Chapter 23
JOHANNES
GERMANY, 1945
‘Oh, Johannes. Johannes!’ He found himself being hugged, then kissed.
He broke away. ‘Mutti?’ Please, he thought, please.
‘She is here.’
‘In this camp?’
‘In this hospital. But she will be well. She will certainly be well, now you are here. And Johannes . . .’
But he didn’t wait. He ran up and down the aisles. ‘Mutti!’ he yelled. ‘Mutti!’ And there she was, trying to leave her bunk, her face white, white as her nightdress, reaching for him, her arms around him. ‘Mutti. Mutti.’
‘Johannes. It is all right. It is all right now. Here, let me look at you. Are you well? You have been eating!’
‘Mutti, Mutti . . .’ He stopped as a doctor approached. A doctor in a white coat, with a stethoscope dangling around his neck.
‘Johannes,’ said the doctor softly.
‘Vati,’ said Johannes.
Nurse Stöhlich organised it all. Moved the patient from the bed next to Mutti’s so that Frau Schmidt could take her place. Found Frau Schmidt a nightdress, covered her with a sheet and quilt, brought bread and margarine and cocoa, which Johannes and Helga ate and drank while Nurse Stöhlich coaxed Frau Schmidt to eat too and Mutti, and Vati as well. ‘Because you doctors always forget to eat, you are so busy,’ said Nurse Stöhlich.
At last Vati said that they must go. ‘Just to the other barracks for now.’
‘I don’t want to —’ said Johannes and Helga together.
But Vati was a doctor now, as well as a father. ‘The people in the hospital need to rest. You may visit again tonight.’ And then, to Helga, ‘I think your mother will recover. Truly I do.’
‘You have sulpha here?’ asked Johannes.
Vati smiled. He looked younger than when they’d arrived. The smile grew as if it would not leave his face. ‘My little doctor. No, no sulpha. But with care Frau Schmidt should not get worse.’ He means that if she has survived till now, she will keep living, thought Johannes, and saw that Helga understood as well.
‘And Mutti?’ he asked softly, but Mutti heard.
‘I am quite capable of diagnosing myself! No infection, thanks to a good nurse, clean bandages and much carbolic. I am nearly better.’
‘Nearly is not healed,’ said Vati, still with his smile spread across his face. ‘You will stay here till you are completely well again.’
‘Yes, doctor,’ said Mutti, which was a game they used to play, each calling the other ‘doctor’.
Johannes felt Vati’s smile on his own face too. ‘Vati . . . can we go home again, when Mutti is better?’
The smile dimmed. ‘We will go home,’ said Vati quietly. ‘But it will be a new home. The hospital, the house, they are in the Russian zone. We could go back.’ He shrugged. ‘But the hospital was bombed, and the house too, as it was being used as German headquarters. There is nothing to go back to, except to Russian rule. We have had enough dictators, enough foreigners disposing of our lives. But we will make a new home. I promise, Johannes.’ He bent and hugged him again. ‘We have come so far. We can keep going. Now you go with your friend, and find a bed and supper — then you can come back and visit.’ The smile came again. ‘But for an hour only, like a proper visitor.’
They left.
Bunk beds in dormitories. ‘She is my sister,’ lied Johannes when they tried to put him in the men’s dormitory and Helga in the women’s, hoping no one would ask to see their ID papers. At last they put them both in the dormitory for families, each family’s space separated by hanging blankets.
So many strangers, milling around, arguing about where the Russians were, or what villages were left, others crying or standing silent, children wailing or sitting, staring at the wall. More fluttering hearts on paper, crying silently for news. Too many people, too much emotion, everything confused and confusing.
Except for Mutti and Vati, over in the hospital. Except for the warmth of Helga’s hand. The world might twist and swirl, and gargoyles might leer at night, and the sounds of screaming and shooting return. But now there was a small ball of warmth to hold onto, a ball of light, as well as the flame of hate, to keep him warm through the night.
