Corridor of Darkness

by Patrick W O'Bryon

  She gave a gentle knock on Horst’s bedroom door. Receiving no answer, she entered quietly and found him lying across the bed in an inebriated stupor. He was still in uniform but for the visor cap on the chair and tall boots at the foot of the bed. Oskar had done his best to make his master comfortable. She took the hypodermic kit from the dresser drawer and injected him with the morphine. Horst twitched slightly but didn’t awaken.

  It was nearing midnight when she had placed the call to her parents in Marburg. The operator made the connection quickly, and Erika heard in her mother’s voice concern at the late hour of the call.

  “Is everything all right with you? With Leo?”

  Years before, on the eve of her marriage, Erika was invited to her parents’ bedroom. Behind closed doors Minna had spoken quietly of the dangers inherent in the big city, made even more ominous by the political situation and Horst’s work with the police. Should you ever be in trouble and need my help—we mustn’t trust the phones, you know—we need a special word. A trigger word settled upon, a term of endearment used for a shrunken old woman, something Minna had always promised she would never allow herself to become. Now Erika trembled as she pulled that trigger:

  “Mütterchen, are you and Father doing all right? I had a bad dream about you.”

  An anxious silence. “Your Mütterchen could be better. Can you get away to visit us?” Her mother’s voice broke.

  “Yes, Mother, but…”

  “Then come, Erika, come home to us immediately.”

  “I’ll be there by morning.” Erika resigned herself to a few more hours’ wait. She told Frieda to prepare the child for an emergency trip, phoned Oskar, and wrote a note for Horst: Mother ill. Leaving for Marburg. Back in a few days.

  She quickly packed a small suitcase with Leo’s and her own needs. Frieda offered to accompany them to look after the boy, but Erika declined, saying that her father would be there to help. The last thing she wanted right now was a spy in her family circle. She left the note on the foyer credenza.

  Oskar was waiting with the car when they stepped out the front door. They drove quickly to Potsdamer Station, the nighttime street free of traffic. It was now well past the one a.m. curfew. The terminal was a mausoleum, her clacking heels echoing eerily in the near-empty hall as Leo shuffled along beside her. The chauffeur had stealthily followed them through the entry, and she spotted him, half-hidden by a column, as they crossed the concourse. Tickets acquired, mother and child boarded the next train to Marburg.

  As Leo slept most of the long hours of the trip, Erika ran scenarios through her mind. Whatever Klaus knew, it had to be political, and very damning. Communists in the family? Someone who fought against the Nazi take-over? A family member with dangerous information about someone in power? An active seditionist?

  It clearly had nothing to do with ancestry. After all, the pure bloodlines of her forebears were fully documented and certified for four generations back, as required by law for her father to keep his position at the university.

  But she was wrong. Erika von Kredow, born Breitling, was a Jew.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Minna’s eyes shifted constantly from her husband to Erika sitting beside her on the sofa. Holding her daughter’s hand, she tried to read the reaction to her husband’s narrative. They had hoped never to share this burden, held secret for years, and now it had come home to haunt them and the small family they loved. In fact, it could destroy them.

  Joachim hunched forward in his well-worn armchair. Stacks of patient files and medical texts lay forgotten to either side on the rug. His elbows rested on his knees, his hands hanging loosely between them, shoulders sagging under the burden of the story they had learned from the pastor, their father.

  In 1881 Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated in Russia. The bomb thrown by a member of the radical People’s Will movement shredded the Tsar’s lower body. In the violent aftermath, reforms that might have led to a constitutional monarchy were shelved, and fear and repression took hold. His successor, Alexander III, cast blame for his father’s death on the Jews, and Imperial Russia erupted in violent pogroms. Jewish men, women and children suffered assault, death, forced poverty and destruction of their homes and livelihood for three miserable years.

