Authors: David Downing
‘Jews have lived there for thousands of years.’
‘So have Arabs.’
‘God gave it to the Jews.’
‘Says who? I didn’t think you were religious.’
Albert grinned. ‘I’m not.’
‘I don’t think you can use the Bible as a title deed,’ Russell insisted.
‘Some people do. Like the Europeans who conquered the Americas – being in touch with the right God made everything okay.’
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘I think that’s what will happen.’
Russell thought about that. ‘Maybe it will,’ he conceded. ‘A friend of mine suggested emptying Cyprus – the Greeks to Greece, the Turks to
Turkey – and then giving it to the Jews. Lovely beaches, good soil, not that far from Jerusalem.’
Albert propped his head up on one arm and gave Russell a look. ‘We already have our homeland.’
‘Yes, I expect you do.’
‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ Albert said. ‘I understand why the Poles are expelling the Germans from their new territories. And I understand why they’re making it impossible for the Jews to return. If my friends and I have our way, the Arabs will all be expelled from Palestine. Anything else is just storing up trouble for the future.’
‘That will put a bit of a strain on the world’s sympathy, don’t you think?’
‘Once we have the land, we can do without the sympathy.’
* * *
Since deducing the connections between her ex-Gestapo man, Geruschke and the Americans, Effi had been wondering what she should do. The sensible course, the one Seymour Exner had advised her to follow, was to wait for Russell’s return. They could then ignore his threats together.
The fact that Exner had suggested waiting for Russell rather prejudiced her against the notion, but as long as working consumed most of her waking hours, and exhaustion ruled the rest, she had little choice in the matter. Then on Tuesday the film’s leading man came down with a heavy cold, the cast was given the whole day off, and the chance arose to set something in motion.
But what? After giving the matter more thought, she still had no idea where to start with Geruschke, and reluctantly conceded that waiting for Russell might, in this one case, make sense. So what else could she do? Russell was dealing with Otto 3, Shchepkin, hopefully, with Otto 2. Kuzorra’s sighting of Miriam had given them hope, but there were no more people to ask and no more places to check – all she could do was wait and hope for some response to their messages.
Once satisfied that logic, and not Seymour Exner, had ruled out anything else, she decided it was time to deal with her flat, and the people who were living there. It wasn’t a prospect she was savouring, but she couldn’t put it off for ever.
She and Thomas had discussed the situation again, and he’d more or less confirmed what she already knew. If abandoning the property and ejecting the occupants were equally unpalatable, then all that remained was negotiation – she would have to meet those concerned, and make it clear that she wanted the flat back at some not-too-distant point in the future. If the occupants were reasonable people, then they could all agree a timetable. If they weren’t, Effi would just have to tell them she was starting legal proceedings.
All of which sounded fine, she thought, standing outside on the familiar street. And now for real people.
She climbed the communal staircase and knocked at the door. The woman who answered was thin and almost haggard, with pale blue eyes and straggly blonde hair.
‘What do you want?’ the woman asked, as Effi searched for the right thing to say.
She took a deep breath. ‘There’s no easy way to tell you this. My name’s Effi Koenen, and this is my flat.’
‘Yours?’
‘Yes. My parents bought it in 1924, and gave it to me in 1931. I lived her for ten years, until 1941, when it was confiscated by the government.’
The woman looked bewildered. ‘So how can it still be yours?’
‘It was the Nazi Government that confiscated it. Their laws are no longer recognised,’ she added, with less than complete honesty.
‘Oh.’ The woman seemed unsure what to do. ‘Well you’d better come in.’
Effi accepted the invitation to examine her old home. Some of the furniture was hers, but the flat as a whole seemed like somebody else’s, and for a few brief moments she experienced an acute sense of loss.
A child was sitting in the middle of the floor – a girl of about four with her mother’s hair and eyes. ‘What’s your name?’ Effi asked.
‘Ute,’ the girl said.
‘I’m Effi. How long have you lived here?’ she asked the mother.
‘Since March. We were given the flat by the Housing Office – you can check with them. No one said anything about an owner.’
‘Maybe the records were destroyed. Or they didn’t realise I was still among the living.’ The little girl was still staring at her, and Effi realised how cold it was in the flat. There were a few pieces of wood by the fireplace, but they were probably being saved for the evening. Noticing two rolled-up beds in the corner, she asked the woman where her other two children were.
