Lehrter Station

by David Downing

  The major looked vaguely interested for the first time. ‘His name?’

  ‘John Russell. We were living in London until three days ago.’

  He wrote something down. ‘So you didn’t work again after 1941.’

  He wasn’t so much naive as stupid, she thought. ‘Of course not,’ she said with as little asperity as she could muster.

  ‘So how did you support yourself?’

  ‘I still had some money hidden away. I had help from my sister. And I was part of a resistance network.’

  ‘So many people were,’ he said wryly.

  ‘Have I done something to make you dislike me?’ Effi asked him.

  He ignored the question, but she detected a slight colouring in his cheeks. ‘Do you have any proof of your involvement in resistance activities?’ he asked.

  ‘Not with me, no. I worked with Erik Aslund, the Swedish diplomat, and I imagine you could reach him through your embassy in Stockholm. Some of the Jews I helped to escape may have returned to Berlin, but I assume most of them will never want to see the place again. Do you want names?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. Not yet, at least.’ He looked up at her, and the first hint of uncertainty crossed his face, taking several years off his age. It was only a moment; the mask of boredom soon slipped back into place. ‘You will be contacted when our investigation is complete,’ he told her, ‘or if we need to ask you further questions.’

  She nodded, rose, and walked out through the waiting room, feeling more dejected than angry. After all they had been through…

  She stopped at the head of the stairs and admonished herself. After all they had been through, things should be difficult.

  Walking down, she heard more laughter and conversation, and what sounded like the clatter of crockery. Advancing down a likely-looking corridor she found herself outside a small cafeteria. The menu was limited to hot soup and drinks, but there was no shortage of customers, and several tables were hosting intense discussions, each ring of heads crowned by a halo of expensive cigarette smoke. She didn’t recognise any of the faces.

  Effi used her new ration card to procure a cup of tea, and took an empty seat in the corner. Most people there were old enough to recognise her, but the woman who actually approached her was one of the youngest, slightly-built, with dark hair, prominent eyebrows and a very sweet smile.

  ‘You’re Effi Koenen, aren’t you?’ she asked in almost a whisper, as if she doubted whether Effi wanted her identity known.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I remember your picture from the newspapers, when the police said you’d been kidnapped. And later you helped a friend of mine – another Jew. My name is Ellen, by the way. Ellen Grynszpan. My friend loved movies, and she recognised you, but she never told anyone who you really were, not until after the war, when she came back from Sweden. Inge Lewinsky – do you remember her?’

  The name was unfamiliar. ‘No, I’m sorry. There were a lot of people. But please, join me.’

  Ellen took a seat. ‘I just wanted to thank you. For my friend. And all the others, of course.’

  Effi shook her head. ‘I didn’t have much to lose,’ she said. ‘How about you? How did you survive?’

  ‘Oh, I had an easy time of it. A Christian friend took me in and, well, I could never go out, but apart from that… it was like being in a really comfortable prison. I’m a painter, and I could paint, so I was happy most of the time.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I’m still painting, but I was persuaded to organise the exhibition here.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

  ‘Oh, it’s in the basement. It’s the Berlin Jewish community’s collection of paintings.’

  ‘Paintings by Jewish artists?’

  ‘Only a few of them are actually painted by Jews. Most of the richer patrons were more interested in a sound investment than racial provenance.’

  Effi laughed. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Would you like to come down and have a look?’

  Effi looked her watch. It might make her late, but Russell was used to that. ‘I’d love to.’

  The basement gallery was empty of people, but the paintings were welllit, the room surprisingly warm. There seemed no coherent theme to the collection, and only the sign on the door offered any connection between the paintings on display and a particular community. There were landscapes, still-lifes, portraits of people and cats. The one exhibit which brought Jews to mind was a futuristic painting of a famous Berlin department store, and only because prominent Jews had owned it. If someone had told Effi that all the paintings were German, she would have taken their word for it.

  And that, she supposed, was the point.

  ‘They’re not that good, are they?’ Ellen said.

  ‘They’re not bad. I suppose the fact that they’re here is what matters.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  They both gazed at a Cubist rendition of the Memorial Church. ‘Have any of the synagogues re-opened?’ Effi asked.

  ‘Oh, at least two. There’s one out in Weissensee and one in Charlottenburg. And someone told me they’re using part of the one on Rykestrasse to house Jewish refugees from Poland. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like buds in the spring, I suppose. Signs of life returning – something like that. But I am looking for two Jews, and if the synagogues are housing refugees I shall need to visit them.’

  ‘Who are the people you’re looking for?’

  ‘Their names are Otto Pappenheim and Miriam Rosenfeld.’

  Ellen searched her memory, but came up empty. ‘Sorry, no. But I can ask around. If I hear anything I’ll leave you a message on the board outside the canteen.’

  They walked back up to the lobby, and stood in silence for several moments, looking out through the open doorway at the mountain of rubble beyond. ‘Do you think many of the survivors will want to stay here?’ Effi asked. ‘The Jewish survivors, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know. Some will, but most would rather go to America. Or Palestine, if the British weren’t making it so difficult.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  And neither have I, Effi thought, as she walked back up to the Ku’damm. Her interviews with Kuhnert and the British Major had been more than a little depressing, but Ellen and the crowd in the cafeteria had lifted her spirits. And if Berlin could be resurrected, there was nowhere else she would rather be.

