Here in Berlin

by Cristina Garcia

  Richtig. As a child, I was told that my father had been a handsome Nazi officer and my mother a simple country girl. These were the standard lies. Intelligence wasn’t important for the program, only racial purity. Much later, I learned that my grandparents had “volunteered” my mother as a breeder without her consent. Their reward? A cash bonus for their “sacrifice.” The times were difficult, and a surprising number of parents surrendered their daughters for the program. It bestowed on the families a certain prestige, proof of patriotism, as if they were contributing to a top-secret mission.

  A team of nurses raised us—yes, the breeding-program children. The nurses looked after our physical needs but deliberately withheld affection. They were specially chosen for this skill. Personal attachments were discouraged, as were emotional displays of any kind. Our devotions were to be channeled exclusively to the Fatherland. Despite the rules, attachments did form. We children comforted each other when we got sick, or skinned our knees, or cried for reasons we didn’t understand. (Crying, too, was forbidden.) We formed our own families, though the word itself was banned.

  The surface of our days were like other farm children’s, I suppose. We milked the cows, shoveled out the barn, helped in the fields (harvesting barley, mostly). The girls were taught homemaking skills as well as basic reading and arithmetic. I learned subtraction by taking away “useless eaters” from productive citizens. Ordinary books, those with no “purpose,” were strictly verboten. Instead we read texts designed to brainwash us into becoming fanatics of National Socialism. But what did we know about any of this at the time? Our reality was our reality, strange as it sounds now.

  It’s a miracle, under the circumstances, that I began questioning my upbringing. As an adolescent, the waters muddied for me. I challenged the nurses, refused their orders, their insistence on silence. Once, I escaped the farm during a lightning storm. When the nurses found me in a distant neighbor’s chicken coop, they beat me to bleeding with a birch switch. Then they locked me up for three days in a storage shed without food. By law, they couldn’t breed me until I turned eighteen. Pregnancy, they told me, would calm my temperament.

  As the Reich’s fortunes soared, the government funded other clandestine experiments. They kidnapped Aryan-looking children in Poland and Russia (after murdering their families) and transported them to Germany. Why? To increase the population and placate the barren women. There was nothing worse for a German woman in those days than to be childless. I heard that the Reich imported girls from Norway, too, more Aryan even than us.

  The nurses kept control of us until the early spring of 1945. When defeat looked certain, they abandoned us. Those were frightening times, chaotic times, not knowing what would happen to us. We’d heard so much propaganda about the Russians that we feared their arrival as much as we did dying of hunger. When the war finally ended, we fended for ourselves as best we could, traveling in every direction, trying to find somewhere we might call home.

  Oh, my dear, what didn’t I do to survive? My upbringing ensured that I was unfit for any but the most menial tasks. For a time in Berlin I became a Straßenmädchen. But business was poor, even for a pretty girl like me. Why pay for a woman’s favors when anyone could take what they wanted by force? Sometimes what must be said can’t be said easily, or at all. I’d need something a lot stronger than this peach tea to tell you more. Let’s just say there were women—starving, like myself—who offered themselves in exchange for food.

  The following winter, I found protection with an American Negro soldier. One morning, he asked me what I most wanted in life. Do you know what I answered? A sandwich thick with goose drippings. That night, he brought me two. It wasn’t love, not for me—I was incapable of that—but his kindness that kept us together. When he invited me to move with him to Louisiana—he stood to inherit his grandparents’ sugarcane farm—I declined. Six kids he wanted. But that was his dream, not mine.

  Not long afterward, I met my husband at a pub where I was paid to flatter the clients into buying me watered-down drinks. Jan was a railway brakeman and twenty years my senior. I didn’t ask him what he’d done during the war, and he never said a word about it. This was an unspoken agreement between us. Jan wasn’t handsome, but he was gentle and asked little of me, and that was enough. No, we couldn’t have children. One doctor told me that my insides looked like a war zone. Some breeder I turned out to be, eh?

