Potsdam Station (36 page)

The familiar keening turned into the familiar scream, and for one dreadful second Effi thought she’d managed to kill them both. But the shell hit a building on the far side of the square, starting an avalanche of masonry and igniting a furnace within.

What people had built, people destroyed, and would no doubt build again. She felt weighed down by the utter pointlessness of it all.

She knew they should go back down, but stubbornly put off the moment. One semi-delirious soldier had recognised her that afternoon, but the doctor had cheerfully put him right. Her acceptance as an Effi Koenen look-alike felt rather strange, but everyone knew that fugitive film stars avoided working in underground hospitals.

Rosa snuggled up to her. ‘Is everyone going to die?’ she asked, matter-of-factly.

‘Not in this war,’ Effi told her. ‘Everyone does eventually, but I think you and I are going to have really long lives.’

‘How long is a long life?’

‘Well, according to the Bible, God thinks we should get at least three score years and ten – which is seventy. So let’s add another thirty for good luck, and live to be a hundred.’

Rosa digested that in silence for a few moments. ‘Is God hiding in a shelter until it’s over?’ she asked. ‘Like us?’

It was a long night. A storm raged in the early hours, adding thunder, lightning and pelting rain to the sporadic Soviet artillery fire, but it all passed over, and by five o’clock there was only smoke to blur the heavens, and a huge red moon seeking shelter behind the western horizon. Dawn brought the usual bombardment, but once again the Soviet artillery and air force seemed fixated on the city centre.

Paul was hunkered down in his unit’s emplacement on the north-eastern corner of the Tempelhof field, reading a copy of the
Panzerbär
newsletter that Goebbels had introduced in place of newspapers, and trying to ignore the bombers droning overhead. ‘We are holding on!’ the headline claimed, but, as an announcement further down the page made obvious, some believed otherwise. Those who hoisted white flags of surrender from their window would be dealt with as traitors, the propaganda minister promised, and so would all the other occupants of their building.

After exactly sixty minutes – the Soviets, sloppy in so many ways, were remarkably precise when it came to timing their bombardments – the artillery barrage abruptly died away. Another ten minutes and they could expect to see the armour creeping forward across the smoke-laden field, supported by the usual hordes of infantry. With only eleven shells remaining, it felt like the Seelow Heights all over again, only this time there seemed no point in destroying the gun – by the time the Soviets lifted it out of its emplacement the war would be over.

There was little point in firing it at all, in Paul’s estimation, but little point in saying so either. He scrambled to his feet just as an SS Hauptsturmführer with one arm in a bloodstained sling loomed over their trench asking for a volunteer. There was a job needed doing on the roof of the terminal building.

‘You go,’ the sergeant ordered Paul.

Cursing inwardly, Paul followed the Hauptsturmführer across the tarmac and around behind the huge concrete edifice. A fire escape zigzagged up the side of the buildings, and Paul spent most of the long climb wondering what the officer needed him for.

He soon found out. Once they reached the huge flat roof, the officer unfolded the map he was carrying, carefully laid it out on the ground, and asked Paul to stand, legs spread, with a foot on each of two corners. He stood on the other two, and began scanning the surrounding city through his binoculars.

Paul resisted the temptation to point out that a couple of chunks of masonry could have done the same job – SS Hauptsturmführers were notoriously unwilling to take criticism. Every now and then his companion would lower the binoculars, fall to one knee, and scrawl lines across the map with a piece of pink chalk. Watching him work, Paul decided he must be plotting the latest Russian advances.

It wasn’t so easy to do. The flash and peal of cannonades and explosions were coming from every direction, but only a few of these could be attributed to actual fire-fights on the ground. Away to the east, on the far side of the aerodrome, one such battle was underway in Neukölln – Paul could hear the distinctive sound of tank fire, and the faint rattle of ma-chine-gun fire. The same was true to the south-west, where a battle was raging on their side of the S-Bahn. On the airfield itself German forces were still dug in to the north of the main runway, but their resistance would serve no purpose if the Soviets bypassed Tempelhof to both east and west.

