How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  They were sipping tea in John’s apartment when the phone rang. It was his sister from Berlin, who was married to a German and had spent the whole war there. John, normally a model of reserve, became intensely animated when he heard her voice, and my mother picked up snatches of a story about hiding with her children in the Black Forest, while her husband had ended up in a concentration camp. She caught one or two names – Adam, Fritz – though they meant nothing to her. ‘Lexi’ came up too.

  And then the voice said: ‘By the way, a friend of mine here is looking for her sister in London. Can you help?’ ‘London is a city of millions,’ John riposted in his teasingly superior manner. ‘I’ll do what I can, but obviously we’ll be searching for a needle in a haystack.’ ‘She’s a violinist and her name is Marianne Liedtke,’ came the reply. ‘Do you know any musicians there?’ ‘Oh, well, that will be easy,’ John interrupted, with deliberate understatement, puffing languidly on his pipe. ‘Now, let me think.’ (I knew him well and he would have relished drawing out a coincidence like this.) ‘Actually, Chris, she’s sitting right here. Why don’t you have a word?’

  The woman on the phone, John’s sister, was Christabel Bielenberg, who had hidden the ‘submarines’ with Ilse during the war and had begged her to find a refuge for the Jew who ended up with the Rosenthals. As Christabel was the only English-born person in Berlin whom Ilse knew, she had asked her to see if she might track down her youngest sister, who, she hoped, was still alive and traceable.

  Early the following year, with the help of John’s formidable connections, my mother secured a place on an RAF bomber that was flying from a small airfield outside London into Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, supplying the occupying troops in the British sector of Berlin. The rattling turboprop had no passenger seating other than on the corrugated metal floor. A few proper seats up front were reserved for officers or sensitive equipment. The vibration and the din were continuous, but conditions on this, my mother’s first ever flight, were smooth – until soon after entering German airspace, when clear skies turned foggy and the pilot announced that they would have to descend immediately into Hannover. It would be impossible to make it to Berlin that day.

  After a night spent in a hangar, fog hung heavy over the airfield and the pilot warned that it might be at least another day before they could fly. Travelling by ground was still extremely difficult: there were few buses and trains, and permits were required to move from one occupation zone to the next. The trickiest to pass through was the Soviet zone that encircled Berlin, so it quickly occurred to my mother to abandon the trip and instead to go and visit Ursel, who she knew was at the Plettenberg family castle, which, like Hannover, was within the British zone.

  As soon as she arrived, it was plain to her that country life was no idyll for her sister. Ursel relished the acceptance and warmth that her new family showed her, but found the isolation hard. She was fascinated by the tales of emotional brutality that seeped in from surrounding villages – isolated childhoods, icy mothers, cruel fathers, and the violence of self-denial, where perdition could be glimpsed in a box of stale chocolates; but she longed for poetry too. She seldom shrank from stirring pots and enjoyed the buzz of local rumour – such as about the bride in a hamlet some kilometres away who was astounded to discover on her wedding night that her husband could arouse himself only by leaping naked out of a large wooden wardrobe, smelling mustily of old oak, into their bed, preferably illuminated by a shaft of moonlight. But she was also oppressed by the claustrophobia of these lives.

  When my mother saw her sister marooned here, devoid of the concerts, theatre, and dance that Ursel craved, she decided, as she generally decided in any unfamiliar situation, to make music. She would play violin sonatas in the castle. A professional pianist, Herr Kraus, was duly located, the white piano was heaved from a corner of the large living room, and the concert was about to begin.

  ‘Where is the audience?’ my mother asks Franziskus.

  ‘What audience?’

  ‘Well, where is everyone? You said this house is full of Germans who fled the communist takeover in Prussia and Pomerania.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve locked them in the attic,’ Franziskus answers matter-of-factly. ‘They are tone deaf, and not one of them has even heard of Beethoven.’

  ‘Release them immediately!’ my mother orders, thoroughly enjoying Franziskus’s mischievous style. ‘Or I’m not playing. You’re crazy, Franziskus. It must be horrible up there!’

