by Susan Firman
CHAPTER 24
Germany
Later that year, Erwin Hans Resmel returned for the last and final time to the country he had been prepared to lay down his life for. His heart was heavy at having to leave Jan behind him but he knew that the separation would only be for four months. He stared out of the train window as the carriage rocked side to side, mesmerising him so that his eyelids drooped and he fell into into a drowsy sleep. Outside, the landscape rushed by, fields quietly preparing themselves for the long winter rest, trying to forget the commotion of war. Hans reopened his eyes. The train puffed towards the coast before turning back on itself, snaking across the land on those lines that were open. A sign: ‘No Time to Die!’ gave warning of a mine-field, reminding people of the constant danger that still lay hidden beneath the soil. His head rested on the back of the swaying seat, broken buildings and mountains of bricks scattered in anger, as village and small town passed before his eyes. No-one on the train spoke. Each sat in their own personal space: staring, thinking, numbed by what each saw beyond the dust-covered pane.
The train slowed to a snail-like crawl as the engine and carriages clicked and clanged over damaged points as they changed from one set of lines to another. Hans noticed that large chunks of rail on the other line were missing or twisted in contortive shapes. Slowly the wheels squealed to a halt as the engine sighed, its breath of steam hissing and whistling from jets near its wheels. Doors banged and four armed American soldiers walked slowly from one end of the carriage to the other, scanning each passenger in silence. Hans heard the end door of the carriage shut. The waiting went on. Then, ever so slowly, he felt the carriage shudder and felt the pull of the locomotive once more. The train rattled on further only to come once more to a shuddering halt with another squeal and hiss. More doors banged. This time, five armed Soviet troops marched through the carriage. The same as before, giving only a secondary glance to its silent occupants. Fifteen minutes later the carriages began to move again and as the train picked up speed, Hans could hear the ‘tatty-tat’ of the wheels as they ran over countless rail joints. He guessed that they had just passed over some sort of border and yet the landscape told him that they were still well within Germany. They began to head due east.
As the train came closer to Berlin, the increase in damage became more exaggerated: ugly, gaping holes and mute, burnt out husks of houses that had once been cared for and lived in. The city had been bombed and pounded, burnt and pounded, and bombed again until there was nothing more to burn. Only bricks, rubble and dust were left.
The train crept into the city centre, past the destroyed park of the Tiergarten and stopped just short of where a railway station should have been. Before the war, all trains stopped at Friedrichstrasse but now that the city was in ruins and many of the bridges destroyed or damaged, the train stopped short of crossing the river. Hans heard the guard bark out the order to vacate the train:
“Alle aussteigen! Alle aussteigen!”
Hans pulled his suitcase from the high shelf behind his head and made his way to one of the exit doors where he stepped down onto the burnt, blackened ground. Dust covered roads and footpaths, deadened footsteps of survivors made them more like ghosts than the vibrant, busy people he had remembered from his previous visits to Berlin. At this point he had no idea where to begin searching for any clue for the whereabouts or fate of little Siege. All the familiar things had disappeared or been turned into grotesque, hideous shapes of their former selves. The Kaiser-Wilhelm church with its interesting, almost fairy-tale spires had been smashed yet those sorry remains still stood higher than the few remaining damaged buildings and within a short distance, the part of the Zoo which edged the canal remained untouched, as unblemished as it had been the day he could remember it as a child.
He walked, hoping to find a tram that might be travelling in one of the directions he had been familiar with, but such transport could not run within the streets, so extensive was the city damage. The centre he had known, just east of the Brandenburg Gate was almost unrecognisable as building after building, palace after palace of what had been Berlin’s Mitte lay smashed and ugly, silently standing in shocked witness to what war could do. Yet, Hans realised that Berlin was not alone: most of the major cities in Europe had suffered a similar fate from one side or another. Warsaw had been flattened, Stalingrad smashed, Hamburg and Dresden fire-bombed. All had suffered. War chose no sides; everyone ended being a victims of its ravenous appetite.
Hans managed to pick up a tram in the direction of Grünewald where he found lodgings with the mother of one of Elizabeth’s friends near the palace at Charlottenburg. Most of the houses in this district were still standing, although many had been badly damaged. Elizabeth had given her husband Frau Mohr’s address during his last leave and told him to contact the lady should anything go wrong. When Hans spoke to Frau Mohr, he discovered that her husband had not yet come home from the war. She told him that her husband had been drafted during the last six months of the war and now was one of the thousands captured in the east and the last she heard was that he had probably been sent to Siberia. Hans said nothing but he didn’t hold out much hope that she would ever see her husband again.
