Against his will, a spark of hope singed his lungs, like a match with its hissing breath. He discovered that he hoped for the letter and tried to strangle that hope in himself at the same time. How pathetic it was that after all that had been done to him, he still wished to see the good in people.
His shoulders heavy as lead, he dragged himself upstairs after her, dreading the coolness of her bedroom, into the privacy of which she pulled him, an unwilling victim.
Once inside, she shrugged off her coat and folded it so that the wet camel wool wouldn’t touch the upholstery of the chair. Tadek kept his on. His hands were buried in his pockets. He observed her silently, still stuck on the threshold, in the shadows between her bedroom and the passageway.
Against the glass, wet snow was throwing itself with force and turning into narrow snaking streams as it melted. For some time, Gerlinde stood in front of the window with her back to Tadek and observed it silently.
“Do you think they’re trying him in absentia as well?” she asked, her voice strangely steady and hollow. “There, in Nuremberg?”
“I wouldn’t know. I followed you outside and didn’t catch the rest of the names.” With the best will in the world, he couldn’t keep accusation out of his voice. “Does it really matter though? He’s not there to stand trial, with the rest of them.”
She still wouldn’t turn to face him. “I didn’t expect to see them all there. To be truthful, I didn’t expect to see any of them alive at all.”
That was an odd thing to say. Tadek waited for the explanation.
“When the war was nearing the end, der Führer was explicit in his wishes. If the German people lost it to the Eastern ‘sub-humans,’ the German people had lost their very right to exist. They lost their right to be called a master race. From now on, their only fate was their entire obliteration.”
At last, she turned around. Her face was a mask of infinite disillusionment; her eyes – oddly extinguished.
“He issued that Nero decree for that very purpose – to destroy all infrastructure that the enemy could use and to hell with the civilians. The best thing they could do, in his eyes that is, was to throw themselves under the enemy tanks with the last hand grenade or to kill themselves otherwise, instead of falling into the arms of the ‘Asiatic hordes.’ On the evening of April 12, the Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance, mostly for the Party members and the rest of the elite. Vati took me along.” Her mouth twisted into a smirk. “After listening to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Bruckner’s 8th Symphony, and some Wagner, we headed to the exit near which Hitlerjugend boys stood with baskets full of cyanide capsules for everyone to take along.”
Tadek found it amazing how calmly she talked about it all – that mass madness which made people follow one single raving lunatic straight to the abyss. As if reading his thoughts, Gerlinde snorted with unexpected disdain.
“He counted at least on the most loyal of his followers to follow his example and do away with themselves. However, as soon as he blew his own brains out, they suddenly realized that there was more to life than der Führer and that, perhaps, something could have been arranged with the Allies, if not with the Ivans. Look at them all, very much alive and well.”
She gestured vaguely toward the window, indicating Nuremberg no doubt. In her eyes, the light was aglow once again, wrathful this time, burning everything with its righteous condemnation.
“As I said, I didn’t expect to see them there. We were raised with this idea that our lives were not our own but Germany’s, the Führer’s. It was them, our leaders, who kept drumming it into our generation’s heads. Not even a year ago, it was them, who made all these heroic speeches before us, BDM and Hitlerjugend; Axmann himself inspired us to commit suicide, no less, by sacrificing our lives for some abstract idea but when the time came and it was their turn to choose a noble death in the name of National Socialism or life in a world without it, they all almost unanimously chose life. Margot was right all along. Betraying him, resisting the entire system was the right thing to do. She wasn’t a coward like my father. Now I understand why he was so fearful of her. It wasn’t because she knew of his past or anything of that sort… It was because he sensed that resentment in her, directed at everything Party-approved. Sensed something in her that he had lost a long time ago – the inner moral guide to what is right and wrong.”
“His past?” Tadek was suddenly interested.
