Necessary Lies (35 page)

“Why did they quarrel? Was it because of Mitzi? Was Helmut unfaithful to her?” Anna's questions are prompted by her own hurt.

“Who knows what happens between two people,” Frau Strauss answers with a question, shaking her head. Käthe didn't want to speak of Helmut so she didn't ask. Maybe it was Mitzi. Maybe not. They were all too young. They didn't know what was coming. This is not what she wants to tell Anna. No, not that part of the story. There are other things Anna should know about. More important. Things about Käthe.

“Bombenkeller des Reiches
, that's what we called Silesia. Air shelter for the Reich. Rich and blessed, and safe. The fortress of the German East.

“We never stopped to think what it all meant,” Frau Strauss continues. Not until the first refugees began coming. ‘We are safe here,' women whispered in stores, on park benches, glancing at the skies. The Breslau cellars were filled with food,
jars of preserves in even rows. You had to sort out the potatoes, though, cut out the eyes and sprouting leaf-buds, remove the rotting parts. Sift the flour, to keep it free of bugs. Make sure the bags of sugar were dry.

“By 1944 there were food shortages, of course.
Röschen kaffee
, we called our coffee, for the brew was so weak that you could see through it, see the little red roses in the bottom of the cup. But that was nothing. Nothing. You know what we used to say then? Enjoy the war — peace is going to be terrible.

“They lied to us. The Gauleiter Hanke, the papers. They all lied.
Destruction of the Soviet Armies Almost Complete. Combat in East Proceeds According to Plan.
That's what we read in the
Schlesische Tageszeitung.
Even at Christmas time, 1944. People were leaving, if they could find a good reason, for you couldn't just leave. That was called ‘spreading defeatism and panic' Punishable by death. We were sure everyone watched everyone else. Your servants could turn you in, but you didn't dare dismiss them.

“At the street corners the Gauleiter's voice beamed from the loudspeakers:
‘Festung Breslau
has sworn its loyalty to the Führer. We will not forget our sacred oath.' The refugees who came from the east sneered at our cellars and preserves and paid in gold coins for sturdy shoes and strong rucksacks. To the Poles and Russians we were nothing but ‘Hitlerist cannibals,' they said. There was no mercy for us in the East.

“Mitzi knew she would die. Her mother had bought enough cyanide vials for the entire family, promised to swallow them before the Russians came. All they will find she said, is my stiff body. Mitzi's father would set fire to his store and shoot himself in the mouth before the flames got to him. I asked Mitzi what she would do. She didn't know. “They won't get me, though,” she said. She was wearing her cyanide vial in a small pouch, around her neck.

“We stayed in Breslau and waited. Stayed until the rumble of artillery never stopped, closer and closer with each hour. Until heat was scarce and we were shivering all the time. In December 1944, Käthe decided to sign up as a Red Cross nurse. I went
along. It was better than sitting at home, worrying. Johann was at the Eastern front. I wondered if I would ever see him again.

“They trained us for twenty hours.
Schwester
Käthe and
Schwester
Ulrike. We had blue striped uniforms. All we were allowed to do was to make beds, bring bed pans, wash the patients. Nothing glorious. Sometimes we were allowed to hold a limb or a bowl for discarded cotton swabs. Most of the wounded were men over fifty or under eighteen.
Volkssturm
, the last hope of the
Reich.

“Trains were leaving Breslau for the West. Filled, we heard, filled to the brim. At the All Souls Hospital we assisted with the X-rays, took down Dr. Tolk's orders. We had to run after him as he walked, stopping by the beds for a few seconds, writing down his verdict. We wrote it all down, into their records, trying not to look at their faces. It gave them too much hope if we did.

“In the evening there were lectures in the cellar, ‘Nursing at the current stage of the war.' We walked down slowly, past the long, tiled corridor with metal lamps, past the laundry with its smell of boiling cotton. ‘This is not the time for compassion,' Dr. Tolk said. ‘Remember. These soldiers are needed at the front. Our
Gauleiter
, Karl Hanke, said that we will fight to the last man. There will be no surrender!' We were warned to look for signs of marauding, for undue attention drawn to themselves. ‘Don't try to save them,' he said. A few days before, a nurse who gave one of the men an injection that kept him from being released was sentenced to ten years by the political tribunal. I prayed that if my Johann were wounded, he would be lucky to find a nurse that brave.

