The Girl from Krakow (33 page)

Berlin was in the early twilight of an April evening. The conductor was coming through the carriage, opening compartment doors. “Berlin, Anhalter Bahnhof.” But Rita could see no mainline station, only rubble on each side of the tracery of tracks surrounding the one she was coming in on. Arriving from the south, she had already seen enough bomb damage to make her wonder why Dresden had been spared, but she wasn’t expecting the Reich’s largest train station to be in ruins. The train had stopped just beyond a narrow canal in the middle of the marshaling yard. There was no quay or even a platform beside the carriages, just a yawning drop to the gravel roadbed. A young man in the
feldgrau
of the Wehrmacht helped her down.

“
Danke
.” Rita looked up at him. “Please. Is this Berlin main station?”

“I’m afraid so. It’s as close as we will get to it by train this evening. The station was knocked out pretty much completely last winter. Please, let me show you the way.” He grabbed Rita’s case from her before she could muster serious resistance, and together they clambered along, next to the now empty carriages, in line with the rest of the passengers. “Between them the RAF and the American Eighth Air Force have pretty much closed the station, along with a lot of other things in Berlin.”

“But I just passed through Dresden. And it’s untouched.”

“I guess that’s because most people in Berlin aren’t Nazis and most people in Dresden are.” He smiled conspiratorially. Rita was taken with his bravura.

“Are you a Berliner? I need some information.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I have to get to the station for trains to Frankfurt and the west. It’s the Zoo Station, yes? Can you tell me how to get there?”

“I’m going in that direction. I shall be glad to take you along as far as I go.”

Ten minutes later they were passing along the crumpled ironwork of the Anhalter Bahnhof’s glass roof. Then they turned toward Potsdamer Platz. As she read the sign directing them, Rita began preparing herself for what was supposed to be the busiest intersection in Europe.

The tumbledown relics, the bombed buildings, the fire damage, and the flotsam along every street leading away from the station was worse than anything Rita had seen in Warsaw. The desolation around her was hard to reconcile with the almost Prussian blue of the still bright sky above. It was as though she were walking through a black, white, and gray photograph displayed under a full color sky. Would Potsdamer Platz be different?

As they reached it, the young man spoke as though reading her mind. “You should have seen it before the war, or even when we were still winning.” Again this irreverence. The cheeky young soldier was courting a lethal charge of defeatism. Was he soliciting an indiscretion from her? She promised herself she wasn’t going to indulge him. “That domed building used to have every kind of restaurant in it. Down there”—he pointed to an open rectangular square of broken facades and collapsed buildings—“was the biggest department store in Berlin. Wertheim’s—a Jewish business. They tried to hang on to it by putting it in the owner’s wife’s name. Didn’t work.” Rita wasn’t much interested in history. What struck her was that amid the ruins, there were cafés full of people, drinking, smoking, talking, actually having a good time, something she had not seen since perhaps the summer of 1939. Somehow Berliners were refusing to take reality seriously.

“Are they drinking real coffee?” She didn’t even realize she had voiced the question aloud.

“Not a chance. But we remember what it used to taste like, and that’s sometimes enough!”

They were beginning to march up the main street leading away from Potsdamer Platz toward the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin’s magnet even for nontourists. Halfway there her escort pulled her away, up a side street leading to grass and trees. “You don’t want to go that way, Miss. It’s Göring-Strasse. Used to be Ebertstrasse, after the social democratic president. Now it leads right to the Reich chancellery, Hitler’s headquarters. Too many soldiers.”

“What’s the problem? You’re a soldier, no?” She was breaking her promise to herself. Perhaps she could smoke him out a little more without taking any risks.

“I’m Wehrmacht Medical Service, a conscript soldier. I don’t carry anything more deadly than a mercy-killing pistol. Up there, those guys are Waffen-SS. You don’t even want to get close. Besides, the park is much prettier.” He looked toward the green.

Soon they were walking along a wide, finely graveled path through generous rhododendron bushes beneath large trees beginning to come into leaf, filtering the still visible but sinking sun. After a few moments, they found themselves walking along a vast avenue cutting through the greenery. At one end Rita could identify the Brandenburg Gate, and at the other, the Victory Column of the Franco-Prussian war. She knew them as the iconic picture postcard images of her childhood, the way children in Western Europe knew the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. They were symbols of Berlin and Germany, the great cultural engine of change bringing Eastern Europe into the new century. She was glad her first views of Berlin were these and not the Reich Chancellery, surrounded by goose-stepping robots in black.

