Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  Whatever real or forged papers Koehler was flashing, they must have been beauties, Cochrane thought, because they eased their way past danger once again.

  They went around a few more corners and landed in a residential section of the city, again not too far from where he had once lived. They stopped in front of a single family house. The POW stepped from the Cochrane’s car, looked both ways, gripped the gun that was under his coat, then went to the door.

  Johnson knocked softly.

  In a ground floor parlor a dim light illuminated. The front door opened.

  A wide woman in a heavy coat loomed into view. She looked to be in her fifties. A triangle of matted gray hair framed her face. She wore pants and had a low belly. She gave a nod to Koehler and said little. Cochrane could hear that she spoke German with an Austrian accent.

  Koehler stepped from his car. He came back to the trailing car and retrieved his daughter. He put an arm protectively around her, steadied her and walked her into the safe house. The woman, Frau Schneidhuber, nodded that the cars could stay where they were.

  They entered the house. The woman closed the door. Sergeant Johnson carried in two suitcases from the second car, one belonging to Frieda, one to Cochrane. Two orange cats were sprawled on the floor in front of a dying wood fire on a grate. One of the cats was too stout to move. The other was two disinterested.

  Sergeant Johnson smiled to the cats and left the suitcases near the smoldering fire. Cochrane whispered thanks to the Englishman. He might have forgotten from the fatigue and lost all his tools of border crossing if the suitcase had disappeared.

  As Cochrane tried to stay out of everyone’s way, he noticed a chair by the window where Fraud Schneidhuber had been sitting in wait. There was a well-thumbed copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz, on a side table, half open and face down. Next to that was a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The woman’s reading tastes were not just curious, they were currently illegal. A phrase from the latter work – which Cochrane had once read, or attempted to read, in English - bounced into Cochrane’s delirious brain: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature.

  The image continued the surrealism of the moment.

  On a wall in a corner right by a window was a yellowing portrait of Hitler, presumably present to keep the local snitches happy.

  It was nearly four AM. The night would end in exercises in pantomime as few words were spoken. Frieda’s father led her to a makeshift sleeping alcove on the first floor. He embraced her and let her settle onto a cot. There was a blanket. He covered his daughter and pulled the blanket up to her chin. Frieda returned instantly to sleep.

  Then Koehler turned. He cautioned Cochrane to stay indoors as much as possible, if not entirely. He further advised Cochrane that he would be back as soon as the proper arrangements could be made. A day or two should be allowed, maybe a week at most.

  Cochrane nodded but by this time was borderline delirious.

  Koehler and his bodyguard stepped from the house. Sergeant Johnson gave Cochrane a wink. Frau Schneidhuber closed the front door and locked it with an oversized key. There was a sturdy lock on the door with a steel panel around it, the lock much newer than the door. When he visitors were gone, she also dropped a long wooden bar across the door.

  She turned to her overnight guests and, continuing in German, pointed out the kitchen, the water closet and a small table near the fire which contained several bottles of liquor. Then she led Cochrane up some narrow uneven steps to another makeshift cot that was crammed into a musty hallway on the second floor.

  “Für dich, mein Freund,” she said. “You speak German, I’m told.”

  Cochrane nodded. He spoke German and these arrangements wer much better than an unmarked grave in the woods.

  “You will be safe here,” she said, “unless there is another air raid. There is no shelter nearby, so we may all be killed if bombs fall. If no bombs fall, we are all safe.”

  Impressed with her logic, Cochrane collapsed onto the cot. He was unconscious and into a deep state of sleep so fast that he never remembered closing his eyes.

  Chapter 43

  Munich

  February 1943

  In Munich, a more horrendous series of events transpired.