  A parade of forlorn figures soon slides awkwardly into the drawing room. One huddled behind the other, in single file, they move with wary steps, saying nothing.

  ‘We will be playing sonatas,’ my mother announces when they are seated. ‘Brahms and Beethoven, each in four movements,’ she adds.

  Everyone looks bemused.

  ‘You know Beethoven, I am sure!’ she says, wondering now whether Franziskus might not have been exaggerating.

  An elderly gentleman tries to clear himself and his relations of the charges of cultural philistinism that Franziskus had seemingly levelled at them.

  ‘Yes, we know who Beethoven is,’ he says, slightly peeved. ‘I . . . we . . . just didn’t know he wrote anything for the violin.’

  27.

  Ilse returns to Berlin

  It was the first week of May 1945, Berlin had just fallen, and Ilse decided the time had come to attempt a return to the city. She’d heard that the Russian army was seizing people’s homes for its officers, as well as plundering them for valuables. The Americans would surely follow suit as soon as they arrived and she was anxious to get back to my grandmother’s house in the suburb of Zehlendorf – to which Emmy had moved in 1936 to escape the memories of Blumeshof 12 – before it was commandeered by soldiers, or else by the homeless and displaced. For the first time in months, it seemed safe to venture back: recently the sound of gunfire had been sporadic rather than continuous. Nights were eerily quiet without the din of exploding bombs.

  She was holed up in Babelsberg, where, the previous summer, she and Emmy had sought refuge from the bombing of Berlin in the house of a Colonel von Nordheim, who had deserted the Wehrmacht not long before and whom she had met at one of the Ufa balls early on in the war. He was an old-fashioned soldier – an embodiment of duty and discretion, but also sensitive and humane – with whom Ilse enjoyed a bond of trust and respect, as well as the sort of silently erotic attachment to a powerful yet elusive older man that, my mother said, she often sought. The moment they met, they sensed that they were on the same side, but without mentioning Hitler, military campaigns, concentration camps, Poland, Russia, or any of that. They knew little about each other: he had no idea that he was harbouring a Jewish woman and she asked no questions about his private or military life.

  As the Russians had encircled Berlin, she had hoped that Babelsberg was one place where, in their haste to vanquish the capital, they might not linger. It had become a ghost district of, she was convinced, no material interest, aside from the equipment in Ufa’s vast movie studios, which the Red Army had already occupied.

  But not long before the capitulation, von Nordheim’s house had been invaded by a ragged bunch of the Volkssturm, the militia that Hitler assembled in the last months of the war to defend the Reich to the death. This motley group of youths and middle-aged men had surged in, puffed up by absurd self-confidence, as if they were about to win an easy victory against a pack of tin soldiers. In fact, they were using the building for one of their ‘heroic last stands’ – and the Russians knew that they were in there.

  Ilse was desperate. The Volkssturm had guns and patriotism, but no effective strategy, training, or leaders. Their idiotic defiance had turned von Nordheim’s house into a sitting duck, and Russian soldiers were approaching. Fearful of being killed, Ilse hid herself, her mother, and her two-year-old son in the cellar behind piles of old clothes and books, making sure she left military uniforms and other souvenirs of the defeated regime, for which Stalin’s army was known to have unlimi
ted appetite, conspicuously outside the front door.

  The shooting soon began, and went on for one relentless hour before all fell quiet. At first Ilse thought this meant that the Volkssturm had been wiped out. Then it started up once more, as viciously as before. After only thirty minutes, silence intruded again.

  Ilse left her child and Emmy, and crept up the stairs. There was nobody to be seen. Had they all escaped, or were they regrouping elsewhere? She kept walking up the spiral staircase. As she passed an open window, drops of blood fell through the clear spring air. Eventually she saw them, dead on the roof garden. Four dozen of them. Perhaps they thought they’d have an advantage shooting from that height.

