A Woman of War

by Mandy Robotham

We wrapped the baby in a soft blanket, and then again in a grey, regulation covering – nothing to stand out and attract attention. Asleep now, his body was cocooned and his tiny features peeked out like those of a Russian doll.

  Eva could barely speak through the sobs, and I peeled back her fingers, knuckles white as I prised him away.

  ‘Darling Edel,’ she breathed, as Christa held her shoulders, grief rocking her entire body.

  I handed the baby to Dieter, with a wrapped bottle of milk.

  ‘I’ve got a motorbike and sidecar,’ he said, focusing on the practicalities. ‘It’s less likely to raise suspicion, but I’ll need to tuck the baby right inside.’

  ‘Can you ride a bike, at speed?’

  Those blue pools flicked up and the boyish grin surfaced. ‘I’ve grown up around engines, Anke. I’ll be fine.’

  I babbled to delay the inevitable. ‘He should sleep for a bit, with the motion too. Just make sure his face is clear of any covering. If you need to stop just give him the bottle.’

  He nodded. It was time for us now. His free hand linked with mine and squeezed.

  ‘I’ll find you if I can,’ he whispered. ‘Be safe, Anke. Survive. You must survive.’ His eyes were the clearest I had ever seen, and I wanted to kiss his lips so hard and for so long – tumble into bed and forget everything of the past day, eat fresh pastries and drink good coffee while tracing my hands over his pale, beautiful face. And never let go.

  Instead, there were only words, insipid and inadequate. ‘You too. Stay hidden. Uncle Dieter will help you. He’s a good man. But look to yourself.’ My hand was so tight on his I might have drawn blood.

  I slipped a note into his pocket, a quickly scrawled code to Uncle Dieter: ‘Care for this boy, find him parents where he has none. I’m well. Noo Noo.’

  It was the pet name my uncle and I had used since childhood, and proof that the message came from me. The rest was up to trust and fate and his rough, good nature. A noise came from the corridor, and Dieter snapped back into the room.

  ‘I need to go,’ he said, turning and mouthing, ‘I love you,’ that little chip in his tooth just visible.

  ‘Me too,’ I mouthed back, but I don’t know if he caught it. I saw the jacket disappear through the door, and my future, once again, became as deep and dark as the weave he was wearing.

  A minute later I heard the thrust of a motorbike engine, the throaty roar as he revved and receded into the distance. They were away, no sounds of a chase; perhaps he had slipped by without attracting attention – his unblemished reputation paving the way. Then a crack. And a second, third. Gunfire or the engine kicking back? I had no way of knowing, only time and consequence would tell. Eva gripped on to my hand while our futures disappeared down the mountain, each of us keening inside at the loss.

  I knew then I could only do what he asked of me and survive. I turned to Christa, whose silent support through the past twelve hours had braced me more times than I could count. All three of us sat in a huddle on Eva’s bed, listening to the encroaching heavy steps outside, Koenig’s strident boom causing us to link arms and stand firm. A thunderous rapping on the door signalled an end to the momentous birthday at the Berghof, and we three prepared ourselves for the battle ahead.

  41

  Retribution

  From his feet to his collar, he oozed fury, pushed out in the slightest of twitches, pacing hard so that his limp barely registered, blood simmering in his vessels. Above the collar, however, Joseph Goebbels was a set mask of calm, sunken cheeks, black hair not a slick out of place. Only his eyes pulsed with unrest.

  He circled me, jabbing at his prey, as if I was a disgusting yet intriguing exhibit in a zoo. I stood perfectly still, resigned, every nerve within me working hard on the blankest of expressions, nothing to rile him, nor show fear.

  ‘So, Fräulein Hoff,’ he began. ‘This is not quite the outcome we expected, is it?’ The tone was not rhetorical.

  ‘No, Herr Goebbels. I’m as sorry as you for Fräulein Braun’s loss. It is tragic.’

  ‘I would say it’s more than tragic. This was not just any child, as you know. This is a tragedy for all of Germany. So, can you enlighten me as to what happened?’

  I sucked in air as discreetly as possible, fighting against the rising quiver in my voice. ‘The labour was progressing as normal – as with any first labour – and there was nothing to concern me until the baby was born.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘It was obvious from the first seconds that he wasn’t … coping.’

