Alex’ as he crossed the square, but that was all. He spent the morning digging gun emplacements in gardens off Neue König Strasse, the afternoon helping to build a barricade with two trams and several cart-loads of rubble. Apart from a few careless strays like himself, the workforce was made up of
Hitlerjugend
and
Volkssturm
, the former painfully enthusiastic, the latter replete with sullen misery. They were reinforced in the afternoon by a posse of Russian women prisoners, all wearing pretty headscarves, all barefoot. It rained most of the time, drenching everyone but the SS supervisors, who strode around holding umbrellas. Their uniforms were astonishingly immaculate, their boots the only shiny footwear left in Berlin, but there was a brittleness in their voices, the hysterical stillness of a trapped animal in their eyes. They were living on borrowed time, and they knew it.

Late in the afternoon a sad-looking horse slowly clip-clopped into view with a mobile canteen in tow. Even the Russian women were given tin cups of soup and a chunk of bread, and Russell noticed one of them surreptitiously feeding the horse. He had no idea what the soup was made of, but it tasted wonderful.

The canteen moved on, and everyone went back to work. An hour or so later, their task completed, Russell’s team stood around awaiting instructions. But the senior SS officers had vanished, and their subordinates seemed uncertain of what came next. Without the noise of their own labours to mask them, the sounds of battle seemed appreciably closer. The machine-gun fire was no more than a kilometre away, the boom of tank cannons maybe even closer.

‘They’ll be giving us rifles soon,’ one of Russell’s fellow-strays remarked. He looked about sixty-five, and far from pleased at the prospect of battle.

‘That would be good news,’ an even older man told him. ‘Most likely they’ll put us with the
Volkssturm
and tell us to use their guns once they’ve been killed.’

As it began to grow dark, Russell gave serious consideration to walking away. But how far would he get? There were still SS in sight, and no doubt others around the next corner. The corpse by the checkpoint was still vivid in his memory. But waiting for the Red Army with a bunch of rocket-bearing children and a handful of geriatrics armed with First War rifles seemed no less life-threatening. When the light was gone, he told himself. Then he would make a run for it.

It was almost gone when an argument broke out further down the street between SS and army officers. ‘I’m off,’ one of Russel ’s fellow-workers muttered. He stepped out of the emplacement they had dug that morning, and strode calmly off in the direction of the nearest street corner.

No one seemed to notice him, and within seconds the darkness had swallowed him up.

Russell followed his example. No shouts pursued him either, and soon he was jogging down an empty side street towards Prenzlauer Strasse. This was barricaded in the direction of the river, so he continued north-westward, searching for an unguarded route back into the Old Town. Several adjacent houses were burning in one such street, a crowd of people apparently watching. He joined it surreptitiously, and realised that an effort was underway to rescue people trapped in an upper storey. Curiosity kept him watching for a few moments, until he realised he was being stupid. He slipped on down the street, and eventually recognised the silhouette of the elevated S-Bahn. He was just heading under the bridge when he had the idea of climbing up – he still had to get over the river and there wouldn’t be a checkpoint on a railway crossing.

He followed the viaduct until he found a maintenance stairway, managed to scramble over the gate, and laboriously hauled himself up to the tracks. He was two or three hundred metres east of Börse Station. Feeling every one of his forty-five years, he began walking westwards between the two tracks.

It was an eerie experience. Berlin was spread out all around him, a dark field in which a thousand fires seemed to be burning. As Leissner had said, the Soviet encirclement was almost complete – only a small arc to the west seemed free of intermittent explosions and tracer ribbons.

He walked on, through the dark and silent Börse Station, past the stock exchange building after which it was named, and out over the first arm of the Spree. As he stopped in mid-bridge, drawn by the terrible beauty of the fire-lit river, something let loose an unearthly screech in the distance. It sounded like one of the Zoo’s big cats, which it probably was. It would be more of a miracle if their cages were still intact.

A little further on, the railway viaduct had taken a recent hit, and the whole structure seemed to sway alarmingly as he inched his way along one edge. The adjacent museum was also badly damaged, but the barracks on the other side of the river’s second channel seemed simply empty. A few kilometres to the north a fierce night battle seemed to be taking place. The distance and direction suggested the area around Wedding Station, where he’d stepped from the train less than thirty-six hours ago.

Another ten minutes and he was walking across the bridge into Friedrichstrasse Station, his feet crunching through broken glass from the now skeletal roof. Standing alone in the dark and cavernous ruin, he felt, almost for the first time, the enormity of what had been done to his city. Of what was still being done.

He took the glass-strewn steps to street level, then descended further to the noisier realm below ground. Once again he heard music somewhere in the underworld, this time a lone trumpeter blowing the melody of a Billie Holiday song. He wended his way down the crowded platforms and disappeared into the familiar tunnel, the words of the song playing on his lips: 

The world was bright when you loved me,

sweet was the touch of your lips;

the world went dark when you left me,

and then there came a total eclipse.

He had escaped a pointless death defending Alexanderplatz from the Russians, but that was all. He had come to find Effi, and in that he had failed. There was no one else to ask for help, nowhere else he could go. It would only take the Red Army a couple more days to roll over the last pockets of resistance, and then he would have to trust to Nikoladze’s gratitude. Some hope.