  Amidst this pain and suffering, a young woman emigrated from the Imperial region of Lithuania. She had lost all her family to the violence. It was rumored in the terrified Lithuanian villages of the Pale of Settlement that Jews were well respected in Prussia and not persecuted, so she headed west.

  Nadia Arens was sixteen years old. She was slender and fit, her hair golden blond. She had blue eyes, and her features were even and lovely. Her smile had lit up a room in the days when life was still sweet and her family whole and she had reason to smile. In a cloth bag slung over her shoulder she carried the few personal belongings rescued from the burned ruin of her family home: a mother-of-pearl-inlaid brush and comb from her mother, a small family portrait, a locket. Nadia had a hooded woolen cloak and the long dress she wore, and little else to call her own.

  She lived on stolen fruit and vegetables and water from wells and creeks. Tree bark, grasses and roots stilled the gnawing hunger when nothing else could be found, but often left her retching at the side of the road. Occasionally she found temporary work for a week or two in the fields and orchards. From time to time strangers took pity on her as she moved from village to village, and she received something more nourishing to eat or drink. She met other Jews on the move and together they somehow managed to work their way farther west before they went their separate ways. Nadia walked kilometer after kilometer, avoiding main roads by day. She often slept away the sunlight hours in barns or hayricks, then returned to her trek as the sun went down. Occasionally she received a ride in a farmer’s cart, or on the back of a mule. Occasionally she was raped, usually by soldiers of the Tsar. Nadia survived.

  At the edge of the east Prussian village of Praddau she stumbled upon a parish church. She was hungry for the affection she had known in her family before the terror of the pogroms. She was starving for food. A young Lutheran minister, fresh from the seminary in Königsberg, found her unconscious on the steps of the church in the first winter days of 1884. Awakened to their Christian duty to care for the less fortunate, Pastor Johann Kessinger and his wife Lotte took in the young woman. Nadia spoke almost no German, but Yiddish carried her through, and they made her comfortable and fed her from the church pantry, until she regained her strength.

  The Kessinger marriage was barren, so they had adopted an orphaned toddler from the village. His Christian name was Joachim, his surname Breitling. The small boy took an instant liking to the young Lithuanian woman with the gentle voice and tender touch, and the Kessingers decided that she should stay on as his nanny. She would earn her keep with child care and cleaning of the parish house and church.

  For six years Nadia thrived in this loving household. She learned to speak and write fluent German. She shared meals with the pastor’s family. She sometimes cried herself to sleep with the sorrow of her loss, but treasured the new family she had discovered in Prussia. In her first year she converted to the evangelical faith. Her former beauty blossomed once again. And in her sixth year in Praddau temptation overcame piety for Pastor Kessinger, and he came to her bed in the night.

  The child of that union was an underweight baby girl. Nadia refused to divulge which of the village men was responsible, and no one stepped forward to claim the child as his own. She was baptized with the Old German name Minna. After much private counseling from the minister, Nadia agreed that the pastor and his wife would adopt the infant as their own. Johann Kessinger emphasized that the baby would thereby never face even the possibility of persecution for being half-Jewish. Nadia had seen the wisdom in the decision. The baby girl grew healthy, nourished at her birth mother’s breast. She loved her nursemaid, and as a child never learned the truth. The clergyman entered Minna’s name in the church registry as the daughter of Pa
stor Johann and Lotte Kessinger.

  Barely a year after the birth, Nadia began to experience muscle weakness. She fell repeatedly and had difficulty coming down the stairs from her attic room in the parish house to look after the baby. She found swallowing increasingly difficult and lost weight she could not afford to lose from her slender frame. The doctor came and could give no explanation for the sudden decline in the young woman’s health. Mucous filled her throat and lungs, and breathing became a painful trial. Nadia was buried at twenty-four after a month of suffering.