In the end he and Helga were not just hospital visitors. There were too many patients and too few nurses. When Nurse Stöhlich saw Helga carrying Frau Schmidt’s chamberpot, she asked her softly if she would mind helping empty some others as well. Johannes joined her, carrying the stinking contents, emptying them in the trench behind the barracks, washing them, and then washing their hands thoroughly too.
‘If we do not keep our hands clean, we may get infections from the patients through their chamberpots,’ said Johannes.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Helga. But she didn’t smile. She hadn’t smiled since Hannes’s death.
The camp was an international one, whatever that meant, but English people ran it. The food was not as good or plentiful as at the American camp, just cocoa and bread and margarine for breakfast, a soup of vegetables at lunch, mostly turnip or swede, more bread and margarine and cocoa for their supper. But Red Cross parcels came through, and although the workers in the office took some of the contents to sell on the black market, chocolate and dry biscuits, dried fruit and even cakes were still distributed, irregularly but often enough to survive on the scant camp food. There were also cigarettes, two packets in each parcel, which Helga and Johannes traded for more food.
The food was better in the hospital, meat sometimes in the stew, and always potatoes, and sometimes porridge made from rolled oats from the Red Cross parcels. As Johannes and Helga helped there, Nurse Stöhlich said they should share the patients’ food as well.
It was a well-run hospital. Only once did Johannes see Vati angry, when he found one of the nurses had failed to feed a woman in the far corner of the ward.
‘Why?’ demanded Vati, glaring at the nurse. ‘She says she has not been fed for two days! How can you do this?’
‘She is jüdisch,’ spat out the nurse.
Johannes thought: Hitler is dead, but he is still alive in these people. And hatred flared again in a small bright core inside him.
Vati looked at the nurse, then at the ill woman, thin and trembling on the bed. ‘You will leave the hospital and not come back.’
‘But I am a nurse! I have my papers!’
‘I will tear your papers into little shreds and tell them you are a fraud if you do not go. Now!’
The nurse spat towards the woman. ‘Juden,’ she hissed, one last time.
‘Helga, will you feed . . .’ Vati bent to hear the woman’s name; she whispered and he said, ‘Frau Liebermann? Helga, will you please give her a meal?’
And Helga smiled, her first smile in so long, and took the woman’s hand. ‘It will make me very happy,’ she said. And Johannes saw it was the truth.
A strange girl. And yet he loved her anyway.
Chapter 24
JOHANNES
GERMANY, 1945
‘Frau Marks! Does anyone know a Frau Marks?’ An English soldier moved through the bunks in the barracks, a shabby German translator at his side. ‘Wer kennt eine Frau Marks?’
No one answered. Those who had survived knew that to give someone’s name might see them hauled into the night. ‘She might be known as Fräulein Stöhlich,’ the translator added.
Johannes peered around the blanket that divided their space from the other families’. The camp’s outside lights stayed on all night, but the dining room lights were turned off after supper, so the only place to talk or play cards after dark was in the dormitories. Nurse Stöhlich! He glanced at Helga. She looked at the English soldier, at the translator in his faded and frayed overcoat, then nodded almost imperceptibly.
Yes, thought Johannes. This was an Englishman. And Nurse Stöhlich’s sister-in-law was English, because she had sent her son to England. He stood. ‘I can show you,’ he said carefully in English.
&
nbsp; The Englishman looked at him. A major, an important man. ‘You speak English?’
‘A little.’
‘She is here? You can take me to her?’
Johannes nodded. He could have told him she’d be in the hospital, or in the room she shared with other nurses nearby. But he wanted to be there when this important man was shown who she was in case this meant trouble for her. If it did, he could help her run and hide. Among the bunks, maybe, then out into the forest. He could smuggle her out chocolate and cigarettes so she could trade them for food.
He could not think what Nurse Stöhlich might have done that would get her into trouble. But what you did in this world was less important than where you were or what you were, like being jüdisch.
‘Ich komme auch,’ said Helga. I’m coming too.
Good, thought Johannes. If they needed a diversion, to get Nurse Stöhlich to safety, Helga would help, and Mutti and Vati too, if they were on duty, for his mother was well enough to work a little now.
