The Berlin Girl

by Mandy Robotham

  The rest was merely details – the words had been said. The storm had come, clouds set to rain their brimstone and fire. Max gripped Georgie’s hand, pressing the makeshift ring into her flesh. ‘Well,’ he said with a smile, ‘we’d better get to work then.’

  Epilogue

  Postcard from Paris,

  3rd September 1939

  Dear islanders across the channel,

  In Paris, there is still sunshine, a breeze rippling the awnings above the street cafés, as French and English citizens huddle around their radio sets. When the announcement came from Mr Chamberlain, that much-awaited declaration signalling we are now at war with Germany, there were mixed feelings of fear, stoicism and relief: that Hitler should be stopped, that his jackboots and his ego can no longer ride roughshod over nations he simply plucks at will to be his own.

  Do we relish war? No. Do we fear it? Maybe. Can we win it? The verdict here is uncertain. The conviction, however, is that we can only go forward, to push back a tyranny that is purely and simply wrong, that bullies can never to be allowed to triumph.

  If truth be told, we are certain only that the enemy we face is one worthy of our efforts, and that the time is ripe for us as allied nations to stand tall and fight for freedom.

  Your Berlin Girl, signing off

  News Chronicle, 6th September 1939, p.6

  NEWS CHRONICLE REPORTER IS WED –

  our very own ‘Postcards from Berlin’ author marries fellow reporter

  News has reached the Chronicle office of a happy event as Britain readies for the consequences of Herr Hitler’s invasion of Poland. A former Berlin correspondent of this paper, Miss Georgina Young – who writes in these pages under the name of George Young – was married to the Daily Telegraph’s former Berlin reporter, Mr Max Spender, in Paris yesterday. Also present were Mr Rod Faber, chief correspondent of the New York Times, formerly expelled from Germany under the Nazi regime, the Chicago Tribune’s Mr Bill Porter, and Mr Samuel Blundon, a British Embassy assistant recently arrived in the city, as the diplomatic service in Berlin is hastily reduced.

  The happy couple met in Berlin over a year they both describe as ‘full of adventure, and a steep learning curve’. However, they will not be setting off on honeymoon just yet. After a celebratory afternoon tea at the Paris Ritz hotel, the couple will travel to new postings in Europe, where they will continue reporting for the News Chronicle and the Daily Telegraph.

  News Chronicle, 5th June 1940, back-page photographic story

  AFTER THE EVACUATION:

  Our correspondent George Young reports on a seaside town left empty after the Allies’ dramatic flight from French shores

  Dunkirk is desolate, its population distended briefly by the hungry and the desperate, now a graveyard of war ephemera, streets emptied like a British seaside town in deep winter. The human cost of the evacuation has largely been removed, and what remains now is the debris of conflict scattered across the wide sands; a French warship beached like a mighty killer whale, its belly exposed with the steel skin cut cleanly in two by German bombs, carcasses of loyal horses left behind, their flanks still shiny, gulls pecking and filling their bellies.

  Only a handful of local beachcombers dare to scavenge what they can. And the smell – a mix of human habitation and acrid cordite overpowering the salt spray scent. There’s near silence, save for the gulls and the gentle engine throb of our vessel, one of the last to leave the French shore. Desolation hits every sense as we bob our way over the waves, Dunkirk left with the promise of fresh occupation only a little way behind – German tanks and troops ready to reinvade as the flotilla of British boats recedes across the Channel to safety, to regroup and reignite the battle for Europe.

  Time magazine, 24th April 1945

  The efficient but ‘forgotten’ camp of death

  By George Young. Pictures by Max Spender

  A short distance from the singed rubble of Berlin city lies another catastrophe of this war, small in comparison, and hidden behind a nine-foot stone wall. Even in liberty, Sachsenhausen remains one of the lesser-known Nazi concentration camps, compared with the shocking images of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Lesser known, maybe, though the suffering is no less hard to observe, as the physical wreckage of human cruelty is laid before the first wave of press observers: an odd shoe cast aside, a shorn piece of striped material common to inmates, evidence of lives lived and lost, blended with the stench of death and torture.

