“Have you seen two women come this way?” he asked. The man pulled his arm free abruptly.
“I’m busy,” he said, and ran toward a colleague who was uncoiling a hose.
Dieter approached another who was spraying water into a building through a window and asked the same question.
“No,” the fireman said. “I wish that I had time to keep an eye open for women.”
Dieter continued along the road until he saw another fireman, this one turning large metal wheels on a fire engine.
“Two women passed this way,” he said to the man, not bothering with formalities. “Did you see them?”
The fireman said nothing. Dieter sensed that he was being stonewalled.
“Tell me,” he ordered the man, who held his gaze with intense olive-colored eyes.
“Why should I help you?” the fireman replied to Dieter, turning squarely toward him now. “Look at this. Look at this.” He raised his arms to gesture at the destruction around them. Dieter held the man’s audacious glare. The noise from the fire, the explosions, and the flak was thunderous.
“You will tell me,” he yelled, “because I am an SS-Sturmbannführer. If you don’t do as I say, I have the authority to execute you on this very spot.”
The man didn’t lower his gaze. He stared at Dieter with contempt.
“And I believe you would,” he said. “I’ve come all the way through this hell, out every night for three years with the RAF dropping death from the skies, pulling bodies from the wreckage, getting into homes to save the living, and you’d end it all here. I know you would. That’s how we ended up in this madness.”
Dieter pulled his weapon from its holster flawlessly. Still, the man didn’t seem to lose his resolve. A senior firefighter came over to the pair of them.
“What’s happening here?” he shouted. “This is no way for us to conduct ourselves when under attack.”
“He has information vital to state security,” Dieter said, not altering his gaze from the man in front of him. “I expect him to give it to me.”
“What kind of information?” the officer asked.
“The whereabouts of two women who are responsible for killing a Gestapo officer.”
This appeared to make no impression on either of the firefighters. Indeed, it seemed to Dieter that perhaps his words had had the opposite effect from what he had imagined.
“I have the authority to execute this man if he doesn’t help me,” Dieter continued. “I will ask for a final time.”
“Come on,” the officer said to his fellow firefighter. “Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s not worth it.”
“Last chance,” Dieter said to the man. There was steel in his voice.
The firefighter turned his gaze as if examining one of the burning buildings.
“You’re headed in the right direction,” he said nodding toward the east.
Dieter sensed that there was more.
“The rest of it!” he roared at the man. “Now! I do not have time for your foolish prevarication.”
“They’re going to Friedrichstraße U-Bahn station,” the firefighter said. “And I pray that you never find them, the poor wretches.”
Dieter began to laugh. It rolled up in huge waves through his body, the noise rising above the rowdy cacophony that surrounded them on all sides.
The two firemen looked at each other.
“They’re going to Friedrichstraße station?” Dieter asked, holding his hand to his chest as he struggled for breath.
“Yes,” the fireman replied. “That’s what they told me.”
Dieter’s laughter rose up again in a second wave, his face twisted and glowing as if the man had told him the funniest joke he had ever heard.
“That really is… quite extraordinary…,” he said, as much to himself as to the men around him.
He lowered his weapon. The firemen hurried away, the junior glancing back at the Sturmbannführer with a hateful look. Dieter stood in the middle of Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, buildings ablaze around him and the deafening blasts of ordnance close by. His eyes welled with tears of laughter, the flames reflecting in the moisture.
There was no need for him to pursue them. The gates of Friedrichstraße station were to be locked within the hour—the station was to be flooded to prevent the Soviets from using the U-Bahn to move around the city.
He had seen the order: It was part of the Nero Decree.
Johann would be in Gestapo custody soon. Then they would all be dealt with.
The bombing continued as Anja and Nadine made their way from Leipziger Straße to Friedrichstraße. Anja had hoped that they would be able to get underground at Mohrenstraße, but the entrance had been blocked off by a collapsed building. The noise from the Zoo flak tower was constant, although the attack appeared to be focused elsewhere in the city for the time being. Anja clasped Nadine’s hand and pulled her north up Friedrichstraße toward the ruined steel-and-glass structure that had once covered the S-Bahn station. The pair of them trod on glass and rubble from theaters and cinemas that had once lined the street. Anja recalled coming here to see American films in the early thirties. She had watched Garbo here for the first time, transfixed in wonder. Had been to plays at the Friedrichstadt-Palast. Now, she and her niece were almost the only people visible. A few others fled, seeking shelter. Everyone else was either in hiding or dead.
They arrived at the entrance on the east side of the street and hurried down the steps. The noise from the skies warned of a new wave of bombers over Mitte soon. Two policemen stood at the entrance to the subway.
“Come on, come on,” one of them said. “They’ll be here soon.”
Anja pushed Nadine forward, and the two of them squeezed through the gate and into the gloom. Groups of people huddled in the lobby area, while others sat on the steps leading down to the trains. There were elderly people, some soldiers, women with children, foreign workers… all that was left of Berlin. Doctor Goebbels’s plan for the defense of the city had proved utterly irrelevant to these people; they just wanted the end to come as soon as possible.