Frau Mohr was still the plump and homely woman he remembered, although some of her plumpness had diminished during the last eighteen months. She had always been one of those women who easily put weight on which had been quite a problem for her whenever she made some of her filling dumplings or large chocolate cream cakes she was well-known for. A cheerful woman who always had a kind word or a helpful pair of hands whenever such was needed. She put her own concerns aside as she tried to suggest things that Hans could try.
“So many people are missing, Herr Resmel. Have you found the lists, yet?”
“Which lists?” he asked as they ate their first meal together in the fading daylight.
“They’re all over the city. Try some of them. You never know what may turn up. Also, I suggest you register at one of the posts and fill in the official forms for lost persons. Everything helps.”
Early next morning, Hans left the house and began the long task of trying to find his son. He said nothing to Frau Mohr for almost a week until a further outburst of despair escaped his lips.
“I’ve spent hours, days and days reading hundreds of the long lists put up on walls of those missing! Hours and hours of my time hoping to find a Resmel, but nothing. It’s too difficult! I’ll never find him! So much of the city’s in ruins.”
“Dreadful. Dreadful,” Frau Mohr agreed. “All those bombs and fires. Dreadful.” She shook her head as if to shake the nightmare away. After a minute or two, she continued. “I never liked Herr Hitler at the time,” she said. “Didn’t say anything, not even to Gustav. Well, the papers kept saying he would save us; that he would lead us into prosperity. And people believed him. Oh dear, what fools we were!”
“I’m sorry that any of it happened.” It was said with a sigh. Hans had seen what evil things war had done, how it had turned good, reasonable men into bullies and murderers. He held his head between his hands, his elbows resting on the edge of Frau Mohr’s dining table.
“Have you tried some of the authorities in the British sector? They may have come across something.”
“Not yet. I’m not sure Siege was even in the city. He could have been taken north of here.”
“Oh dear,” sighed Frau Mohr. “That makes things more difficult. All that sector’s under Russian control. Very tight security I’ve heard, far worse than any of the others. The Americans seem to be the easiest to deal with.”
“I could try the British sector, I guess. I’ve already found that moving from one sector to another’s difficult. The occupation forces want to keep a tight rein on any movement in the city. My papers don’t allow me to move easily around the city.”
“You’ll find a way. A soldier can always find a way. Coffee?” She wanted him to feel that someone cared. “I’ve still got some Ersatz. It’s better than just boiling up tree
leaves and things.”
“No, keep it for yourself.”
“Have some of this.”
Frau Mohr handed him a thick slice of bread and a thin strip of pink ham. She had managed to cook a small cake for them both, just sufficient for two days’ supper.
“I don’t know how you manage,” he commented.
“Black market. Prices are so, so high. After six years of rationing, we’ve learnt to get by. People in the occupying forces are not permitted to trade with any of us Berliners. Luckily, I’ve a contact who is able to get a little fresh food. Works in the Tiergarten growing vegetables and he has been able to push some in my direction.” She ate the slice of bread and began carefully cutting the cake, making sure she would have some left for the following evening. The conscious act of doing this visibly upset her and she bit her lip as she tried to put on a brave face. But it did no good and her inner emotions welled out and spilt over. “I don’t know what’ll happen during this winter. We had so little coal before. Now we don’t even get that! I dread to think how many of us will freeze. Ach, Herr Resmel, everything’s so dreadful! People living in shelters and cellars. There’s nowhere else. You shouldn’t have come. Really, you shouldn’t have bothered. I’m so sorry!”
Hans wondered how many people were struggling in exactly the same way, all over Europe. There was suffering everywhere and people like him had to take the blame. When the Reich was strong and the war was going well, very few complained. Now, it was different and the faces of the people had become sour or dejected as they struggled to survive. He wondered what kind of child Siege would be. That’s if he was even able to find him. Yet he had to find the child and with each passing day the trail became more difficult to follow.
Hans wrote many letters to Jan, for by writing them he was able to feel closer to her. He had only managed to post a few of them and any reply from her took many weeks in getting to him. Each time she wrote, she told him how much she was missing him and reminded him of his promise to both Andrea and herself that he would try and return to England by the years’ end. By the time winter had set in and the first flakes of snow had begun to drift down from the low grey sky, Hans was almost ready to return to England. He had discovered from a man who had served with the Kriegsmarine that his brother Renard had not returned from one of his stints at sea. U-248 on which he was serving had been reported missing in early January 1945, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic and it was six months before the authorities were able to confirm its sinking with the loss of all her forty-seven sailors on board.