  * * *

  After leaving Effi, Russell walked east along the rapidly wakening Ku’damm and up Joachimstaler Strasse to Zoo Station. The first DP camp he intended visiting was in Moabit, a walkable distance to the north, but laziness and the sight of a local train rumbling west across the Hardenbergstrasse bridge persuaded him to make use of the Stadtbahn. Walking up to the platform he noticed that most of the signs were also in Russian.

  The next train was tightly packed, its passengers almost bursting out through the opening doors. Shoving his way on board, Russell found himself standing with his face almost pressed to the glass, and forced to confront Berlin’s ruin. The gouged and pitted flak towers were still there, and beyond them the deforested Tiergarten, a sea of stumps in which small islands of cultivation were now sprouting.

  The air on the train offered stark proof of the continuing soap shortage, and once decanted on the Bellevue platform, Russell took several deep breaths of purer air. It was all relative, of course, and his nose was soon under renewed assault, this time from the River Spree. There were no floating bodies as far as he could see, but the scum floating on the stagnant surface was an uncomfortable melange of yellows and browns, and the smell rising up was suitably disgusting. The bridge he had intended to cross lay broken in the water.

  A passer-by told him that the next one up was open, but that proved something of an exaggeration – a makeshift wooden walkway offered pedestrian access to the other bank, but the original bridge was still in the river. He crossed and continued northwards,
down a street still lined with piles of broken masonry. A team of women was stacking bricks – die Trümmerfrauen, Thomas had called them, ‘the rubble women’ – their breath forming plumes in the cold morning air.

  It was time he got to work, Russell thought. Tomorrow he would spend some time at the Press Camp, talk to his fellow journalists, get the lay of the land. The occupiers would be imposing restrictions on reporting, but he had no idea what they were, or whether the different occupation authorities had different rules. And the current mechanics of sending out copy were also a mystery. With civil communications in tatters, were they using military channels?

  All of which would sort itself out soon enough. But what was he going to write about? The story that interested him, but apparently not many others, was what had happened to the Jewish survivors. It seemed as if the Nazi crimes against the Jews were still being undersold, almost lost in the general shuffle of European misery. Perhaps he was still seeking atonement for 1942, when he’d been unable to get the story the prominence and urgency it deserved, but he didn’t think so. Over the last few months all four occupation powers had forced Jewish refugees to share camps with their persecutors, but there’d been no cries of outrage, or none from anyone with the power to make changes.

  His and Effi’s search for Rosa’s father would make a good story, or provide a good narrative on which to hang the wider theme. He would have to change the names, of course – Rosa had traumas enough to work through without becoming a poster child for orphans.

  And then there was Miriam. It would really be a miracle if she was still alive.

  He had reached the southern edge of the Little Tiergarten, which looked in no better shape than its bigger brother. He walked diagonally across the bare expanse, past a scorched and trackless Tiger tank with the words ‘Siberia or Death’ still emblazoned on one side. Two children eyed him warily from the open turret, and he wondered if the tank was only a place to play, or what they now called home.

  As he passed the cemetery behind the old municipal baths he noticed several long lines of freshly dug graves, and what looked like a team of prisoners digging more. It was several seconds before he realised who they were probably meant for – the victims of the coming winter.

  The old barracks loomed in front of him. There was a wall around the compound and British soldiers at the gate, who checked his papers and gave him directions for the camp administration office. En route, he noticed that one barracks door was slightly open, and took a quick look inside. The large open space had been divided up by the simple expedient of using lockers to form waist-high walls, inside which double-decker bunks were arranged in squares, enclosing a small private space. The barracks were cold and surprisingly quiet, a fact that Russell first attributed to a lack of residents. But as his eyes grew used to the gloom he realised that almost every bunk had one or more silent owner. The sense of hopelessness was almost overwhelming.

  He continued on to the office, where three young Englishmen were lording it over three elderly German assistants. Once Russell had explained the reason for his visit, a sergeant with a Yorkshire accent interrupted his game of patience to instruct one of the latter, who reached for the pile of exercise books that contained the camp records, and began working his way through them. He was halfway through the last but one when he found an Otto Pappenheim.

  Russell could hardly believe it. Nor did he really want to – he knew what losing Rosa would mean to Effi. As the German checked the final book for Miriam Rosenfeld, he reminded himself that Otto and Pappenheim were both fairly common names.

  ‘Can you tell me anything about him?’ Russell asked the man in German, once the search for Miriam had ended in failure.

  ‘No, but maybe Gerd can. Wait a minute.’ He walked stiffly across to the doorway of the adjoining room and asked a colleague to join them.

  Gerd, a wafer-thin man in his sixties, was still wearing his Volkssturm jacket, albeit without the insignia. When he heard the name ‘Otto Pappenheim’ he made a face, which worried Russell even more. ‘Yes, I remember him,’ he said. ‘He turned up in the summer, the beginning of August, I think. He had his Jewish identity card, which was unusual – most destroyed them when they went into hiding. I didn’t like him, but I couldn’t really tell you why. He didn’t stay long. He soon found a job and somewhere else to live, which was also unusual, but we can always use the extra bed.’