  Overall, I guess you could say I’ve been more satisfied than happy. I don’t feel joy the way other people seem to experience it, yet I don’t suffer as much either. It’s hard to describe—a little like trying to sew closed an infinite hole. You see, my dear, the problem for me isn’t enduring life’s pain but its beauty. Ja, that’s the harder, the much harder, thing.

  Jobst Hoppner

  Skies

  We were both Luftwaffe pilots, but we met in the boxing ring. Max S. was a famous fighter from before the war, a German hero. I was fifteen years his junior. We agreed to fight to amuse the other pilots, to help raise morale as our hopes for victory faded. Dear Visitor, how can I explain to you what it was like at the very start of the war, singing through the skies? The great dream of glory to which we were willing to lose our lives? On cloudless days, we watched the wings of our planes like birds of prey shadowing the land. We felt invincible.

  Ja, that was before everything went to shit. Defeat, our superiors insisted, wasn’t an option, and they pressured us to rat each other out. Every morning there were six new ways to commit treason. One kid from Hanover was hanged for telling a stupid joke about Himmler. Ach, I don’t remember how it went exactly—I’m useless at jokes—but it was a play on Himmel, or heaven. What does it matter? The point is that by then we were murdering our own faster than the Russians. On top of the world at eighteen; ruined and strung out on Pervitin at twenty-two. That’s how it was then. We grew old, very old, before our time.

  Sometimes I think it’s better to remember nothing at all. Memories are selective. We pick and choose what we need to believe, what we require to survive. Have you heard about the guilt placards the Allies posted in town squares all over Germany? diese schandtaten: eure schuld! (these shameful deeds: your fault!) They showed the very worst photographs from the camps. Everyone was shocked. This surprises you? How could we have known what was going on in every corner of the Reich?

  Yet from the moment of defeat, we were determined to rebuild the country from zero. To carry on as if nothing had happened, as if millions of our own innocents hadn’t been killed. We suffered our share of war crimes, too, but who could complain? Countries build weapons then need to use them, nicht wahr? That’s the business of war. As for the pilots, who wanted to hear from us? We were living reminders of what everyone wanted to forget. Our self-respect vanished. Not a shred of it left. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying our mission was honorable, only that there were honorable men serving it. We lost that honor. In the end, we were left alone to die in our pasts, hour by hour.

  I worked odd jobs for a few years, on cleanup crews and construction projects. Anything for my daily bread. Ach, the tons of wreckage we cleared out! We found corpses trapped in the positions they’d died in, body parts gnawed to the bone by rats. Finally, I got lucky and landed a job selling men’s shoes on the Ku’damm. It was a relief to escape the backbreaking work of banishing every last trace of the war from our midst. No matter what we accomplished, or how fast we accomplished it, the war lived on in our heads. Dear Visitor, there were times I was convinced I’d be better off dead. That I should’ve died young rather than live to endure such humiliation. But hunger shouts louder than dignity. Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral.

  Sure, I kept track of my famous opponent over the years. It was hard not to. Max S. lived to a ripe old age. When he turned one hundred, his birthday face was plastered on magazine covers everywhere. That day we fought in the ring? I knocked him out in the seco
nd round. Ohne Zweifel, he did very well for himself, very well. Grew rich working for the Americans—for Coca-Cola, in fact. Drove around Berlin in a gigantic Cadillac. The Yanks loved Max S. in that way they loved everything larger than life. In Germany, we were desperate for heroes, and so his war record was conveniently forgotten. His prowess in the ring was what everyone talked about. And later, his millions, his success. He was the great Max S., a national icon, the best part of who we needed ourselves to be.

  Once, I fitted old Max with a pair of imported cordovans that cost more than two months of my wages. His feet were surprisingly narrow for so large a man. No, he didn’t recognize me. Barely glanced at me, as I recall. He was too busy reading a newspaper article about himself. True, quite true. Anonymity can be a sobering mercy. In any case, he bought three pairs of those pricey cordovans and then disappeared in a cloud of cigar smoke.

  Or perhaps, Dear Visitor, it was I who disappeared.