  Nearby, a mass of men was crawling over the fields, accompanied by a few tanks. Ilse fled back to the cellar, praying that they would bypass the house. Which, luckily, they did.

  But she was sufficiently worried about the suicidal and out-of-control Volkssturm to stay put at von Nordheim’s even when it was said that the battle for Berlin was over and they had surrendered. She remained in Babelsberg for another few days after the capital’s fall; then, early one morning, at around 5 a.m., she walked the fifteen kilometres to Zehlendorf, leaving Emmy and her son to follow when she gave the all clear. It was 8 May, the day on which Germany would unconditionally surrender. She had no idea that within hours the war in Europe would be over.

  28.

  Geri and Eva are shot

  In Zehlendorf, all was peaceful. No shooting could be heard and the early-morning sky was deserted. My grandmother’s house had been neither pillaged nor occupied. A few windows were blown out, but otherwise, like most of the area, it was undamaged. In a nearby park, hundreds of Russians had set up camp. There were Cossacks with their colourful dress, unkempt and exhausted horses, and the odd tank that kept watch at crossroads. Soldiers in celebratory mood were wandering the streets drinking and singing. It hardly seemed like the end of a world war.

  Now Ilse was really frightened. Any knock on the door might spell death. She could handle a Nazi, but the Russians were more unpredictable. It was certain, though, that if you gave them what they asked for they would smell treasure and come in for more. If you refused them, they would kill you. Everyone knew that the booty they coveted wasn’t just material. They wanted to rape and kill women too. Stories were emerging about three generations, from grandmothers to their pubescent granddaughters, being treated in this way.

  She and Emmy, who had returned home a few days after Ilse, decided that, in the event of a knock, the older woman was to walk audibly towards the front door, while Ilse slid herself and her son under a bed, feeding him the cookies that she had baked to keep the child quiet at precisely such times. The Russians might rape Emmy, but they would be less likely to kill her than they would younger prey.

  How wrong Ilse was. A week or two later she heard unusual songs from her neighbour’s house, which belonged to old friends, Geri and Eva, both of them professional singers who had been Emmy’s teachers. In place of Lieder by Schubert and Schumann, the strains of Ochi chyornye, ochi zhguchie, Ochi strastnye I prekrasnye and other Russian folk music could be heard. A balalaika was moving into a higher gear. Peals of male laughter and some forced female twitters drifted across the garden fence. There was stamping and clapping. Then a gunshot. But the music continued. Someone screamed. Another voice seemed to get hysterical. Two more gunshots. And there was silence.

  Ilse and my grandmother froze. They bolted every lock, placed money and cigarettes near the front door in case the Russians broke in, and hid themselves and the child under beds. Retreating steps could be heard. People were speaking animatedly in the street. Then all was quiet again.

  They lay under their beds until it was dark. Ilse crept out of the back of the house and into Geri and Eva’s. They were both lying dead by the fireplace, together with the body of a young woman who was naked except for her bloodstained bra. The parquet reeked of vodka, and cigarette ash had been trodden into a rug. Otherwise nothing had been disturbed, except that the toilet in the downstairs bathroom was jammed full of potatoes. Ilse hurried back, leaving the bodies.

  The next day there was more coming and going next door. After that, nothing stirred for several days. Something had to be done about the bodies, Ilse thought. But what? Sure that Geri and Eva’s house was empty, she stole over. As she entered, she froze. A soldier was smoking a cigarette by the fireplace as he rifled through papers.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he snarled. When Ilse heard the American English, she felt that a death sentence had just been lifted.

  ‘I live next door. I’m an old friend of these people.’

  ‘Go bury the bodies in the park,’ he ordered her. ‘Oh, and clean those potatoes out of the toilet!’

  ‘What are they doing there?’ Ilse asked.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ He chuckled. ‘Those Russian boys from behind the Urals, they’ve never seen a toilet. They think you use it to hide valuables. You push things down the pipes and that way other people can’t get at them. I’ll bet you there are a lot more potatoes stuffed into the piping behind the bowl.’

