Drew and his mom reached the southernmost corner of the American sector of Berlin as JFK ended his address with a plea. Now, in the thermonuclear age, any misjudgment on either side about the intentions of the other could rain more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history. Therefore, I, as president and commander in chief . . . need your goodwill, and your support—and above all, your prayers.
The weight of the danger, the apocalyptic consequences of any mistake JFK, his nation, or any American in Berlin might make settled as heavy as the city’s rubble mountains on Drew. Turning off the radio, Drew’s mom spoke in a grave voice. “Honey, the eastern perimeter of the camp borders the Russian zone, so please don’t meander out that way when you take a break today. We’re all very careful to avoid creating any kind of confrontation at the line.”
“Wow—that close?”
She nodded. “It couldn’t be helped. This is where there was available land. But that proximity—the refugees seeing Russians on patrol as they wait for asylum with us—really rattles them. So be prepared for some to be pretty fearful on top of being hungry and exhausted.”
They rounded a corner.
“Oh my goodness!” Drew’s mom caught her breath. “I’ve never seen the line stretch this far this early in the morning.”
“Guess they heard Kennedy’s speech, too,” Drew murmured. He slid back to his side of the front seat and took in the morass of people who’d managed to escape a police state that had to keep its citizens by force.
Snaking toward them was a restless, thrumming line of hundreds of people, clumped together in family units. Elderly Germans sat slumped on bundles of whatever they’d been able to smuggle across the border and carry away from the homes they’d never see again. Mothers held up umbrellas against the already-hot July sun to shield children, who napped on coats on the pavement. Babies cried in strollers. Fathers paced. Young adults talked animatedly, testing out American slang that before would have brought them trouble. Others hungrily read West Berlin papers they’d purchased from newsboys working the sidewalk.
Drew’s mom parked, and she and Drew hustled through the camp’s entrance, where a massive sign read: the free world welcomes you.
“Entschuldigen Sie, bitte.” His mom excused them as she guided Drew through throngs of people to the main reception building. She headed for the door reserved for the five hundred American, British, French, and German workers who manned Marienfelde’s medical clinic, mess halls, screening offices, and apartment complexes.
“Bitte . . .” An older lady reached out and caught his mom’s sleeve, tugging fretfully on it. “Hast du meinen Man gesehen?”
The elderly refugee was so distraught, Drew’s mom hesitated, gently answering that no, she hadn’t seen the lady’s husband.
“Wir fuhren getrennt mit der S-Bahn . . .” The woman explained that the couple had traveled in separate train cars once they reached East Berlin, promising that if one was stopped and detained, the other would continue on to freedom. Tears streaked the lady’s furrowed face. Please, she begged. Her husband’s health was poor. Could Drew and his mom help her look for him? He had to be somewhere inside.
Seeing a sympathetic American, other refugees surged forward, a tidal wave of anxiety, imploring Drew’s mom to help them, too.
“Es tut mir so Leid, gnädige Frau,” his mom apologized, plucking the woman’s hands from her sleeve. She held them together, as if in prayer, and explained that she couldn’t help right that instant, but that she would once the lady had been processed inside. She pulled away, waving no, no to the dozen or so people clamoring after her.
“Bitte,” the woman wailed as Drew and his mom rushed through the door, slamming it behind them.
“That poor lady,” Drew’s mom murmured as she stopped to collect herself, taking some deep breaths. “I suspect her husband was caught.” Suddenly, she looked weary.
“Are you okay, Mom? Is it always like this?”
“It is lately.” She took one last deep breath, drawing herself up tall. “Come on, honey, let’s see how they’d like to use you today.”
She took Drew down a hallway. It was already packed tight with refugees parked elbow-to-elbow against the wall, holding official questionnaires, awaiting their first intake interviews. Drew’s skin crawled when he saw a sign written in bold lettering. He translated the German to himself:
be careful:
during conversation (danger of snooping);
with invitations (danger of abduction);
in corresponding with the east zone (danger of their arrest).
heed the sector boundary.