  Hertha Huber

  Kiosk

  It’s circumstantial, Schätzchen, like most things in life. There’s no such thing as pure evil. As far as I’m concerned, people who make pronouncements about the innocent and the damned can’t be trusted. I’m old now, half blind, nobody of historical interest. An ordinary person. Except for this: I’ve watched the whole world pass by my kiosk at the Hauptbahnhof. Trains coming and going, whistles blowing, countless tearful good-byes. The world is round and we keep moving and moving until we return exactly to where we started. Sag mal, what’s the point of it all?

  Sixty years I’ve been sitting here, first helping out Uncle Heinz, then taking over the business when he died. My uncle spent two years on the Eastern front and somehow lived to tell about it. All the rest of our family was killed in the air raids. I survived because I stayed too long at the water pump flirting with a boy. When I ran home, everyone was gone—Mutti, my brother Franz (who’d lost both hands in Poland), and my baby sister Liesel. For weeks I wandered around Berlin, hiding in cellars and bombed-out buildings. I chopped off my hair, wore my brother’s old pants, his falling-apart shoes. Skinny and flat-chested and with a too-big jaw, I passed for a boy. This saved me when the Russians came.

  It was a miracle Uncle Heinz managed to find me at all. He asked around until someone directed him to a flooded bunker where a bunch of us street kids lived. He was in his forties by then—too old for the regular army but not for a police order battalion. Uncle Heinz went crazy from what he’d been forced to do. Crazy, meaning that he didn’t hide the truth of what he’d lived. Everyone in the neighborhood was afraid of him. Too loose-lipped, they said. Dangerous. Wherever he went people held up their hands, as if trying to protect themselves. Our neighbor, Herr Drawert, threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut the fuck up.

  Why? Because for Uncle Heinz to own up to his crimes meant that everyone else might be forced to do the same. Und glaub mir, that was the last thing anyone wanted. Instead they shunned my uncle, treated him like a pariah. What people wanted most was to go about their business, rebuild their homes and their lives, polish their lies, and not look back. Everyone had at corpse in the basement, as the saying goes, but who would admit it?

  After sixty years at this kiosk, Schätzchen, I can tell you that nothing is what it seems. Berlin isn’t one city but many cities, and much bigger even than its myths. You’ve got to know where you’re standing, what you’re looking at. Like that old American car parked right outside the Hauptbahnhof. They say it used to belong to a famous boxer, someone you probably never heard of. The current owner keeps it parked there, gleaming and impeccable, as if his life depended on this. Shines it up himself on weekends with a chamois cloth. Who knows why people do the things they do?

  I’ve seen every drama played out on these platforms—marriage proposals, heart attacks, jiltings, overdoses, suicides, and a shootout six years ago that left four people dead. Wieso? Who would read a book from the likes of me? Sehr lustig, Schätzchen. My plan? What a question! In the end, there’s no ending. Me, I’m going to die on this very spot, waiting for the next whistle to blow.

  Bettina Streim and Jochen Fick

  Hunters

  What was right yesterday, can’t be wrong today.

  ——Klaus Filbinger, former Nazi judge

  1.

  There aren’t too many of us doing this work anymore because there aren’t too many of them left. Most are on their last legs, their minds gone, on oxygen tanks or dialysis machines. What has this career cost me? Everything, Dear Visitor, everything. My family. My friendships. My sleep. Isn’t that enough? Why do you go on, Bettina? Why have you spent your life interrogating these old Nazis? Haven’t we paid a ransom in reparations already? They had to live with their crimes, no? Haven’t we suffered enough? And yet I persist with my investigations: Isn’t it true, Herr Krüger, Herr Scheer, Herr Grabitz, Herr Fick, Herr Bentheim, Herr Rohrbaugh, Herr Schlag . . . ?