  Those who remained active in the White Rose group delivered the sixth and final leaflet to buildings in Munich. They mailed copies to influential members of the military and the government. They ran off duplicates on copying machines and sent them to other cities through trusted couriers. As a special insult to Hitler, the White Rose distributed the pamphlets to Linz where Hitler had spent his youth. As a further affront, they smuggled the final leaflet out of the country to the French resistance in Cherbourg. It was passed along underground routes and several thousand were eventually scattered over Germany by Allied planes.

  In the early morning hours of February 18, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were leafleting throughout the University of Munich. They carried a suitcase filled with leaflets through the main university building, leaving handfuls of their work at key intersections where students and faculty would find them in the morning. Jakob Schmidt, the custodian who had been shadowing them, suddenly appeared and confronted them. Schmidt who had left school at age eight, remained an ardent Nazi.

  “You two! You’re under arrest!” Schmidt barked.

  At first they laughed. Schmidt was an ignorant little ape of a man. How could anyone take him seriously? The laughter didn’t last long.

  Gestapo agents were already on campus. Schmidt phoned them. The suitcase of printed matter was seized as evidence.

  The Gestapo handcuffed Hans and Sophie and led them into an unmarked van. They were driven away. Later in the day, the SS arrested Willie Graf. The next day they arrested Christoph Probst. The Gestapo took all of them to Wittelsbach Palace. The Palace in central Munich had once been the residence of the Wittelsbach monarchs of Bavaria. These days, however, it was Gestapo headquarters in Munich.

  The first thing the interrogators asked for was a list of names. “Other members of your treasonous group,” asked the Gestapo of Hans and Sophie.

  The philosophy student and the biology student refused to cooperate. The recriminations were swift and brutal. The torture began within two hours of their arrest.

  Chapter 44

  Berlin

  February 1943

  Bill Cochrane was a young man again. He sat on the front porch of the house in Virginia where he had grown up. He was having a wonderful conversation with his father about the great baseball pitcher Walter Johnson. He felt a hand on his shoulder. A woman was gently saying, “Mein Herr? Mein Herr?”

  Cochrane’s father laughed. “We don’t speak German in Virginia,” he said. “We fought a war with those Huns and we don’t have to speak German.”

  “Mein Herr?” came the woman’s voice again. “It’s afternoon.”

  Bill Cochrane’s eyes flickered open. His father, long since dead, waved good-bye and went back into the dream. The dream dissipated and went to wherever in the psyche they lurk.

  Cochrane sat up groggily in a strange house in Berlin. There had been no air raid overnight, so he was still alive.

  Frau Schneidhuber was leaning over to speak to him, a kindly smile on her wrinkled face, kinship in her deep blue eyes. “Mein Herr, it’s already afternoon,” she said in German.

  Cochrane’s sleepy gaze fixed upon her. He blinked like a fighter who had been dazed but was coming around. There was a clock on a nearby table. He focused on it. It said 2:38 PM. Midafternoon indeed.

  “God…,” he said.

  “I have some tea, some canned fruit and some bread,” she said. “You are welcome to anything I have.”

  Cochrane sat up on his elbows and came awake fast. “Where’s the girl?” was the first thing he asked.

  “Frieda is downstairs,” she said. “Reading.”

  “Good,” Cochrane said, relieved. �
�Good.”

  He struggled to his feet. The previous day, which started in a trailer, continued in more than one car, played out at a grave site, included a burial and then brought him back to Berlin, played out at sixty miles an hour. His head pounded. He asked himself: was he really alive?

  “Some tea would be good,” he said.

  “I thought as much,” Frau Schneidhuber said.

  He noticed that she was wearing a silver chain around her neck. On the chain was a large key. He recognized it as the key to the front door. She took his hand and led him downstairs.

  Frieda was sitting on a worn sofa in the parlor. She had borrowed the resident copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. She was buried in it, her sharp eyes shooting across line after line.

  There was a log smoldering in the grate. Someone had been out because there were some other scraps of wood that had been collected and set by the fire. That, or someone had given them to the fraulein. No matter, she made tea.

  “Good morning. Good day,” Cochrane said in German to the girl.