‘The boys are at school. Look… we came from Königsberg – my husband was killed by the Russians.’ There was a dreadful weariness in her eyes as she looked around her. ‘But if this is yours…’
Anger or resentment would have been easier. ‘Please,’ Effi said, ‘I don’t need the flat at the moment – I’m staying with friends. I shall want it back eventually, but I won’t ask you to leave until you have somewhere else to live. And I’ll help you find somewhere. In the new year, we can start looking.’
The woman was using a hand on the table to hold herself upright, Effi realised. Both mother and daughter were in desperate need of a decent meal.
‘Look, I’m an actress,’ Effi told her. ‘For reasons best known to themselves, that means the authorities give me top-grade rations. More than I need. So please take these,’ she said, searching through her bag for the relevant coupons. ‘Give your children a good meal. And yourself.’
After only a slight hesitation the woman took them. She looked more bewildered than ever.
As well she might, Effi thought. A stranger arrives, claims the family home, and then dispenses gifts. ‘I’ll come and see you again after Christmas,’ Effi said. ‘And don’t worry – you can stay as long as you need to.’
‘Thank you,’ the woman said.
‘What’s your name?’ Effi asked her.
‘Ilse. Ilse Reitermaier. Thank you.’
Effi went back down to the street. Sensing watching eyes, she turned to see mother and child looking out of the window. She waved and they waved back.
She wondered how many families Hitler had torn apart with his stupid war. And how many more Seymour Exner would destroy with the one that he was planning. Did men never learn?
Of course the war had been good to some. Men like Geruschke and his ex-Gestapo underling were thriving on the misery of other people’s lives. She wondered how many other Nazis he was employing.
A sudden thought stopped her in her tracks. She could bring Jews to the Honey Trap, Jews from Schulstrasse and the survivor organisations, Jews that Ali and Fritz and Wilhelm Isendahl knew. They were bound to recognise some Nazis.
No, she thought. After what Exner had told her, it seemed clear that the authorities weren’t interested, and without some guarantee of official protection she would be putting the Jews in danger. So no.
She had only walked ten metres when the solution presented itself. Photographs. If she obtained photographs of Geruschke’s employees, she could show them around. The photographer would need an acceptable reason for popping off flashbulbs in the Honey Trap, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Some pictures for an article about something or other – how the soldiers enjoyed their leisure, the renaissance of cabaret, the rebirth of jazz in Berlin. Maybe Irma could pretend to commission some publicity photos.
First she needed a photographer. The one John used to use, the one Ströhm had told him was back from the dead. Zembski, that was his name. The Fat Silesian. John had said he was working at the KPD newspaper offices. She had no idea where they were, but they shouldn’t be hard to find.
* * *
Next morning, Russell and Albert walked back up the hill to the station. Russell had vivid memories of catching a train there in August 1939 – his
American editor had sent him to Bratislava to report on a pogrom, before hustling him on to Warsaw to witness the countdown to war. Ambulance-chasing on a continental scale.
His fellow passengers on that train had included a family of Jews intent on reaching the safety of Poland. All dead, most probably. And if they weren’t, they’d be fleeing in the opposite direction. In such circumstances, Zionism made perfect sense. A homeland in Palestine or shuttling to and fro across European borders, one step ahead of the knout. Put like that, it was no choice at all.
Their train headed north through the Czech countryside at a funereal pace, stopping at stations, on bridges, in the middle of dark, silent forests. Albert expressed no resentment over Russell’s reservations – he was, Russell realised, sure enough of his own mind to forgive the doubts in others. They talked for a while about Otto Pappenheim, and the possible reasons for his disappearance. When Russell mentioned Effi’s fear of handing Rosa back to a man who had abandoned her, Albert grew more serious, and warned them against pre-judgement. ‘After what some of them went through,’ he said sadly, ‘you could forgive them almost anything.’
After Brno they had the compartment to themselves. Albert laid himself out across a row of seats and was soon asleep, but Russell sat by the window, watching the wintry Moravian countryside and thinking about the next few days. They would reach Náchod that night or the following morning, and after finishing their business would cross into Poland. There had been an atlas in the UNRRA office at the Hotel Jelen, and Russell, boning up on the local geography, had discovered that Glatz – or whatever the Poles were now calling it – was the nearest railway station. He could travel to Breslau from there, along the line he’d once used to visit the Rosenfeld farm. Breslau was now in Poland, and doubtless sporting a new name, but the tracks would still be leading west to Berlin. If the Poles were uncooperative, he’d find some friendly Russians.