  Those few souls left behind sport skin-and-bone faces, pinched and ghostly, eyes glazed, hoping but also daring themselves not to hope, weak smiles still questioning whether freedom has truly arrived.

  I was here, briefly, before war broke out; I saw only the granite wall, knew something of the suffering beyond that barrier, but seeing really is believing.

  Since its opening in 1936, Sachsenhausen has been exploited by the Nazis as a prototype, a working blueprint to practise their architecture, hone their skills for degradation, and their experiments for more efficient annihilation elsewhere. As such, it was a testament to production and variety: the Nazis’ largest currency-counterfeiting operation was placed here in the war, so too a vast brick factory to construct Hitler’s utopian ideal, a lengthy track for exhaustive testing of military footwear, not to mention the avid development of fatal mustard gas by medical experts. A camp relatively small and hidden, nicely within Berlin’s reach, but so, so deadly.

  The prisoners, too, were a mix: German political, Jews, Romani, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, the so-called ‘work shy’, mental ‘defectives’, British commando agents, Special Operations Executive prisoners – all were incarcerated, and many died here. In all 30,000, another 30,000 forced on a vast route march in the days before Soviet troops arrived to liberate, as the Nazis fled and scattered their dirty spoils. It is the legacy of that barely human existence that we see now.

  The smell forces into our nostrils, sour and hostile, the sights beyond belief – barracks designed to corral humans and laid out in a fan shape, meticulously designed so that machine gun posts were afforded a bird’s eye view, picking off stray targets in the gravel strip known as the ‘Death Zone’. In its relative abandonment, it is a stretch to imagine everyday life in Sachsenhausen; the torture and the abject cruelty, but also the humour, the tenacity and zest for life that carried some through to freedom.

  It may never be the name that sticks in our minds, not one to mark in the global consciousness, but Sachsenhausen is no less worthy of our attention – and our pity. This correspondent will surely not forget.

  Der Bund newspaper, 13th March 1946, p.17

  DOCTOR’S DEATH IS RULED SUICIDE – SUSPICIONS OF NAZI LINKS DIE WITH HIM

  The death of a former German doctor, found in his home three weeks ago, has formally been ruled as suicide by the Swiss coroner, our correspondent writes.

  Doctor Frederik Graf, sixty-five, was found at home by his wife, Lieda, after a bout of reported depression. Beside his body, she told the Coroner’s Court in Berne, there was a one-word note stating: ‘Sorry’. Asked what he might be apologising for, Lieda Graf shook her head and became overcome with emotion.

  Doctor Graf made a name for himself in his native Berlin at the Haas Institute, a clinic renowned for its elderly care, though rumours of links with the Nazi hierarchy have dogged him since the war’s end. He arrived in Berne – some say fled – from Berlin in February 1945, and took up a hospital post in general medicine, but retired through ill-health soon after. He is survived by his wife. His only children, two sons, were both were killed in the D-Day battles in France.

  The Daily Mirror, 23rd December 1947, p.10

  Nazi chief caught out by his ‘unusual’ eyes

  The last day of the month-long Auschwitz trial in Krakow took an unusual turn yesterday with a late guilty verdict for one concentration camp officer, thanks to an unusual eyewitness report – on spotting a distinctive pair of eyes.

  The trial of sub-camp commandant Kasper Vortsch �
�� in the dock alongside forty other guards and officers at one of the Nazis’ principal death camps – was set to collapse due to a lack of evidence. Vortsch, thirty-four, consistently claimed a case of mistaken identity.

  But when former prisoner Egon Cussel saw a picture in the local press, he recognised Vortsch immediately as ‘the one with those eyes’.

  ‘I was in Sachsenhausen camp in the early years of the war, and he used to visit the officers’ mess all the time,’ Mr Cussel told the court. ‘They made us wait on the tables, serving up platefuls of food, while we had only weak turnip soup to live on. He had a charming smile, but after dinner, he would make us watch prisoners having to stand for hours in an agonising squat until they fell and were beaten. I watched those green and grey eyes light up as they suffered.’