Gerlinde only looked at him with a faint smile. Slowly, she turned around and went to her vanity table. From one of the drawers, she pulled what looked like a heavy, leather-bound album. She stood for some time, pensive and impossibly distant, caressing the leather with her pale fingers. At last, she sat on the bed and patted the spot next to her. “Yes. His past. This is what I wanted to show you.”
In spite of himself, Tadek lowered next to her. It wasn’t the letter but it was still something and besides, something had shifted in Gerlinde herself. She was talking like a different person altogether.
She carefully lowered the album onto her lap. When she turned the first page, its hard cover, with “Our Memories,” engraved in silver on it, landed on his knee. Tadek felt as though she was doing it on purpose, pushing it all too close to him, making him a part of what he wished to be no part of.
“It starts with their wedding.”
As Gerlinde gently turned the rustling, transparent paper that preceded each new page, Tadek expected to see the blackness of the uniforms, the arch of the daggers, the familiar faces which were now all answering for their crimes before the world; instead, there was an old, Gothic cathedral, a young, smiling couple in front of it, top hats, laughing girls with short hair and bright lips, and some dignified gentleman with a walrus mustache who was caught in the process of popping open the bottle of champagne. The bride and the groom weren’t looking at the camera but at each other instead.
“They had a different, official wedding portrait,” Gerlinde whispered, as though not to disturb the past, “but Vati insisted to put this one first. They’re very happy here. See? It’s not staged, it’s natural and they don’t look as stiff and somber as in the official one, taken in the studio… See?”
He did see. He didn’t want to but he did.
“It was taken in 1922, right before the hyper-inflation hit Germany full force. They loved each other very much back then.”
“They weren’t in the Party,” Tadek remarked incredulously. Far from it; they looked like typical Bohemian Berliners, if anything.
“No, they weren’t. Not yet, at any rate. Mutti came to Berlin from a very small Bavarian town to be in the pictures. Needless to say, she wasn’t the only one with such an idea and before she knew it, she was working as a cigarette girl in some dingy dive or the other.” She chuckled and shook her head. “Incredible, isn’t it? The high and mighty Mathilde Neumann, a cigarette girl.”
Tadek felt a grin growing on his face as well. “What of your father?”
“What of him? He was not much better off. He also came to Berlin in search of a good life but without any connections, his education as an economist didn’t mean squat. The banks were going bankrupt almost every week, therefore hiring new workers was the furthest thing from their agenda. So, he was doing odd jobs for whoever would hire him. He worked as a busboy in hotels and as a waiter and as a taxi driver. In the evenings, he played the piano in different dives. In one of them, he met my mother. They got married quickly and soon, she was pregnant with Georg.” Gerlinde paused, regarding the photos tenderly. “I think they were the happiest the most, those days. Money was tight but they had each other and that was all that mattered.”
“What happened?” Tadek repeated, boring his gaze into the black-and-white couple in front of him. What happened to this seemingly happy family that turned them into such cold-blooded Nazis? That was the question that burned the tip of his tongue and yet, he held it in for now.
“What happened was that the hyper-inflation turned their meager income into a vi
rtually nonexistent one. Mutti couldn’t work anymore, as no one wants a big-bellied cigarette girl in their cabaret. And whatever Vati was making wasn’t enough by any means. They had to leave their apartment and rent a room in East Berlin – worker’s paradise, as it was mockingly dubbed. It was no better than living in the slums. When Georg was born, it was worse still. She didn’t have enough milk for him and they both were half-starved, Vati and her… And then her neighbor, some good-meaning woman, also from Bavaria, began bringing her milk and along with it, papers from their hometown. Nationalistic ones. It was from them that Mutti ‘learned’ that it was all the Jews’ fault that her newborn was starving and that the German people ought to take their country back and that communists are all violent atheistic criminals who are a cancer on the German society and need to be obliterated…”
Her hand lay limp next to the photo in which Otto Neumann held not one, but two babies.