The water from the fire crews had made the floor wet and slippery; the soot and cinders from the fires had mixed with it, streaking the mustard-colored tiles black with filth. The deeper that Anja and Nadine pushed their way into the station, the more tightly it seemed that bodies were packed. Lighting had been jerry-rigged from a generator that had been placed next to a former ticket booth. After searching through the crowd, Anja found the staircase down to the platform. She reasoned that she and Nadine would be safer the deeper underground they were. If there was a direct hit on the station they would be able to escape along the tunnel.
As they walked down the stairs to the platform, she and Nadine were faced with a heaving mass of humanity. As the noise of the generator abated they could hear murmured conversations that were punctuated by the sound of explosions from above. People sat silently, looking upward as if watching to see if the paneled ceiling might collapse.
In the middle of the platform the booths that had once sold snacks and periodicals had long since been emptied. Families squatted inside, filthy and exhausted. A woman cut chunks of cheese for her children, who resembled urchins. Anja noticed that the woman also had a bag of rice. Her mouth watered.
“Where do you want to go?” she said to Nadine, looking around for a place for them to sit.
“Look,” Nadine said, indicating a train that was parked at the station, its doors open. Anja peered inside to see dozens of injured soldiers lying on stretchers. Most of them were wearing uniforms and lay motionless beneath gray blankets. A few had wounds that had been patched with bandages and medical compresses. Anja wondered whether Johann had treated any of them.
“It’s too dangerous in Berlin even for the soldiers,” Nadine said. “Are we all to become subterranean? People will eventually go blind, like moles, foraging under the ground for grubs and worms.”
“We will rest here,” Anja said, leading the girl
to a tiled pillar that had space for both of them to sit at its base. “And once the attack finishes we will get to the surface. We can make it to Lehrter in fifteen minutes. We will board a train there.”
“Auntie, we don’t have the papers,” Nadine said.
Anja didn’t reply. The girl was right, of course, but Anja was damned if she was going to admit it. She would find a way. She had to.
“As long as the station and tracks don’t get hit today, there are still trains running,” a man sitting near them said. He wore the uniform of a postal worker but was wearing an armband that showed that he had been drafted into the Volkssturm.
“South and west, so they say,” he continued.
Anja felt a stab of anticipation. “Good luck getting on a train, though,” he told them with a chuckle. “They’re full of the families of Party officials. The golden pheasants are escaping the nest of their own making, while those of us who loathed them are left to take the punishment. It’s all wrong.”
Anja, still mindful of informers, said nothing. She turned to Nadine to see how her niece was. She looked frail now, her body that of an adolescent rather than of a woman. As much as they needed to get to the station, the pair of them needed rest.
“Is there water here?” Anja asked the old man.
He waved his hand down the platform. “There’s a tap down there,” he said. “It’s still working.”
“Thank you,” Anja said. She picked her way through the wretched people huddled on the platform, all of them waiting for the end. As she walked she wondered what she should do about papers: The SS had taken her and Nadine’s identification and ration cards. If they were stopped they would be arrested immediately. She consoled herself with the thought that the Gestapo and SS units on the streets hunting for deserters were not looking for a woman and a teenage girl. Most of them were fanatics focused on vengeance against those they considered responsible for the demise of the Thousand Year Reich.
Nevertheless she had much to fear: Dieter. He was dogmatic and remorseless enough to come after them. And he knew their plan to meet at Lehrter Bahnhof. Despite the risk, Anja determined that she had to go to the station. It was her only chance of encountering Johann, no matter how slim the odds of their meeting.
She had to keep moving, keep ahead of Dieter, even if it meant leaving Berlin without Johann. She could survive, she knew that: There were soup kitchens, and she would get ration cards from the NSV by telling them that she had been bombed out and had lost everything. A false name and address would not be checked; the places were full of women clamoring for help for their families. She would keep them alive by her wits. She would use the chaos as cover until the pair of them was safe.
She took a deep breath. The station was putrid; how she longed for some clean air. A battered pail had been left by the tap. She filled it with rust-colored water and made her way back to Nadine, trying not to spill any on people. The two of them scooped water out of it, drinking silently. Then both of them used it to rub the soot and dirt from their faces.
As Nadine leaned over the pail, it suddenly struck Anja that the girl needed a haircut. She wondered at the triviality of the thought.
Anja returned the pail and sat on the platform next to her niece. The girl leaned her head on her aunt’s shoulder. Anja saw that, despite the water, the girl’s hands were filthy.
“We will rest here,” Anja said. “But not for too long. We must get to the station before they stop running the trains. Even if that SS man is looking for us”—she couldn’t bear to think of him as Johann’s half brother—“we must stick to the plan we made with your uncle. We must be very careful but leave as soon as the bombing halts.”
Anja realized that Nadine wasn’t listening. Her niece was fast asleep.
“This will be our last Berlin air raid,” she said to the dozing girl, closing her own eyes. “Tomorrow we will be gone. I promise you that.”
With that, Anja’s head nodded forward and, as thousands of pounds of explosives were detonated only a few meters above, the pair of them was lost in a deep slumber.