  ‘And so it breathed?’ This heinous man – a father of six himself – could not even attribute a sex, a persona to this baby. I hated him more for that than anything in his despicable history.

  ‘Yes, briefly.’

  ‘Did you attempt to save the baby? To give life?’ His tone was still flat, a gargantuan anger kept underground, bubbling like the pot of ham on Mama’s stove, puffs of steam fighting their way out from under the lid. Always, always, that pot spilled its dirty scum onto the clean metal stove.

  ‘I did, for a short time.’

  ‘Why only for a short time?’ he shot back. Now he was animated, a chink to show my guilt, assigning my own blame. It would save them having to fabricate it later, just for the records.

  ‘Fräulein Braun asked me to stop.’

  ‘Are you sure about that? Are you sure you just didn’t want this baby to die, the Führer’s baby? For revenge, retribution? We know the Reich has enemies.’ His face was inches from me now, spiny teeth just showing. An ugly man, inside and out.

  ‘No.’ I said it as calmly as I could, without emotion. The lid on my fear made his nostrils flare.

  ‘And why did Fräulein Braun ask you to stop? Why would a new mother tell you to cease saving her baby from death? I can’t imagine it, Fräulein Hoff. I really can’t picture it at all.’

  ‘Because it was obvious the baby was not capable of living. The baby had—’ here I felt a stab of betrayal to all babies born not quite perfect ‘—deformities. Significant deformities.’

  ‘So you say. In fact, severe enough that you felt the need to dispose of the body before we were able to view it, to burn it so completely that all proof was lost?’ Now his voice was rising, the pot beginning to boil, sour foam bubbling.

  ‘I imagine that was behind Fräulein Braun’s thinking,’ I said. My own voice was beginning to crack, resolve crumbling. Come on, Anke. Fight for the baby, for the family, for Eva, for yourself. Deep breath.

  ‘Her first concern was that the Führer’s reputation may be damaged if he were … if the baby was known to be his. She wanted no record, no possibility of an image, to be used against the Reich.’

  I looked him squarely in the eye and lied through my own, silently chattering teeth. ‘She did it for the love of the Führer. For Germany.’

  He was briefly blindsided, drew back, and paced the room again. Then he rallied for a second attack. ‘And you, Fräulein Hoff, you didn’t think that these actions would arouse suspicion, might create questions?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of that at the time,’ I said, in semi-truth. ‘I was dealing with a dead baby, and a very distressed mother, who had just lost her son. My priority is always with the mother, and the baby, if possible.’

  ‘So you have said!’ He was shouting now, loud but controlled. ‘And yet I am still at a loss, Fräulein Hoff, as to what is the truth. The real truth.’

  He banged his fist on the desk at the same time as the door flew open, and Eva launched herself in the room. She had the look of an injured lioness rallying to protect her cubs.

  ‘Joseph!’ she cried, and his face swivelled, stricken at probably the loudest and only rebuke she had ever dared aim at him. She stood, trembling, pale and unsteady, loose hair hanging limply, her robe soiled and hanging from her suddenly diminished body. I left my spot, took out a chair and led her to it. Her voice was calmer when she spoke. ‘Herr Goebbels, please. This is not Fräulein Hoff’s doing. It was my
decision entirely.’

  He was struck dumb by her intrusion and forthright words. ‘You cannot – and will not – hold her responsible,’ she went on. ‘Her care was unblemished. There was simply no hope and I did what I thought was right at the time.’

  He stepped forward, and I saw in his twitch the wily cogs of his brain working overtime.

  ‘Of course, Fräulein Braun, and my thoughts go out to you – mine and Magda’s. Our deepest condolences.’ His sudden fawning made me nauseous. ‘But perhaps it would have been more … fitting, if we had been able to prepare an appropriate burial.’

  No one in that room believed for a minute he was talking out of respect, rather than control. Not even Eva, as gullible as she could be. She looked at him, her face cracked from crying, and acted like a consummate actress.

  ‘I understand, Joseph, and it is for me to make peace with the Führer, when the time is right. But I did not want anyone – anyone – laying eyes on the boy who should have been perfect. I did it out of respect for the Führer, for his bigger creation. Surely you can see that. Or is your faith in the dream waning?’