Thinking about the Rosenfeld farm, a possibility occurred to him – one that he and Effi had somehow missed. If Miriam had had her baby, and somehow healed herself in the process, might she then have tried
to go home? Kuzorra had seen her in January 1942, so it would have been after that. But if she’d gone home that year or the next, only ruins awaited her – by that time her parents had long since fled over the mountains. So what would she have done – gone back to Berlin?
There was only one source of sanctuary that Russell knew of – Torsten Resch, the gentile neighbours’ boy who had always been sweet on her. He had worked in Breslau until his call-up in 1941. One or two years later, he was probably still in uniform, and Miriam would have sought him in vain. But the boy might have been invalided out; he might have been on leave when she came looking. It was the thinnest of chances, but she had to be somewhere. Alive or dead, she had to be somewhere. So why not Breslau? It shouldn’t take him more than a few hours to find out.
The afternoon wore on, until darkness finally filled the valleys. Yellow lamps now glowed on the station platforms, and myriad wood fires crackled beside the frequent refuge sidings. At one such passing place, their train pulled up alongside another, and the sound of singing rose from the latter’s lightless compartments, a young girl’s voice both sweet and infinitely sad. It was, Albert said, a song about a Jewish mother who saves her daughter by placing her in a Christian orphanage.
Another song followed, this one sung by many voices and accompanied by mandolin. According to Albert it was a paean to the writer’s home, a simple village somewhere in the Pale which he or she would never see again.
When their own train jerked into motion, and swallowed the voices up, Russell found himself feeling almost bereft. The emotions which flickered on Albert’s face were the ones Russell remembered from 1939 – anger and bitterness.
They travelled on, eventually reaching the junction for Náchod too late for the last connection. After checking the time of the first morning train, they walked across the dung-strewn forecourt to the only available inn. The proprietor’s initial suspicion of Albert was mollified by the false documentation, and Russell’s American passport was enough to secure them a late supper. The latter was somewhat spoiled – for Russell at least
– by their host’s insistence on regaling them with tales of Czech revenge against the local Germans. Albert seemed happy to hear them, but the proprietor’s wife, who had served up their supper, looked even more disgusted than Russell. ‘What an achievement,’ she said sarcastically. ‘We’ve become just like them.’
* * *
There turned out to be several Party offices, but the one where Miroslav Zembski worked was on Klosterstrasse, in a building that Effi remembered as once housing an art gallery. The size of Zembski’s second floor office suggested a man of some importance.
He stared at Effi for several moments before recognition dawned. ‘Fräulein Koenen,’ he finally said, his face breaking into a smile. ‘Or are you and Herr Russell married these days?’
‘No, we still haven’t got round to it,’ Effi told him. Zembski was hardly wafer-thin, but it was difficult to believe that Russell had dubbed him ‘the Fat Silesian’.
‘I heard he was back. How is he?’
‘He’s all right. He’s in Austria at the moment – at least I think he is. But I know he means to come and see you – he only just heard you’re alive. When he turned up at your studio in 1941 and found that you’d been arrested… well, he feared the worst.’
‘He wasn’t the only one,’ Zembski said drily. ‘It would be good to see him again,’ he added, ‘but what can I do for you?’
She looked at him. Until that moment, she’d been planning on hiring him – or whoever he recommended – with some sort of cock-and-bull story, and without revealing her motives. But it made more sense to be straight with him. She would have a clearer conscience, and probably get better results. ‘I need a photographer,’ she began. ‘I need someone to take pictures at the Honey Trap nightclub on the Ku’damm without arousing suspicion. Inside and outside. Inside, the photographer should look like he’s concentrating on the singer Irma Wocz – she’s an old friend, by the way – but catch as many people in the background as he can. Staff in
particular, but customers too. The club is on a corner, and there’s a back way out onto Leibniz Strasse which only employees use. The buildings across the street were destroyed, and there’s plenty of rubble for a photographer to hide in. I need pictures of anyone using that exit.’