The soldier noticed her turn her head from east to west and back again along the avenue. “Those buildings are—”

“I know.” She smiled, appreciating his proprietary feeling about Berlin. “We knew all about them in Poland. I didn’t realize you could see one from the other.”

“You couldn’t, until the
Führer
moved the whole Victory Column into the park a few years ago.” They were silent for a moment. Then the soldier began to point out ground-clearing projects. “We think the city government is going to allow citizens to set up vegetable garden allotments in the park. They are beginning to worry about food. Nothing is coming in from the Ukraine anymore. There have always been garden allotments in Berlin, but not here in the Tiergarten. Mainly people grew flowers in them anyway. Now it’s going to be potatoes. Last summer thousands of people slept in the Tiergarten every night during the RAF bomber offensive.” He led her away from the wide boulevard and back into the paths sheltered by lateral tree branches and hidden by banks of foliage. It was easy to forget where you were or even when. A velvet silence descended, and neither wanted to break it.

Ten minutes later, however, the young soldier began to frown as they approached a massive concrete turret emerging from out of the ground like a black ogre, looming over the large trees that surrounded it. Rita had never seen something so formidable, immovable, impenetrable, lowering, threatening. It seemed the nightmarish keep of malevolence itself.

“That’s where I work. It’s the Tiergarten Flaktower. There’s a military hospital on the third floor. The top has the antiaircraft guns. The bottom is an air-raid shelter.”

“It’s the ugliest building I have ever seen. Please take me away from it.”

“Sorry, I can’t take you away. It’s where I’m going. My post. But if you continue straight ahead, you’ll come to the canal that runs through the park. Turn right. When you come to the second bridge, cross it, go past the café in the park, and you will come out at the train station you want, Zoo Station.”

She felt safe with this soldier of the Reich. “But can’t you take me the rest of the way?”

He looked up at the tower, back at Rita, and shook his head, turned, and began walking toward it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I
t was dark, but there was still a spring mildness in the air when Rita arrived at the Zoo Station. Entering, she went to the waiting hall and sought the train indicator board. There were no trains for Leipzig on the board at all. She looked around for an inquiry desk and saw none. There was only the ticket windows, with a long queue stretched away from them. Finally she saw a cleaner, pushing a broom against the tide of dust, newsprint, food wrappings, and discarded tickets. “Excuse me. Is this the right station for Leipzig?”

He continued to sweep, but said distinctively enough for her to hear, “Yes, but you won’t get a train tonight. Bombing on the line south. They’ve stopped everything going that way for the night at least.” He moved on past her.

Could it be right? She needed a more reliable source. Rita stepped over to the queue and attached herself to its end. In front of her were a mother with two children, one coughing and wheezing. With them was another, older woman.

In fifteen minutes the queue had made no appreciable progress. But the proximity of the women had made their faces, their postures, even their smells, familiar enough to break through the anonymity. It was no surprise to Rita when the older woman asked, “Where are you off to, dear?”

“Leipzig. But there are no trains there tonight.” She looked toward the departure board above the steps up to the quays.

Overhearing, the woman with the two children intervened. “Hilde, remember, just when we got here, they announced no service to Leipzig till morning. There is an air raid on the line at Bruck.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Rita decided to be friendly. “Where are you going, ma’am?”

“Magdeburg,” was the answer, but it came amid the blast of loud sirens echoing painfully throughout the building.

“What’s that noise?” Rita could not suppress the question or the sound of fear in her voice.

“Air raid, dear. Come along, children
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
” Everyone in the station was surging out. Rita followed the two women and their children. Without thinking, she took the hand of the elder boy, who looked up at her for reassurance. The crowd was flowing out of the station and moving down a broad street, but Rita’s group was not moving fast enough. Even before they arrived at the U-Bahn station on Kurfürstendamm, the older woman was saying, “We’ll never make it.”

She was right. Breathlessly they reached the stairway down only to be confronted by a thick metal barrier (and a sign that announced, “No Jews”). “Nothing for it but the park,” said the younger woman, and all five turned back, hurriedly retracing their steps back past the railway station, under the elevated tracks, and into the park. Well before they reached its entry, the boy was coughing uncontrollably. Rita swept him up and carried him along while the child regained his breath. As they reached the park, she set him down. The boy smiled up at her.