  She didn’t weep, or falter. She wasn’t supposed to at that point, moulding to the expectation of a Nazi mistress, focused and unyielding, like the scores of Magda models across Germany. But I caught it in Eva’s voice, the tiniest glitch, the pain not of a dead baby, but a live child all but dead to her, knowing he was out there somewhere, without her, nuzzled into someone else’s breast. And I couldn’t help applauding her for it, the sacrifice.

  The Reich’s ultimate wordsmith, master of the truth twist, was finally silenced. He was Hitler’s right-hand man, among the most trusted, but could he – would he – dare question the word of a queen, the only chosen one?

  ‘As I say, my condolences,’ he managed. ‘Fräulein Hoff, please help your mistress back to her room.’

  I felt the tremble in Eva’s limbs as we walked out, perhaps from weakness and loss of blood, but more likely from the biggest confrontation of her life. For someone who had spent her life in the shadows, she had come out fighting when it mattered most.

  ‘Just before you go, Fräulein Hoff.’ Goebbels’ quiet, understated tone jerked on my leash and I froze mid-step.

  ‘Yes, Herr Goebbels?’ I didn’t turn but held firmly on to Eva.

  ‘Captain Stenz. Do you know anything of his disappearance, the circumstances surrounding it?’

  I felt Dieter’s watch prickle on my wrist, where I had strapped it, perhaps unwisely, the day before. I slipped it out of sight under Eva’s robe. Joseph’s beady stare was on me, burning into my shoulders. Had he seen my wrist, the giveaway I couldn’t bear to hide away?

  ‘No, Herr Goebbels. I saw him yesterday, briefly during the labour, and not since.’

  ‘As have we all, Fräulein Hoff. I understand from Sergeant Meier that you were … friends.’

  He didn’t see me swallow, but it allowed a second to stop a sob forming. ‘Not friends, but we were civil to each other. He was my overseer.’

  ‘Nothing more?’ He was probing, would have loved to wheedle, cajole or beat it out of me, given the chance.

  ‘Nothing. It does as well to be on good terms with your captors, Herr Goebbels.’

  ‘Hmm.’ I took it as a dismissal, and piloted Eva from the room.

  I settled her in bed, checked on her bleeding, while her face turned into the covers, eyes creasing into tears. Her dry, cracked fingers locked into mine.

  ‘Thank you, Eva,’ I said. ‘For me and for my family.’

  She looked at me, eyes red, tears rolling. ‘It seems I do get to care for someone after all,’ she sniffed, and smiled weakly. ‘Just briefly.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ I said, and held her as she sobbed for her lost boy.

  Epilogue: Berlin 1990

  Anke, aged seventy-seven

  From my flat near the Chausseestrasse I can see the Wall coming down, little groups chipping away at years of internment, bodies scurrying away with their piece of concrete history, already marketable. Like ants with their spoils.

  I’m strangely sad, not for humanity, because those on the Eastern side might finally know something of democracy in time, but because those bricks assure me I’m not alone in my memories of that time. Each one of us old enough to see the Wall go up would remember the time before, during and after the rage that took hold of Germany, Europe and the world. Today’s little piles of rubble are a reminder of that moon rock landscape of post-war Berlin. In an odd way, that’s comforting.

  Sometimes, I find it hard to remember things – details of daily life – but it’s the privilege of age that you can recall events of forty-five years ago with clarity. Some I want to shy away from, but I have long since battled with my demons and we have come to an impasse. They are part of the package.

  In those days after the birth of Eva’s baby, there was confusion; she with her grief, me with the fear of retribution for my family. I was oddly calm about what I viewed to be the inevitable: the arrival of the Gestapo at the Berghof, being taken from my porch, perhaps into the surrounding forest, and shot for my failures. What I feared was a tortuous and lengthy preamble, to no end other than facing a bullet anyway. Christa had been sent back to the Goebbels’ the day after the birth, no doubt where Magda would control her silence. I could only hope she was safe.

  At intervals, Magda stalked the rooms of the Berghof under the guise of easing Eva’s sorrow, but she was preying on information. She cornered me each time, probing my knowledge about disability and survival, most of which I bluffed with a sheen of medical jargon. Woman to woman, I felt she could see through my mendacity far more effectively than the Gestapo’s best agents, but I was vigilant with my words, playing cat and mouse with her questions.

