Authors: David Downing
‘So you don’t know where he went?’
‘Oh, he had to give us an address, or his ration card wouldn’t have been re-issued. It’ll be in there,’ he added, pointing out one of his colleague’s desk drawers. And it was, Solinger Strasse 47. ‘That’s not far from here,’ the first German told him. ‘It’s one of the streets off Levetzowstrasse. On the south side.’
Fifteen minutes later, Russell was walking down Solinger Strasse, trying to deduce which of the still-standing buildings was number 47. An elderly man sitting in a doorway pointed it out. ‘The one at the end,’ he said, ‘thanks to the Reichsmarschal.’ Russell saw what he meant – the original end of the block had been destroyed by Allied bombers, which Goering had famously promised would never reach Berlin. Now a wall boasting seven empty grates and seven different wallpapers rose towards the sky.
A woman he met in the lobby gave him Otto Pappenheim’s room number. Rather reluctantly, Russell thought, as if she wanted nothing to do with Otto, or anyone looking for him.
Russell climbed three storeys, and knocked on the appropriate door. There were no sounds of life within, either then or after a second hammering, but another woman emerged from a flat across the landing. ‘He’s hardly ever there,’ she told Russell in response to his question. She had no idea where Otto worked, if indeed he did, but he only used the room for sleeping. ‘He’s a Jew,’ she added with barely concealed disgust. ‘That’s how he got the flat.’
Back out on the street, Russell started walking towards the river. He wouldn’t tell Effi, he decided, not till he knew whether this was the Otto they sought.
He was ten minutes late reaching Zoo Station, but there was no sign of Effi in the crowded buffet. He went back out for a newspaper – the American-produced
Allgemeine Zeitung
looked more promising than the British
Der Berliner
– and scanned the front page while he queued for a cup of tea. The main story was the communists’ humiliating defeat in the previous weekend’s Austrian elections, a result that the editorial attributed to the Russians’ behaviour back in the spring. Given that the Russians had behaved ten times worse in Berlin, Russell wondered what the Soviets would deduce from this setback. And what lesson would the German communists take from it? A need to distance themselves from their allies and sponsors? He was beginning to appreciate the importance of the task that Nemedin and Shchepkin had given him – testing the loyalty of the German comrades. And they would not be happy if he kept them waiting. Tomorrow he would follow Shchepkin’s instructions and present himself at the Housing Office on Neue Königstrasse.
Effi swept in, still in her glamorous outfit, causing more than a few heads to turn.
She looked more animated than she had for a while, Russell thought.
‘I forgot to change at Schlüterstrasse,’ she announced, ‘and the station toilets are “closed for refurbishment”. I’ll have to ask here.’
She was back in five minutes, looking more like an ordinary citizen, and the two of them made their way down to the U-Bahn platforms.
‘Remember taxis?’ Effi murmured wistfully, after they’d waited twenty minutes for an eastbound train.
One eventually arrived, and they squeezed aboard a crowded carriage. The smell of unwashed bodies was bad enough, and Russell dreaded to think what it would have been like if half the windows hadn’t been broken.
They changed at Friedrichstrasse, and this time a train came quickly. The lifts weren’t working at Leopoldplatz, and the long ascent to the booking hall left them both short of breath. Outside on Müllerstrasse the usual broken facades stretched away in both directions, a single double-decker bus the only thing moving on the once-busy boulevard. The tricolour fluttering above one of the surviving buildings told them they were now in the French sector.
They started up the long Schulstrasse, and were soon passing one of the recently reopened schools. Several of the rooms were still unfit for occupation, but teachers and children were working in the others, and the view through the few unboarded windows was almost surreal in its ordinariness.
The local dogs seemed more in tune with their surroundings. There seemed an awful lot of them, each staring angrily out from his own small patch of ruin. Humans had destroyed their homes, cut off their food supply, and left them nothing to do but snarl at passers-by. Several started slowly towards Russell and Effi, but were easily deterred by the miming of a thrown stone. Most looked too weak to sustain an attack.
At least they were alive, Russell thought. He hadn’t seen a single cat since their return. Or a bird.