  The American soldier surmised that the boys had tried to rape Eva and the younger woman and that the three of them had been shot when Geri attempted to protect them.

  Ilse wrapped each of the corpses in a carpet and dragged them, one by one, to the park, then hurried home for a spade, and dug their graves.

  A few days later, the same thing happened to other neighbours, a few doors away. They, too, had been forced to invite in some Russian soldiers, who raped a mother and shot her son, before raping her again.

  At first, Ilse said, the Soviet high command seemed to tolerate and even encourage the raping, as if their troops were entitled to a spot of revenge after the horrors they had endured at the hands of the enemy. Many had survived the inconceivable brutality of battles such as Stalingrad as well as that special discipline supposedly ordered by Stalin, which I’d once been told about by a Red Army veteran on the night train from Moscow to Riga: any soldier who hesitates for a moment is shot by a comrade behind him. That was one way, he said, in which the dictator forcibly kept up their fighting spirit. Now the war was over, they were bored, weary, and consumed by hatred for the conquered nation.

  But soon they were called to order and told that rape would be severely punished. At least in this part of Berlin. Eventually their liquor store was closed. A Russian officer even called on Geri and Eva’s household to offer his condolences. Nobody was there, so he called next door at Ilse’s. When Emmy opened the door, she feared the worst; but slowly she understood from the officer’s few words of German and her smattering of Russian that he was reassuring them that Soviet order would prevail.

  Ilse decided to move into Geri and Eva’s empty house to protect it from another occupying force prowling the streets of Berlin: the abjectly poor and the displaced, who were sleeping rough, living off rats and other street animals, and looking for shelter as well as anything to grab and sell. Their daughter, Monika, had fled Berlin with her husband during the bombing for the relative safety of a small town in Westphalia, and without a guardian the house would certainly be looted. Ilse set up her photographic studio there with the equipment she had rescued from her old studio in the Budapesterstrasse after it suffered a direct hit, and settled into her new home with her son, leaving Emmy to keep watch next door.

  29.

  ‘I love shopping’

  In July 1945 the Americans formally assumed control of Zehlendorf. The victorious powers were dividing up Berlin into zones of occupation, and now the Russian troops gradually withdrew to their own sector in east Berlin, replaced in Ilse’s neighbourhood by a bunch of equally restless GIs.

  Under the Americans, Ilse said, life for the locals was a lot less frightening – and a lot less comfortable. The US forces weren’t prepared to live in tents in the park, relieving themselves at night in the rain-sodden mud, as the Soviets had done, while the enemy they’d vanquishe
d luxuriated in comfortable beds.

  Within days of the new regime taking over, Ilse found a note, on US Army notepaper, pinned to her front door. All Germans out! Within seventy-two hours!

  Where she was supposed to go with her mother and a small child at such notice was not the victors’ problem. Ilse’s first idea was to live in one of the tents that the Soviets had abandoned in the nearby park. She packed a few of the lighter valuables to take with them, including some of the family silver, a candelabrum, and an ivory pen holder; and buried whatever else she could – pictures, cutlery, antique vases, porcelain, wine glasses – in the garden, wrapped in sheets. The three of them then left to claim a tent.

  But the Americans were about to issue another order. My grandmother’s road, the whole park, and all the streets in the surrounding area were to be cordoned off for the exclusive use of military personnel. Again, you had seventy-two hours to leave. So the trio moved on, this time to an apartment beyond the exclusion zone that belonged to friends of friends.

  The next day, Ilse was out for a walk to search for other places to live, in case she was evicted again or quarrelled with her new hosts, when, pausing to read an advertisement seeking vegetables, a man tapped her on the shoulder.

  She jerked around in terror.

  ‘Do you speak any English?’ asked the young American soldier. ‘I need someone who can develop fifty-three rolls of film. My captain needs the photos by the day after tomorrow. Do you know anyone who can help me?’

  ‘I can help you!’ Ilse exclaimed euphorically.

  ‘By the day after tomorrow?’