Through the bunks, outside into the cold air — for although it was summer now, summer seemed as confused as everyone in this strange land. It was still a land of war, even though the war had ceased.
Into the hospital. The other staff were used to Johannes and Helga now. ‘Why do you need to find her?’ Johannes asked just as Nurse Stöhlich came around the bunks and saw them.
‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Johannes. ‘The English soldier is looking for you.’
‘For me?’ Nurse Stöhlich looked at the soldier and the translator. ‘Good evening,’ she said in English. ‘I am Nurse Stöhlich.’
The major stared at her. Suddenly Johannes saw what the English soldier saw: a woman like a skeleton, with a little hair growing in tufts, her hands red and swollen from small infections from dealing every day with wounds that oozed pus, with washing them over and over again in cold water and carbolic soap, the only disinfectant that they had. Her lips caved in over her empty mouth, where once there had been teeth.
‘Are you Mrs Marks?’ he asked, in English.
‘Yes.’ Nurse Stöhlich . . . or Frau Marks . . . seemed to have lost her breath. ‘Why do you want me?’
The soldier stared. He had expected to see a young woman, Johannes realised. How old was Frau Marks? Thirty-five?
She looked eighty. All the women in the camp, even Mutti and Frau Schmidt, looked old, older than crumpled ancient castles.
‘You have a sister-in-law in England?’
‘Miriam! Georg . . . is Georg alive? Are they both alive?’
‘Yes,’ said the major gently. ‘They are both alive. Your sister-in-law is a woman of great determination, Mrs Marks. And influence. She has arranged for you to go to England.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Do you have any identification? Papers? A passport?’
No! thought Johannes. Of course she didn’t have any, except the ones that said DP and the names she had given to be allowed in here. No one who had been in the extermination camps had proper papers! Didn’t the major know that? Would he leave Frau Marks here because she had no proper papers?
‘I have my passport,’ said Frau Marks carefully. ‘My English passport and my German one. They are hidden in the hospital where I was taken prisoner. The Germans occupied it, but I don’t think they would have found my papers. It is about an hour’s drive from here, if someone could take me?’
She knows where we are, thought Johannes. He realised he had never thought about where they might be on the map he had known at school. In the belly of the ogre you did not think of maps.
‘My driver will take you,’ said the major, then stopped as Frau Marks began to cry. She held out her arms to Johannes and to Helga.
‘Georg,’ whispered Frau Marks as she hugged them. ‘I will see Georg.’
The papers must have still been in the hiding place, for the next morning Frau Marks was gone, taken away in an ambulance, Mutti said, one ambulance just for her, as if she were a soldier. Johannes had never thought that Nurse Stöhlich was sick. She cared for the sick! But the English major must have thought so.
The major came to see Johannes one more time. He brought a loaf of bread and a tin of jam — opened, in case they had no can opener — and a piece of cheese. Johannes thought it must be the major’s own food, for the English had no big warehouses where food could be bought, like the Americans had.
The major sat with them, while he and Helga and Frau Schmidt ate the bread slowly, and then the cheese, and spoon after spoon of jam. You did not leave food uneaten in the camp, unless it was small enough to put under your pillow wrapped in a corner of the sheet and tied to your wrist so no one could steal it in the night.
The major stood when Mutti came in. He handed her a small twist of paper. ‘From Mrs Marks,’ he said. ‘She told me how you saved each other’s lives. She asked if I could help you. Mrs Wolcheki, I wish I could —’
‘Dr Wolcheki,’ said Mutti.
‘Dr Wolcheki. But Britain is only taking single men, not families. There is nothing I can do.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mutti politely.
‘Good luck, young man,’ said the major. He nodded to the Schmidts, who said ‘Guten Tag’ politely back, though Frau Schmidt had not understood the talk in English. Johannes saw pity in the major’s eyes, and anger and guilt, and all the feelings of a good man who had seen too much and could do nothing, or not more than he had done.
He left.
Later, when it was dark, Mutti opened the paper. It was a ring, too big for her thin fingers, with a red stone, like blood. She wrapped it in cloth and hung it around her neck to hide it.