A sudden ear-splitting roar sounded overhead, causing them both to jump. It was an American Dakota, flying just above the few remaining rooftops, and presumably headed for Tempelhof. Russell wondered why it was flying so low. Because the pilot enjoyed scaring Germans?
Turning to Effi, he saw momentary panic in her eyes, beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead. He found himself wondering whether those Berliners who had survived the years of bombing would ever hear a plane without flinching.
He took her in his arms, and she let out a couple of sobs. For the first time, he fully appreciated how hard all this must be for her, and how extreme her emotional reactions might be. And most of their fellow Berliners would be riding the same emotional see-saw, he thought. A city full of unexploded bombs, in more ways than one.
‘I’m okay,’ she said at last.
‘Are you sure you want to do this today?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. What idiot said that?’ She was looking back down the street, remembering the view through the barred window of the Black Maria that had brought Rosa from the Frankfurter Allee police station.
Russell laughed and took her arm.
A few minutes later they reached the iron archway entrance. It was unguarded. Passing through, they found the rooms of the old Pathology Department deserted. ‘This is where we slept,’ Effi told him, pointing out a corner of the first one. It was empty, save for a table with two broken legs which seemed to be kneeling in the middle of the floor. ‘And that’s where Dobberke signed our release certificates,’ she added, gesturing towards it.
When Russell glanced at her, she was angrily wiping tears from her eyes.
‘I’m okay,’ she said again. ‘Can you see anything out of those windows?’ she asked, pointing to the row on one side.
Raising himself on tiptoe, he reported movement in the distance.
‘That’s the main hospital,’ she explained. ‘All the half-and quarter-Jews lived there. There’s a connecting tunnel.’
This had been guarded in April, but now stretched emptily away, lit only by a fortuitous rent in its ceiling almost halfway down. A ladder leant against the rim of the opening, and Russell had a mental picture of Nazi guards slipping out into the Berlin darkness as Russian troops stormed the main entrance.
At the far end of the tunnel, they emerged into a different world, one that was tidy, well-lit and obviously populated. After passing a couple of
almost empty dormitories, they climbed the stairs to the ground floor. Here, they found rooms where people were sitting and reading, and one with rows of desks that was clearly in use as a classroom. The first person they asked for directions shrugged and offered a few words in Yiddish, the second informed them in Polish-accented German that the offices were on the next floor. Halfway up the stairs a rabbi passed them on his way down.
In the administration office a young woman was laboriously pushing down keys on an antique-looking typewriter. She smiled up at them, revealing warm brown eyes, and seemed relieved to abandon the task. At Russell’s request she explained the current set-up. The hospital was run by an
ad hoc
committee, which had representatives from all the parties involved. There were reps from the American Jewish organisations, and from international refugee organisations like UNRRA and the Red Cross; there were members of the hospital staff and, of course, liaison officers from the French garrison. New refugees were arriving all the time: survivors of the camps, returnees from voluntary exile, people who’d spent the last few years hiding in barns or cellars or garden sheds. There were ex-partisan fighters, who’d made their way west across Poland from the Russian and Lithuanian forests. The hospital fed, clothed and sheltered them all, and did its best to help each individual reach his or her destination of choice. In most cases this was the American Occupation Zone beyond the Elbe, where purely Jewish DP camps were now up and running, staging posts
en route
to the promised lands of Palestine and America.
In the meantime the refugees waited, and often for a great deal longer than they wanted to. But at least they were waiting for something better, and the mood was generally good.
Effi asked the woman whether records were kept of all who passed through.
‘Of course. Who are you looking for?’
Effi gave her the names, and watched as she worked her way through the relevant boxes of index cards. The woman was a Berliner from her
accent, no more than twenty-five, and almost certainly Jewish. Her whole adult life would have been shot through with fear, Russell thought, but there was nothing downcast about her, no apparent edge of bitterness or well of grief. On the contrary, she seemed full of life. Someone looking forward rather than back.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said, coming back to her desk. ‘The only Pappenheim is Greta, and all three Rosenfelds are men. Where else have you looked?’
