Tell Me Who I Am

by Julia Navarro

  “And Heinrich? What happened to him?” Professor Schatzhauser asked in alarm.

  Father Müller burst into tears. He gave way to the suffering that he had managed to control for so long.

  “When he thought that I would be far enough away from the building, he went up to the director’s office and threw himself out of the window.”

  “My God!” Professor Schatzhauser, Pastor Ludwig Schmidt, and the Kastens cried out, almost in unison.

  “My brother has suffered much,” Hanna whispered, putting her arms around her brother’s shoulders again. “Perhaps we should go home. He needs to recover.”

  “Father Müller, you are a very brave man, and you have done God’s work. By finding out about this we may be able to fight it,” Pastor Schmidt said.

  “Nazi ideology contains the idea of getting rid of the sick and the weak, it isn’t the first we’ve heard about mental patients being killed. There was a similar plan mooted before the war broke out,” Manfred Kasten remembered.

  “The only way to stop these killings is to make sure that people know about them,” Professor Schatzhauser murmured.

  “The archbishop will denounce what is happening in Hadamar to the authorities,” Father Müller said.

  “But they won’t pay any attention to him! What use is it to denounce the crime to the executioners themselves?” Amelia said, who was only just capable of controlling the horror that the priest’s tale had awoken in her.

  “But they will have to stop the killings in Hadamar, even if just for a moment. We have the duty to tell people what is going on there,” Schmidt said.

  “I am worried for your safety,” Professor Schatzhauser said.

  “So are we,” Hanna, Father Müller’s sister, said, “but the archbishop has decided to send Rudolf to Rome.”

  “So you are leaving... ,” Pastor Schmidt said.

  “It’s for the best,” Manfred Kasten conceded. “The Gestapo will work out who the worker was who disappeared from Hadamar. And if they find him... well, these people respect no one.”

  “When are you leaving?” Amelia asked.

  “In a few weeks’ time,” the priest replied.

  Father Müller was not the only one who could not sleep as a result of what had happened at Hadamar. None of the people who had been at the meeting in Professor Schatzhauser’s house could stop thinking about what the priest had told them. Their impotence in the face of this criminal regime was painful.

  Amelia went back to the Kellers’ house with her mind firmly made up. Whatever happened, she would do what she could to bring down the Reich.

  That night, alone in her room, she wrote a letter to London telling them about what was taking place in Hadamar.

  Herr Keller insisted that she take a cup of tea with his wife Greta and their son Frank, but Amelia did not think that she would be able to pretend to be normal, so she claimed that she had a headache and retired early.

  “She’s a nice young girl, but a bit strange, don’t you think?” Frank said to his parents.

  “Well, she lost most of her family in the Spanish war. I think that it’s difficult for her to stay in Spain surrounded by memories of her parents,” Herr Keller explained to his son.

  “She is a good companion to me,” Greta added.

  Amelia arrived at Dorothy and Jan’s house so early that they were both worried.

  “But what’s going on?” Dorothy asked when she opened the door and found Amelia there.

  Dorothy still had her dressing-gown on and her eyes looked sleepy.

  “For God’s sake, Amelia, it’s seven o’clock in the morning! Tell me what’s going on!”

  “You have to send an urgent report to London, I have it here in code. It’s not very long, but the sooner they have it the better.”

  Jan came and stood in the doorway. He was wearing a dressing-gown as well.

  “I told you to come at a time when it wouldn’t attract attention,” he grumbled to Amelia.

  “I know, but the information I have is extremely important, I wouldn’t have come like this if it weren’t.”

  She told them what Father Müller had told her, word for word, and although Dorothy and Jan both seemed affected, he continued to reproach her.

  “All this could have been passed on in a couple of hours’ time, or this evening. It is terrible what is happening in the Hadamar asylum, but you must not, I insist, you must not come to our house at this time.”

  “How can you say that! The Nazis are killing thousands of innocent people! Father Müller calculated that they must have already killed around eight thousand,” Amelia said, with a note of hysteria in her voice.

  “Of course it is horrible! But we have to be careful, we can’t draw attention to ourselves. Do you think that if they find out about us we’ll be able to help these people more? We will make the neighbors suspicious, someone will gossip about us to the Gestapo, and then... well, you know what that means.”

  Dorothy looked at Jan as if telling him not to be too hard on Amelia. Then she left the room to make coffee.

  It was difficult for Amelia to recover her calm. Jan intimidated her, she felt like a schoolgirl in his presence. He reminded her of the precautions they had agreed to take.

  “Right, you need to stay for a long time now. It may be that someone besides the doorman saw you come in. The best thing is if you now leave at a more reasonable time.”

  “When will you send this information to London?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  “But when will that be?” Amelia insisted.