A loud explosion turned both their heads round. Two kilometres to the east a vast cloud of smoke and dust was rising into the sky. As it cleared, it became apparent that the huge Karstadt department store was no longer there. The SS had done what they promised, and Paul’s companion duly grunted his pleasure.

The view to the north was presumably less to his taste – following the morning air raid most of the centre seemed to be on fire. The blessed Führer was somewhere under that lot, no doubt safe and sound in a concrete bunker. Paul wondered how Hitler’s morning was going. Surely he must realise it was all over – for all his increasingly apparent faults, the man was not stupid. But if he did, then why were they fighting on? Did his own troops’ lives mean nothing to him? That was hard to believe after all they’d been told of his First War experiences, but what other explanation could there be?

‘You can take your feet off now,’ the Hauptsturmführer said, breaking into his reverie. The SS officer folded his map back up, took one last look round, and headed for the fire escape. Paul followed with some reluctance. On the way up he had expected to feel appallingly vulnerable on the flat roof, but no plane had swooped down on them with machine-guns blazing, and a wonderfully deluded sense of being above the fray had slowly come over him. Now, each step down felt a little closer to hell.

It proved an accurate assessment. They were just rounding the corner of the building when incoming
katyushas
started ploughing a wide path towards them. The Hauptsturmführer ran for the nearest door, and, for want of anything better, Paul followed in his wake. There was nothing to open – the door had already been torn off its hinges – and a down staircase offered sanctuary on the far side of the lobby. By the time the rockets crashed into the front of the terminal Paul was halfway down the stairs, but the Hauptsturmführer, hindered by his wounded arm, had only just reached the top. Thrown over Paul’s head, he hit the wall above the staircase with massive force, and dropped like a stone onto the bottom steps. His map, opened by the blast, fluttered down beside him.

Though he tumbled down the last few steps, Paul sustained nothing worse than bruises. The barrage had rolled over, but he had been through enough
katyusha
attacks to know that another might plough the same furrow, and after a cursory glance at the dead Hauptsturmführer, he clambered over the body and continued on down the steps, only stopping two floors down when another SS officer told him he could go no further – his men were booby-trapping the building.

He had no objection to Paul waiting out the barrage, and even offered him a cigarette. When Paul declined, he lit his own before delivering a rueful monologue on the evils of smoking. ‘You should hear the Führer on the subject,’ he said. ‘As I was once privileged to do. His hatred of smoking will one day seem prophetic – mark my words!’ He drew deeply on his cigarette and smiled through the smoke he exhaled.

Paul said nothing – the only question seemed to be whether Berlin would be renamed Wonderland before the Russians razed it. After fifteen minutes the
katyusha
barrages abated for a while, half convincing him that they had stopped. Big guns were now firing somewhere close by. German ones, he hoped.

He went back up. Someone had moved the Hauptsturmführer’s body to the side of the stairs, but had not bothered to close his eyes. Paul did so, and, on impulse, took the binoculars that were still hanging from the man’s neck. The machine pistol might come in useful, so he took that too. Some of Himmler’s officers liked to mark their guns with SS insignia, but this one had not, which was just as well.

The doorway was a lot wider than it had been, and there was now a large crater on the threshold. Smoke and dust obscured most of the field ahead, but there seemed to be a lull in the bombardment. He worked his way round the rim of the crater, and hurried out past the still-standing ‘Welcome to Tempelhof’ sign in the direction of his gun emplacement. A few seconds later the curtain of smoke drew apart, and he could see the long barrel pointing straight up at the sky. He feared the worst, but the emplacement was empty – his comrades had fired their shells and gone. And so, he realised, had everyone else in this sector. While he’d been discussing Hitler’s tobacco-phobia there’d been a general pull-out.