Drew had to force his eyes away from the sign’s distressing message to meet his mom’s superior, who greeted Drew with, “So, this is your famous son?”
“Famous?” Drew asked as he shook hands.
“She’s very proud of you, young man.”
“Of course I am!” Drew’s mom beamed. Then she introduced them. “Honey, this is Mr. Klein. He—”
“No names, no names, my dear,” Mr. Klein cautioned her, only half joking. He waited through a loud intercom announcement: “Two hundred twenty-two, two hundred twenty-three . . .”
“You see,” he said to Drew, pointing to the loudspeaker, “we don’t use the refugees’ names. Just numbers that we assign each day. The walls have ears, you know. Stasi spies everywhere.” He gestured to the waiting refugees. “They’re looking to find out where we relocate these people so later, they can kidnap them and drag them back into the arms of the KGB. That’s why we ask each refugee so many questions—why they left, how they crossed over to us, where they came from. To make sure they are indeed who they claim to be. Your mother has become quite a heroine among our debriefers.”
“Oh no, nothing like that,” she demurred.
“She’s too modest. Just last week, she sensed a young man’s statements didn’t add up. She kept questioning him—and he turned out to be a member of the Stasi elite guard.” Mr. Klein lowered his voice so much that Drew had trouble hearing him. “Once she got that out of him, he claimed he wanted to defect. So we told the kid to prove his good intentions by going back to East Berlin and returning with something of value to us.”
Drew’s mom looked down and fidgeted with her purse.
“Because he’d been granted a few days’ leave for R and R in West Berlin—that’s how he was able to get to Marienfelde—we asked him to go back to his regiment and use the ruse of telling the guards at the gate that he just needed some fresh laundry. He returned with the latest Soviet gas mask, thanks to your mom.”
“It seemed a terrible risk for that boy to take, all for the sake of a Russian gas mask. It’s not as if we didn’t know they had them.”
“In intelligence, my dear, any bit of information might prove important.”
“But you’ve processed him through to the West now, haven’t you?” she asked.
Mr. Klein smiled. “Your mother believed he wanted to defect,” he said to Drew. “She has a big heart.” Then, without answering her question, he walked down the hall to his office, wading through refugees.
Drew was assigned to the cafeteria, where a mass of people had already queued up, holding large tin bowls, awaiting their breakfast.
How many runaways were already crammed inside the camp?
“You will give each person two sausages,” the head cook explained as he dumped peeled onions and potatoes into vats of soup bubbling on the stoves. The man had a long, razor-thin, horizontal scar across his cheek—a healed dueling cut, most likely, a telltale sign that the man had attended an elite German military academy before World War II. I wonder what this guy’s story is, Drew thought as he took his place behind the steaming pots of hotdog-sized sausages.
About fifty people into Drew’s shift, a thin boy around his age approached him. As the teen held
up his bowl, Drew speared a pair of sausages and dropped them next to the generous hunks of bread and butter already on the plate.
“Bitte, darf ich noch eine Wurst haben?” The teenager asked for an extra sausage. His stomach growled so loudly, it sounded like a snare drum. Even over the clank of forks, Drew could hear its anguished rumble.
“I . . .” Drew hesitated, not knowing if he was allowed to give the boy extra. He felt dozens of eyes on him as the line stalled.
“Bitte,” the youth repeated. At first he wouldn’t look up at Drew. But when the boy finally did, Drew winced at the starvation and embarrassment in the young German’s hazel eyes.
“I’m sorry, son.” An American officer stepped up beside Drew and explained that they had just enough to feed the number of people they’d counted that morning. If Drew gave the boy a third sausage, someone else down the line would be shorted. The officer spoke in English, so Drew had to translate. He felt his freckles fry with shame at the memory of the enormous pancake breakfast he’d left unfinished that morning.