They were not the only ones seeking the sanctuary of the park. By the time they arrived at the entrance, many others—families, couples, single men and women—were streaming in, some carrying cushions, even bedding. Rita was still holding the young boy’s hand as they reached the café by the canal, now closed, and seated themselves at one of the outdoor tables.

The mother had taken note of Rita’s care for her child. She smiled. “Thank you for helping. Maybe he likes you. Not many adults he holds hands with. My name is Flora.” She took the child to her lap.

“Rita.” She offered her hand to each.

The older woman settled herself and turned to Rita. “Ingrid is my name. Not from Berlin, are you?” Before Rita could reply, she said, “Never been in an air raid before. That’s how I knew.”

Rita looked up at the bright lines of white sent up by the searchlights, moving like pencils across the black sky. Then she heard the distant thud of what must have been either bombs or antiaircraft artillery. “No
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I mean, yes. This is my first time in a raid.”

“Wish it were my first time,” said the younger woman.

Looking at the boy on Flora’s lap, Rita asked, “What’s his name?” When she misheard “Stefan,” she gasped slightly and repeated it to herself.

“No. It’s ‘Sylvan.’ ” His mother went on, “He’s four—big for his age.”

The child began to cough again. “Do you have any more of that cough syrup you got from Dr. Cohen last year?” Ingrid asked Flora.

“I went round last month, but they told me he’d been deported. Gave me a good talking to about letting a Jew doctor treat an Aryan child.”

“Right they were too,” scolded Ingrid.

“Jew or no Jew, he was the only doctor in the neighborhood who treated you like a human being. Sometimes you have to make exceptions.”

They turned back to Rita. “Where are you from, dear?” Ingrid asked.

“Poland, the part Stalin took in ’39.” Rita pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering them to her two new friends.

Flora, the younger one, pulled a face. “The
Führer
hates tobacco.”

It was a clue Rita missed as she lit her own. Had she picked it up, she certainly would not have gone on as she now did. “Back at the underground
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
the sign on the shelter, ‘No Jews.’ Are there still Jews in Berlin?”

Both women replied at once. “Yes, thousands.” “Of course. They’re everywhere.”

“Probably out in this air raid looting my flat right now!” Flora observed.

“It’s all Goebbels’s fault, running things in Berlin. The government is far too lenient with them. Thousands of
Mischlinge
—halfbreeds—hundreds of full-blooded Yids married to German women, committing race crimes every time they go to bed at night
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
and there’s nothing can be done about them!”

Rita was surprised. “Why not?”

Ingrid answered, “It’s the law, the silly stupid law. All those by-the-book civil servants, you’d think they were Jews the way they enforce the Nuremberg laws. If someone is less than three-fourths Jew or was married to an Aryan before ’35, you can’t touch ’em.”

“She knows the law.” Flora indicated her older friend. “Knows the status of every Yid in our district. If it weren’t for those untouchable Yids, she’d be in a decent flat by now.”

“Been waiting ten years, I have,” Ingrid agreed. “I’ll die before they kick one out and give me the place. I ask you, how long does someone have to be a Nazi to get what you deserve?”

“You got that nice fox collar from
Winterhilfe
. Wasn’t that enough?”

“What’s a used fox collar? You got a nice flat easy enough. Once those Ostjuden across the hall from you went for resettlement, you were allowed to move in right away.”

“That was five years ago.”

“Well, they’re getting softer on Jews all the time.” The old woman looked toward Rita. “You’re not from here, so you wouldn’t know. Last winter they tried to round up those Berlin Jews married to German women. The wives protested on the street for a week. Instead of shooting them, they released their husbands! Unbelievable.”

“Spineless, these wishy-washy national socialists Goebbels lets run the
Schutzpolizei
. It’s as bad as the way they caved in to bleeding hearts before the war.”

“What do you mean?” Rita couldn’t help wanting to hear more.

“They were making a real start on eliminating the social parasites, those who eat but don’t contribute—the dumb, the mental defectives, mongoloids, and genetic defectives. But the pastors got wind of it and whipped up churchgoers to protest. We wouldn’t be scrounging for ration coupons to buy meat, butter, and eggs now if the Race Purity Office had been allowed to do its job.”

“What can you expect from that little man?” Now they were obsessing together and ignoring Rita. “He has already got the
schnorrers
extorting honest people for the
Winterhilfe
collections.” Rita couldn’t suppress a laugh at the Yiddish word. Not noticing, Flora continued, “Did you get the new contributor’s button last week? If you’re not wearing one, they’ll make you pay double this week.” The older woman nodded.