“There were bodies swinging from lampposts, when we were returning home. Hundreds a day. Executed by the SS. We were not to pity them. They were traitors.

Wir werden weiter marschieren
Bis alles in Scherben fällt
Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland
Und morgen die ganze Welt...

“I sang this song,” Frau Strauss continues. “So many times, with Käthe, at school Only when we sang it we didn't really know what it meant.”

We will continue marching
Until everything is in pieces
Because today we own Germany
And tomorrow the whole world

Some of the wounded men lay with their eyes closed, breathing hard. Some trailed us with their eyes as we walked through the ward. They begged us for anaesthetics.”

Johann Erben. Frau Strauss can still remember his name. Their first serious case. It was obvious by then that there were not enough nurses and even the Red Cross volunteers were allowed to do more than they should have. Two legs crushed, pieces of bones still popping out of his massacred flesh. Tibia and fibula, they had learned the names of the bones only the day before. The matron cast a suspicious glance at their white hands, their breasts that would not flatten under the apron. She, Ulrike, felt faint, but Käthe took a pair of tweezers and began taking the shreds of bone out, piece by piece. The matron thought Käthe, too, would become queasy, that she would not stand it. But Käthe could concentrate on the hard pieces of bones. Her hands deftly picked up the shreds, fast, efficient. When she had finished, the matron didn't say anything, but gave her a long look, and from that time on she would put Käthe on duty with the badly wounded.

“Not me,” Frau Strauss says. “I was still emptying bedpans.”

So many of the soldiers didn't even know they were dying. They just stared at the ceiling, or at the window. Those who knew it was the end cried for their mothers, girlfriends. They cried for their wives, for God. “We gave them champagne and special food if they requested it — and if we had any.”

“Then,” Frau Strauss says. “The hospital was bombed. It was still burning when I arrived in the morning, flames shooting out of the windows. I could smell gas everywhere and the air was filled with heavy black smoke. You could hang an
axe in this air. “But I work there,” I said, stupidly, and the
Kommando
guard shrugged his shoulders. “Not any more.”

“We left Breslau together. Käthe, Greta — her nanny — and Willi. For
Hauptbahnhof.
I just closed the door of my house, where I thought I would live with Johann, and put the key under the mat. We all had sturdy rucksacks with wide straps. Willi had one, too. With sweaters and clean underwear. Food, as much as we could carry. Käthe told me to bake cakes with all the flour and eggs I still had. They came out hard, but good to chew on the way. We sewed money and jewellery into the linings of our clothes. Anything that was small and could be sold or exchanged for food and shelter. Willi was so awkward then, in his coat and sweaters. Poor thing. He kept saying he was too hot.

“The
Hauptbahnhof was
so crowded we couldn't even get to the platform. There were people everywhere, spilling into the hall, the side tunnels. People said there would be no more trains. I remember a woman with a baby, screaming, ‘Where can we go?' The guard told her to go to Opperau-Kanth. ‘Trains are waiting there,' he said. ‘There will be enough space for everybody.' He kept saying we should all go there. That it was safer for the trains. ‘Mothers don't forget to take
Spiritus
cookers to boil the milk for your children,' that's what we heard from the loudspeakers.

“We didn't go to Kanth. A good thing we didn't. Later, I heard it called ‘Kanth Death March.' Eighteen thousand women and children, they said, froze to death. Minus twenty Celsius and icy, bone freezing wind. Babies wrapped up in pillows and blankets. Mothers were afraid to look, afraid to check if the children were still alive. And in the end there were no trains.

“I don't know what happened to Greta. She was separated from us right at the start, swallowed by a wave of refugees. Käthe never found her. She wrote to Red Cross, to refugee camps. Nothing, not a word. Most of the women and children from Breslau went to Dresden we were told. That's where they died, in the bombings. Mitzi went there, too, Käthe found out, from her father's old driver. She just disappeared in the ruins. Burnt to cinders.”