“By the time Götz was born, she was worshiping der Führer. She grew so obsessed with him, she traveled to Munich with her two small children to have his new book signed by him and made friends with some people… Vati was making good money by then, as Margot discovered him in one of the dives where he played the piano and offered him to take up the position as a pianist in a very upscale restaurant. She used to sing there but when she met Vati, she was already involved in the motion pictures, so they didn’t really stay in contact, of which he was very grateful later in life.”
“How did he come to be in the SS, if he was a simple pianist?”
“My guess is that my mother talked him into it. I don’t think he was ever a convinced nationalist himself. An opportunist, if anything. Those people she met in Munich, they told her about the new elite regiment forming there. Its leaders were in desperate need of educated, young men, of Aryan origin. Vati fitted the bill. They offered him an elegant new uniform, a very good position in the administration sector, and decent money. If I’m entirely honest, I think he agreed to move there just to placate my mother. Mathilde Neumann was an ambitious woman, you see, but when she realized that her dreams of becoming an actress would never come true, not with two children on her hands at any rate, she most likely began nagging him that she was bored at home and that no one in Berlin had an ounce of respect for the Mother and didn’t count one for anything. And in Munich, she had der Führer and all of his followers putting Aryan mothers on a pedestal and praising them something ridiculous for doing what a cat in the alley can do and a few times a year at that.”
Tadek snorted with laughter at the sarcasm. “Your father told you all that?”
“In part. The rest of the voids I filled in myself. My father didn’t particularly like to talk about his Weimar Berlin past. I only began asking him questions directly when all sorts of people began appearing on our doorstep. I’d never seen them before; the butler – we had a butler already by then – slammed the door in their faces sometimes without even announcing them to my father. He couldn’t imagine that his employer could have ever kept such company, as they had claimed and one couldn’t quite blame him. My father was Standartenführer Neumann by then, a dignified and thoroughly politically-reliable man.”
“Former acquaintances from the dives?”
“Yes. They still waited for him right on the steps and spent the night near his staff car, so that in the morning, if the driver didn’t chase them away first, they could ask him to say a word for them. I saw them through the window a few times. It was always the same scenario: ‘Otto, it’s me, Willy, from Bogart’s joint, surely, you remember? I brought pork for the christening of little Georgy. We had such a feast that day, do you remember?’ My father would always grab them by the sleeve and drag them away from the driver and say the words to them that I could never hear. I just remember he looked almost terrified whenever one of them would appear and call Georg, Georgy, in the American way, and ask my father to do something about the summons they received from the Gestapo. The Gestapo part I heard a few times because they would invariably raise their voice when pleading with him and my father would try and hush them and then put them in the car if they refused to leave and drive away somewhere with them… They never returned twice. I always wondered what happened to them.”
“Didn’t you ask him?”
“Of course, I did. I was much too curious for my own good.”
“And what did he say?”
“That they were criminals and that they ought to go to jail.” She pondered something for a long moment. “I’m thinking that is where he took them all. Straight to jail. Or, perhaps, even worse. Asked somebody from the Gestapo for a favor. He had new friends and the new friends couldn’t find out about the old ones, or it would be the end of everything. He had a very good career and a very bright future before him. He finally had a lot of money, a new house, and five domestics working for him. Two adjutants and a driver. He couldn’t lose it all because of some Willy, who smuggled pork for his firstborn’s christening, from the countryside and who was stupid enough to get caught on the suspicion of falsifying the papers for some Jews.”
In the silence of the room, the rustling of the paper sounded like a whisper as Gerlinde turned the page and moved the album closer to Tadek. “This is Georgy’s christening. This is Willy. He died in Dachau.”
“Your father told you?”