  Joseph was elsewhere, constructing lies about the crushing defeats and the impending fall of Germany; I caught whispered talk in the dining room about the war nearing its end. Aside from Lena, no one talked to me directly, dared be infected by my leprosy of failure.

  Yet the Gestapo did not sweep up the drive in their black, demonic chariots, and Frau Grunders bristled as if nothing much had happened, eyeing me with a mixture of suspicion and admiration. Her boy was once again safe from the tethers of that woman.

  He – Germany’s great father – did not make an appearance, rushing to the side of his grieving woman. I was sorry for her, but relieved for myself. I had lost hope of hearing about my family, left with only a sliver of faith, wrapped and tucked deep in my heart. With Dieter gone, there was no one to ease the path, and Sergeant Meier’s punishment was a wall of silence. There was no talk of whether I would go, stay or be returned to the camp. All thoughts instead were way beyond our sightline, in Europe, scrambling to salvage what they could from the Allied advances. The skies overhead buzzed with aircraft, theirs or ours I couldn’t tell, but no one ran or called alarm. We either cast our eyes briefly upwards, or ignored them. The road to inevitability perhaps.

  I checked on Eva, as I would do any post-birth woman, but she was engulfed by her own grief, as barbed as the wire surrounding all of us. And she had no one to share it with, aside from me. Yet I knew that just a glimpse of my face brought back her own loss so acutely and so I avoided her whenever possible; I had become a symbol of betrayal to her own child, and the brief intimacy we had was gone, consumed by her guilt. Her eyes were a dull blue-grey surrounded by ripples of red, the amber glint to her hair lost in days without washing. She was no longer that girl in a Berlin department store, all smiles and promise. I recognised the look, having seen it countless times among the bed racks and bunks of the camp – a woman who had lost.

  Two weeks after the birth, Sergeant Meier called me to his room. I felt as I had on facing the Commandant on my last day in the camp – resigned, ready. It only irritated me that he would enjoy a smug satisfaction on delivering my fate. Instead, he handed me a month’s ‘wages’ and told me I was to leave immediately.

  ‘To where?’ I said, aghast.


  ‘To Berlin, to your freedom,’ he said curtly. ‘There are some that keep their promises, Fräulein Braun.’ He couldn’t look at me, a standing icon of betrayal to his beloved Reich.

  ‘And what of my knowledge, of the things I’ve seen? Are you going to blind me, like Samson, or cut out my tongue?’

  His eyes narrowed to reptilian slits. ‘Who would believe you, Fräulein Hoff? Some madwoman from the camps, muttering about the Führer’s baby. Besides, your family remains with us, and will do so for the foreseeable future. I have every confidence in your discretion.’

  I turned before I might glimpse a perfect smirk settle under the oily bristles of his lip.

  I said a brief goodbye to Eva. She managed a wan smile, put out a wrinkled hand – nails bitten to the quick – and squeezed my own weakly, then pulled it away to hug at her other babies, Negus and Stasi. They were her solace now, sprawled among her sheets. On the bedside table I noted letters, handwritten, perhaps from him, perhaps acknowledging her sadness, their loss, but maybe not. The tiny imprint of the baby’s foot was beside her pillow.

  Rainer drove me to the train station in Berchtesgaden, and left me with a handshake.

  ‘Enjoy your freedom, Anke,’ he said. ‘It was hard won.’

  There was a look in his eye, one I had never seen before and couldn’t fathom, but I was too anxious to shed all traces of the Berghof to give it much thought. In the envelope of money was a train ticket – second class to Berlin. I didn’t take the first train out. Instead, I went into the town square, and I sat in the cafe – our cafe – under an umbrella. Was it the same spot? I couldn’t remember. I drank a cup of very good coffee, the milk froth still rich and active. I raised the cup to my lips, thinking of Dieter, and I let the tears fall over the rim, the brine adding to the bitterness of the beans.

  Berlin was in pieces. Under siege of the military, it was unrecognisable as the place of my birth – the city now grey and encumbered, the air singed with the smell of cordite. Hunched figures scuttled through the streets, shoulders cowed, their heads turned upwards only when a noise broke through the fuggy air above – a raid, or falling debris from damaged buildings everywhere. The noise merely made them scurry faster. It was as though Berlin had been a carnival, and the circus had left town. Approaching defeat infected every ashen pore, each stricken face.