The German teen just frowned, biting his lower lip.
“Es tut mir Leid.” Drew murmured how sorry he was. He and the boy stood frozen in mutual mortification.
Everyone around them in the cafeteria seemed to hang suspended in time as well.
Then a little girl stepped out of line and approached the teen. “Du kannst eine von mir haben.” She offered to share her sausage with the boy, claiming she couldn’t eat two.
Grateful beyond words to the child, Drew added a third to the boy’s bowl and then fished out the biggest, fattest single sausage from the bunch for the girl. As she moved away, Drew heard her stomach roil in concert with the boy’s.
“Sweet Jesus,” murmured the officer. “And the children shall lead us.” He cleared his throat awkwardly and patted Drew on the back. “Carry on, soldier.”
After his breakfast shift was done an hour later, Drew went out to the wide courtyard encircled by the apartment buildings where refugees were housed four to a room. Sitting on the steps, he watched children racing, mothers hanging out fresh laundry to dry, and a young woman giggling about the Coca-Cola she’d just purchased at the snack bar—her very first. She held her hand to her nose and warned her friend not to take too big of a sip—Es kitzelt in der Nase!—because of the fizz.
An older man and woman, arm in arm, asked timidly if they might sit next to Drew. They were farmers, most likely, given their rough hands and homemade clothing. He smiled and welcomed them: “Willkommen in Berlin.” Drew started to ask from where they’d traveled, but the pair seemed so wide-eyed and jittery that he let them enjoy the sunshine in silence instead.
As he took in the scene, Drew overheard refugees sharing their stories, the safety of the camp making some talkative, despite the signs warning against divulging specifics of their lives.
A muscular man in his late twenties had left after pushing himself to exceed the state-mandated quota at his mill, only to be told that he wouldn’t be given the promised raise for doing so unless he served an additional eighteen months in the Nationale Volksarmee. He’d already done his time in the army, he said gruffly.
A woman approached a young father sitting on a nearby bench, surrounded by his five children, the youngest three fretful and clinging to him, the smallest whimpering and tugging at his diaper. “The child needs changing—may I help?” the woman asked gently. But the man just looked up at her, unresponsive. Saying she would be right back with him, the woman simply picked up the toddler and cradled him, humming reassuringly.
As she passed Drew to head inside, an older woman asked what was wrong with the father.
“He just lost his wife,” she replied softly. “Miscarriage. Hemorrhage.”
The older woman tut-tutted in sympathy. “Did he not get her to a hospital?”
“He did. But he was a Grenzgänger. The East Berlin doctors called him a criminal, a parasite for working in the West. They refused to admit her, saying that since he earned his money in the West, he was not entitled to free medical care in the East. She bled to death in his arms in the street.”
Drew stared at the bereaved husband and his herd of motherless children. How could someone be that inhumane because of politics? Drew stood to search for his mom. She’d know how to help this family.
But the older gentleman sitting beside him finally spoke. Apologies for disturbing the young master, he said in a painfully nervous voice, but had Drew heard about Americans trying to poison refugees with radiation?
Drew turned to him, astonished. “What?”
“Ach, nein!” the woman breathed. “Er is ein Amerikaner!” She struggled to stand, her old, overworked knees popping, and looked like she might shriek.
With considerable coaxing, Drew got the frightened pair to divulge that another refugee had told them they’d be taken to a clinic and shot with radiation, an American conspiracy to kill off Germans too old to work.
Jeez Louise, the irony, he thought. Drew explained that the camp was just taking X-rays to check the refugees’ lungs for tuberculosis so they could treat anyone who had it. The couple didn’t believe him and scurried away across the courtyard, passing a man in a straw fedora and seersucker suit, holding a clipboard.
Drew started to shout at the couple to ask that guy— he looked official. But his words stuck in his throat, an unease tugging at him. There was something weirdly familiar about the fellow. Drew crossed the courtyard to get a better look.