“Yes. Sometimes, he would tell me things. I think it was too difficult for him to bear it in silence. He never told Georg that he used to be Georgy at one point. Only to me he would tell these things, sometimes. I think, he knew, on some instinctual level, that I would understand. Or, at least, that I would ask the right questions, not the ones that my brothers would ask. Or, he was afraid they’d go and denounce him. Such things happened, too and particularly with Hitlerjugend members. And both of my brothers were exemplary Hitlerjugend leaders before they joined the SS. I think, he was equally afraid of his own past and of his own future – what he did to his own sons, that is. He was afraid of many things, my father.”
For some time, Tadek sat and stared at the face of the Bohemian Berliner with that roguish look and longish hair as the fashion had it in those days. Gerlinde was right, they all looked so happy in those first photos from the twenties. Gruppenführer Neumann never looked happy in any of the photos Tadek saw.
“Why?” That was all he could come up with. “If he never was a truly convinced nationalist; if he knew that it was all wrong… why?”
Gerlinde shrugged slightly, another wistful smile passing over her face without reaching her eyes. “It is my profound conviction that he simply got so used to playing the role before all of these people and then suddenly couldn’t shed his costume anymore. He lied to everyone around – his new friends, his own children, his own wife but what’s worst of all, to himself, about what he was. And maybe those two personalities eventually merged together and even he couldn’t separate them any longer. They became the Siamese twins, Gruppenführer Neumann and him. Still two different people but forever locked in one body. There was no ridding of one without killing the other.” She looked up sharply from the album. “He wrote to me, you know.”
Tadek blinked, unsure if she really just said it. Gerlinde was suddenly standing before him, then squatting on her haunches and digging wildly under the mattress until she pulled out a small, square piece of paper folded in two and thrust it into his hands.
“Read it.”
With great hesitation, Tadek reached for the letter, still unable to process that she just, in fact, handed it to him of her own volition. Slowly, the words came into focus, written by an unsteady hand of someone in a rush.
My dearest Gerlinde!
I hope this letter finds you well. I learned about your Mutti already here, in Italy, and despite my profound grief that this news brought me, I ought to say I celebrated in secret because you, my little warrior, found in yourself enough strength not to follow her example. In no way, I condemn her for what she did. I can only imagine how horrifying the prospect of such a fut
ure was for her. But you, I am so proud of you and your spirit, my sweet little girl; whatever happens, do not let that spirit fail you. No matter what fate throws your way, stay strong and stay brave, my little soldier and never, for one instant, no matter what they tell you, believe that I would abandon you. My heart is breaking each day when I think of everything I’ve put you through. Trust me when I say that I only wished the best for you and your brothers and Mutti. All I ever did, was just to give you the best life I could ever give you. My biggest regret in this life is that I failed you so, my Herzchen. Have courage and do not lose your faith, my little one! As soon as it is possible, I shall come back for you and bring you with me to where I am heading now. We’ll have a new life there, a completely different one and I shall do everything that is in my power to make you forget these last few years of war and devastation and all the losses you had to endure in your short life. I am setting off now. I cannot tell you how long it shall take but as soon as it is possible, I will have you in my embrace again.
With all my love,
Vati.
A lump in his throat, Tadek handed it back. On Gerlinde’s cheeks, wet trails shone.
“I’m sorry for not showing it to you earlier. I should have. I just… wasn’t ready. I’ll give it to Morris tomorrow. There’s nothing important in it anyway, no location, nothing. Just an insufferable amount of words, apologies… It’s not me he should be apologizing to but the people… Willy. His other friends. The man who drew that portrait in his bedroom. You. Your family. Your friends. Their graves.”
“They don’t have graves.”
“No, they don’t. Not even that.”
He didn’t know what possessed him but Tadek was suddenly on his feet, pulling Gerlinde into a suffocating embrace. Tears found their way out, the first time in so many months. His voice, full of sobs, was thick with them. Gerlinde’s hands stroked his hair, his back. She was crying too and laughing at the same time. “You’re not mad at me then? I thought you were so mad at me but couldn’t figure out why exactly. Because of my father or because of Erich—”
The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII Page 27