The hospital trains were still parked in the darkness – where could they go? – but the sounds of lamentation seemed more restrained. There was no nurse sat on a step, but as he walked past he saw one cadaverous face up above him, pressed tight against a window, staring out at the tunnel wall.

Back in the abandoned station, he found Varennikov reading his novel by candlelight. The Russian looked up. ‘Someone came to see you,’ he said. ‘A German comrade named Ströhm. He said he’d come back tomorrow.’

It was five in the morning, and the men in Paul’s unit were readying themselves and their weapons for the expected dawn attack. Some were writing their wills, some last notes to their loved ones, some a combination of the two. Most had done so many times before, littering Russia and Poland with their urgent scribbles.

They all looked depressed, especially those who’d been drinking the night before. Paul had never really taken to alcohol, and imbibing large quantities of the stuff on the eve of battle seemed less than clever – why dull the reflexes that your life might depend on? And he could also hear his father telling him not to ‘turn off’, to live with it, learn from it. If he did survive this, and he ever got to speak to his father again, he would take great pleasure in asking him what more there was to learn from this, once you’d realised that human stupidity was a bottomless pit.

On the previous evening a couple of idiots from the Propaganda Ministry had turned up out of the blue. One had a roll of posters under his arm, the other a hammer and a pocket full of tacks, and between them they had solemnly pinned their boss’s latest message – ‘The darkest hour is just before the dawn’ – to a wall. They had offered the unit a ‘hope-that-helps’ look before moving on in search of another grateful audience.

It was hard to believe, but there was the poster, waiting for a shell to contradict it.

It was all over – any fool could see it. Here they were, waiting to die in defence of the Teltowkanal, when the enemy was already across it in the south-western suburbs. The Russians were in Dahlem, someone had said. Any day now they’d be camping out in his own bedroom.

Would they ever go home again? He supposed they would. Armies always had.

He felt frightened, which was no surprise. At the beginning, first as a
flakhelfer
and then on the Eastern Front, he had half expected that the fear would diminish, that he would gradually become immune. But it had never happened. Your body just learned to ignore your mind. His first
katyusha
attack, he had crapped himself almost instantly, and felt terribly ashamed. But no one had laughed at him. They’d all done it, sometime or another. These days he still felt a loosening, but that was all. Progress. You went with the fear rather than under it. He liked that. Maybe he would become a psychiatrist after the war. There’d be quite a demand.

When Stefan Leissner came to see them on the following morning, he brought Gerhard Ströhm with him. Both were wearing Reichsbahn uniforms, but Ströhm’s had none of the braids and fancy epaulettes, only the sewn-on badge below each shoulder, the eagle and swastika motif above ‘RBD Berlin’. His hair was shorter, the moustache gone, and he no longer resembled the young Stalin. He looked ten years older than the man Russell had known four years earlier.

There was no obvious friction between the two German communists, but he sensed that they didn’t have much time for each other. Ströhm deferred to Leissner, who was presumably his Reichsbahn superior, but their relative positions in the Party hierarchy might well be different. From what Russell had seen of them – which admittedly wasn’t much – their different temperaments reflected very different ways of looking at the world. Leissner, he suspected, would have no trouble working with the Soviets, whereas Ströhm probably would.

‘I understand you are an old friend of Comrade Ströhm,’ Leissner said to Russell, sounding less than thrilled. ‘You can catch up on old times in a moment, but first I must give you an update on our advance.’

It was much as Russell expected. The city’s encirclement had been completed on the previous evening, and Soviet forces were pushing steadily in toward the centre from all directions. That morning a battle was raging along the Teltowkanal, only four kilometres away.

‘Tomorrow they should be here,’ Leissner said with barely suppressed excitement. ‘The following day at the latest.’

He departed, leaving Ströhm with them.

‘It’s really good to see you,’ Russell said. ‘I must admit, I assumed you were dead.’

‘Not yet,’ Ströhm said wryly, walking over to embrace him. ‘It’s good to see you too. A welcome surprise. I won’t ask how you got here – or why – I gather it’s not a subject for discussion…’

‘According to Comrade Leissner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to upset him. But I would like to know how you escaped the Gestapo in 1941. We were told in Stettin that the whole Berlin network had been arrested.’

‘Most, but not all. A few were saved. Like myself.’

‘How?’

‘In the usual way. The Gestapo got careless – in one case they applied too much pressure and the comrade died, in another they gave the comrade a chance to take his own life. And those two deaths cut the only links to several cells, mine included.’

Ströhm’s recitation of tragedy was as matter-of-fact as ever. He had initiated their relationship in 1941, in the hope that Russell, as an American journalist, could somehow get news of the accelerating Holocaust to the outside world. Together they had witnessed the first steps of the process, the trains loading up under cover of darkness, at several different Berlin yards. Ströhm’s passionate concern for the Jews was personal – his Jewish girlfriend had been murdered by stormtroopers – but Russell had always known that the man was a communist, and when he and Effi needed to flee Berlin, Ströhm was the man he had turned to. Ströhm had taken the matter to his comrades, and they had arranged the first leg of his eventually successful escape.