26
Johann blinked as the bag was removed from his head. Two desk lamps, which had been set up only three feet away, were producing a blinding light. He wanted to raise his hands to shield his eyes, but they were secured to the wooden chair onto which he had been forced. It was impossible to see anything and the heat was stifling. The rest of the room existed only in shadow, although Johann suspected that two darker spots might be guards, silently watching.
Somehow they had found him.
He had feared this day for almost half his lifetime. Memories of that awful night his father was taken away were not buried that deep. Dieter’s presence had revived the part of him that he had been happy to let lie dormant for so long. Then a powerful thought rose above all other considerations: Where were Anja and Nadine? Were they here in the same loathsome building?
He heard a dull thud. Something had been dropped on the floor.
“You have been busy.”
Johann felt sickened. It was Dieter, somewhere out beyond the lights. He had hoped never to hear his half brother’s voice again. He knew, surely, that this was the end for him. After what had happened at the hospital, Dieter would exact the ultimate revenge. He wondered at his half brother’s resilience in the face of terrible injury.
Johann looked around, but he still wasn’t able to see his half brother’s face. He longed to stare into his eyes, to communicate how much he despised him, but Dieter remained disembodied—a ghostly presence disconnected from the earth, as much in Johann’s dreams as in the real world.
“Medical school, married, on the eastern front…,” he said. “I’m surprised that I didn’t bump into you. I imagine that you were one of those snobbish army types who wanted little to do with the SS.”
“I believe that the SS were busy rounding up civilians and executing them,” Johann said.
“Tut, tut…,” Dieter said. “I believe that you should presently be at the front tending to our brave soldiers, not hiding in Berlin with the other cowards and deserters.”
There were brown shapes floating in front of Johann’s eyes now. He looked down—his shoulders ached as he was unable to alter the position of his body.
“Not only do you kill at least one SS man, you attempt to kill me as well,” Dieter said slowly. “By the way, whatever happened to Lehman? The fat driver? We know that you were seen with him the night before he disappeared.”
Johann didn’t wish to see anyone dead, but he recalled Lehman being a particularly nasty piece of work. The amount of death he had witnessed over the past three years made it hard for Johann to grieve for the driver.
“He fell,” Johann told Dieter. “He was pursuing me through the woods in the dark and he ran after me and tumbled into a ravine. I don’t think he survived.”
“Sounds to me like it was as much his fault as your doing,” Dieter said. “We are probably best off without oafs like that.”
Johann was beginning to sweat now. A bead rolled down his nose and clung to its tip. He shook it off and it flopped on the floor. His half brother was standing perhaps only two meters away to his right, but still out of sight.
“How strange to see you dressed in this way,” Dieter said to Johann. “In every army officer there is a secret aspiration to join the SS. You wear it as a costume, though, in your vain attempts to change the course of history.”
Johann raised his head. It was only the day before, but his attempt to end the Nero Decree seemed an age away.
“Ah, I see,” Dieter said. “Now I have your attention. I have to say that I was impressed by the daring of your escapade in the farmhouse, but your visit to Reinhard at the Ministry was even more reckless. Not like you at all. At first I found it hard to believe, but the officers at the farm identified you when they were shown a set of photographs. Reinhard did the same. ‘We have an impressive fifth columnist here,’ I thought to myself. ‘Would that he had shown the same
commitment to the Reich.’”
“I was doing my duty as a citizen,” Johann said. “I will not stand by and allow Berlin to be destroyed and its people terrorized and killed. And I tell you this, for every fanatic—every self-described Werewolf—who is going to lurk in the ruins and continue the fight even when Stalin himself is sitting in the Reichstag, there are dozens more who will welcome the advancing armies with open arms, because nothing—and I mean nothing—could be worse than what you have done.”
There were stars floating in Johann’s vision, following a beating in the back of the truck that had brought him here. They seemed to cross from his eyes to his mind, floating like bubbles that he could catch if only he could reach out. There was a sudden slapping noise as Dieter began to clap slowly.
“Bravo,” he said, moving his hands close to Johann’s right ear. “I bet you’ve been thinking of that speech for quite some time. Rehearsing it in your head at the operating theater perhaps, or on your lonely bed somewhere between Smolensk and Minsk.”
Johann tried to recollect his thoughts. Suddenly Dieter, his face scarred and discolored, appeared in front of him.
“If only your wife and—what is she, niece?—had been around to hear it.”
Johann’s heart ached with an overwhelming intensity.
He wondered: Had Dieter captured them at the house too? How he wanted to know if Dieter had them, but to raise their names would only demonstrate vulnerability.
“Yes, yes,” Dieter said, “they have spent some time with us here at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße.”
Johann sagged. He imagined them in the infamous basement. They were just a few flights of stairs away. He ached to see them one last time. He doubted, once Dieter got what he wanted, that he would last long. This was likely to be the last hour of his life. As the realization pulsed through his being, he was mindful that the threat of death had hung over him almost for as long as he could remember. Every minute was simply an extension; all you had to do was keep surviving for another hour, and another hour after that. If you added them all up then the total grew to be a lifetime.
The Nero Decree Page 28