  “You need to do your work and I need to do mine, each of us doing what he or she knows how to do best. Don’t hurry me, I will decide when the right time is.”

  “Come on Jan, Amelia is upset, and it’s not over just some trifle,” Dorothy said.

  “You think I’m not upset? What kind of person would I be if I weren’t absolutely disgusted by what this priest has said about the Hadamar asylum? But we have to keep our heads, and not make and false moves. Of course I will send this information to London as soon as possible, but you know that we have to be careful in establishing contact. I will not do so before seeing someone else who has information to pass on to us. After meeting him I will send what he says along with Amelia’s report, but I will not take the risk of getting in touch with London twice in the same day except in cases of extreme emergency.”

  “You are right,” Dorothy admitted.

  “Of course I am. Losing our nerve will not get us anywhere.”

  That day, Manfred Kasten and his wife had guests. Professor Schatzhauser had asked them to call a meeting to establish some facts about Amelia. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t trust her. It did not make sense to him that Amelia should have appeared out of the blue offering to help them.

  “We might have been a little imprudent to accept her so quickly, we don’t really know anything about her,” the professor explained.

  “Do you think that she could be a spy for Franco, and that the information she is gathering is ending up on Hitler’s desk?” asked a gray-haired man, with an air of command.

  “I don’t know, General, I don’t know... Max von Schumann seems to trust her, and she helped Father Müller a great deal in getting a young Jewish woman out of the country. But why has she come back? I don’t believe her when she says that she is trying to recover her father’s former business, or that she has broken things off with this American journalist, and has nowhere better to go,” the professor replied.

  “She might have a personal motive to be back here,” Helga Kasten interrupted.

  “What do you mean?” her husband said, looking at her with suspicion.

  “We met her via Max, and as far as we know they met each other in Buenos Aires a few years ago. You don’t have to be a psychic to know that she is important for him and he is important to her. If Amelia has broken off her relationship with Albert James, it’s not entirely impossible that she has come to Germany looking for M
ax.”

  “The things you imagine!” her husband said.

  “Helga may be right,” the man they called general said. “But even so we cannot trust her fully.”

  “It is not a good idea for her to know just how many of the heads of the army are opposed to Hitler,” a colonel suggested.

  “Yes, it would be an incautious move,” the general agreed.

  “Yes, but perhaps she already knows more than is convenient for us,” Professor Schatzhauser replied. “That is why I asked Manfred to call this meeting.”

  “Yes, I think that what we should now do is keep a certain distance from Fräulein Garayoa, without cutting her off completely; she might be useful to us, given her relationship with the British,” Manfred said.

  “I don’t think that the British will listen to her now that she’s broken things off with Albert James, her connection with the Admiralty was a personal one,” the professor said.

  The professor and his friends were right to be worried. It was a great risk for them to trust this Spanish woman about whom they knew so little. Even though the army had sworn loyalty to Hitler, there were some military officers in important positions who were plotting against the Führer and it was only natural that they should be suspicious.

  Baroness Ludovica had decided to reclaim her husband. She wasn’t going to accept Max’s indifference simply because they could not agree about politics. Yes, she was a Nazi, and proud to be one. Was it not the case that the Führer was giving Germany back her former greatness? She was upset that Max refused to recognize Hitler as a man of destiny. When she heard him talk she was greatly moved, his speeches aroused in her a sense of pride at being a German. But Max was a romantic who made light of Hitler and who said that it was a disgrace for the German army to be under the orders of the Austrian corporal, as he referred to the Führer. She would make him see that they had to be practical; at the very least, he had to acknowledge that her family’s factories in the Ruhr had been helped by Germany’s economic recovery.

  But Max’s sense of honor came before any other consideration, so he would never accept the family’s prosperity as a reason to accept the Third Reich. So Ludovica could only think of one way for Max not to end up abandoning her, and that was to get pregnant. It was not easy, because for some time now they had only lived together in the same house and had not shared a bed, but she was prepared to do anything to have a son, a son who would tie Max to her forever. He was the only male son of his family; his two sisters had sons, but it was only through him that the von Schumann name would be perpetuated.

  And so Ludovica promised herself that she would not make any political comments when her husband came home, that she would even meekly accept anything he said against the Führer, and that she would pretend to find his irritating friends sympathetic.

  Thinking about his return, Ludovica had prepared a dinner of her husband’s favorite foods.

  Max came back from Warsaw late in the afternoon on May 15, and his face showed tiredness but also some other emotion that Ludovica was not able to understand.

  He kissed her briefly on the cheek and seemed not to notice her new haircut or her new dress, and he didn’t seem to appreciate the glass of champagne that she gave him to welcome him home. Ludovica hid the annoyance that her husband’s coolness had provoked in her, but she was not a woman to give in at the first hurdle.