  Frieda raised her eyes, looked at him blankly, then lowered her gaze and kept reading.

  “Is that my only greeting, Frieda?” he asked with some irony, still in German.

  No answer.

  “I’m putting my life on the line to get you to Switzerland,” he said in English, mildly piqued.

  She looked back to him. “Sie schnarchen wie eine Säge, die Holz schneidet,” she said.

  He wasn’t certain what he had heard. “I snore?” he asked.

  “She’s right,” Frau Schneidhuber said in German. “You snore.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “We don’t care,” the proprietress said. “My husband Fritz used to also.”

  Cochrane was about to ask where her Fritz was but the woman’s eyes indicated the portrait of a young soldier who was in a World War One uniform. Her gaze said everything. Nearly two million German soldiers had died in the first great war and Fritz had been one of them. He wasn't here right now and was not expected back.

  “Argonne Forest,” she said without emotion. “Killed by the French. Do you like your tea strong?”

  “Anything you can do would be fine,” he said.

  She served tea and bread with loganberry jam. Cochrane devoured it. His eyes fell upon the picture of Hitler by the window. The lady of the house was no one’s fool. She followed his eyes.

  “The Nazi block captain, the gauleiter, served in the war with my late husband,” she said. “He knows what I think. He knows about my books. I keep the picture in the window and he doesn’t see anything else. We disagree on Hitler but we are friends.”

  “Does he know you have guests right now?” Cochrane asked.

  “No,” she said after a pause. “And even if he does, he doesn’t. That’s how it works.”

  Cochrane finished his tea. Without being asked, Frau Schneidhuber, stood, went to the heating coil, retrieved the tea pot and poured Cochrane a second cup. All this while Frieda flipped pages of Kafka and ignored them both. The girl was in her own world, or more accurately the world of the great Prague-born author. Kafka had been born near the Old Town Square in Prague, at the time a major city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were German-speaking middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. And then there was the content of his work. There were more reasons that Kafka was on the Nazi’s proscribed list than there were unmarked graves in the Argonne Forest.

  Cochrane finished his second cup of tea.

  “I want to show you something,” Frau Schneidhuber said.

  She drew Cochrane to a small cabinet near the kitchen sink. There were shelves and draws. “Left side, bottom drawer,” she said. “Open the drawer, take a look.”

  Cochrane obeyed. There were a pile of rags that looked as if they were used for cleaning.

  “Prowl,” she insisted.

  Cochrane rummaged through the soiled rags. Then she helped. She reached down and pulled the cloth material out of the drawer. Beneath them there was a collection of pistols: German and Czech, most at least twenty years old.

  “They work and they’re loaded,” she said. “They were with my husband’s things when his final box of belongings was shipped back to me. In 1926. Eight years after the war ended. Weimar efficiency. You should take a gun,” she suggested. “If you kill a Nazi before you leave the country it won’t bother me a bit.”

  Cochrane reached in. He selected a Czech pistol. Sure enough, it was loaded. It did not show much use. It had recently been lubricated, also. Frau Schneidhuber said that once a year she took a bus out to the most remote western edge of the Tiergarten in Berlin and fired away at vermin. She always picked a Sunday morning, she explained, because there weren’t many people.

  She gave him a handful of bullets. “In case of trouble,” she said. “The others I keep. Someday the Red Army will come to my door if I’m not dead first from English bombing. I will be ready. I do not wish to be raped by filthy Russian peasants or live under Bolshevism. The first soldiers who come to my door will not live under it either.”

  Carefully, Cochrane put his Czech pistol and the bullets in his coat pocket.

  “I’d ask how long you’ll be staying in Berlin,” Frau Schneidhuber said, “but it would be a pointless question, wouldn’t it? You don’t know.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “And thank you for the weapon.”

  “To your good health,” she said with no small sense of irony.

  Frieda remained silent through all this, not even glancing up.