Frau Strauss tells Anna of a succession of cold school gyms, peasant barns. Of cabbage soup so hot she could hardly swallow it. A woman let them sleep in her bed. “It's still warm,” she said. “Go fast.” Of Willi's dirty face streaked with tears. Ditches everywhere were filled with belongings, cast off, too heavy to carry. Books, china, cutlery, plates, Frau Strauss even saw a pair of brass candelabras. Ditches littered with clothes, bundles of clothes. Käthe dug into these bundles like a fiend to find clean underwear for Willi.

“There were so many children. Children with frightened faces, running noses, hands clinging to the handles of sledges and prams. The young and the old always die first,
nein
? The bodies of the dead joined the cast off possessions, frozen until the spring would free them from ice.”

Frau Strauss is clearing her throat. She wants Anna to know about Käthe. The way she really was then, in these horrible times. Fate itself willed it that Anna should know everything. “If I don't tell you,” she says, “Käthe will take her pain with her, to her grave. Let me tell you about revenge.”

“The cellars are dark and damp, and when you huddle in them time stands still. The bodies around you shake, like aspen leaves in the wind. You think of different things. Silly things. How you used to swipe sweet dough from the bowl with your finger in the kitchen. How a mouse hid in a cardboard box and the farmer hit it with a stick and then threw it by the tail into the compost heap. How you heard that the Russians steal watches and wedding rings, and how all will be fine for you don't have any.

“The door of the cellar opens. You can see that the men who stand at the entrance are drunk and they smell of tobacco and vodka and something else, something sharp, acidic, but you don't know what it is. They are Russian, they are Polish. They have bulls-eye lanterns and they cry loud,
Davai suda!
and
Woman come!

“It all becomes very simple then. You are German or Russian or Polish; you are a man, a woman or a child. There are no other choices. German men are hit in the head with a rifle butt. Children are taken somewhere, but you don't know where.

Women? Women are raped. You have been with them in the same room. You already know their names, Marie, Erika, Ilschen, Frau Neumann. Some of them scream, some cry. What's going to happen to us, they ask. Oh God, Oh God, why is this happening?

“I was taken to a big house and told to wait. I thought I heard Käthe's scream. From another room. Such an unnatural scream. Later, only later, I learned that before these soldiers have been let loose in this village, they have been taken to a concentration camp, to see piles of bodies, heaps of glasses, of hair. That they have been reminded by big white signs on wooden scaffolds.
Soldiers! Auschwitz does not forgive. Take revenge without mercy!

“The first one gave me vodka to drink from his field flask and then a piece of greasy sausage to eat. He laughed and pinched my cheek and I thought: Thank you, God! He will let me go! Then he hit me. Down, you German whore, he yelled, and I closed my eyes and lay down.

“I stopped counting how many times I was raped. The soldiers lined up. Some spit on me or hit me in the face. I closed my eyes. I didn't care if I lived or died. My throat was swollen, for one of them tried to strangle me, and others pulled him away. Another one pressed a pistol against my chest, and I prayed that he would fire.

“I must have fainted, for when I woke up I had no clothes on. I groped in the dark, in the blood and vomit. There was a wardrobe in the room, and a dress on a hanger. But it was too small. I had to leave the back unfastened, to make it fit. I climbed through the window. There was a church in this village, and I wanted to hide there.

“The church was dark and empty. There was a big cross at the altar. There was a body on the cross. A woman's dead body. Naked, pinned down to the wood by her hands and feet. They had torn away the figure of Christ to make room for her. Her face was swollen and blue, her hair entangled. Her mouth was opened as if she were still trying to say something.

“Käthe, I saw a few hours later. With Willi. Her face and legs were bruised and swollen, but she said she fell down the stairs, Nothing happened,' she said. ‘Nothing.' I knew she was
lying, but it was just as well. I didn't want to hear the truth. I wanted to forget. She said a Russian, Captain Zeneyev, helped her and Willi. ‘A good man,' she said. ‘Isn't he a good man, Willi?' And Willi said, ‘Yes, Mutti.' He was playing with an aeroplane made out of a Russian army bulletin.

“This Russian Captain let us stay in his quarters for a few days. He sent us a Russian nurse. Gave us food. Said he had a boy at home, the same age. Before we left, we saw carts with Polish refugees coming to this village. They moved into empty houses. Their children ran around the yard with hoops, climbed the trees, pretended to shoot at each other with sticks. On Sunday morning, the women, their heads tied in flowery kerchiefs, went to pray in the church.