  ‘So you don’t know where he went?’

  ‘Oh, he had to give us an address, or his ration card wouldn’t have been re-issued. It’ll be in there,’ he added, pointing out one of his colleague’s desk drawers. And it was, Solinger Strasse 47. ‘That’s not far from here,’ the first German told him. ‘It’s one of the streets off Levetzowstrasse. On the south side.’

  Fifteen minutes later, Russell was walking down Solinger Strasse, trying to deduce which of the still-standing buildings was number 47. An elderly man sitting in a doorway pointed it out. ‘The one at the end,’ he said, ‘thanks to the Reichsmarschal.’ Russell saw what he meant – the original end of the block had been destroyed by Allied bombers, which Goering had famously promised would never reach Berlin. Now a wall boasting seven empty grates and seven different wallpapers rose towards the sky.

  A woman he met in the lobby gave him Otto Pappenheim’s room number. Rather reluctantly, Russell thought, as if she wanted nothing to do with Otto, or anyone looking for him.

  Russell climbed three storeys, and knocked on the appropriate door. There were no sounds of life within, either then or after a second hammering, but another woman emerged from a flat across the landing. ‘He’s hardly ever there,’ she told Russell in response to his question. She had no idea where Otto worked, if indeed he did, but he only used the room for sleeping. ‘He’s a Jew,’ she added with barely concealed disgust. ‘That’s how he got the flat.’

  Back out on the street, Russell started walking towards the river. He wouldn’t tell Effi, he decided, not till he knew whether this was the Otto they sought.

  He was ten minutes late reaching Zoo Station, but there was no sign of Effi in the crowded buffet. He went back out for a newspaper – the American-produced Allgemeine Zeitung looked more promising than the British Der Berliner – and scanned the front page while he queued for a cup of tea. The main story was the communists’ humiliating defeat in the previous weekend’s Austrian elections, a result that the editorial attributed to the Russians’ behaviour back in the spring. Given that the Russians had behaved ten times worse in Berlin, Russell wondered what the Soviets would deduce from this setback. And what lesson would the German communists take from it? A need to distance themselves from their allies and sponsors? He was beginning to appreciate the importance of the task that Nemedin and Shchepkin had given him – testing the loyalty of the German comrades. And they would not be happy if he kept them waiting. Tomorrow he would follow Shchepkin’s instructions and present himself at the Housing Office on Neue Königstrasse.

  Effi swept in, still in her glamorous outfit, causing more than a few heads to turn.

  She looked more animated than she had for a while, Russell thought.

  ‘I forgot to change at Schlüterstrasse,’ she announced, ‘and the station toilets are “closed for refurbishment”. I’ll have to ask here.’

  She was back in five minutes, looking more like an ordinary citizen, and the two of them made their way down to the U-Bahn platforms. ‘Remember taxis?’ Effi murmured wistfully, after they’d waited twenty minutes for an eastbound train.

  One eventually arrived, and they squeezed aboard a crowded carriage. The smell of unwashed bodies was bad enough, and Russell dreaded to think what it would have been like if half the windows hadn’t been broken.

  They changed at Friedrichstrasse, and this time a train came quickly. The lifts weren’t working at Leopoldplatz, and the long ascent to the booking hall left them both short of breath. Outside on Müllerstrasse the usual broken facades stretched away in both directions, a single double-dec
ker bus the only thing moving on the once-busy boulevard. The tricolour fluttering above one of the surviving buildings told them they were now in the French sector.

  They started up the long Schulstrasse, and were soon passing one of the recently reopened schools. Several of the rooms were still unfit for occupation, but teachers and children were working in the others, and the view through the few unboarded windows was almost surreal in its ordinariness.

  The local dogs seemed more in tune with their surroundings. There seemed an awful lot of them, each staring angrily out from his own small patch of ruin. Humans had destroyed their homes, cut off their food supply, and left them nothing to do but snarl at passers-by. Several started slowly towards Russell and Effi, but were easily deterred by the miming of a thrown stone. Most looked too weak to sustain an attack.

  At least they were alive, Russell thought. He hadn’t seen a single cat since their return. Or a bird.

  A sudden ear-splitting roar sounded overhead, causing them both to jump. It was an American Dakota, flying just above the few remaining rooftops, and presumably headed for Tempelhof. Russell wondered why it was flying so low. Because the pilot enjoyed scaring Germans?

  Turning to Effi, he saw momentary panic in her eyes, beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead. He found himself wondering whether those Berliners who had survived the years of bombing would ever hear a plane without flinching.

  He took her in his arms, and she let out a couple of sobs. For the first time, he fully appreciated how hard all this must be for her, and how extreme her emotional reactions might be. And most of their fellow Berliners would be riding the same emotional see-saw, he thought. A city full of unexploded bombs, in more ways than one.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said at last.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this today?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. What idiot said that?’ She was looking back down the street, remembering the view through the barred window of the Black Maria that had brought Rosa from the Frankfurter Allee police station.