  Cochrane went to his bag and opened it. Nothing had been touched. He found fresh clothes and a razor. He piled his books and the box of dominos on the table. Frau Schneidhuber watched, then volunteered a piece of soap for shaving. He asked if he could wash. She said yes. She warmed some water in the tea kettle on the grate. He closed the door to the tiny chamber where there was a toilet and a narrow standpipe above a drain that served as a shower. He cleaned up as best possible. The water from the pipe was frigid.

  He began to wonder anew about the Tavern Wittgenstein and why he couldn’t locate it. Dulles had urged him to go by at least once. He still felt that it could be important.

  When he came out again in twenty minutes, Frieda was examining his books. She raised her eyes and looked at him.

  “These are yours?” she asked in German.

  “Those are mine,” he said. “You may read them if you wish. The ones in German, of course.”

  Her eyes narrowed. He caught an air of mischief. She reached to the one by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night, in English.

  She scanned the opening page.

  Her eyes rose to his again. “I’d like to read this one,” she said in German.

  “It’s in English,” he said.

  Frau Schneidhuber watched with a smile.

  “I know,” Frieda said, switching to English. “I speak English, too.”

  “You speak English?”

  “Why do you assume I don’t?”

  Stunned, “How do you happen to speak English?” Cochrane asked.

  “My father taught me.”

  “Why?”

  “So I could go to England. Or America,” she said. “So I could leave Germany.”

  “He’s been planning it for a while?” Cochrane asked.

  She went back to her reading.

  Cochrane sat down at the table with her. “Jesus,” he muttered.

  “Jesus?” she asked, looking up again.

  “It’s just an expression,” Cochrane said.

  “’Jesus,’” she repeated. “Is that what you say when you’re angry? Or surprised?”

  “Some people do.”

  “You do,” Frieda said. “I heard you say it before.”

  “You learn quickly,” he said as a compliment.

  “My teachers always told me that,” she said.

  Frau Schneidhuber laughed indulgently. “’Jesus.’ Not a polite expression, Frieda,” she said.

  The German lady
came around to a position behind Frieda. She placed her unsteady hands on Frieda’s shoulders. Two of her fingers were crooked and there was a scar on the back of her right hand. “This is a very special young lady,” Frau Schneidhuber said, again back in German. “You will take good care of her, I know.”

  “I will indeed,” said Cochrane.

  Frieda returned to her reading, setting Fitzgerald aside and returning to Kafka, who better fit the mood. The day passed uneventfully.

  Chapter 45

  Berlin

  February 1943

  As Frau Schneidhuber prepared to go out to go shopping the next morning, Cochrane gave the woman fifty Swiss francs. She returned two hours later with fresh bread, dried meat, canned vegetables and real coffee. Cochrane stayed indoors all day, lest he be spotted by the block gauleiter and arouse suspicion.

  Frieda stayed in also. There was no new communication from her father. Cochrane and Frieda were in a holding pattern. That was the bad news. Or maybe it was good news, the absence of anything bad happening being good. Again the notion crossed his mind of making a final pass at finding the Tavern Wittgenstein. He needed to decide if the risks outweighed the potential benefits.

  Instinct and training told him to give it one more try. Caution told him not to.

  Factored in: he would need to carry his pistol and need to take Frieda with him. There was no way he could allow her out of his sight for any significant passage of time.

  Frau Schneidhuber had a radio. It was a primitive crystal set, and it worked. The fraulein, Cochrane and Frieda huddled around it toward nine in the evening and tried to pick up the BBC. The Nazi Party had initiated a new station with a powerful transmitter to broadcast at the same frequency to drown out broadcasts from London. But saboteurs, probably local Communists who moved about Germany at night, kept bombing the local transmitter. So tonight the BBC was clear. Listening was illegal. They kept the volume low.

  There was much about the great Russian victory at Stalingrad, and projections of how long it would take for the Red Army to begin its march westward.