Moving to another group of refugees, the man noticeably limped. When he took off his hat to wipe sweat from his forehead, his noggin so bald it practically reflected the sun like a mirror, Drew stopped dead in his tracks. It was the man who’d picked up Linda’s dog at Wannsee Lake.
Holy moly. Drew fought the urge to sprint to his mom. What exactly would he say? It could be a total coincidence that the man was at the lake the same day they were. He seemed to be a Marienfelde employee, so the guy should be on the level. Shouldn’t he? Maybe Drew was just seeing shadows, like Matthias had said. Overreacting. Overimagining. On too high of an alert. Still, Drew stood behind the snack truck, like he was just catching some shade, to observe what the official did next.
The man approached a group of young mothers who were folding diapers and watching their toddlers play in a sandbox. As he talked with them, the official marked off a few things on his clipboard, then moved on to a group of men playing cards. Finally, he came to a klatch of college-aged boys sharing a newspaper and debating. The man singled out one youth, who reluctantly stood and followed him to some distance away.
Drew tracked the pair, stopping to peer around the corner of a building and watch them. The teenager looked unhappy. His lean, angular figure slouched, like a kid sulking over being pulled out of class by the principal. As the man lectured him, the teen vehemently shook his head. Their disagreement escalated. The man put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The boy knocked it off. The man grabbed the teen’s collar. The youth contorted and broke free, loping away, straight toward Drew.
Quickly turning, Drew leaned against the cinder-block wall, stuck his hands in his pockets, and kicked at the ground as if he just happened to be there, pouting about a crisis of his own as the youth rushed past him. At the same moment, the teen glanced back over his shoulder to make sure the man wasn’t following him—and that’s when Drew saw the boy’s enormous eyes. One blue, one brown!
It was the teenager who shared Matthias’s home! The FDJ believer who’d shouted Freundschaft and made Matthias so skittish. The kid rewarded by the Stasi for something with a GDR Olympic tracksuit. Probably the Judas who’d turned him over to the tribunal. What the heck was he doing at Marienfelde?
Then a more ominous question surged through Drew: How did this kid know the man from Wannsee Lake who’d gotten too close to Linda? Were they in cahoots somehow? Did the fact the bald official had singled out Matthias�
�s neighbor from the other refugee youth suggest he was the guy’s Stasi handler? Good God. Had the teen sent the man looking for them at the lake? For Linda?
Drew spun around and saw that the man was already scuttling away. He let the guy go, bolting after the youth instead. If that boy had somehow endangered Linda . . . Drew was filled with wrath he didn’t know he was capable of feeling.
The German teen slowed to a walk on his way to rejoin the clutch of boys he’d left behind. He seemed completely unaware of Drew sprinting up behind him.
“Hey! You!” Drew launched himself, wrapping his arm around the teen’s neck, hurtling them both to the ground in an explosion of kicks and grunts.
“Runter von mir!” The youth was bigger and stronger and punched Drew hard in the gut. He rolled Drew off of him and sprang to his feet, poised to flee. But Drew managed to kick out, buckling the German’s knees and knocking him back down to the ground. Drew pounced, and they wrestled, flailing, cursing.
People around them scattered, crying out, “Ein Kampf! Ruf die Wachen! Hilfe! Hilfe!”
For a triumphant moment, Drew had the German pinned and started shouting himself. “This guy’s a Spitzel! Get the MPs! Get my mother, Emily McMahon!”
The refugees around him panicked even more when he shouted the word Spitzel. The youth shoved himself up, hurling Drew off to land flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him. The teenager would have gotten away but for Drew blindly grabbing his leg and hanging on, coughing and gagging as the teen kicked dirt in his face.
“That’s enough!” With an easy grab and jerk, two MPs separated the teens and dragged them both into the camp’s main building. Drew spotted his mom running up the hall, tailed by her superior. He had never in his life been more relieved to see her.
Walls Page 19