  The boy Joachim grew into a tall, fine-looking young man with a sharp mind. He adored his younger “sister,” and she him. At eighteen he moved to Königsberg, leaving behind his parents and ten-year-old Minna. Pastor Kessinger had only one close relative, his brother Albert. The brother had done well with his tannery and remained a bachelor. Albert offered to pay for Joachim’s study of medicine at the university, and the young man declared his determination to find the cause of the illness which took the family nursemaid. His studies so impressed his professors that they invited him to lecture at the university and upon graduation join the faculty of internal medicine. He occasionally returned to Praddau to see his family, and watched Minna mature into a beautiful young woman.

  In 1906 fever took the life of Frau Pastor Lotte Kessinger at only thirty-seven years of age.

  When Uncle Albert also offered to pay for Minna’s education, she gladly moved from the village to the big city. Sharing a love of medicine with her “brother” and thrown together in the rambling house of their uncle, it was only a matter of time before Joachim and Minna—siblings in name only—fell in love.

  They went hand-in-hand to the pastor and declared their devotion to each other and desire to marry. The minister buried his head in his hands and prayed to God for forgiveness. He then said that, despite his misgivings, he would not stand in the way of their marriage, but suggested a city marriage to avoid any hint of impropriety in the gossip-ridden parish. Joachim and Minna thanked their father for his blessing, returned to Königsberg, and were married in a civil ceremony. Uncle Albert and a friend stood as witnesses, and the Prussian state blessed the union. In the first year of their marriage a baby girl was born. Johann came to Königsberg to christen his grandchild Erika.

  The couple lived and researched and taught at the university, but then came the Great War. Joachim served as a field doctor at the western front, tending the wounded and witnessing the tragedy of mangled bodies and soldiers blinded by mustard-gas. The Treaty of Versailles created a Polish Corridor to the Baltic Sea separating East Prussia from the Weimar Republic, and the young parents found the growing threat of Bolshevism from the east too unsettling. Joachim applied for a faculty position in the Hessian university town of Marburg. He readily won acceptance based on recommendations from his peers in Königsberg and his impressive clinical work.

  The years passed and Pastor Kessinger preached the Gospel, counseled his flock, and enjoyed the occasional letters and phone calls from his distant family. Travel between Prussia and its eastern arm was restricted to sealed trains across Polish territory and ship ferries along the Baltic coast, so family visits were difficult to arrange.

  Then in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws “for the protection of German blood and German honor” changed everything. All who wished to acquire or maintain civil service or teaching positions in Germany were required to prove their pure Aryan heritage for at least four generations, untainted by Jewish blood. An Ahnenpass, a certified documentation of ancestry, would provide that proof. Anticipating no problems, Joachim sent a letter to his adoptive father requesting completion of the form, since the pastor was official keeper of the Praddau parish records.

  The request stunned Johann Kessinger. There was no problem with Joachim’s bloodline. His natural parents—the mother dying in giving him life, the father killed shortly thereafter in an agricultural accident—were of pure German blood, fourth-generation Praddauer stock. The church records confirmed this.

  But the harsh new laws also made Gentile marriage to a Jew a crime, Rassenverrat, betrayal of race. Pastor Kessinger feared for the safety of his beloved children. He painstakingly altered the date of Minna’s birth in his parish records, giving his daughter a pure Aryan heritage, as well. Then he went to the town hall to view the civil records. They showed that a Jewish woman, Nadia Arens, residing at his address in the same year, had borne a girl child of unknown paternity. There was nothing he could do to change that document. He could only hope no one would ever compare the entries. With trembling hand Pastor Kessinger signed the Ahnenpass and attested to the pure bloodline of Joachim Breitling and his family.

  At seventy-five, exhausted from bearing his secret for almost fifty years, the minister then boarded a train and made the strenuous trip from Königsberg to Marburg to deliver the truth in person. Minna finally learned that her birth mother was the beloved nursemaid Nadia, and that Johann was her natural father. She also learned that her mother had been a Jew. With that revelation Minna became a first-degree half-breed by National Socialist standards, and her daughter Erika, “tainted” by birth as a second-degree Mischling, was now married to a fervent anti-Semitic Nazi and ambitious Gestapo officer. Fear for her family clenched Minna’s gut, and she and Joachim had vowed to hold the secret forever.