  “I am so glad you are back. Rest a little and then we will eat, I want you to tell me everything that has happened in Poland over these last few months. Everything is the same here, apart from the fact that the RAF are visiting us from time to time. We haven’t suffered any setbacks because of that, though. Your sisters and your nephews are well, they want to see you. I told them I would tell you when you got back to Berlin.”

  “They’re in the city?” Max asked.

  “Yes, although your older sister told me that they would go to Mecklenburg when the weather got better.”

  Max nodded, and thought of the old family home in the lakes, not too far from Berlin. He had spent the happiest summers of his life there, riding his bicycle and fishing.

  As soon as he had had a bath and a shave, Max went to find Ludovica. The months he had spent in Warsaw had made him think about his marriage, and he had decided to put an end to what was only a marriage of convenience.

  “How have you been these last few months?” he asked politely as they ate.

  “Bad, very bad,” she said as he fixed his gaze on her.

  “Why? What happened?”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about us, Max...”

  “So have I, Ludovica.”

  “Well, in that case you will understand why it has been so bad. I love you, Max, and I have missed you, and I have realized that I don’t know how to live without you. Don’t say anything, listen to me... I know that my political comments have irritated you, and I am sure that none of this is so important as to drive a wedge between us. Remember the day we married? I was the happiest woman in the world... I didn’t marry you because my parents wanted it, and I know that you also weren’t simply motivated by your parents’ desire to join our families.”

  “Ludovica, that’s all in the past,” Max protested.

  “No, no it’s not, at least it’s not for me. I know I have not been a good wife, and I ask your pardon. You have always told me that I am too temperamental, and you are right, I put too much of myself into what I do and what I say. And what I want to say, Max, is that I won’t let Hitler, and I won’t let the Third Reich stand between us, I am a Catholic like you and our marriage is forever.”

  Max was taken aback by Ludovica’s confession. How would he be able to tell her now that he was thinking about an amicable separation? He looked at his wife in surprise and he thought that he could see, behind her imploring smile, the same hardness as before in her eyes.

  “We’ll try to make it work, won’t we, Max? she said, asking him for an answer.

  “It may be too late...”

  “No, it is not too late! How could it be too late? We made our vows before the altar, and I want to keep them. I am sorry for my behavior and for upsetting you with my defense of the Führer, but I assure you that it won’t happen again.”

  Max looked directly at Ludovica once again. It was hard for him to recognize his wife in this apparently submissive woman, and he knew that this was all an act and that she would never accept the idea of a separation.

  They finished their meal in silence, and then he excused himself, saying that he was tired from the journey. Ludovica told him to rest. Half an hour later, when Max was just about to fall asleep, he heard the door to his room open and saw Ludovica there, wrapped in a flimsy white nightdress. Before he could say anything, she had got into his bed.

  2

  The sirens broke the silence of the night.

  “The RAF might have decided to pay us a visit in return for the one the Luftwaffe carried out. I heard on the BBC that our planes have caused damage to the British Museum and Westminster Abbey,” Helga Kasten said to her guests.

  The Kastens were holding a dinner party in honor of Max von Schumann.

  Amelia had spent the whole evening trying without success to talk to Max alone, but Ludovica would not leave her husband alone, and everyone could see that their relationship seemed to have improved. What is more, Ludovica did not make any of her usual comments in favor of the Third Reich that evening.

  Amelia went up to Manfred Kasten.

  “Do you think you could help me get to speak to Max for a moment?”

  Manfred agreed. He thought that his wife might have been right and that Amelia had come back to Berlin in search of Max.

  “I’ll get Max to come to the library with me, go and wait for us there now. My wife will try to head Ludovica off, but you see how she hasn’t left her husband alone all evening.”

  Amelia left the salon and went to the library. Max and Manfred Kasten did not take long to arrive.

  “What is so important that
you have to speak to me alone?” Max asked the diplomat.

  “There is someone here who wants to speak to you.”

  Max stopped in the doorway when he saw Amelia’s figure in the library; the rigidity of his posture showed how uncomfortable he felt.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said with a smile.

  “What’s going on?” he said, drily.

  Manfred Kasten left the room to leave them alone.

  “Have I done anything to upset you? If I asked Herr Kasten to bring you here it is because there are certain things I didn’t want to talk about in front of Ludovica... ,” Amelia said.

  “Let’s leave Ludovica out of it, and tell me what is so urgent that you need to talk to me.”

  “I would like to know what’s going on in Poland...”

  “So that’s it, you need to tell your British friends all the news?”

  “Max, please! What’s got into you?”

  “Why should I tell you what’s happening in Poland? Will it help stop the war?”