Rita wondered,
Could one freely abuse Goebbels for his disability? Did they really think he was soft on Jews?
This was a slice of public opinion she had been missing. And
schnorrer
—beggar. They had no trouble helping themselves to Yiddish either. She never should have gotten them on to this line of conversation, but now it had transfixed her, listening to these two women. She was about to make a serious blunder. “Flora, Ingrid, I don’t understand. Twice you mentioned resettling Jews to the east. Your child’s doctor, Cohen, and the people who were in your flat, right, Ingrid?”

“Yes. All the non-German Jews and the German-full Jews have been resettled. All the Jews in the former Poland have been moved to the east.”

“Well, the east, that’s where I come from. And I have never seen any Jews resettled there.”

“Probably farther east than where you come from,
liebes Kind
.” Ingrid’s “dear child” was slightly ominous.

But Rita was beyond any self-restraint. “Maybe. But in the part of Poland I came from, the
Waffen-SS
and the Wehrmacht just took thousands of Jews out of the towns, shot them, and buried them in shallow graves.”

Both women turned to her, aghast. “What are you saying? That is the vilest libel on the German Wehrmacht and the security services I have ever heard.” Ingrid was spitting the words out.

Now Flora joined. “You sit here protected from the Mongol hordes the Bolsheviks have unleashed against German womanhood, uttering slanders against our soldiers.”

They were now both shrieking. The men and women at tables nearby turned their heads and began to listen. “
Polizei! Polizei!
” Both women were standing, shouting freely. Flora gathered her children to her for their protection, and Ingrid was rising either to strike or take hold of Rita. Ingrid’s surprisingly strong arm was suddenly clamped on Rita’s forearm.

Suddenly everything was drowned out by the roar of four Merlin aeroengines throbbing under the wing of an Avro Lancaster flying much too low. Whether it was disabled and about to crash or off course and on damaged instruments, no one could tell. Whatever, it was more than enough of a distraction for Rita to pull free, grab her case, and begin running out of the park, into the danger of bombs now audibly and visibly falling on the Ku’damm. “Thank you,” Rita said aloud under the drone of the engines in one of the few English phrases she knew.
Better,
she thought,
to chance her life to the RAF’s carpet bombing than to have to explain herself to Goebbels’s Jew-loving
Polizei
.

Rita reached the park exit at the station still running. Instead of going down toward the U-Bahn air-raid shelter, she decided to follow the elevated tracks of the aboveground S-Bahn as it curved south and west away from the station. The closer to a military target, like railway tracks, the safer she would be from the
Polizei
. After ten minutes of sprints broken by the need to catch her breath and the pain of a stitch in her side, she found herself in a square, trees splintered and cut down, surrounded by a number of buildings already derelict from previous bombings. There was an entrance to the S-Bahn at the end of the square, and a light still shone on the station name, Sivigny Platz. The name rang a bell for Rita. Then she recalled the Berlin address Magda Halle had given her back in Krakow. She reached into her purse and pulled out the piece of paper:
Directions: S-Bahn to Sivigny Platz, two blocks west to Schlucterstrasse, 21
, Halle’s family’s home in the Charlottenburg district. Bombs were still falling, but the sounds were definitely moving away. Rita turned toward what she reckoned had to be west.

A few minutes later, she found herself before 21 Schlucterstrasse, or what was left of it. The building number was still clearly visible on the lintel of the burned-out entryway. It had been a substantial art nouveau structure in pastel peach. Now all that remained was blackened peach stucco topped with broken white windowsills. Above the second-story walls, black sky was visible through broken rafters and timbered beams. Derelict parquet flooring cascaded in a frozen stream down toward the ground floor. Through the main entry, Rita could see a staircase going up to nothing at all. Behind it was the charred rear of the building, where a courtyard and a large burned-out tree were visible in the street lighting that cast the facade’s shadow back to the next street’s bombed-out structures. If Magda had any family left, they were not to be found hereabouts.

There was nothing to do but to continue to put distance between herself and the women in the Tiergarten. Fifteen minutes’ farther down the street brought Rita to still another small park, in the middle of which hundreds of people were sitting out the air raid, evidently excluded by lateness or other disability from the Fehrbelliner U-Bahn station at the foot of the park. Rita laid out her coat, setting her head on the case, and was quickly asleep.