Maybe, it’s just as well, thought Hans, for he knew that Renard had been very much involved with all the hype that surrounded Hitler and his regime, although he was saddened for all the families who had lost their loved-ones on the boat.
His thoughts turned to his younger brother and although It was strange he had heard nothing from his younger brother, he could have gone underground. He pinned his hopes on finding Axel alive although deep down he had his concerns as he knew that Nazi sympathisers had scoured the country routing out those who had shown their disapproval to the regime or it could be possible that, like so many others who had avoided the call-ups, that during the last days when the regime struggled in its final death throws, Axel had been forced to fight. The entire population was in turmoil and no-one seemed to know what had happened as the Russian front reached into the streets of Berlin.
Hans had walked round to the street where Aunt Laura and Uncle Karl lived. Only a few houses were still occupied but most in the street stood as black burnt out hulks or as one lonely brick wall that gave an indication that a house had been there at all. The house Hans had remembered spending his teenage years in was now just a pile of bricks. At least Uncle Karl did not live to see its destruction for he had died during the winter of forty-four and the house had been unoccupied since then. Aunt Laura had gone back to Austria where most of the family still lived.
Hans spoke to one of the survivors in the street, and was told that one evening a huge wave of bombers had appeared overhead and had first dropped incendiaries to light up their target, followed by a thunderstorm of bombs which rained down from one end of the street to the other. As there were a number of factories a few kilometres away, people guessed the planes were hoping to destroy those but inaccuracies were commonplace and one entire section of town was flattened. The irony of it was that the ammunition factory down the road was left completely unscathed that evening. That is the way war mocks its participants.
Hans was beginning to come to the conclusion that his future did most likely lay in England with Jan and Andrea. There was nothing so far for him to remain where he was. He was in the middle of brooding over these thoughts, when there was a buzz from the entrance bell to tell Frau Mohr that someone needed to speak to her.
Hans had been close to the downstairs door when the caller had just pressed the bell. Hans opened the door.
“Hello. Frau Mohr is not at home at the moment. Can I be of help?”
A young man, more smartly dressed than usual, was standing on the step. He had a black attaché case under his arm and as Hans spoke to him he raised his newly brushed black cadet cap.
“It is not Frau Mohr I have come to see. Can I find Herr Resmel here?”
“I am Herr Resmel,” Hans answered.
“A delivery for you. From the Red Cross office for missing people.”
Hans felt a surge of adrenalin. Even though he was surprised, he didn’t dare allow himself the privilege of hope. And yet, he desired hope as much as a dying man in the desert desires water. He signed for the envelope and thanked the messenger for bringing it.
He held the door ajar with the toe of his shoe and tore the brown envelope open so that he was able to extract the paper inside. There were two printed pages, each one headed by the Red Cross logo and headquarter address in Zurich.
Siegmund Erwin Falko Resmel born 20 October, 1942. Mother: Elisabeth Resmel (nee Kohler) Father: Erwin Resmel POW England. Last known report of Siegmund Resmel was with his grandmother. The pair were walking with other refugees who were heading for Schwerin. Mrs Kohler’s body was found by roadside near Altentreptow. Siegmund Resmel not found. Possible survivor of air attack. Soviets hold all records for known survivors in their Berlin headquarters.
It gave some faint hope in the overwhelming chaos as vast numbers of people were still on the move in all directions. The child had not been brought to Berlin and neither did he seem to be in Neubrandenburg. It could be possible that the Americans or British had some information. A river of refugees had made their way westwards in the hope of reaching Schwerin and the western Allies before the town was handed over to the Soviets but the child could be anywhere and Hans was coming to the conclusion that the path to finding his son was not going to be an easy one. He leaned against the door frame as he considered his options. The first thing to do would be to move away from his present lodgings and find somewhere that was nearer to the address he had been given. He knew he hadn’t much time left before he had promised Jan he would try to get back to England. He must tell her of this new development and he re-entered the building and shut the door behind him. He climbed the stairs back up to Frau Mohr’s flat and immediately sat down at the table and began writing another letter to Jan. Tomorrow morning, he’d post it on his way and then apply for a visa to be able to cross the internal border into the Russian sector.