Abandonment was becoming something of a habit. But he wouldn’t be alone for long – the moving shapes in the distance looked like T-34s and their accompanying infantry. Was this the moment to surrender? He thought not. As he’d told Uncle Thomas, surrender was a risky business, best attempted away from the heat of an ongoing battle, when emotions were raw and trigger-fingers itchy.

No, it was time for another retreat. There couldn’t be that many more. If the Soviet forces to the north of the city had breached the Ringbahn defence line, then all that remained in German hands was a corridor about five kilometres wide.

He clambered out of the gun emplacement and started running, only stopping when he reached the sheltered rear of the terminal building. The Soviet artillery had thoughtfully pounded holes in the high wire fence that surrounded the aerodrome, and he had a clear run to the U-Bahn station on Belle Alliance Strasse. He took it at top speed, almost tumbling down the steps as shells exploded further down the road. The booking hall was packed with civilians, most of them women, and none seemed pleased to see him. ‘Either go or get rid of the uniform and gun,’ one old man told him imperiously. Paul could see his point, but still felt like hitting him.

He went back up the stairs. The Landwehrkanal, just over a kilometre to the north, was the next obvious line of defence, and he supposed that should be his destination. He could think of none better.

Out on Belle Alliance Strasse he could see men in the distance, heading in the same direction. Behind him, the battle for Tempelhof seemed to be winding down. The centre of the wide, traffic-free road offered the clearest path, but he kept to the edge for fear of shell-blast, wending and climbing his way along the rubble-choked pavement. The bodies he came across were mostly women’s, though sometimes it was hard to tell.

A single shell exploded a couple of hundred metres up the road, taking the corner off a three-storey block and conjuring flames from within.

As he passed another bombed-out house the Kreuzberg loomed into view, crowning the wooded slopes of Viktoria Park. Why choose blood and stone, he asked himself, when grass and trees were there for the taking? He took the first available turning and worked his way through to the park’s eastern gate, then followed a path up through blossoming trees to the summit. He and his Dad had come there often, catching a tram to the depot at the bottom of the hill, walking up, and sitting on a wooden bench, ice cream in hand, with Berlin spread out before them. On a clear day they could usually see the Hertha grandstand away across the city.

There was no such clarity today, but he could still see enough to be shocked. Myriad fires were burning across the city’s heart, from the Ku’damm away to the west, through the district south of the Tiergarten, to the Old Town and Alexanderplatz in the east. Every few seconds the flash of another explosion would spark in the smoke-leaden gloom, reminding Paul of the matches flaring to life in the Plumpe grandstand as spectators lit their half-time cigarettes.

Turning his head, he caught sight of Soviet tanks. They were crossing Immelmann Strasse and entering the street that ran along the bottom of the park’s western slope. And away to the west, marching up Monumenten Strasse towards him was an absurdly neat formation of infantry. There had to be a couple of hundred men, but there was something odd about them…

Remembering the binoculars, he brought the formation into focus. The ‘something odd’ about them was their size – they were children. Two hundred neatly-turned out
Hitlerjugend
were marching out to meet the Red Army, panzerfausts at the ready. And they were walking into a trap.

A machine-gun rattled but no one fell down – either the Russians were too drunk to shoot straight, or they were firing warning shots. The column visibly hesitated, but kept on coming, and more warning shots seemed only to encourage whichever heroic nincompoop was in command. The machine-guns opened up in earnest and the front lines went down, exposing those behind them. As bullets scythed through them, the rear echelons broke and fled, dropping their panzerfausts and sprinting back across the railway bridge. Ivan, to his credit, ceased fire.

Other Russians were visible at the southern foot of the hill. It was time to go. Paul strode back down through the empty park, the clashing smells of death and spring mingling in his nostrils. The depot at the bottom had taken several hits, and through the wide-open entrance he could see one tram half raised on the rear of another, like a dog mounting a bitch. He walked round the corner of the building and started up Grossbeeren Strasse, which had lost most of its houses. At the first intersection he found six bloodied female corpses around a standpipe. Two were still clutching the water buckets they’d come to fill.