Chapter 25
JOHANNES
GERMANY, 1945–1946
People came, frightened people, lugging all the debris of their lives that they could carry. People left, as the effects of war ebbed, for even after Germany surrendered it took months to capture the bands of soldiers, to stop them looting, killing, spreading the disease of war even though peace had been declared.
Slowly, those who had homes, or land where new homes might be built, or friends or relatives to take them in, left. The food grew worse — Germany had had little chance to grow food, nor had the English had time to grow enough food even for themselves and fight a war too, much less enough to send to Germany to feed displaced people.
But Red Cross parcels continued to arrive from countries across the world: tinned meat, chocolate, more cigarettes to trade. The parcels meant they didn’t starve. But every day was spent thinking about food, wondering if they would be weak with hunger by the night, or if a parcel might arrive, or someone might trade some jewellery with the farmers outside the camp.
Frau Schmidt joined them now, sharing Helga’s bunk. Helga no longer helped at the hospital, for Frau Schmidt needed her, holding her hand, or listening to stories of when she and Hannes were young.
Helga never joined in the stories, never said, ‘I remember when . . .’ It was as if Frau Schmidt was reading the memories from a book, as she lay on her bunk, her eyes closed, looking at the past, speaking about Helga as if she were not there. ‘. . . and then Hannes and Helga caught tadpoles in the lake. Those tadpoles! Hannes kept them in a jar in the kitchen and one morning — plop! A frog jumped into the milk. And Helga said . . .’
‘What did I say, Mutti?’
‘You said, “Other frogs live in the water. We have Berlin’s only milk frogs.”’ She began to weep again.
Vati and Mutti had a small room at the end of the hospital that they shared with two nurses, taking turns, two on duty and two asleep. They worked long hours, for there were many sick people and with no sulpha drugs or the new medicine called penicillin there was no quick way to make them well. So Johannes stayed with the Schmidts, carrying their midday meals in to eat in their own tiny world behind the blanket.
Then one day he arrived with the tray to find the blanket pushed aside. A man sat on Frau Schmidt’s bunk, a strange man, holding her hands.
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nbsp; Not a doctor in a white coat. A thief maybe, after the cigarettes, chocolate and chewing gum they kept under Frau Schmidt’s pillow? But then he saw that Helga stood there, her face carefully blank. Helga would not just stand there and let a thief take the precious things they had to trade.
‘Helga?’ he asked.
But the man answered. He held out his hand for Johannes to shake. ‘I am Herr Schmidt,’ he said.
Chapter 26
JOHANNES
GERMANY, 1946–1947
Herr Schmidt shared Frau Schmidt’s bunk now, and Helga had another. It felt strange at first, having Herr Schmidt there, added to their ‘family’. Even Helga seemed to find it strange. But Herr Schmidt had been away for most of the war, an engineer, working for the army. How old had she been when he left home? Six? Seven?
No wonder it felt strange for her to have a father, and strange for him to have a daughter her age too.
‘Thank you for caring for my family,’ he said quietly to Johannes, that first day, when Frau Schmidt was sleeping again. For the first time since Hannes’s death there was a faint smile on her face. ‘And thank you, Helga. Without you, I would have no family at all.’ Johannes saw tears in his eyes as he added, ‘All across the world now men are coming home to find they have no home, and have no family either. But I have a family. I have a wife. I have a daughter.’
He smiled at Helga as he said, ‘I am a lucky man, to have a wife and a daughter. And one day, I promise, we will have a home again.’
A nurse at the hospital one day said there were twenty million displaced persons in Europe now. Twenty million! That was almost a quarter of all the people on the continent! So many that no one bothered to say the whole words now. They were just DPs.
Too many places had been destroyed. People must remain displaced till more houses were built, more crops sown, more order established in shattered lands.
Mutti and Vati worked, though they received no pay at first, as the foreign doctors did. Finally someone noticed that the hospital’s main doctors were DPs, and they too were given envelopes of money every week.
Goodbye, Mr Hitler Page 8