Effi explained that they’d only just started on their list of possible locations, whereupon the woman insisted on comparing that list with another, which one of the American Jewish organisations had compiled. Three more sites were identified, one of them a recently opened agricultural training camp for Zionists.
They were crossing the downstairs lobby when a familiar face came in through the main doors. Effi had met and befriended Johanna – she had never learnt her surname – during her and Rosa’s week-long confinement in the Pathology department, but once Dobberke had signed their releases Johanna had opted to spend the last few days of the war where she was, rather than risk the streets outside. Now a huge smile engulfed her face, and she enfolded Effi in a fierce hug. ‘Where have you been? I’ve often wondered what happened to you when you left. You and Rosa.’
‘You’re looking well,’ Effi said, and Johanna was. In April she’d been painfully thin, but in her case the ‘Victim of Fascism’ ration card was obviously serving its intended purpose – she looked several stones heavier and ten years younger. ‘We ended up in the Potsdam Station,’ Effi said. ‘It was a nightmare. We should have stayed here with you and Nina.’
Johanna’s smile disappeared. ‘No, you made the right decision. You remember – Nina thought the Russians would behave themselves because we were Jews and because there were so many of us. She couldn’t have been more wrong. I got off quite lightly, but Nina was young and pretty and…’ Johanna sighed. ‘Well, she killed herself…’
Effi closed her eyes for a few seconds.
‘But is Rosa all right?’ Johanna asked anxiously.
‘She’s fine. She’s in England, in London. Which is where we were until last week. This is John, by the way. I must have told you about him.’
‘Yes, you did.’ She gave Russell a knowing look, then turned back to Effi. ‘I met another friend of yours a couple of months ago,’ she told Effi. ‘I work in the hospital, but I was in the office when she came looking for you. Her name was Ali something…’
‘Ali Blumenthal!’ Ali was the daughter of two Jews whom Russell and Effi had befriended in the first years of the war. They had agreed to ‘resettlement’ in the East, but Ali, like Effi, had opted for an underground existence. When they ran into each other in 1942, Ali had put Effi in touch with the identity forger Schönhaus, which had probably saved her life. She and Ali had shared a flat, a business and a life of resistance for most of the next three years.
‘Yes, that was the name,’ Johanna confirmed. ‘I told her I’d met you in April, and she told me who you really were. I was surprised, I can tell you. I must have seen some of your films, but I never recognised you.’
‘Did Ali leave an address?’
‘Not here, but most people leave their contact details on the boards outside. Come, I’ll show you where.’
They walked out onto Iranische Strasse, where a line of boarded-up windows were plastered with scraps of paper and card, some neatly cut and printed, others simple scrawls on scraps. It was Effi who recognised Ali’s elegant handwriting. ‘Hufelandstrasse 27,’ she said excitedly. ‘In Wilmersdorf. I think I know where that is. We must go there.’
Russell smiled. ‘Of course.’
Effi thanked Johanna, and gave her Thomas’s address. ‘Wherever we eventually end up living, he’ll know.’
Johanna was reluctant to let them go. ‘Remember how we all agreed to meet on August 1st, in the Zoo Cafeteria. Well, I went to the Zoo, but there was no sign of you and Rosa, and no cafeteria. I wasn’t surprised, but…’
‘Rosa remembered,’ Effi told her. ‘She was upset. But we were in England, and even if we’d known where you were, we had no way of making contact.’
‘I’m glad you both made it.’
‘And you,’ Effi said with feeling. With so many gone, each survivor seemed doubly precious.
* * *
Before the war the trip would have taken forty minutes, but more than two hours had passed when they finally reached Ali’s apartment building. Hufelandstrasse seemed almost untouched by the war, as if some higher power had intervened to protect its residents from the bombs and shells that rained down on the neighbouring streets.
Ali herself opened the apartment door, and let out a whoop of pure delight when she saw who it was. The two women threw themselves into each other’s arms, and shared an excited hug, their feet almost dancing as they twirled each other round. The young man behind Ali smiled and shook his head.