  Erika sat in the room of her Marburg childhood and took the devastating knowledge to heart. She had told her parents of the SS plan for conquest and extermination. Now she tried to reconstruct in her mind the complex structure of the 1935 racial laws, which had never before had serious meaning for her. One thing was certain: she, her mother and the peacefully-sleeping child whose head rested on her lap were officially tainted by the blood of an “inferior race.” She thought marriage between a full-blooded German and a second-degree half-breed was officially allowed under the laws, with any offspring considered deutschblütig, but she had heard her husband’s anti-Semitic rants, knew his venom. All laws be damned, Horst would still categorize her and Leo as sub-human, worthy only of death.

  She had rarely seen Jews in Marburg. The tailor Edelstein, for one, a master of the needle and sewing machine who could make any piece of clothing fit, according to Minna. Erika recalled a gentle man with scraggly beard and bushy eyebrows. He always had a kind word and a piece of hard candy for the child when she and her mother visited his basement shop with items for mending or alteration. She also remembered seeing in the Altstadt a bearded man in black hat with twists of hair dangling at his ears. But in Berlin she had seen Jews on the streets, and asked herself why they didn’t dress and act like real Germans.

  All Erika really knew about Jews was learned from Nazi propaganda. The constant barrage over the past five years had instilled the message that Jews were responsible for the collapse of the German Empire and the loss of the Great War. They were Marxists and Capitalists all in one—a political conceit which Erika found difficult to grasp, even given her limited understanding of Karl Marx’s tenets of class struggle. The Jews undermined all Christian and German tradition and virtue. German women and children were not safe in their company. Germans no longer shopped in their businesses; and the venal Jews were forbidden to buy in German shops. The Jews were being forced out of the Reich in any way possible for the good of the Volk. Yet this anti-Semitism had not resonated because she had nothing to which it truly related in her life. Until now.

  Rassenverrat, Rassenschande, Blutschande—there were many terms in the Nazi lexicon for criminal defilement of blood and race, the betrayal of Aryan purity through sexual relations with a Jew. To her father Joachim, professor and physician, it was one more proof of the collapse of German idealism into the cesspool of racial and religious intolerance and cruelty.

  Though her marriage was not technically forbidden, Horst would feel betrayed by this devastating blow to his “purity” and all legal technicalities would mean nothing. Should word of his “shame” reach the upper echelons of power, blackmail and coercion would follow, and
his career—his very reason for being—would be over. And now here was Klaus Pabst, the sycophant who desired her and also despised her for standing between him and his idol Horst. Pabst had uncovered the secret and would use it.

  Without a plan, they were already dead.

  HEIMKEHR

  Homecoming

  November 1938

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ryan set his tray on one of the tall tables in the station canteen. Standard traveler’s fare: grilled bratwurst, bread roll, potato salad, a small beer. Other patrons stood nearby with luggage at their feet as they grabbed a quick meal between trains. Most ate in silence. One thumbed through a magazine. Another stared vacantly toward the platforms, holding the crisp-skinned sausage in hand, stirring it in the mild mustard.

  Ryan observed the man more closely. His skin was sallow, a thick stubble showed gray. The Iron Cross at his throat hung in stark contrast to a stained collar and frayed overcoat. The veteran ate slowly, his toothless mouth giving him difficulties. Bit by bit he slid the sausage into his mouth, gumming intensely at the fatty meat.

  Just above the bridge of his nose sat a triangular depression at least a thumb’s thickness in depth, each of the three indented sides perfectly symmetrical, as if an object had struck his forehead with great force. Perhaps he had been thrown into some unyielding, canted object. The skin of the indentation appeared remarkably smooth and unscarred. Ryan looked away. He thought of his own good fortune. With a last sip of the beer he decided to be on his way.