  On giving his damning evidence, Mr Cussel went on: ‘My brother, Felix, made it out of Auschwitz, and he told me about an officer with these unusual eyes being a “particularly cruel bastard”, watching men squat until they dropped. And I knew instantly who he was talking of. Sadly, Felix died a month after his release. That’s why I’m here now.’

  Vortsch was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for his part in hundreds of deaths at Auschwitz and made no plea for mitigation.

  The News Chronicle, 16th August 1950, back page

  Kindertransport child graduates from Oxford with first-class degree

  One of the first children included in the operation to save Jews from the tyranny of Nazi Germany has graduated from Oxford University with a first-class degree in English.

  Ester Amsel, now twenty-one, was among the first wave of children sent to England via ‘Kindertransport’, with her brother, Leon, then twelve. Ester was only nine years old when she faced saying goodbye to her parents at the train station in Berlin, unaware that she might never see them again.

  ‘I remember it to this day,’ she said. ‘My mother was trying not to cry, telling me to mind my English manners. I realise now how hard it must have been for our parents to send us. But thank goodness they did.’

  Ester’s parents, Rubin and Sara, were lucky enough to escape Germany’s anti-Semitic oppression only weeks before war broke out, with the help of two British correspondents working in Berlin, former Daily Telegraph reporter Max Spender, and Georgie ‘George’ Young, who reported for this paper at the time. The now married couple had to effect a last-minute escape just days before Hitler’s tanks rolled into Poland, and both were present in Oxford to see Ester graduate from Somerville College with honours. Brother Leon now has his own engineering company in Bristol.

  ‘We’re delighted to see Ester and Leon thriving,’ Georgie Young told the News Chronicle. ‘The Amsels were typical of so many families in Germany at the time, living under threat, and it could have been so different but for Kindertransport. It ensured the futures of children like Ester and Leon.’

  Once reunited in London, the Amsel family settled in the Cotswold town of Stroud, where Mr Amsel – a former journalist in Berlin – is a reporter on the Gloucester Citizen newspaper.

  ‘We left behind so much,’ he said. ‘My wife’s brother, Elias, sadly did not survive the Sachsenhausen concentration camp beyond 1944, but we’re endlessly thankful as a family to have avoided what many did not. We love England and think of it as our home now. I don’t even mind the warm beer!’

  Ester now plans to follow in her father’s footsteps as a reporter, using ‘Georgie’ Young as her role model in a bid to become a female overseas correspondent.

  Radio Times Listings, March 1972

  4 p.m., Radio 4

  ‘The women who courted and reported Berlin’

  Renowned war correspondent Georgie Young investigates the lives of three former acquaintances, Frida Borken and Simone Doucette – both fellow reporters in Hitler’s pre-war Germany – and actress Margot Moller; all three known resistance agents across Europe. Were these three glamorous women working for governments, the press and the German film industry in unison?

  Simone died on a French resistance mission in 1943 and was soon exposed as a double agent for the Nazis. Margot Moller found fame in Joseph Goebbels’s renowned stable of starlets, was later a key informant for the Allies and shot for treason by the Reich. And Frida Borken – a one-time contributor to Time magazine – has not been seen in peacetime. Young, who knew all three women in pre-war Berlin, asks: Was or is Frida an heiress who simply melted into the shadows? If so, where is she now?

  The Guardian, 12th October 1994, p.3

  Celebrated war correspondent writes her last lines

  The Fleet Street of old has turned out in force for the memorial to award-winning journalist Georgina Young, who died last week at the age of eighty-two, writing her last lines only hours before her death.

  Hundreds attended St Bride’s, the journalists’ church in central London, for the much-loved correspondent, who for years went under the by-line of ‘George’ to offset prejudice against female reporters. She was apparently working on an article about the irritations of old age when she fell victim to a sudden stroke, leading to her death. ‘It’s so typical of my mother that she was scratching in her notebook right up until the last, insisting that I type it up properly!’ her son, Elias, said in one of many fond eulogies.