  In recent years, we’ve been going after the Nazi “ladies” as well. Don’t think for a minute that the fairer sex wasn’t doing its fair share for the war effort. “Hitler’s Furies,” one historian called them. These women are living longer than their male counterparts, but their memories are equally selective. Why, they can’t seem to remember if they were hunting rabbits or Jews in the woods. Or which drugs filled the hypodermic needles they used to “sedate” their patients. How did they acquire mink coats and diamonds on their salaries? Keine Ahnung. Yet when it comes to blaming others—Those nasty Poles betrayed every last Jew they ever met!—their memories fire up with astonishingly fine detail.

  How many convictions have I secured? Dear Visitor, if I assessed the value of my work solely by the successes, I’d be too disheartened to continue. Please understand that we have only six lawyers on my team, each carefully trained to investigate war crimes. We’ve dedicated twenty-three years to rounding up the last Nazi criminals in our district. After this massive effort? How many? Fourteen convictions, three overturned on appeals, no sentence greater than eight years—and even those were commuted due to the defendants’ failing health, or legal technicalities.

  But what do the Nazis’ lies matter to me anymore? What matters to me is continuing to shine a light on them. Flushing them out of their cozy hiding places, where they’ve been pretending for decades to be who they’re not. Forcing them to squirm before their family and friends, before the unforgiving cameras. My dear, I don’t give a damn how these murderers rationalize their lives. What spurs me on is justice—justice for the living, but especially for the dead.

  2.

  Who gave you my name? That bitch lawyer? She came after me for years and couldn’t pin a fucking thing on me. That ball-breaker wasn’t even born until ten years after the war. So, what’s any of it to her? Sticking her nose in everyone’s business—and for what? She made my life a living hell. Came after me like I was the Führer himself. My wife left me, my kids don’t speak to me, and even the wrecks in this shit hole of a nursing home keep their distance, as if their own hands aren’t stained with blood. How could all of them have been in the resistance during the war? Their lies, Liebchen, are as thin as your notepaper there.

  Damn right, I took to drinking again. Who wouldn’t drink shackled to that kind of stress? Nobody understands what we went through. Nobody. We were soldiers. We followed orders. We didn’t have the luxury of sitting back with a fucking brandy and discussing the moral implications of every goddamn command. I killed a few people. Everyone did. There was a war on. I was an expert marksman. As a kid, I used to go hunting with my grandfather in the forests outside Berlin. No crime in a little hunting, is there? Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I did it without justification.

  I was a policeman for forty years after the war. Doesn’t that count for anything? That bitch nearly got my pension suspended after I put my life on the line every day for the likes of her. Now I’ve got one foot in the
grave, and they’re still hounding me. They’re the real criminals, if you ask me. Don’t tell me you’re ignorant about what the Russians did to us either. We didn’t commit half the atrocities they did. They used their jeeps to pull apart our women like rag dolls. Raped them right in front of their own children. Nailed them to barn doors and crucified them. Crucified them, do you hear me? Where’s the big outcry about that? Fucking savages. We had to keep our mouths shut about a whole lot of other things, too. Like the thousands of Germans burned to death by the firebombs. That’s right. They tried to wipe us out like an accursed species.

  What the hell do you mean that sounds familiar?

  Look, I don’t have to talk to you. Who are you, anyway? Get out of my room. Nurse! Nurse! Get this woman out of here! She’s agitating me! You know my heart’s weak. I’m not going to sit and stand trial all over again. They had their day in court and they lost! Got it? They fucking lost!

  Gabrielle von Holz

  Swan

  Naturally, I was called upon to perform for the Führer on numerous occasions. I know what you’re thinking: Another collaborator beats her breast with disavowals! My dear, I’ve no need of your sympathy. I had a choice—and I chose to survive. In fact, I bargained for my life every day. Nobody expected the slightest political intelligence from a ballerina, and so I insulated myself from the worst. I attended elegant soirées at the Hotel Adlon and danced cheek to cheek with those marionettes. Photographs of me appeared regularly in the press, including the Völkischer Beobachter. I performed on the stages of our allies in Italy and Spain, too, and in the conquered territories. The Parisians, in spite of themselves, gave me a standing ovation.