  The Cotswold-born reporter started life on the fashion pages of the now-defunct News Chronicle, rising to the newsroom and then opting for a posting in Berlin in the year before war broke out. She met her husband and long-time work partner, reporter Max Spender, in Berlin, the two having to quit Hitler’s Germany promptly after helping a Jewish family to escape the city, a year they later described as ‘a fairy tale and horror story in one’.

  They continued freelancing as a couple throughout the war, covering Dunkirk, the French and Dutch occupations and D-Day, Georgie being among the few women to land alongside the invasion forces. Often, they reported in war zones with their press colleague, Pulitzer prize-winner Rod Faber, and remained friends until his death at the age of eighty-five.

  During the war, Max discovered a talent for photography, and their words and picture essays were seen in Time and Life magazines, a stream of Sunday supplements and worldwide publications. Both received multiple single and joint awards for their work, although Max later joked that his shrapnel wound from France in 1943 ‘is the only talisman I don’t have to share with my wife!’

  Georgie chronicled their adventures as roving reporters in her memoir ‘Postcards from my Life’, and continued working after the birth of their two children, Elias and Margot, though in what she described as ‘weekend war reporting’. They specialised in snapshot news features, flying into conflict areas difficult to reach, bringing human stories to light from Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia. She described one of her best moments as seeing the Berlin Wall pulled down to ‘free a city I can’t help being in love with’. She and Max worked tirelessly together until his death two years ago from heart failure.

  ‘It’s all about the humanity,’ Georgie told Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1990. ‘Behind every picture, every word, there is a person, even if it seems to be a very dry political story – it affects someone. I love words, I love to use them to speak out, but at the end of the day, all I’ve ever wanted my words to do is tell the truth about people.’

  It is only fitting, then, that we leave the last word to a woman credited with such skill in weaving them, in the introduction to her memoir:

  POSTCARDS FROM MY LIFE

  It’s odd because when I think of that time, it’s always in pictures. My life has been dominated for decades by words on a page, and yet I view the memories as if I’m looking through a magnifying glass at a tiny reel of film, stopping and slowing, juddering in the places where the adrenalin spikes in reaction to near disasters or heart-stopping moments. And when I recall it in detail, there were a good many of those. Then, it jumps ahead, to new scenes, people and places. Sometimes other countries.

  But my first foray in Berlin – that time when the world
held its breath in fear of a maelstrom of a war – I remember it with fondness. It was my apprenticeship to conflict, and yet oddly exciting. I was enticed. Hungry, fuelling a lifelong appetite pushing forevermore to be satisfied. So, yes, that time was precious. It was the beginning of war – and me, in so many ways. Part of me, I think, will always be that Berlin girl.

  George Young, February 1978

  Acknowledgements

  As ever, I am indebted to so many people in helping me wrestle this book into being, not least since I made the monumental break (for me at least) from midwifery to full-time writing, halfway through this book. Having said that, all my colleagues at Stroud Maternity figure hugely as my ‘chivvying’ support network, sharing much-needed walks, wine and whingeing; Gez, Kirsty, Annie, Sammi, Sarah, Isobel and Kelly – especially good at the walking (and wine). Hayley, Micki and Idris, too, for their coffee meets and wise words.

  More thanks I extend to fellow writers: Loraine Fergusson (LP Fergusson in print) – ever present as the common-sense tsar in the mad world of books – and Avon stablemate Lorna Cook, whom I have been prevented from meeting face-to-face by lockdown, but that doesn’t stop us nattering endlessly on Zoom or social media. Katie Fforde – you’re a constant support just by being a Stroudie legend.

  Thanks also to Fiona Vandenburgh-Harwood, who not only had a beautiful homebirth and allowed me to be there, but also speaks German perfectly and is generous with translations.

  My family I include in that buffer between the angst of writing and needing to make the dinner – Simon, Harry, Finn and Mum – bringing me back to earth very quickly. Basil, the muse mutt, too – always keen for his tea.